All of LeeBowman's Comments + Replies

(Burying comments like this is perfectly acceptable on LW, btw. Though not necessary, since a parent is already under most viewing thresholds. I'm not leaving BHTV over Behe, but I wouldn't have bothered to have him on myself, either.)

Please don't do that. The point of voting things down is to make them "disappear from view". If you want to see downvoted comments you can set that in your preferances. Reposting is just begging to get more downvotes (you got one from me, though I didn't downvote the first version of it.

Given that one descended from the other and brought a multitude of proponents along the way, this is seriously wrong -- even if one grants all your points for the argument's sake. The one single thing that separates ID from OEC is the explicit deference to the Bible. Every bit of data indicates that this has simply been replaced by an outwardly implicit, but internally explicit deference to it.

I know perfectly well what the IDists claim to the public. The only question is whether this claim is genuine or whether it is an evasive tactic designed after Edwards v. Aguillard. I think the latter is more likely, because * they made a similar change of tactics after the Kitzmiller trial to now endorse the "teach the controversy" meme. * numerous sources (see posts above) point directly to the Christian culture war effort underlying the entire endeavour. The entire ID motivation is explicitly conservative Christian. Their conclusions are given beforehanded: to accord with Christianity's teachings.* * while e.g. Behe supports common descent, many IDists don't. To an allegedly scientific field regarding life's history on Earth, such discordance is simply disqualifying. * the exact same textbook that taught creationism turned into an ID textbook with barely any editing. The authors were: 1st & 2nd ed., Davis (YEC & IDist) & Kenyon (creationist & IDist); 3rd ed., Dembski & Wells (both IDists). * the designer agnosticism is completely indefensible in scientific terms and most obviously a tactical move. No genuinely scientific field would a priori rule out research into the designer's identity if not to circumvene the Establishment Clause. * even the Templeton Foundation, whose entire rasion d'être is to "reconcile" religion and science, disavows the DI as a scientifically vacuous PR front. As the Vatican has done. In short, the DI's insistence on the non-committal to the Bible is a dishonest front. The same people, the same arguments, the same tactics, the same goals, the same lies, the same quote mining, the same books are involved. The difference between OEC and ID is the explicit deference to the Bible, and this difference can be fully accounted for by the DI's dishonesty. Once the DI officially has endorsed any finding that contradicts central conservative Christian tenets, I'll grant them and you the benefit of the doubt. For now, they haven't earne

This is just a word game. If you sleep better not calling the IDists creationists, fine. It doesn't change reality, even if the ID movement do their best to make it so. Longer answer below.

Until I got to this part of your comment, I was about to vote it up. And then I read the above, and decided not to. Then I read the next couple of sentences about cosmic spirit entities, and decided to vote it down instead, as you'd by that point undermined the one interesting/useful point you had: the idea that there might be a way for genes to increase variability or decrease error correction, without needing some sort of external randomness. It would probably be a good idea for you to read some of the past OB/LW corpus, particularly the bits on reductionism, optimization processes, and the mind projection fallacy, as you are committing rather big errors on all three fronts. (Specifically, you are positing ontologically basic mental entities, anthropomorphizing "design", and conflating intelligence with agency.)

All right then. According to the Discovery Institute, ID states and to the question "Is intelligent design theory incompatible with evolution?," they state According to Answers in Genesis, creationism states that * evolutionary theory cannot account for life on Earth * God created the earth (exact method & age optional) * death was the result of the Fall * the biblical Flood occurred and was global * God caused languages to diverge at the Tower of Babel incident ...plus some Christian tenets The latter three are demonstrably wrong and the latter two are not directly related to biology They go on to say and Creationism and ID agree that an intelligence created the universe and life, and that evolution cannot explain all of biology. Typically, the same arguments against evolution are used. What's left is the explicit deference to the Christian bible, and here we can either take DI's word for it, or we can see what they say to their peers when they think we're not listening. That's what the book Of Pandas and People, the pdf and the Wedge document illustrate. I mean, seriously, that book which was supposed to be a creationist textbook became an ID textbook. Authored by creationists (including YEC) who are also IDists. Further, do you really think Phillip Johnson or Bill Dembski would acknowledge anything that does not accord with what the Bible teaches? I don't. So what's left to distinguish them?

I thought Torben explained well that there is no noticeable difference between the two camps, that they're essentially the same camp.