Re: [asa] ID/Miracles/Design

If the waters have been muddied, David, in your words "so badly that almost everybody thinks thats TD is ID and ID is TD. Everyone seems so concerned that some transcendental agent is at work," then IMO it is mainly if not entirely b/c leading ID advocates themselves have turned the ground under them into mud.

I mean especially Phil Johnson, none other than the "father" of the ID movement, with his campaign to use ID as the "entering wedge" to topple naturalism, which he in turn sees as the cause of so much moral and cultural depravity. And, I mean Bill Demsbki, who (in the preface to the Festschrift for Johnson that he edited) wrote, following the Dover trial, that "school boards and state legislators may tread more cautiously, but tread on evolution they will — the culture war demands it!”

When 2 of the 3 top guns in the movement (the other one is Mike Behe) say such things, it's somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible to separate the ideas from the culture wars and thus from the religious component. Ditto for the refusal publicly on the part of ID to pronounce a view on the history of nature (i.e., the big bang, the old earth, the historicity of the fossil record), which allows YECs to make up a good part of the camp following. Ditto for the attack dog mode of UD and Denyse O'Leary, which apes what it abhors (namely, the attack dog mode of Dawkins and company) and plays to the culture of talk radio and sound bites. This isn't what the genuine pursuit of truth about God and nature should be about, IMO. But, if you somehow rid ID of all of those associations, you might end up with half a dozen nerds sitting around a table talking serious stuff, not a movement large enough to effect change in how science is taught in public schools. And that, f!
 or Johnson and many of his friends and followers, is the bottom line.

Ted

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Received on Thu Apr 23 10:41:54 2009