Has interest in intelligent design WANED?

_{Denyse O'Leary

April 18, 2022

Intelligent Design, Media}

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If ID has “waned,” why can’t I keep up with my mail?

I don’t see any cobwebs:

A new ID the Future episode continues the debate between design theorist Casey Luskin, an editor of The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith, and science historian Adam Shapiro, co-author of Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Justin Brierley, of the popular British debate program Unbelievable?, hosts. In this second half of the conversation, Shapiro argues that intelligent design’s popularity seems to have waned. Casey Luskin counters, arguing that the number and frequency of New York Times articles on ID is a superficial metric. In truth, the ID research program is exploding, with the number of peer-reviewed ID papers growing every year, and the number of interested graduate students, ID hubs, and conferences expanding around the world. The latter are attended by high-level scientists, including Nobel laureates. This is not an idea that’s on the wane.
Evolution News, “Luskin, Shapiro: Has Intelligent Design Waned?” at Evolution News and Science Today (April 17, 2022)

Comments

Seversky
What Luskin’s cherry-picked quotes reveal, if anything, is the unacceptable threat that Christians fear the theory of evolution poses to their doctrine of human exceptionalism, of being a chosen people and the pinnacle of their God’s creation.
What those quotes reveal is that textbooks promote evolution as a religious doctrine - which should be illegal and should elicit the shock and horror of the secularists since it's not different from saying something like "clearly, God created the universe for a purpose". Evolutionary theory cannot even refute the idea that humans are the chosen people of God. The mere statement that "evolution is unguided" is a religious concept. All of those quote confirm that Darwin's interest was religious. He was attacking creationism.Silver Asiatic_{April 20, 2022
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Silver Asiatic/21
Religious doctrine in biology textbooks (courtesy of Dr. Casey Luskin’s research):
What Luskin's cherry-picked quotes reveal, if anything, is the unacceptable threat that Christians fear the theory of evolution poses to their doctrine of human exceptionalism, of being a chosen people and the pinnacle of their God's creation.Seversky_{April 19, 2022
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Zweston @8 and Pearlman @13, KRock @14, Sandy @19, Silver Asiatic, and Jerry, All nicely stated. I appreciated the link to Dr John Sanford’s presentation, which I’ve been watching, Sandy. The emotion we see in modern social media and politics is a commitment to an aspirational paradigm that’s turned many major cities in the U.S. into “socialist worker’s paradises” (also known as hell holes) covered over with a bodyguard of blatant rationalizations and lies. It’s destroying the U.S. economy in the name of concern for poor people, has destroyed the U.S. education system to create poorly educated slaves for the government and mega corporations. It’s compromised the U.S. medical community and medical research in favor of the profits of insurance companies and big pharma. It’s destroyed nurturing families and promoted poverty and crime. Emotion has also resurrected the corpse of pervasive racism in contrast to Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech. It turns out that skin color has a high degree of genetic variability and doesn’t reflect a single pathway of haplogroups. Science has been deformed and slowed for over 150 years by a frequently falsified racist theory from the time of British colonialism that was used to justify brutal enslavement through racial manifest destiny. This crappy theory provided us with terms such as vestigial organs, living fossils, “junk” DNA, pliable tissue preserved for millions of years in fossils, continual surprises pushing back the appearance of many organisms, the seemly magical origin of life, and the unimaginable complexity of “simple” cells that belie their random spontaneous appearance. Emotion also misleads our religious allegiances, either for and against sets of beliefs that do indeed bear critical examination. For example, one can trace Torah through numerous manuscripts over thousands of years. One can validate its records, often obscured but frequently and continually vindicated by new archaeological discoveries such as over 50 persons mentioned in the Tanakh. One can follow its prophetic fulfillment in history. One can compare the lives of its disciples with those of the Hollywood glitterati and sewer politicians. None of these aspects require any faith to examine, but they're continually assaulted by uncredentialed "fact checkers" and "social justice warriors" whose mission in life is to suppress the truth and freedom of speech in favor of their own pet political views and in service to their self-righteous snobbery. Frankly, I'm truly fed up with the continuous hysteria of appeals to emotion. -QQuerius_{April 19, 2022
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The previously “unknown” Stephen Meyer has, with great fanfare, let the religion cat out of the bag with his publication of the “Return of the God Hypothesis.” The so-called “design inference” now points directly to the gates of heaven
Ignorance on display! Doesn’t come close to describing Meyer’s book which doesn’t endorse any religion or point to heaven. But what else is new with one of our most uninformed commenters. If anything supports ID it is our permanent trolls who can never defend their nonsense.jerry_{April 19, 2022
