Sometimes I wish I had gone to law school, and learned how to speak and write in polished English, the way lawyers do.
This was the text of my post:
See, this is one of the reasons why I know @Eddie is dishonest.
Yes, the DI have repeatedly stated that they don’t want ID to be mandated in schools. But that’s a smokescreen they (and @Eddie) raise whenever some-one claims they want ID to be taught in schools, which they clearly do want, because they write textbooks and lesson plans.
The DI want ID teaching allowed in schools, but whenever this is pointed out @Eddie says they don’t want ID teaching mandated in schools, which is a different question. Bait-and-switch. Deliberately misleading. Dishonesty.
This is the only part you quoted:
they want ID to be taught in schools, which they clearly do want, because they write textbooks and lesson plans.
The DI want ID teaching allowed in schools,
Everything about ‘mandated’ vs ‘taught’ has been removed, with only partial sentences being retained. You even stopped quoting immediately before the word ‘but’.
While you responded to some of my reply, there was one question in bold, and only one. That would suggest it was a “key point”, but you ignored it.
Here it is again:
If ID is not ready to be taught in schools, why are the DI producing school textbooks at all?
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I thought I answered this in my previous comments. The “textbooks” you have given as examples either (i) were not books designed to teach ID, but to show weaknesses in standard Darwinism; or (ii) in the case of Pandas, were not published by Discovery, but by another company, and ceased to be promoted by Discovery before the Dover trial began, i.e., 17 or more years ago.
Since I never denied that the DI wants weaknesses in standard Darwinism taught in schools, I don’t see that (i) poses a problem for my previous statements, and since you have been talking about Discovery’s policy now, not over 17 years ago, I don’t see that (ii) contradicts anything I have said.
I understand that you object to teaching weaknesses in standard Darwinism in the schools, and that you think it’s a bad policy. But whether or not it’s a good policy, it’s one Discovery has announced openly, so there’s no hypocrisy or slyness when they write or publish books that could serve that purpose. In any case, they have not been pushing public school boards to use these books, but only inviting private schools and home-schooling parents to use them, so there is no threat that the public schools will disseminate Discovery material to the children of the nation.
By the way, Explore Evolution, which came out in 2007 (paperback 2009), was not published by Discovery but by Hill House. Hill House specializes in books on nature, and most of its publications are serious works for collectors on butterflies. Doesn’t look like a “creationist” publisher to me, but not having read any of its books, I can’t say.
One has to ask, if one excludes purported “weaknesses in standard Darwinism” (i.e. ID’s anti-evolution arguments), how much of ID’s argumentation is left? The Fine-tuning argument perhaps, but then that would come under ‘Cosmology’, which isn’t typically taught in schools.
ID would seem to vanish in a puff of logic. 
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It should be noted that Hill House was founded by the late Bernard d’Abrera who, as both a signatory of the DI’s (woefully misnamed) “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” and a member of their “International Society for Complexity, Information and Design”, was either an ID advocate, or at least closely ID-adjacent. It is therefore not in the least bit surprising that they published Explore Evolution. And as that book was co-authored by Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson and Scott Minnich, all of whom are DI fellows (along with two others), I don’t see the fact that it wasn’t published by the DI has much impact on its close association with them.
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You did not.
You haven’t answered it here either.
As noted in my previous post, the DI don’t just produce books like Explore Evolution, they also produce textbooks and curricula which explicitly cover ID, for use by private schools and homeschoolers.
If ID is not ready to be taught in schools, why are the DI producing school textbooks [on ID] at all?
Those were examples of DI textbooks produced for public schools, not examples of DI textbooks on ID. They were counterexamples to your claim that “All the books they have written and published are for the private schools and home school market.”
Following up my last post, I have since discovered that a fourth co-author, Jonathan Moneymaker, was a DI Fellow at some stage. The fifth and final co-author, Ralph Seelke, was apparently a participant in the DI-orchestrated Kansas Evolution hearings. The overlap with the DI becomes somewhat closer to complete.
If it helps complete the connections, I got my copy of Explore Evolution at a talk Michael Behe gave for a British creationist group.
The question of allowing vs mandating ID teaching has come up before, in the megathread, with much the same outcome as here.
Likewise the ‘it doesn’t count as a DI book, if the DI weren’t the actual publisher’ line was also used in that thread.
It just makes too much sense that one of these grifters would have a name like that.
Amusingly, when I do a search of that name on Google, the first hit that turns up (others searches may yield something different), is to a CEO at a Defense company (“Leading the Transformation of Modern Warfare” no less). 
As usual, you try to use semantics to get out of the corner you have painted for yourself. God creating species supernaturally is creationism.
ID is the God of the Gaps. They argue that evolution can’t produce what we see, so it must be the “Designer” (wink wink, nudge nudge). We all know what they are saying. It’s a God of the Gaps argument, one of the oldest religious arguments there are.
Read the Wedge Document.
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I thought you and I were both talking originally about books teaching ID per se, so when I wrote “all the books” I meant all books that promote ID. By taking my “all the books” with mechanical literalness, out of context, you read more into it than I intended.
In any case, you can plainly see that I have conceded that the DI has produced books for use in home schooling and private schools, and potentially for use in public schools (though DI is not naive about the low likelihood that such books will be used in public schools at this time) that are critical of Darwinian evolution. And given that DI has been open all along about wanting to see this happen, no secret conspiracy to establish a theocracy or overthrow American freedom of religion is indicated by this fact.
All that shows is that a “British creationist group” (and we have to take your word for it that was creationist in a precise sense, and not merely ID-sympathetic) was selling Explore Evolution. It doesn’t prove that the publisher of Explore Evolution was “creationist” in intention. I used to see books on sale at the back tables at Inter-Varsity meetings by C. S. Lewis. That proves only the C. S. Lewis was admired by some of the people who ran the IV meetings; it doesn’t prove that Lewis’s intentions, when he wrote the books, was to endorse the theology typically held by IV people.
