Excellent fisking Mr. Heddle!

Thank you for doing all the hard work and laying it out.
J-Dog | 09.21.07 - 3:55 pm | #

Good work. I would like to add a few complaints against the ID movement:
1) The relationship, implied or direct, with God-of-the-gaps thinking. If we can't currently give a naturalistic origin or reason for a biological phenomenon,
then God must have done this, which, if the scientific community accepted this, would kill the motivation for research on this phenomenon. And, of course,
there's the danger of thinking that God didn't have anything to do with things that we think we understand. God is the God of infinity, imaginary numbers, and two plus two.

2) The danger, if invoking special, fairly recent creative activity for phenomena we don't understand the origin of, of suggesting that God didn't get things right in the first place.

3) I'm not sure that this qualifies as political deception, but it sometimes seems to: Pretending that Young Earth Creationism and the Intelligent Design movement are one and
the same thing, when they are not. All of the leaders of the ID movement have said that they believe that the earth is very old, or that Genesis 1 does not need to be
taken literally.
Martin LaBar | Homepage | 09.21.07 - 4:23 pm | #

David,

Would you say that 'cursing God' is the action of one who looks at circumstances and thereby experiences a reduction in his/her faith/trust in God such that it drops below some threshold? If so, would a more basic thrust of Satan be to get one to look away from God as their 'rock?'

I just finished following your exchange with some "new atheists" over at PZ's blog. VERY enjoyable; great seed sowing. It was surprising how much time you were granted before being booted.

One of the comments you made concerning the order of regeneration vs faith is a subject I have been considering recently. Have you posted on it? Do you have any good references? Salvation has several components; are all included in the definition of regeneration you used or only some of them?
David W | 09.21.07 - 4:56 pm | #

"...allowing web pages on your server only later to demand their removal..."

I don't think Baylor "allowed" the web page. IIRC, the web page was put up without permission on a Baylor server.
GCT | 09.21.07 - 6:49 pm | #

One small correction, Dembski didn't "imply Baylor's imprimatur", he claimed it outright. Go into UD’s search function and search the string: Baylor’s new evolutionary Informatics lab. Don’t use quotes. Then go to the third page of results and look for “Jesus Tomb Math” near the bottom. There you will see the original wording of Dr. Dembski’s July 12th post before it was cleaned up to remove the offending Baylor’s reference: “I have been collaborating on some papers on the mathematical foundations of ID at Baylor’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab”. Google is a wonderful thing!
Anonymous | 09.21.07 - 9:01 pm | #

Tom English, who is a fellow of Baylor’s Evolutionary Informatics Lab, has said that "The lab is not doing ID."

More information about him:
http://boundedtheoretics.com/
http://pandasthumb.org/archive | Homepage | 09.22.07 - 6:04 am | #

Any idea how Tom English got involved in this? He was a great critic of Dembski on UD for a while (during a brief "let 1000 flowers bloom" period). I hardly think that WAD would want to be associated with him - was he brought in after Dembski was booted, to give the "lab" some intellectual respectability?
Altabin | 09.22.07 - 11:10 pm | #

Altabin,

Tom English wrote:
"I joined the lab to protest Baylor’s infringement of Bob Marks’ academic freedom. In my opinion, it’s impossible to discriminate against ID, because it’s a sociopolitical instrument that has no intellectual legitimacy.

If you look at the discussion page of the Wikipedia article on “no free lunch theorems,” which I maintain, you’ll see that I decided in June, prior to the controversy, that there was no ID at the EvoInfo lab’s site. My concern at the time was only to avoid bias in the article. It happens that Marks’ definition of evolutionary informatics covers most of my research of the past twelve years, no matter its motivation. It also happens that I was expelled from a Baptist institution 30 years ago for opposing discrimination against women, and I have strongly supported freedom of expression ever since – especially for those I don’t agree with. It seemed to me I was, like it or not, the perfect person to step forward and support Marks. I resisted for a while, worrying about what sort of games I might be sucked into. Now I’m in the difficult position of not only backing a guy everyone I know in the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society regards well, but aiding and abetting the ID movement. I believe that individuals are higher than causes, and academic freedom is a higher cause than opposition to ID, so I’m really just whining about being in a tight spot."

http://pandasthumb.org/archives/...#comment- 128677
aaa | Homepage | 09.23.07 - 4:40 am | #

Hello

I'm new to your blog, I found your post very interesting.

Although I do disagree with your first paragraph. I'm curious your opinion of 1 Peter 5:8, refering to Satan (in the NIV) as an "enemy" and a "roaring lion looking for someone to devour," and also the temptation of Jesus (although granted, God could have allowed Satan to tempt Jesus).

However, that was not the main point of your article and I'm probably in over my head criticizing your theology. Very nice article, I'll continue to read your blog.
Joe | 09.23.07 - 9:06 pm | #

Hi David,
Thanks for an interesting post.
Regarding the notion of ID being religious, how does that notion differ from the metaphysical implications of the big bang?
Most theories have some metaphysical implications, don’t they? For instance it’s the perceived metaphysical implications of Darwinism that drove ID.
Although I guess what you’re referring to is the uptake and origin of ID by a mainly mainstream American Christianity plus one Moonie?
I agree that ID is not science, no more so that Darwinism. For instance how predictive is evolution–what will the future look like? Apart from a retro-dictive ability, Evolution has nothing to say about tomorrow with any detail.
You say:’ The prominent role played by lawyers and philosophers in the ID movement is circumstantial evidence for this charge.’
That’s one way to interpret it; it could also be that the stranglehold of the prevailing theory would not allow any competing ideas to emerge through the usual channels?
I think your right to highlight the issue of tenure as over worked, I wish the theory and nothing but the theory was discussed, the political approach will end up sullying any honest developments in intelligent design. If only the ID impetuous would be exclusively theory driven –ho hum.
Thanks for a timely reminder that we need not be concerned with playing the victim –I agree completely.
Mike Godfrey | Homepage | 09.24.07 - 4:28 am | #

Mike,

All of science has metaphysical implications--certainly the big bang does. But ID is only about metaphysics. That would be OK, even good--ID the apologetic is perfectly fine, but the leaders insist on calling it science.

The big bang makes predictions, perhaps the most remarkable of which was the cosmic microwave background. It is science, science at its best, even.

As for evolution being predictable, I agree that it cannot predict what the diversity of life will be in the future. How could it? Life could be wiped out by an asteroid. I believe evolution does, however, make laboratory-scale testable predictions. But even if evolution could make no testable predictions, I would not want to support ID on the basis that it is "just as bad" as evolution.
heddle | Homepage | 09.24.07 - 8:01 am | #