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Religious doctrine in biology textbooks (courtesy of Dr. Casey Luskin's research): “[E]volution works without either plan or purpose — Evolution is random and undirected.‚ (Biology, by Kenneth R. Miller & Joseph S. Levine (1st ed., Prentice Hall, 1991), pg. 658; (3rd ed., Prentice Hall, 1995), pg. 658; (4th ed., Prentice Hall, 1998), pg. 658; emphasis in original.) “Humans represent just one tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life.‚ (Stephen J Gould quoted in Biology, by Peter H Raven & George B Johnson (5th ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pg 15; (6th ed., McGraw Hill, 2000), pg. 16.) “By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.” (Evolutionary Biology, by Douglas J. Futuyma (3rd ed., Sinauer Associates Inc., 1998), p. 5.) “Darwin knew that accepting his theory required believing in philosophical materialism, the conviction that matter is the stuff of all existence and that all mental and spiritual phenomena are its by-products. Darwinian evolution was not only purposeless but also heartless–a process in which the rigors of nature ruthlessly eliminate the unfit. Suddenly, humanity was reduced to just one more species in a world that cared nothing for us. The great human mind was no more than a mass of evolving neurons. Worst of all, there was no divine plan to guide us.” (Biology: Discovering Life by Joseph S. Levine & Kenneth R. Miller (1st ed., D.C. Heath and Co., 1992), pg. 152; (2nd ed.. D.C. Heath and Co., 1994), p. 161; emphases in original.) “Adopting this view of the world means accepting not only the processes of evolution, but also the view that the living world is constantly evolving, and that evolutionary change occurs without any ‚goals.‚ The idea that evolution is not directed towards a final goal state has been more difficult for many people to accept than the process of evolution itself.‚ (Life: The Science of Biology by William K. Purves, David Sadava, Gordon H. Orians, & H. Craig Keller, (6th ed., Sinauer; W.H. Freeman and Co., 2001), pg. 3.) “The blind watchmaker is natural selection. Natural selection is totally blind to the future. ‚Humans are fundamentally not exceptional because we came from the same evolutionary source as every other species. It is natural selection of selfish genes that has given us our bodies and brains ‚Natural selection is a bewilderingly simple idea. And yet what it explains is the whole of life, the diversity of life, the apparent design of life.‚ (Richard Dawkins quoted in Biology by Neil A. Campbell, Jane B. Reese. & Lawrence G. Mitchell (5th ed., Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), pgs. 412-413.) “Of course, no species has ‚¬Ëœchosen‚¬â„¢ a strategy. Rather, its ancestors‚¬â€little by little, generation after generation‚¬â€merely wandered into a successful way of life through the action of random evolutionary forces ‚¬Â¦. Once pointed in a certain direction, a line of evolution survives only if the cosmic dice continues to roll in its favor. ‚[J]ust by chance, a wonderful diversity of life has developed during the billions of years in which organisms have been evolving on earth.‚ (Biology by Burton S. Guttman (1st ed., McGraw Hill, 1999), pgs. 36-37.) “It is difficult to avoid the speculation that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront. ‚The real difficulty in accepting Darwin‚¬â„¢s theory has always been that it seems to diminish our significance. Earlier, astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the solar universe, or even of our own solar system. Now the new biology asked us to accept the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are the products of a random process that, as far as science can show, we are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design.‚ (Invitation to Biology, by Helena Curtis & N. Sue Barnes(3rd ed., Worth, 1981), pgs. 474-475.) “The advent of Darwinism posted even greater threats to religion by suggesting that biological relationship, including the origin of humans and of all species, could be explained by natural selection without the intervention of a god. Many felt that evolutionary randomness and uncertainty had replaced a deity having conscious, purposeful, human characteristics. The Darwinian view that evolution is a historical process and present-type organisms were not created spontaneously but formed in a succession of selective events that occurred in the past, contradicted the common religious view that there could be no design, biological or otherwise, without an intelligent designer. ‚The variability by which selection depends may be random, but adaptions are not; they arise because selection chooses and perfects only what is adaptive. In this scheme a god of design and purpose is not necessary. Neither religion nor science has irrevocably conquered. Religion has been bolstered by paternalistic social systems in which individuals depend on the beneficiences of those more powerful than they are, as well as the comforting idea that humanity was created in the image of a god to rule over the world and its creatures. Religion provided emotional solace ‚ Nevertheless, faith in religious dogma has been eroded by natural explanations of its mysteries, by a deep understanding of the sources of human emotional needs, and by the recognition that ethics and morality can change among different societies and that acceptance of such values need not depend on religion.‚ (Evolution by Monroe, W. Strickberger (3rd ed., Jones & Bartlett, 2000), pg. 70-71)Silver Asiatic_{April 19, 2022
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CD
;a blatant attempt to inject religion into the public-school science curriculum in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
ID was attempting to bring some balance. When biology textbooks say that evolution is "unguided" or that evolution showed that life emerged without a plan or purpose or that creationist ideas were proven false, as textbooks have done - then they have been "injecting religion" into the government schools for a long time already. But for whatever reason, atheism was considered a protected religious view whereas theism was forbidden.
The so-called “design inference” now points directly to the gates of heaven…..
Stephen Meyer is not the owner of the design inference. He can point it to whatever he wants. So can you.Silver Asiatic_{April 19, 2022
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Best video dismantling Darwin fairy tale , very clear , sharp and save you from reading thousand of pages. Best summary I've ever seen. https://youtu.be/XVM8mRQTfjkSandy_{April 19, 2022
