Congratulations to Mr. Arrington on his appointment. I look forward to the new era of UD.

T.

One of the toughest calls of all consists in judging a commentator’s sincerity and capacity to finally respond to a reasoned argument. On many occasions Dave has had to remove from the roster some misguided soul who simply could not or would not reason in the abstract. These people can turn an otherwise intelligent discussion into a remedial seminar on basic logic. Another challenge consists in differentiating between an uninformed religious proselytizer, who will compromise ID’s reputation, and an informed philosopher of religion, who will enhance it.

While this issue must be critically evaluated, it is possible to go overboard. Some here suffer from what I call “Dover anxiety.” They fear that too much religious commentary will cause our enemies to say, “Aha, see what I mean! Those ID people really are a bunch of mindless creationists.” What they don’t realize is that our adversaries have nothing else going for them. They wouldn’t give up that tack even if we were all Anthony Flew clones. For them, A Dembski-like foray into the intersection of science and theology is indistinguishable from an altar call. So, while we must guard against introducing God at every turn, we should not, at the same time, expel God from the discussion.

From the standpoint of moderation policy, anyone who knows anything about statistical distributions knows about central tendencies and extremes. To lower the odds that an innocent man will be found guilty, our court system, for example, was designed to err on the side of allowing guilty men to go free. Given the reality of human error, it’s a trade off that cannot be avoided. Still, once in a while, an innocent man get’s convicted. That same phenomenon can manifest itself in the moderation policy. Once in a while, we will ban an exceptionally good blogger, such as Timeaus. This is one problem that should be rectified immediately. Other than that, I agree that this is the premiere website for intelligent design, and Dave Scot helped make it that way.

I am in no way against Jack Krebs’ readmittance. I just meant that I don’t miss him…

I’d love to see them return. TE and ID interaction has a lot of great potential, in my opinion. I trusted the UD admin in the past, no sense not trusting them now.

I rarely agree with Jack Krebs but he has always been polite even when he was being attacked. He is also a window to some of the politics in this debate.

Jack Krebs? As you like…

Timaeus? Agreed!

(note: far be it for me to say…but I noticed a new feature with access to ID books…I see that Berlinski’s Devils Delusion is not among them. That would be a terrible oversight, IMO).