If you spend any time talking to ID folks, you know that they are very touchy about being called creationists. As they see it, the creationists have been so incompetent in making their case, and so extreme in their religious views, that they discredit the cause of anti-evolutionism every time they open their mouths.
For this reason, they are endlessly differentiating themselves from the creationists. The script is always the same: Whereas creationists discuss science through the lens of their religious beliefs, ID folks are just honestly trying to come to the conclusions best justified by the evidence. If those conclusions happen to have religious consequences then that is incidental.
A recent contribution to this genre comes from Christian apologist Jonathan McLatchie (Video here). He says,
Creationism, by contrast, is an attempt to interpret the world in view of a specific religious text, whether that be Genesis 1 or something like that. And, so, creationism is really concerned with ontology, what is the source of being, whereas intelligent design is the quest for detecting the products of intelligent causality in the world.
That’s the party line, and it’s a script the ID folks repeat endlessly. Any critic who rejects it is accused of lying about ID. They are shills for the Darwin lobby. They are mendaciously misrepresenting ID to smear it by association.
But the script is nonsense. It is McLatchie and his fellow travelers who are being dishonest about creationism, and not the critics who are being dishonest about ID.
McLatchie has described “Biblical creationism.” But the creationists are adamant, at least when speaking for public consumption, that this is only one side of the coin. There is also “scientific creationism,” which is a different thing entirely. Scientific creationism, in their telling, is just an honest attempt to do science, and to go where the evidence leads them. That the evidence just happens to be in accord with their understanding of Genesis 1 is neither here nor there. Precisely the claim McLatchie makes on behalf of ID.
Of course, you might retort that this is just a sham. You might point to the history of creationism, in which scientific creationism appeared suddenly after the courts found that it was unconstitutional to teach theories in conflict with the Bible.
But this hardly distinguishes ID from creationism either. ID was created as a legal strategy in the wake of adverse court decisions in the eighties. They even wrote the famous Wedge Document, to spell out the way in which ID was just a political and legal strategy for reforming the culture. They took a famous creationist textbook and simply replaced occurrences of the word “creationism” with occurrences of the phrase “intelligent design.”
Maybe the difference lies in the arguments? The scientific assertions made by creationists are really so foolish that they are hard to take seriously at all. Perhaps this is the difference we seek. Surely the ID folks have provided novel and interesting arguments that have reshaped the discussion.
But no. There is nothing in the ID canon that was not anticipated by creationists. ID folks contributed some spit and polish, and they sling jargon with greater skill than their predecessors, but the ID canon is just a proper subset of what creationists offered. Irreducible complexity? Back-of-the-envelope probability calculations? Science is blinded by naturalistic philosophy? Nothing new here. It’s all standard fare for the creationists. And now that the ID folks have happily embraced the thermodynamics argument, we cannot even credit them with avoiding the silliest arguments made by the creationists.
There is no important difference between ID and creationism. They are different dialects of the same language.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1jT4GWZ
If you spend any time talking to ID folks, you know that they are very touchy about being called creationists. As they see it, the creationists have been so incompetent in making their case, and so extreme in their religious views, that they discredit the cause of anti-evolutionism every time they open their mouths.
For this reason, they are endlessly differentiating themselves from the creationists. The script is always the same: Whereas creationists discuss science through the lens of their religious beliefs, ID folks are just honestly trying to come to the conclusions best justified by the evidence. If those conclusions happen to have religious consequences then that is incidental.
A recent contribution to this genre comes from Christian apologist Jonathan McLatchie (Video here). He says,
Creationism, by contrast, is an attempt to interpret the world in view of a specific religious text, whether that be Genesis 1 or something like that. And, so, creationism is really concerned with ontology, what is the source of being, whereas intelligent design is the quest for detecting the products of intelligent causality in the world.
That’s the party line, and it’s a script the ID folks repeat endlessly. Any critic who rejects it is accused of lying about ID. They are shills for the Darwin lobby. They are mendaciously misrepresenting ID to smear it by association.
But the script is nonsense. It is McLatchie and his fellow travelers who are being dishonest about creationism, and not the critics who are being dishonest about ID.
McLatchie has described “Biblical creationism.” But the creationists are adamant, at least when speaking for public consumption, that this is only one side of the coin. There is also “scientific creationism,” which is a different thing entirely. Scientific creationism, in their telling, is just an honest attempt to do science, and to go where the evidence leads them. That the evidence just happens to be in accord with their understanding of Genesis 1 is neither here nor there. Precisely the claim McLatchie makes on behalf of ID.
Of course, you might retort that this is just a sham. You might point to the history of creationism, in which scientific creationism appeared suddenly after the courts found that it was unconstitutional to teach theories in conflict with the Bible.
But this hardly distinguishes ID from creationism either. ID was created as a legal strategy in the wake of adverse court decisions in the eighties. They even wrote the famous Wedge Document, to spell out the way in which ID was just a political and legal strategy for reforming the culture. They took a famous creationist textbook and simply replaced occurrences of the word “creationism” with occurrences of the phrase “intelligent design.”
Maybe the difference lies in the arguments? The scientific assertions made by creationists are really so foolish that they are hard to take seriously at all. Perhaps this is the difference we seek. Surely the ID folks have provided novel and interesting arguments that have reshaped the discussion.
But no. There is nothing in the ID canon that was not anticipated by creationists. ID folks contributed some spit and polish, and they sling jargon with greater skill than their predecessors, but the ID canon is just a proper subset of what creationists offered. Irreducible complexity? Back-of-the-envelope probability calculations? Science is blinded by naturalistic philosophy? Nothing new here. It’s all standard fare for the creationists. And now that the ID folks have happily embraced the thermodynamics argument, we cannot even credit them with avoiding the silliest arguments made by the creationists.
There is no important difference between ID and creationism. They are different dialects of the same language.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1jT4GWZ
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