Theistic Evolutionists Close Ranks — Let the Bloodletting Begin!
| June 12, 2008 | Posted by William Dembski under Intelligent Design |
Theistic evolutionists hold that Darwinian evolution is God’s way of bringing about the diversity of life on earth. They used to be content to criticize ID on scientific grounds. But that’s no longer enough. They are now charging ID with undermining the very fabric of civilization and even the Christian religion itself. Ken Miller’s most recent book, just out, makes this point in the title — Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul. From the title, you’d think that Darwin is the Messiah and that until his ideas about evolution gained acceptance, our souls were in jeopardy.
Miller has called himself an Orthodox Christian and an Orthodox Darwinian (cf. the 2001 PBS Evolution Series). But one has to wonder which of these masters he serves more faithfully. A year or so ago, when Richard Dawkins’s website posted a blasphemy challenge (reported at UD here — the challenge urged people to post a YouTube video of themselves blaspheming the Holy Spirit), I asked Ken Miller for his reaction. He pooh-poohed it as “a clumsy attempt to trivialize important issues.” The obvious question this raises is whether systematic efforts by atheists to trivialize (and indeed denigrate) important issues is itself an important issue.
Could it be that the evolutionists’ assault on both science (by perpetuating the fraud that natural selection has unmatched creative powers) and religion (by using evolution as a club to beat people of faith) is undermining America’s soul? Not according to Miller. He’s got other fish to fry. For him, it’s the ID proponents’ assault on evolution that is undermining America’s soul. Forget about Dawkins and his blasphemy challenge. Let’s shaft the ID community.
Francis Collins agrees. His endorsement of Miller’s book leaves no doubt that the ID people are a bigger threat than the atheistic evolutionists like Dawkins:
“In this powerfully argued and timely book, Ken Miller takes on the fundamental core of the Intelligent Design movement, and shows with compelling examples and devastating logic that ID is not only bad science but is potentially threatening in other deeper ways to America’s future. But make no mistake, this is not some atheistic screed — Prof. Miller’s perspective as a devout believer will allow his case to resonate with believers and non-believers alike.” –Francis Collins, Director, the Human Genome Project and author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
With devout believers like this, give me a good infidel any time. Ever since Phil Johnson began publicly voicing his criticisms of Darwinism in the early 90s, his biggest detractors and most vicious critics have been — surprise, surprise — fellow Christians. In fact, we had a Mere Creation conference at Biola University in 1996 rather than at Calvin College (where we had planned to hold it initially) because Howard Van Till was so enraged with Johnson during his visit in the winter of 1996 that he was visibly shaking (Johnson and Niles Eldredge were having a debate at Calvin College — Eldredge turned to Phil after witnessing Van Till’s meltdown and remarked that even though things get heated among fellow evolutionists, it’s nothing like what he witnessed here).
So here’s the deal, everyone. Theistic evolutionists are implacably opposed to ID (Denis Alexander, head of a Templeton funded science-religion center in Oxford recently admitted, in these very terms, that this is his view toward ID when he asked for my consent to use and edit a video of me — and you wonder why I didn’t give my permission). They are happy to jump in bed with Richard Dawkins if it means defeating ID. They are on the wrong side of the culture war.* And they need to be defeated.
What’s our strategy. The strategy is multipronged. Let me just give you one prong: WIN THE YOUTH. The release date for Miller’s book is June 12th. I’ve got a book titled Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language (co-authored with youth speaker and high-school teacher Sean McDowell) whose release date is July 1st. It is geared specifically at mobilizing Christian young people, homeschoolers, and church youth groups with the ID alternative to Darwinian evolution. You might want to compare Francis Collins’ endorsment of Miller’s book with Ann Coulter’s endorsement of mine:
In my book Godless, I showed that Darwinism is the hoax of the century and, consequently, the core of the religion of liberalism…. Liberals respond to critics of their religion like Cotton Mather to Salem’s “witches.” With this book, two more witches present themselves for burning: Sean McDowell, whose gift is communicating with young people, and Bill Dembski, often called the Isaac Newton of intelligent design. I think Dembski is more like the Dick Butkus of Intelligent Design. His record for tackling Darwiniacs is unmatched. This book gives young people all the ammo they need to take on Darwinism and understand the only viable scientific alternative to Darwinism: intelligent design. Every high school student in America needs a copy of Understanding Intelligent Design. –Ann Coulter, BESTSELLING author of Godless: The Church of Liberalism
You know, I would be happy to sit down with theistic evolutionists and discuss our differences. I think they are wrong to baptize Darwin’s theory as God’s mode of creation. But I don’t think they are immoral or un-Christian for holding their views. But ID proponents, for wanting ID to have a place at the table as a scientific alternative to Darwinism, are, according to Miller, Collins, Alexander, etc., immoral, undermining Western civilization, and destroying America’s soul. Well, you want this fight, you’ve got it.
