Further to Not all creationists are created equal? (Typically, Real Clear Science didn’t ask an ID theorist to explain what ID is, so the result is like a dog dancing – not good but at least, sort of, dancing):
Programmer Jonathan Bartlett offers some thoughts:
The discussion of intelligent design, while not terrible, has a few significant flaws. First of all, it basically equates ID with old-earth creationism. ID’ers come from a range of specific opinions. There are people in ID who are YEC, OEC, Theistic Evolutionists, and even a few atheists (technically, they are probably better considered pantheists).
The article correctly states that fundamental difference for ID is that there is a mode of causation, namely agency, that is not law or chance (which the article mentions). However, an important consideration missing was that this does not have to be expressed in a way that is interventionist, and it doesn’t have to be God who is behaving in this way.
If you think that your own choices are the result of your internal will and your creativity, and not forced upon you by the laws of nature and chance, then you are a member of ID. That is, if you think that humans act as automatons of nature, you probably need to pick another position, but if you think that humans are not fully coerced by their physical body and environment, then you are a de facto ID’er. If you think that God’s work in creation is detectable within nature as not emanating from nature itself, even if you think He did all of the work at the beginning and everything evolved from there, you are an ID’er.
Well, that is a position that would be recognized within the ID community.
But by now it should be axiomatic that few pop science outlets today would serve their readers so well as to have anyone who identifies with the intelligent design community explain what ID is.
Unfortunately, academic science is currently no better, on a variety of measures. See, for example: Peer review: Snail declared extinct turns up again, no retraction issued?
Some of us think that any committee of non-extinct (as claimed) snails would be good enough peer reviewers under the circumstances…
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