The ID group isn't trying to run away. Most of us quit the original
evolution reflector because it came to be dominated by low-quality
posts (some of them sent by me). But we speak to academic
audiences regularly, where it is impossible to avoid tough questions.
This past year, I spoke on ID to the ASA Rocky Mountain section,
at the NTSE conference in Austin, and at a science colloquium at
Wheaton; in about one month's time, I'll be speaking at Montana State
in Bozeman, and to a history and rhetoric of science meeting here
in Chicago. You're right, Glenn: "Sometimes the best place a
theorist can be is among those who disagree strongly with him."
The Internet, however, gobbles up one's time like a hungry shark.
I could spend an evening explaining why your "personal knowledge"
objection to Dembski's notion of specification, for instance, is a
non-starter. [If you were right, anyone could justifiably complain to a
skilled archeologist that he didn't really find the pottery shard
which others didn't even notice, as they walked over the same field:
because that was just his "personal knowledge" at work. But of course
that's nonsense. He did find the shard, it's real, and he found it
precisely because he knew which specifications to look for. The shard's
design properties are fully objective, but one needs some training --
some knowledge -- to see them.] We all have to make choices, however.
And I choose to spend less time debating on the Internet.
One last thing. You wrote:
>I am also sorry that no one seems to want to defend the concept
>that all the information for all of evolution was input into the original
>cell.
I don't want to defend it because I don't believe it. (Pack the information
for a blue whale into a bacterium?) IDers are hardly monolithic: Jonathan
Wells and I have talked with Mike Behe, in a critical vein, about his original
super-cell idea. Mike's ideas continue to develop. We're struggling out
here like everybody else.
Back to work.
Paul Nelson.