David Klinghoffer Gets an Education
David Klinghoffer recently challenged Lauri Lebo to explain how the Discovery Institute’s promotion of “intelligent design” related to creationism.
And Lauri wrote a nice article explaining how. It is a good read. And if Klinghoffer can manage to read it for comprehension, he might even achieve enlightenment.
As Lauri notes, we are fast coming up to the fifth anniversary of the start of the Kitzmiller trial.
Thanks for he link Wes. Lauri did an excellent job in clearly outlining her case. I am sure mr. Klinghoffer will admit he was totally wrong any day now…
Stephen Meyer writes:
And,
Newton’s complete failures at invoking God’s design of the solar system are among Meyer’s major appeal to let “intelligent design” back into science, too. As if it’s really a mystery as to why theism has been ruled out as explanatory in science, its invocation early on in science only gave us red herrings, “explanations” that were nothing of the kind at all.
Nor was the “idea of design” so “foundational” as Meyer claims, since God as engineer is generally a more recent conception, a companion to the “clockwork universe.” Prior to Newton the idea was more of God’s role being profoundly mysterious, and of course even Deists hardly understood God to be an engineer in the human sense, a Cause rather than one who produced a series of causes. The “idea of design” was more of a God of the gaps explanation, and a way of getting around theological objections to tampering with what God was thought to have produced.
The upshot is that one of Meyer’s major “arguments” for letting miracles back into science (since he hardly presents “intelligent design” as the capability of evolved human-like beings) is simply that early science was quite theistic. There isn’t even a real fig leaf for that in his book.
Of course there is some conceptual difference between teaching theism as “intelligent design” in schools and teaching even ID’s pathetic objections to evolution without invoking God, explicitly or implicitly. In practice, one suspects that there would be little difference at all, and worse, the “gee it’s so complex” is quite obviously part of ID’s implicit idea that God did it.
They’re certainly not saying that humans or human-like beings created life. The complexity of life is a consideration in evolution, but when we recognize that this complexity has all of the hallmarks of evolution, it’s no argument against it at all. So that “discussion of the weaknesses of evolution” is undoubtedly an ID “argument,” and thus is teaching the theism that is behind all of ID’s “design” talk.
Glen Davidson