From the Nobel Foundation website:
The statutes of the Nobel Foundation restrict disclosure of information about the nominations, whether publicly or privately, for 50 years. The restriction concerns the nominees and nominators, as well as investigations and opinions related to the award of a prize.
Has there been a leak in the Nobel Foundation? Or is this supposed short-listing invented?
Co-incidentally[1], this is also the reason why Henry Morris and co. introduced “scientific creationism”, and why it does not refer explicitly to Genesis.
Not really. ↩︎
And made one of the authors and the editor DI Fellows.
But that always means, in context, “Darwinian evolution” or some view of evolution in which all changes are unguided, unplanned, etc. Behe never means, “descent with modification from very primitive forms didn’t happen” – which is primarily what creationists mean when they attack “evolution.” They’re much more upset about the idea that man arose from an ape, or from slime, than about the existence of “natural selection” or “mutation” or the like. Thus, Behe’s view is objectionable to Ken Ham, who is almost an archetypal creationist.
Well, if it’s “non-literalist”, then it’s not “creationist” as that term is popularly understood. It’s the emphasis on a largely literalist reading of Genesis (coupled with rejection of universal common descent) that distinguishes “creationism” from “belief in creation”. So what you’re saying here is that you believe that people like Sternberg and Denton and Behe are religiously motivated, even though they’re not creationists by the normal definition. Well, then say that. I’d still disagree, at least for Denton and probably also Sternberg, but at least you wouldn’t be misusing a word. But Faizal Ali’s claim isn’t just that all ID theorists are religiously motivated; it’s that they’re all creationists. It’s this that I have stoutly rejected.
I disagree. You are still redefining “creationism” to take the Genesis part out of the definition, and you have no reason to do that, other than to find a way to put someone like Denton inside of creationism. It’s ad hoc.
I agree with your statement about the contents, but that doesn’t affect my argument. I said that the two tasks, social activism and presenting ideas about nature, often get conflated. I didn’t say that every single publication of the DI is of 100% pure type (either social-political or an exercise in pure ideas about nature). And I’ve already conceded your point that this particular book did explicitly advocate ID (while reminding you that it was not designed for the public schools).
Yes, I know that ideally no information is let out. But you should know that “leaks” can occur even under tight security. Just recently we witnessed a leak from a major US court ruling about abortion. People on prize committees being human, there’s no reason to think that leaks could not occur. So your quotation about the Nobel principle of secrecy has no force for me. However, I will freely admit that I only know of the claim through rumor. It could be a false rumor. On the other hand, the nanocar is an astounding piece of scientific work certainly worthy of consideration for the prize, so the rumor may well be based on fact. In any case, whether he was short-listed or not, he clearly knows a lot about making complex molecules, because that’s what he does for a living. Does any scientist posting here know more?
I already explained in detail why, despite the similarity between “scientific creationism” and intelligent design, they are not the same thing. No one here has shown that the distinctions I made are false. Scientific creationism, though avoiding mentioning Genesis, selects what it wants to prove about biology and geology (young earth, Flood, etc.) from the narratives in Genesis. Its content is thus tainted by its motivation, whereas that’s not the case with, say, Denton’s argument for fine-tuning or Behe’s argument about the flagellum, neither of which have any reference to Genesis. As a religion scholar who had been studying Genesis and its interpretations for decades, and who had been studying natural theology and non-Bible-based accounts of design in pagan authors, I could see the difference instantly. I had always been repelled by Scientific Creationism, but did not feel that repulsion when I read Behe and Denton, who kept Biblical interpretation completely separate from arguments for design.
Because that wasn’t the topic. We were discussing whether or not ID was creationism, not whether or not ID was science, non-science, good science, or bad science. But I can understand why you want to shift the topic to whether or not ID is good science, since you’ve lost badly in your effort to show that it is creationism.
It’s not possible to produce a thorough analysis of ID without addressing that question, but it’s possible to answer the question whether ID is creationism without answering that question. Which I have done.
I was only interested in what you were discussing when you were arguing that ID was creationism. When you shifted to a different topic, I lost interest, since that topic you shifted to has been beaten to death on this site and many other websites over the past 15 years or so, and I find the repetition of the same arguments on both sides to be boring.
