Creationist summit coming to MSU

The Saturday morning program of the Origin Summit includes workshops on why the Big Bang is a fake and how a belief in evolution might have guided Adolf Hitler's thinking.

The event is the work of Creation Summit, an Oklahoma organization that exists to "challenge evolution and all such theories predicated on chance" and "to introduce men, women, boys and girls to the One who made them."

It is being held at MSU thanks to a student organization called Christian Challenge that reserved the rooms in the Business College Complex.

"People suspect we targeted the campus because of the prominent evolutionists who are employed by the school," said Mike Smith, the founder Creation Summit. "The fact is, although I knew something about Dr. (Robert) Pennock, I had never heard of Dr. Richard Lenski or his long term experiment until one of our speakers told me he was going to be doing a talk on it."

Pennock, a professor in MSU's Lyman Briggs College, has been described as "Darwin's border collie." He is the author of "Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism" and served as an expert witness in Kitzmiller v. Dover School Board, a federal court case that ended with a ruling that that intelligent design represents "a particular version of Christianity" and that teaching it in science classes was unconstitutional.

Lenski, John Hannah Distinguished Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, is best known for the remarkably fruitful experiment in e. coli evolution that he has kept going for 26 years, though he also has some history of tangling with the intelligent design crowd.

The organization had more mundane reasons for coming to MSU, Smith said. Four of its board members live in Michigan, "and we knew that, wherever we did this, we would need the manpower to pull it off."

The day-long conference won't be about evangelism, Smith said, though he hopes to lay the groundwork "for the other campus ministries to come along behind us and share the Gospel message." It will be about the scientific evidence for intelligent design.

"From first grade on, anyone going through the public school system is taught evolution," Smith said. "We thought the students need to hear the alternative view."

It's what the organization, on its website, calls its "backdoor strategy."

"We may have been banned from the classroom, but banned does not mean silenced," the website says. "By booking the speakers, and renting the facilities, we still have an impact."

The fact that the conference will run on campus has bothered some MSU scientists, precisely because they don't consider intelligent design science.

"It's unfortunate that some people feel the need to distort and undermine science to support their beliefs, but I think that's a losing strategy," Lenski said. "Scientists will continue to ask questions and find answers, some decisive and others more tentative, about nature and the universe."

Most people, he added, "whatever their religious beliefs, are fascinated and empowered by scientific discoveries."

Others were actually enthusiastic. Bjørn Østman, who was a post-doctoral researcher at MSU's BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action before leaving for the University of California, Santa Barbara a month ago, wrote a scientist's response to the lecture topics, which was posted on the Spartan Ideas website.

"I'm excited about this as an outreach opportunity," he said, "I'd like to actually be able to reach some creationists with some real science."

The Origin Summit is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. on Saturday in Room N130 of the Business College Complex.

For information, go to www.originsummit.com.