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*Miller himself uses the warfare metaphor in the subtitle of his most recent book — Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul.
133 Responses to Theistic Evolutionists Close Ranks — Let the Bloodletting Begin!
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All I’m saying is that according to observable evidence, the propaganda approach has failed to make any headway beyond that which has already been made. Follow the evidence where it leads. Publishing picture books for ages 3-10 may have won public opinion, but it got creation science no further. You know what that approach did do though? It made creation science a laughing stock in the academic communnity, fit only for Sunday School children.
Maybe we should be trying something different with our resources, as ID has always been advertised as “a new approach”. If as you say (and I agree), the public opinion war has already been won, why do we need to focus on that theater? It makes no strategic sense. Focus our resources on the front lines. Offensive warfare is all about applying a large amount of force at a small, weak point in the enemy’s defenses to achieve a breakthrough and a major victory. I don’t understand why “WIN THE YOUTH” is supposedly our most effective strategy at this point. IMO, that is now liberated territory. Now we have to win the adults.
tragic
Now we have to win the adults.
No, we have to win our constitutional right to teach the controversy without teaching religion along with it. The prevailing theory of evolution is an emperor wearing no clothes. If it can be taught objectively it will get laughed out of the classroom on its own lack of merit. The opposition knows this is true which is why they must resort to legal chicanery to keep their exclusivity in the classroom.
Creation science poisoned the well by a) starting from a literal interpretation of Genesis and making ridiculous arguments for how many disparate scientific disciplines from physics to geology to astronomy are all wrong and 2) trying to get the Genesis interpretation taught in science class which is not going to pass constitutional muster. The chance worshippers know that and have been very successful in equating intelligent design with creation science in order to win the court cases. Unfortunately they’ve been given a lot of help because it’s quite true that many, or at least enough, intelligent design proponents are guilty as charged. The Dover school board deserved to lose when the facts came out – lying under oath, hiding the source of money to pay for textbooks, declaring in school board meetings they were standing up for Jesus, and things like that. Intelligent design has to be divorced from the religious motivations. I fear that might not be possible. The well was poisoned too well. The only thing that appears to be possible at this point in time is teaching the scientific weakness of evolution by chance & necessity – God knows it’s incredibly weak and getting weaker every day. Once chance & necessity is put down something else will rise by default whether it’s taught or not because students are going to be able to figure out by themselves that if it didn’t happen by chance then it must have happened by design – there’s just no third option.
Creation science is the laughing stock of academia because it was bad science, not because it was presented in Sunday school. The creation science of the past left a blemish on the new generation of creationists like myself.
It is not well-known, but a fairly sizeable portion of the ID movement came from a mix of Old-Earth Creationists and re-treaded TE’s, and many of these were from academia. See: Eugenie Scott defeat Ed Brayton. I pointed out there, that ID was primarily for university students and professors, not kids.
That means ID was geared to the adults and not to the youth initially. What needs to happen:
1. Gear ID toward the youth
2. If creation science is fixable, and if it gets fixed, then it can begin to wedge into academia like ID has. It’s not there yet, it has a ways to go [finding a revision to Maxwell's equations would be a good start if the creationist want to wage a serious scientific onslaught. Until then, creation science is like a great race car stuck in the mud]…if creation science succeeds, ID for biology will be proven beyond a shadow of doubt.
Who now?
PS I am led to understand “God knows” is a religion-neutral idiom. I just thought it was funny given your astute observation abouthow design should be taught.
tragicmishap: this is an ongoing conflict over two world views.
ID advocates celebrate freedom of expression, employ a legitimate scientific methodology, and go where the evidence leads. Darwinists deplore freedom of expression, impose an unduly restrictive process, and ignore evidence that does’t support their ideology.
While I don’t accept creation science, I don’t think that it is nearly so ridiculous as radical Darwinism. To propose that God created the world in seven days is less laughable than to propose that everything created itself.
So if school children are laughing about creation science, it is because Darwinists have brainwashed them in materialistic ethics. That means that we need to educate the next generation of children to refrain brainwashing the generation that follows them. That way they won’t shut down ID labs, withhold research funds, and, at the same time, demand to know why more research isn’t being done.