You’ve offered a few passages from books or journals which present a definition of creationism which can in every case be traced back to the polemics generated by the needs of the political opposition to ID. None of your sources are by trained philologists or trained historians of ideas. They’re all either written by partisans or borrowed from partisans. So I disregard them. Produce a historically grounded definition of creationism which by its very contents allows the valid inference that ID is creationism, and I’ll listen. But stuff deriving from Pennock, Forrest, Scott, etc. is philologically worthless as evidence. It has about the same status as the same number of references, if you could produce such references, that treated Ayn Rand as “fascist”. Deliberately redefining a term to broaden it, to make it include someone or something you don’t like, is not cricket. And all your sources either did that, or borrowed their understanding of ID from those who did.
I never said that. Reread what I wrote. I said that “scientific” adds meaning to the simple term “creationism,” so the two aren’t synonyms. It is still creationism and still possesses the same two minimal requirements of creationism: rejection of evolution, and belief (whether stated out loud or not) that the stories in Genesis 1-11 are literally true. What I was rejecting was your implication that because scientific creationism has something in common with ID (explicit argument is all from natural evidence, none from the Bible), it is the same as ID. That’s like saying that because rhinoceroses have something in common with horses, rhinoceroses are horses.
For once you have said something that is totally correct and would be agreed on by people of all biases. I wish you would make a habit of writing with such objectivity.
Yes, you will not discuss the scientific merits of the purportedly scientific movement known as “Intelligent Design” because the discussion bores you. And that is the only reason. Endless debate over the correct meaning of “creationism”, OTOH, is endlessly fascinating and you can’t get enough of it.
Colour me unconvinced.
So what? Ken Ham is an anti-evolutionist. So is Michael Behe. Them having different views of what did happen doesn’t stop them agreeing that evolution didn’t.
You mentioned that the basis for Morris’s motivation for scientific creationism was his religious views. I’m pointing out that the basis for some IDers’ motivation for ID is their religious views.
I reject it too - I think some of them are opportunists.
No, Henry Morris is defining “scientific creationism” to take the Genesis part out of the definition. His reason to do that was to bypass US laws on teaching religion, he did it long before the advent of ID, and Denton’s position was no part of his rationale.
You said that “their curricula for private schools and home schools are predominantly concerned with the defense of theistic beliefs against atheism and materialism in the public square.”
Discovering Intelligent Design is their private/home school curriculum about ID, and it presents ideas about nature, not about social activism. Either ID’s ‘theory’ is “predominantly concerned with the defense of theistic beliefs”, or you were wrong.
So you’re repeating unsubstantiated rumours.
I showed that most of the distinctions you made were based on the motivations of their respective adherents, and had no relevance to their nature; and the only distinction you made that was based on their nature didn’t show that ID wasn’t a form of creationism.
You omitted the reasons from your reply.
Last week you didn’t even know what it was.
Well, of course, our “Eddie” is engaging in his usual Humpty Dumptyism and re-defining evolution as “micro-organisms to man”, regardless of the process by which that may have happened.
So if the Earth was teeming with no life forms other than micro-organisms a few billion years ago, and then a team of extraterrestrial wizards landed and cast a spell turning some of these micro-organisms into men, that’s “evolution” according to @Eddie.
I wonder what someone would find if they conducted a thorough historical/philological study of the term “evolution” to determine if this is consistent with how “Eddie” is personally using the term.
And that @Eddie is unable to cite any evidence that he finds compelling, only rhetoric.
I’m pretty certain that all changes are unguided, unplanned, etc. in non-Darwinian evolution, too.
That’s a lot of words to admit that you had no idea.
No, it’s engineering, not science. There’s no Nobel for engineering. Or have you heard a rumor that there will be one?
But not biology, the subject at hand.
Except that one of @Eddie’s heros, Michael Behe, has stated that he uses the term “Darwinian” to mean “unguided.”
This would mean that processes such as the fixation of neutral mutations by genetic drift (a crucial evolutionary process that Behe routinely disregards in his arguments) would have to be guided, since they are non-Darwinian.
Which is, of course, patently absurd. But that’s ID for you. And if “Eddie” is the least bit concerned about this blatant and deceptive misuse of terminology, he certainly has given no indication of it. But call Michael Behe a creationist, and watch “Eddie” blow a gasket.
We’ve just seen thousands of fruitless words arguing about the meaning of “creationism.” I see no point in duplicating that result regarding the word “evolutionist.” I’ll just say what I’ve already said, that by “evolution” I mean descent with modification, stretching from unicellular beings to man. (Years ago here Joshua agreed that this was one legitimate meaning of the word.) Behe accepts evolution in that sense, and Ham doesn’t. From Ham’s point of view, Behe is not a creationist, and Ham ought to know what “creationist” means. If you want to quarrel over whether Behe should be called an “evolutionist,” go ahead; I won’t be in on the quarrel. But he’s not a creationist, as that term is commonly understood, and this isn’t just my opinion; he confirms it explicitly in his own statements.
