anonym comments on Why I'm Staying On Bloggingheads.tv - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 07 September 2009 08:15PM

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Comment author: anonym 09 September 2009 05:14:40AM *  1 point [-]

Intelligent Design: does not necessitate the Christian God and centers around the idea of irreducible complexity.

I guess you didn't read the wikipedia article I linked to:

The concept of intelligent design originated in response to the 1987 United States Supreme Court Edwards v. Aguillard ruling involving separation of church and state. Its first significant published use was in Of Pandas and People, a 1989 textbook intended for high-school biology classes.

That textbook [the later 1993 edition] was the first significant published use of the term. It's the same book where they started with a creationism book and used hundreds of passages verbatim by replacing "creationism" with "intelligent design". It was obviously a ploy to repackage creationism in a way that wouldn't run foul of separation of church and state, and would thus allow it to be taught in public schools. Just as obviously, if "intelligent design" centered around the idea of irreducible complexity, why did it not figure prominently in the 1989 edition of the intelligent design textbook?