The wrong people will do everything in their power to guarantee that the wrong political climate will continue. It seems, then, that the wrong people ensure the wrong political climate and the wrong political climate ensures the wrong people. How then to break free of this vicious circle?

The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

Because government has tremendous power, it attracts people who are eager to game the system, obtaining by force of law what they could never achieve through consensus.

Government has a legitimate sphere of operation. The problem arises when that sphere continually expands, encompassing areas where government lacks legitimacy.

Intelligent Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God.

I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong.

Wrong people are wrong not because of their faults but because of their presumed virtues.