It is one thing to have the majority on our side, which we do. It is quite another thing to be liberated from the tyrants who have the power to discredit our scientists and ruin their careers. It should not be necessary to come up with some new scientific breakthrough as a means of winning back our freedom of expression. If anything, that is putting the cart before the horse.
Let us say the YEC case has a remote chance of succeeding. Fine, I’ll take that as a given….but what if Maxwell’s equations can be reformulated successfully in favor of YEC?
Understand, the age of the Earth and Universe is an empirical, theoretical, and historical question. It does not have to be a theological question!
If this simple question about reality is answered for a shorter time frame than say 100,000,000 years (not even 10,000), then Darwinism is toast!
To that end, when I was at GMU, there was some discontent about mainstream cosmology. The question was, “how can gravity assemble stars and galaxies”. At least 3 professors and the chair of our Center for Space and Earth Observation, a PhD from MIT by the name of Menas Kafatos, beleived, gravity did not assemble stars and galaxies, but rather electricity!!!
I’m now convinced gravity did not assemble stars and galaxies. God used electricity, not gravity!!!
Maxwell’s equations deal with electricity and magnetism and light. These developments are friendly to YEC, because if the speed of light were faster in the past, a plasma cosmology could assemble stars and galaxies in a matter of hours — and any development friendly to YEC is friendly to ID.
See:
Plasma Cosmology Rocks!
If the TE’s want some bloodletting, what will happen if in addition to their new foes (the ID proponents), their old foes (the YECs) re-join the battle. Whoa!
Denis Alexander is director of the Faraday Instiute in Cambridge.
scordova:
Indeed. Preferably like soon to be EXPELLED John Freshwater did.
DaveScot, I appreciate your analysis, but no scientific theory ever disappeared without a ready replacement. Most people cannot function without a coherent worldview. We need to be making positive arguments. People get frustrated with negative ones.
StephenB:
Regarding freedom of expression, that’s exactly what I’m worried about. I’m worried about tyranny of Darwinism being replaced with tyranny of ID or whatever. Science and humanity will gain nothing by replacing one form of indoctrination with another.
“It is one thing to have the majority on our side, which we do. It is quite another thing to be liberated from the tyrants who have the power to discredit our scientists and ruin their careers.”
Actually the advantage in the former area can very easily lead to the advantage in the latter. Raise funding for private scientific enterprise. Doing that would require a massive amount of money and minds, all focused on making discoveries rather than lecturing 8 year olds and insisting how right we are.
One more comment: “DaveScot, I appreciate your analysis, but no scientific theory ever disappeared without a ready replacement.”
ID is not ready, and I think we all know that. My point is that it getting even more people on board will not make ID more ready. The only way to do that is focus on the realm of creative ideas and furthuring science, not on propaganda objectives.
tragicmishap
ID is as ready as chance & necessity. Maybe more. We can at least prove that intelligent agents can cause complex specified information to appear where none existed before.
Look at it like a murder case where we need to show means and opportunity.
Chance & necessity – we can show opportunity but not means. In other words, we can place the alleded perpetrator at the scene of the crime but we can’t prove it had the means to commit the crime.
Intelligent design – we can means but not opportunity. In other words, we can show that intelligent designers can cause highly improbable specified changes to heritable genetic material but we can’t prove the perpetrator was at the scene of the crime.
As far as I’m concerned that puts chance & necessity and intelligent design on equal footing. Preferring one over the other is a matter of dogma not science.
Plus the assertion that for a scientific theory to be falsified requires a replacement theory is a dog that doesn’t hunt. That is not part of any philosophy of science that I ever heard of. It’s a lame assertion made by chance worshippers and nothing more.
—–“tragicmishap: “Regarding freedom of expression, that’s exactly what I’m worried about. I’m worried about tyranny of Darwinism being replaced with tyranny of ID or whatever. Science and humanity will gain nothing by replacing one form of indoctrination with another.”
So, do you have any reason to believe that ID supporters will not tolerate those who disagree with them? You are being tolerated here, aren’t you?
In any case, I get it. You feel a great sense of urgency that the ID community may someday gain power and tyrannize the Darwinist community, even though you have no evidence to support those concerns. On the other hand, you are not overly concerned that the Darwinist community already has power and tyrannizes the ID community daily, even though you have been given abundant confirmations of that fact.