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SA
So the wedge goals have not been met (I’d call them a bit far-fetched actually) but I don’t see interest in ID waning.
Judge Jones certainly did not see the wedge goals as far-fetched. He saw them for what they are, a blatant attempt to inject religion into the public-school science curriculum in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. DI's second Governing Goal could not be more explicit:
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God. (emphasis added)
The previously "unknown" Stephen Meyer has, with great fanfare, let the religion cat out of the bag with his publication of the "Return of the God Hypothesis." The so-called "design inference" now points directly to the gates of heaven.....chuckdarwin_{April 19, 2022
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I assume this will cover all the details to offset those emotional responses. By one of the modern originators of ID.
The Miracle of Man The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence by Michael Denton
https://www.discovery.org/b/the-miracle-of-man/jerry_{April 19, 2022
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@#15 Thanks Sandy!KRock_{April 19, 2022
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{blockquote} text to be quoted {/blockquote} but replace { with < for bold insert( instead of blockquote) strong for italics insert (insted of blockquote ) emSandy_{April 19, 2022
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@ Jerry #7 Perhaps! However, it is difficult to ignore the extent to which the pursuit of truth (today) is being sacrificed at the alter of emotional feelings. We see this, for example, with the idea that men can somehow menstruate or have babies. It's the abandonment of fact driven truth in lieu of emotional driven truth. We are living in a de-facto post-truth world, or so it would seem. Sure, emotions will always have some role to play in any belief system or worldview. But they shouldn't be the deciding factor for what is true and what isn't—that's dangerous, in my opinion anyway. I see many anti-ID'er argue their points out of emotional feelings instead of factual substance; they simply hate the idea that ID represents a plausible (but still debatable) explanation for the origin of species. It bothers them so much that they'd rather spend what little precious and fleeting time they have debating the existence of something they don't believe in. Talk about being hyperemotional. Feelings don't equal facts! That's really the point I was trying to make. On a side note, I'd really like to know how people on here are able to quote previous posts. I've yet to figure out how this is done.KRock_{April 19, 2022
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If the debate has waned it is because ID has won the science dispute, and NDT Darwinism exposed for the faith-based doctrine it is. At the leading edge is deep-time dependent ID vs YeC creation science and how to reconcile scriptural testimony with the science and at the same time advance ethe science and scriptural understanding. reference Pearlman YeC for the alignment of Torah (Word of The One) testimony, science and ancient civ.Pearlman_{April 19, 2022
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Seversky
As we are now past the 20-year mark, how many of the objectives of this ambitious program have been achieved?
They were definitely ambitious goals. So, there's nothing wrong with "stretch targets" and being bold about what you hope to achieve. None of those goals were fully achieved, but we have to look at progress over this period of time. In my view, the progress ID has made has been tremendous. Going back to 1988 and the wedge document - that was 6 years before Michael Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" which was a major publication for ID. Stephen Meyer was virtually unknown at the time also. In 1988, the only real opposition to Darwinism was from various creationist groups, and those were ignored for the most part because of their Bible-centric approach. Since then, ID has some peer-reviewed papers, an academic journal and some considerable respectability from scholars. It's still a small group, but it's growing, not shrinking. So the wedge goals have not been met (I'd call them a bit far-fetched actually) but I don't see interest in ID waning. I just judge it on anecdotal evidence. In the early 1990s, ID was universally ridiculed and considered a complete embarrassment. This is just anecdotal but I look at this recent video by Lukas Ruegger: Do Homology and Phylogenetics REALLY Support Darwin’s Tree of Life? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwcC-4YxOlk Something like that, in the past, would have been swarmed with atheistic-hostility and ridicule. Today, the ratio of positive to negative comments looks like 20 to 1. Even those few negatives have very little to say about the actual content of the video. The strength of the ID inference continues to grow stronger and people are not afraid to defend it. That's all happening at the grass-roots level. It's much more difficult to break through into tenured academia - which self-selects against anything like ID. But that resistance will eventually break down.Silver Asiatic_{April 19, 2022
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Is that because you are emotional?
Unusual question to ask? People describe me as just the opposite. I do too. My favorite subject in school was geometry because of the logic involved. But I certainly can be very emotional about lots of things.jerry_{April 19, 2022
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Jerry Ask anyone who is committed to a belief system and you will find emotions at the heart of most their beliefs.
You put the horse in front of cart. Is that because you are emotional?Sandy_{April 19, 2022
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"I believe it because I think it’s true" Zw, Ditto. Andrewasauber_{April 19, 2022
