When I attended a meeting where people from the Discovery Org were going to
talk about exciting new evidence I was a bit confused when they focused on
issues such as the tree of life, Cambrian explosion, peppered moth, Haeckel
and other issues.
My thoughts then and certainly now are that they are trying to indict
Darwinism by planting reasonable doubt in the minds of people that there is
something wrong with Darwinism. This is not attempted per se through a
rigorous scientific research program but more through a carefully designed
propaganda program. I never took the Wedge too seriously but now it seems to
me clearly that science is sacrified in favor of the time table to displace
what they mistakenly identified as ontological materialism/naturalism.
It started with Philip Johnson who tried the lawyer-like approach to place
Darwin on trial. Although his arguments were hardly scientifically rigorous
or even supportable he did manage to place some seeds of doubts.
But to a similar extent is has become quite obvious that the ID movement is
not interested in extending their paradigm of ID beyond the vaguaries of
Dembski's design inference or Behe's IC. Despite the facts that many problems
have been shown to exists with these theses, little effort has been expended
on addressing these criticisms.
Wesley's arguments about intelligent designers and natural selection:
The "actualization-exclusion-specification" triad mentioned above also
fits natural selection rather precisely. One might thus conclude that
Dembski's argument establishes that natural selection can be recognized
as an intelligent agent. "
http://inia.cls.org/~welsberr/zgists/wre/papers/dembski7.html
or his and other people's comments about CSI, all seem to remain unaddressed.
So is ID scientific?
"At no step --not even one-- does Doolittle give a model that includes
numbers or quantities; without numbers there is not science."
Behe pp. 95 Darwin's Black Box
Will the ID movement hold itself to the same standards to which it seems to
hold its opponents?
They could start by defining some of the concepts more clearly and explain
how intelligent designers can be detected and separated from natural
"intelligent" designers.
It's time for some science.
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