That’s your private definition, not how the term is generally used in popular American discussions of origins. For a study detailing the latter, see the article I have already published here.
That Paley, along with all traditional, orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims, thought that creation involved supernatural action, at some points at least, is obvious, and no one contests it. But many prominent people have thought that supernatural action, at some points at least, was involved in the creation of the world, yet have not been disparaged by the NCSE or the witnesses at the Dover trial as “creationist” – Newton, Boyle, Kepler, Clerk-Maxwell, Francis Collins, Darrel Falk, Kathryn Applegate, etc. This makes it clear that the term “creationist” in culture-war debates is more specific than what you are presenting.
Learn the meaning of “premise.”
This will be less confusing to you if you remember what the acronym “NCSE” stands for (my emphasis): National Center for Science Education.
None of he above mentioned individuals, AFAIK, have attempted to impede or corrupt science education.
The term “creationist”, I will remind you, is generally used as a term for those who deny the theory of evolution, not for those who merely believe in a creator god.
Hope that helps!
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It is interesting that you express that in terms of “popular American discussions of origins”.
That’s fair enough. Meaning is connected to usage.
The thing is, in popular American discussions of origins, ID is considered to be a version of creationism.
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I have also previously provided to @Eddie several peer-reviewed academic publications that explicitly identify ID as a form of creationism. I don’t know if he has just forgotten that, or has now decided that American vernacular is to be preferred to the scholarly literature as the standard for how terms are properly used.
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As best I can tell, the “proper meaning” for a term is the one that best supports whatever it is that @Eddie is currently arguing
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It’s a basic tenet of pseudointellectual argument that, if you have no argument worth a damn which goes to the substance, arguing about definitions is a great way to burn up pixels without admitting you’re wrong.
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Could have fooled me. Based on its predominant early activities, I would have thought it stood for “National Center for Selling [implicitly unguided, unplanned] Evolution.”
I don’t need your reminder. I explained this point at great length in the article I put up on this site, an article which, based on your flawed usage of “creationism,” you appear not to have read, or at least not to have understood.
Since ID per se does not “deny the theory of evolution,” that right away distinguishes ID from creationism, though of course, as I have already granted here a hundred times, most people who support ID are creationists.
Ironically, only in recent popular American discussions in which the authors are actually departing from the established popular American meaning of creationism.
Yes, and those “peer-reviewed academic publications” were (a) vastly outnumbered by the number of texts I provided, and (b) almost uniformly written by extreme culture-war partisans or those who used them as sources.
Which terminology is to be preferred depends on context. If the question is: “What did the term ‘creationism’ mean in US popular discourse just before ID first entered the scene?”, then you produce a study like mine, which records the popular usage accurately, without judging it or attempting to use it for any political end.
If the question is, “Given the standard popular meaning of ‘creationism’, and given the stated definition of ‘intelligent design’ by the people who have promulgated the term, is intelligent design creationism?”, then you ask scholars who are trained in elaborating the meaning of terms, in philosophical and theological language, etc. That is, you don’t ask philosophical and theological washouts like Matzke, Miller, Scott, Coyne, etc. You ask people who have shown the mature academic detachment to produce works like those of Ratzsch and Kojonen. And such people give much more nuanced and careful discussions of the relationship of ID to creationism than anyone at the NCSE, or anyone at Wikipedia, or most of the people here.
No, I have not done that at all. In fact, I have done the exact opposite. I have established empirically, i.e., by actual usage (not by imposing my preferred usage), how the term “creationism” was used in American popular discussions of origins. I have shown that the meaning of this term was well-established before ID came on the scene.
So, now that ID is on the scene, if someone wants to know the answer to the question, “Is ID, as currently formulated, creationism?” the only rational, empirical, and, non-politicized way of settling that question is (a) to look at the current definition of ID provided by those who champion it, and then (b) compare that definition with the empirically established definition of “creationism.” And this is exactly what I have done.
I’m surprised someone trained in mathematics would misunderstand what I’m doing here. If someone had just yesterday invented the square, and you were asked, “Is this new figure, the square, a rhombus?”, you would look at the current definition of “square”, and compare it to the standard definition of a rhombus, and only then would you venture an answer.
The one thing you would not do is redefine rhombus to make sure it included squares, and then, employing your rigged definition, say, “therefore a square is a rhombus.” But that’s exactly what the “scholarly” sources mentioned by Faizal Ali do; they use an extended meaning of creationism, going beyond the received understanding, an extended meaning so rigged as to include intelligent design automatically. By that procedure, one can of course “prove” that ID is creationism.
But by a similar procedure, I could prove just about anything. If I’m allowed to redefine “human,” I can prove that chimpanzees are human, simply by broadening the conventional definition of “human” to include the sort of abilities that chimpanzees have. If I’m allowed to redefine “Christianity”, so that it means only “the belief that we should show compassion to other people”, then I can easily show that vast numbers of Buddhists, Jews, atheists, etc. are Christians. And if I’m allowed to redefine “creationism” so that it automatically includes anyone who thinks that there is evidence for design in nature, then I can easily show that intelligent design proponents are by definition “creationists”. But a proof that is achieved only by redefinition is not a proof at all.
The only possible proof that ID is creationism (not that many ID proponents are creationists, but that ID, by its own definition, is necessarily creationism) would have to start from an established definition of creationism (a definition established before ID came along, to guard against the possibility of deliberately redefining creationism to embrace ID). No one here has presented such an independent definition of creationism, other than myself. I am quite willing to consider alternative independent definitions of creationism that are different from the one I presented. Just provide them and I’ll have a look.