This article is in strong contrast to the other one: The Evangelical Debate About Adam and Eve, though both are from Casey Luskin.
There is much to disagree with here, but I’m not sure what specifically is worth spelling out.
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You might start with the explicit creationism: refusing to accept that mice and rats (and what of gerbils?) are related, much less humans and chimps; rejecting similarity (and ignoring the very notion of nested similarity) as evidence of descent; claiming common design as an equal, perhaps superior, explanation. I note that he also confuses acceptance of common descent with rejection of ID, even though he claims in that very article that ID is compatible with common descent. Very confused.
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I guessing that @vjtorley won’t agree with how they have characterized his position.
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It was helpful of Casey Luskin to document you calling creationists liars with a link to an example of a creationist lying.
Not that I expect anyone reading Luskin approvingly to follow that link, let alone check the context, but Luskin himself may know that your criticism in that case was justified…
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Don’t play Chess with pigeons.
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On second thought, having now read the article, some sort of reply seems in order.
Perhaps we start by asking if @terrellclemmons will join the conversation. She is one of the co-authors.
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Or, in this case, with the DI’s “attack gerbil.”
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When you repeatedly frame science as mere arguments, with evidence only applied in retrospect, you should not be surprised when others use that frame to smack you over the head (rhetorically, of course).
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There may well be opportunities for bridge building with some people and organizations that are uncomfortable with evolution for religious reasons. I see no reason for optimism that the DI or any of its core membership are among these.
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Indeed not. ID has always been a means to an end for those people, and there’s no reason to think that any of them are motivated by the slightest curiosity about the natural world. They are working hard to convince religious fundamentalists that science is the enemy of religion, and any proposal which seeks to reconcile or avoid conflict without doing grave damage to science is unhelpful to them. This culture war is the whole point; if it weren’t for that, nobody would be the slightest bit interested in these ludicrous ID notions and natterings.
Should they ever win the fight, I will be fascinated to see how the one burning question turns out: will they burn the heretics, who sought to reconcile science and religion without harm to science, first? Or will they burn the infidels, who never saw any reason to try to reconcile the two, first? Essays like this one suggest to me that they’ll burn the heretics first.
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I don’t know that’s their motivation. It seems more that it’s a vehicle to promote creationism in slight disguise, i.e., in a cheap suit. The suit is cheap enough that many holes have worn through the fabric, allowing the naked creationism to show through. When you boil it down, the main complaint about GAE is that it doesn’t allow for fiat creation of the single ancestral pair, genetic A&E, just like the Good Book says.
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… and they can’t take a position that distinguishes their view from even YEC creationism, since so many of the people in their audience are YECs, even some of their donors. That’s quite a dilemma right there.
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Not just their audience and donors, a number of their Fellows are YECs, including Dean Kenyon, Paul Nelson & Nancy Pearcey.
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16 posts were split to a new topic: Common design and common descent
AND neither does ID. Go figure.
I do hope @terrellclemmons will consider commenting here. The SALVO article when to great lengths to point out difficulties that occur in any such discussion form, but failed to mention any of the many positive things that occur here. Also conspicuously missing is the fact that the Discovery Institute doesn’t allow any sort of open discussion about ID.
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Of course it does. ID is a big tent movement that allows for everything from YEC to theistic evolution (though not under that name). But it’s definitely, though tacitly, biased toward YEC.
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In that sense, yes, but most of ID assumes an old Earth and some degree of natural evolution.
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I disagree. Most of ID, if you mean its supporters, are YECs. Most of ID, if you mean its prominent personalities, won’t say, but they do try to cast doubt on just about everything associated with evolution, no matter how trivial. Consider, for example, the peppered moth story. Is Casey Luskin OEC? Hard to tell.
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