A New Deal for Intelligent Design?

@TedDavis, @patrick’s preference would be for us to say we are “Christians that affirm evolutionary science.” I am in this camp too. We don’t talk about theistic gravity, so I’m not sure why we would talk about theistic evolution.

As I understand, Darwinism (as defined in ID) was definitively falsified in 1968 with Kimura’s work, who solved a puzzle first uncovered by Haldane. As you may know, creationists commonly quote Haldane’s puzzle as if it remains unsolved, and they leave out that Kimura solved it by (1) agreeing Darwinian mechanisms were insufficient, and (2) proposing/validating the first and most important example of a non-Darwinian mechanism. An excellent article on this history of this story can be found here:

So did ID have a point? Well, no. A “Dissent from Darwinism” is about as cogent as a “Dissent from Newtonian Mechanics.” Newtonian Mechanics is still taught to students, even though it has been shown inaccurate compared to Relativity. In the same way, positive selection dominated change (darwinism as ID defines it) as been known for decades (since at least 1968) to be inadequate to explain evolution.

It is an anachronistic representation (which is to say it is a misrepresentation) of evolutionary science. If all they had done was explain how Darwinism was falsified by population genetics back in 1968, and we have continued to learn more and more, no one would have objected. Instead, they seemed also to think (or claim) that Darwinism (as they define it) is an accurate description of evolutionary science (it is not).

So, @TedDavis, what would you make of an organization that publishes a list of scientists that “Dissent from Newtonian Mechanics”?

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