There is the common fallacy that ID was created to sneak creationism into public high schools. Actually, one could make the case that ID was created to sneak “creationism” into universities. 🙂
ID literature is more sophisticated than creation science literature, perhaps because it is (except for Of Pandas and People) usually directed more toward a university audience…
Eugenie Scott
Eugenie Scott defeats Ed Brayton
and
I feel that the essential argument has to be carried on at the higher level, at the university level, and it’s interesting you see that the people that come from the NCSE side are always trying to say this is just an issue in the high schools
Phil Johnson
The link below is a video of a debate was between 3 Darwinists vs. 3 Creationist students of science. The Creationists relied heavily on ID materials and rarely appealed to theology or philosophy, they just kept pounding facts and mathematics and information theory and cybernetics.
The debate was, in some dimension, quite boring as what you’d expect from a dispassionate scientific inquiry. But that was also its strength. The Creationists appeared termperate, knowledgeable, and intelligent. A good fraction of their arguments came from ID literature, not from creation science literature or theology.
There was Raquel Murray, a Master of Science student in Modeling and Computational Science, with a BS in physics with math minor! Her proficiency in understanding biochemistry was amazing. Although her delivery was nervous and stuttering, her points were unassailable. She drew heavily, not on the Bible, but the work of atheist biologist Jack Trevors! Talk about a subtle and sophisticated line of argument! She made reference to the inability of any future discovery of physical law to thwart claims for the intelligent origin of information (the paradoxical fact that physics makes high levels of information possible but also simultaneously improbable, ala Shannon).
At best for the evolutionists, the debate was a draw, and the evolutionists had to rely on some fabricated “facts” (howlers such as the claim genetic code is created via thermodynamics, a total misinterpretation of this paper). If this is representative of the next generation in the Creation/Evolution debate at the university level, the creationists will fare very well. ID’s influence (which is not Bible based) is evident in its effect on biblical creationists. I didn’t watch the whole debate, but focused on the origin-of-life part of the debate and the origin-of-information part of the debate. The creationists were quite sophisticated in not making appeals to the authority of the Bible. They pounded the facts, math, information theory and cybernetics. God made the facts of nature, and He expects us to use those facts.
The way they argued reminded me of Phil Johnson’s admonition in dealing with Darwinists:
Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate
The creationist students, for the most part, did exactly that. Here is the video:
Creation vs. Evolution University Debate
NOTES:
Christ said in John 10:38
though you do not believe me, believe the works