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Jerry, I agree that there is an emotional piece to my faith, as I think it is demanded...but what is great about Christianity is it has evidence. I believe it because I think it's true, not just because I want it to be true (which is also true). The tomb is still empty. Praise be to God! And, can we also note that evolutionists show their religious beliefs when they make emotional appeals and ad-hominems.zweston_{April 19, 2022
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truth is no longer determined by facts but rather by one’s emotions
My guess this was always true. Ask anyone who is committed to a belief system and you will find emotions at the heart of most their beliefs. I recently asked some older people why they believed what they did. Not one could give a logical reason. It was all emotional. I asked a preacher a couple years ago why what he believed is true. He had no answer that wasn’t emotional. Try it yourself - ask a minister, priest, rabbi, or other religious person what they believe and listen for a why that is not emotional. I rarely find it. Is it different here? Somewhat but see how easily the discussions revert to religion and then it becomes emotional. And why are there different religious choices if not emotions at the heart of it. The problem with choices based on emotions is that they are subject to other emotional experiences that counteract them and often overrule them. So one changes their beliefs.jerry_{April 19, 2022
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As we are now past the 20-year mark, how many of the objectives of this ambitious program have been achieved?
:)It's easy to be comunist under Stalin . If you can’t beat them, ban them ( https://creation.com/slaughter-of-the-dissidents )Sandy_{April 19, 2022
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@Asauber #4 Exactly! I would also add that truth is no longer determined by facts but rather by one's emotions—a bi-product of the postmodern world we now live in I suspect.KRock_{April 19, 2022
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Since today's popular media and culture are designed to obscure rather than inform, any subject that requires thinking gets ignored. Andrewasauber_{April 19, 2022
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Sev, lessee, has there been a little bit of a culture war and in the shadows, 4th gen civil war in the US? Could that be a relevant factor? He who hazards to project the precise timeline of a war will surely be shown wrong. Moltke the Elder said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. And yet, paradoxically, strategic planning is vital to having capability to meet contingencies. KF PS, and given subtext, kindly note that it is clearly well warranted that the world of cell based life, from the root, exhibits coded, algorithmic genetic information: language and goal-directed stepwise procedures. Only in a world locked into the crooked yardstick of Lewontin's a prori imposed evolutionary materialistic scientism, would that not have been instantly decisive in the 1950's when it came out. The history of ideas matrix in which design theory emerges, was and is under ideological domination by backers of crooked yardsticks, so a paradigms fight and wider struggle to break out of Babylonian Captivity are givens. And yes, as de Rastaman does say, dis ah Babylon. When you are willing to admit to the grim realities of Babylon, we can reasonably discuss what the late Philip Johnson was pondering and proposing in an early fund raising newsletter. Similarly, as we ponder the context of Plato's first design inference on record, cosmology, I clip from a comment I made to Q a little while ago:
assume, for argument, that there are as yet undiscovered super laws of the underlying quasi physical world, say, the quantum foam. That is, fluctuations are constrained to be in the close ballpark, in parameter space, of where our observed cosmos is, and thus have support for C-Chem, aqueous medium, cell based life written into them. All that would do is shift fine tuning up one level. The underlying point is, this is a scientific-mathematical exercise based on what we observe. We observe an array of so far well confirmed laws, never mind the current storm in a teacup over the standard model and a fifth force. We can see that Mathematics is the study of the logic of structure and quantity, i.e. a technical quantitative extension of logic of being, which invites possible world analysis. Vary the parameters in the configuration space, boom, we are at a locally sharply fine tuned operating point. It matters not, that other zones might be carpeted with Lewis’ flies, we have a patch with just the one fly and splat, it’s swatted by a bullet. The reasonable thing is to infer precise aiming, then go on to look for a marksman with a first class, tack driver of a rifle set up on a bench rest. The design inference is the first step, the second is a worldviews level forensics exercise.
Oh yes, this response to DD may also help.kairosfocus_{April 19, 2022
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These were the goals of the Intelligent Design movement as set out in the Discovery Institute's "Wedge Document" (1998)
GOALS Governing Goals To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies. To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God. Five Year Goals To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory. To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science. To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda. Twenty Year Goals To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science. To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its influence in the fine arts. To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.
As we are now past the 20-year mark, how many of the objectives of this ambitious program have been achieved?Seversky_{April 18, 2022
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Frankly, there are more important things going on in the world. An unending "virus" witchcraft holocaust still going strong in most places, another aggressive war against Russia, total destruction of economies to enrich Bezos, etc, etc, etc.polistra_{April 18, 2022
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