Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Is this the safest time to be a non-Darwinist in half a century?

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At New Oxford Review, Tom Bethell considers the Darwinists’ attempt to suppress any an all criticism a turning point in the Evolution Wars: “The Cell Declares His Handiwork” (July/August 2011)

At the political level, they have mounted a furious response to the ID challenge. They try to identify it with creationism because ridiculing those who accept Genesis seems simple. Unless I am much mistaken, the Darwinists today increasingly look back to the creationist wars of the 1980s with nostalgia.

In the biology departments of secular universities, discussion of intelligent design is forbidden. Philosophy and theology departments are a bit more relaxed, but according to [math guy] William Dembski, the author of The Design Inference, not much so. He questions whether they will be any more hospitable to design than the biology departments. By way of explanation, he quotes Machiavelli:

There is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly for fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor.

But that fear is crumbling. Similarly,

In an e-mail, [math guy] David Berlinski, who wrote The Deniable Darwin (2010) and The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (2009), says that intelligent design has “flourished” in recent years.

Under its own name, it is “streng verboten in biology departments, but this is, I rather suspect, a matter of the orthodoxy of names.”

He continued:

The ID movement itself has put on the table concepts such as specified complexity and irreducible complexity, and in one way or another, these ideas are making steady and inexorable progress. They are everywhere discussed; and they have played a significant role in experimental design. For the first time in one hundred years, the faithful [Darwinists] have been compelled to justify their claims by experiments.

And we all know how that experiment thingie is turning out. They’re reduced to this laughable rubbish and increasingly failed persecutions instead.

The UD News team has always bet that the math guys would bring down Darwinism, and that the cult’s last defenders would be “Thank God for Evolution!” woo-woos, for whom evidence is irrelevant.

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Comments
Or, mebbe they do . . .kairosfocus
July 22, 2011
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It is indeed as if these various "intellectuals" have never heard of--or do not understand--a strawman argument.jjcassidy
July 21, 2011
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"Darwinists today increasingly look back to the creationist wars of the 1980s with nostalgia." This was empirically demonstrated via the fecal matter fight incited by Nick M in the thread "Why so many Darwin Defenders were no-shows..." Nick's lust for the glory of battles past was observed by his unquenchable desire to set up the ID front line as a toy battlefield with Noah and his ark and all the animals lead by Jesus on a unicorn. Like the Japanese soldiers still fighting decades after WWII ended, Nick smashed down on the toy battlefield of his special creation with gleeful wrath like the pagan god Aries.junkdnaforlife
July 21, 2011
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