02.27.09
A pox on both houses…
http://www.uncommondescent.com/faq/
I get a bit impatient with these endless defenses of ID against what, to be sure, are often vituperative rather than intelligent critiques.
I think there is something sad about ID (but by comparison Darwinism is turning into a tragedy). Just at the point that the critique of Darwinism was gaining steam, in the period of Michael Denton that effort was suddenly hijacking by the imposition of design arguments on the whole question of the flaws of Darwin’s theory. We can see the slide in Behe’s The Black Box. That book is on the borderline, slipping into the ID confusion. The basic argument without the intimations of ID to come (as an organized lobby) is insightful, and the book, which should have been in the Denton, genre got corrupted by the devious thinking of a movement.
Defenders of ID have never once cited the classic problems with the design argument and instead done in reverse what the Darwinist have done, claim science where science has been betrayed.
These tactics can really corrupt thought, and leave people unable to evaluate intelligibly the issues of evolution.
To be fair the Darwin paradigm has done the same thing.
You need to give it a rest, and stop destroying the work of those who are critics of Darwin outstanding. Secular, and scientific.
A postdarwinian paradigm is never going to happen with design thinking. It is a conservative phantom and vampire on the attention and efforts of those who want change.
It is a bitter fact, but Darwin critics are now ostracized twice, twice mark you, first by Darwinists, and now by the Design cult, which won’t even exchange emails with the secular critics.
That’s sad.
And a pox on both houses
For a long time, Intelligent Design (ID) proponents, enlightened by current scientific knowledge and faithful to its methods, have been making specific and objective arguments about the origin of biological information. Nevertheless, many critics mistakenly insist that ID, in spite of its well-defined purpose, its supporting evidence, and its mathematically precise paradigms, is not really a valid scientific theory. All too often, they make this charge on the basis of the scientists’ perceived motives.
We have noticed that some of these false objections and attributions, largely products of an aggressive Darwinist agenda, have found their way into institutions of higher learning, the press, the United States court system, and even the European Union policy directives. Routinely, they find expression in carefully-crafted talking points, complete with derogatory labels and personal caricatures, all of which appear to have been part of a disinformation campaign calculated to mislead the public.
Many who interact with us on this blog recycle this misinformation. Predictably, they tend to raise notoriously weak objections that have been answered thousands of times. What follows is a list of those objections and our best attempt to answer them in abbreviated form. If you have been sent here, you are now being asked to familiarize yourself with basic ID knowledge so that you can acquire the minimal amount of information necessary to conduct meaningful dialogue.
James said,
February 28, 2009 at 1:25 pm
“Just at the point that the critique of Darwinism was gaining steam, in the period of Michael Denton that effort was suddenly hijacking by the imposition of design arguments on the whole question of the flaws of Darwin’s theory.”
I wonder what happened here. It certainly seemed like the Denton/Wesson/Lovtrup stream would take charge of the critical genre, but somehow the whole effort got derailed by this form of neo-Creationism. The ID movement is the very reason why the scientific establishment clings so tenaciously to Darwinian theory. Given the political stance and cultural orientation of the ID movement, I can hardly blame scientists for their efforts to wipe out this movement.