I’ve been meaning to post this to give the Uncommon Descent community a chance to respond to an essay by Jack Krebs. Jack Krebs is president of a militant pro-Darwin organization in Kansas, and he writes in ID Moving On in Fighting the Culture War:
So where is the ID movement going now in this post-Dover, post-Kansas world?
Well, it seems to me that they are giving up on trying to seriously sell ID as science. Instead, they are forging full-steam ahead with their cultural “war of the worldviews†agenda, pitting materialism and atheism (as represented by science) against religious belief (as represented by their particular flavor of fundamentalist Christianity.)
….
Let’s get these social and cultural issues out on the table and work on them. This is not about science and never has been. Perhaps now ID can just die away, and we can focus on the real issues.
Jack effectively repeats the tired old misrepresentation that it’s ONLY about cultural issues, that it’s not about science.
His assertion is contradicted by people like Edward Sisson, David Berlinski, John Davison, Richard Sternberg, Stanly Salthe, Michael Denton, Frank Tipler or several others who don’t have a particular stake in some sort of culture war.
But Jack’s reasoning is understandable given that Jack is the sort of fellow that swallows the party line and repeats it. In 2005, in a discussion about Dembski’s work over at ARN I asked him repeatedly whether he read Dembski’s books, to which he reluctantly confessed he’d only read Shallit, Elsberry, and Perakh’s misrepresentations of ID theory. He was trying to debate me over Dembski’s works which he didn’t even read or have access to!
Jack is symbolic of the kind of leadership the militant pro-Darwinists have in office. Perhaps we should enlighten Jack’s closed mind. To that end, I invite those sympathetic to ID to answer the following two questions:
1. For me personally, ID is ONLY about cultural issues
2. I believe Blind Watchmaker evolution is a proven fact of science, and it’s ONLY because my religious faith and upbringing that I question Blind Watchmaker evolution
I answer “No” to #1 and #2.
How much you bet that Jack Krebs, after reading our answers, will continue to misrepresent our views and say it’s ONLY about cultural issues (it’s not about science and never has been)?
Salvador
PS
I’m not really involved in selling ID to public school boards or peer-reviewed journals. I’m involved in getting the discussions going in cyberspace, at the colleges, and among church members interested in science. I challenge Jack Krebs to find anywhere where I assert it’s ONLY about a culture war, or that Darwinian evolution should be disbelieved primarily because it is a cause for social or spiritual or moral ills.