And because of your word “some,” I entirely agree with that. I’m quite sure that among the ID people there are many “scientific creationists.” But there’s a difference between: “There are many scientific creationists in the ID ranks” and “ID, per se, is just a version of scientific creationism.” I wholeheartedly agree with the first formulation, and reject the second.
I’ve already agreed that he took Genesis out of the formal definition. He didn’t succeed in removing Genesis from the content, since, though he never quotes Bible verses, he wouldn’t be arguing about the Flood and a young earth without an a priori commitment to a literal Genesis. If he were really interested in presenting only what nature shows, why would he focus so much argument on a young earth and the Flood? Why wouldn’t he argue about more general features of nature, as, say, Denton does? The contents of his arguments are dictated by his Bible agenda, which is not the case for Denton or Behe.
This may well be true; I have not studied his writings. I read writings of some of his colleagues, such as Duane Gish, and I read many YEC writings that cited Morris and Gish, and they were enough to persuade me that “scientific creationism” was not something worth studying.
Agreed, but I don’t see what that proves, other than that ID people could have been influenced by his work – which I already granted.
Agreed, since Denton’s first book didn’t come out until well after Morris had staked out his position.
No major contradiction there, though because we are arguing on the fly and I have not been trying to present a formal essay, I have stressed different things at different points, and I should refine the statement somewhat. Being concerned to defend theism against arguments that appeal to biological Darwinism justifies publishing books critical of Darwinism, both on its biological side (“nature”) and its cultural side (the sort of stuff pushed by Dawkins and Provine). Most of their books for schools (“predominantly” comes in here) are about flaws in Darwinism (including flaws in the metaphysical, anti-religious agenda which often goes with Darwinism). However, they did publish one book which focused on promoting ID specifically, in which the emphasis was more on nature than on the defense of theism. I hope that clarifies.
I don’t need the rumor, and can make my point without it. Does anyone here know more about actually making complex molecules than Tour does?
I don’t need to show the negative; you and Faizal need to show the positive. The only argument you have is that scientific creationism and ID both use arguments based on nature rather than the Bible. That by itself could never show that ID was a form of creationism.
What you need is an objective definition of the genus “creationism” and an argument that the species “ID” belongs under that genus. You have not provided it, because you refuse to give any definition of creationism. Instead, you keep presenting examples of creationists whose ideas overlap with those of ID. I, on the other hand, provided a clear definition of the belief called creationism (in popular US discussions about origins): evolution didn’t happen, and Genesis, read literally, is what happened instead. Those are the two characteristics that are both needed to qualify a belief as “creationist.” If ID, in itself, affirms both of those things, then it is, according to the rules of logic, a species of creationism. If it doesn’t affirm both of them, it isn’t. But I despair of teaching our psychiatrist friend the model of reasoning which has been part of Western thought since Euclid and Aristotle. His education, it seems, has been wholly on the modern side, and has taught him to present suspicions and imputations of motivations in place of definitions and derivations.
I knew what it was, though in my day it was more commonly called “Creation Science.” And I certainly knew that Morris and Gish were among its leading representatives. And I knew that even when it was trying to avoid referring to Genesis, it stank of Genesis literalism between the lines. In contrast, there’s no Genesis literalism, either in the lines or between the lines, in Behe, Denton, Sternberg, Flannery, and many other ID leaders, and that’s also true of many ID followers.
Did you not observe my marathon debate here with Paul Price, where I rejected his mechanical literalist reading of Genesis? I even got “Likes” from Mercer for my posts! Have you not figured out that if I thought ID required Genesis literalism, I would abandon ID? If my very clear words (here) can’t convince you, and my very clear actions (my debate with Price) can’t convince you, what could convince you that I mean what I say? You pick away at what you think are little inconsistencies in my posts, but you miss the forest for the trees. Any objective reader would infer: “This guy is an ID proponent, but not a creationist.” Why do you have trouble drawing the inference? And once you grant that it is possible that one person (me) could be an ID proponent but not a creationist, why is it hard to grant that there could be other people like that – including some ID leaders?
Hardly redefining. It’s what Darwin meant in the Origin of Species by “descent with modification” (which he later translated to “evolution” due to the popularity of the term). And Joshua and others have said that it is one genuine meaning of the word “evolution.”
Look up “caricature” in the dictionary.
Actually, this has been done, at least for parts of the history of the word. Darwin originally did not like the word “evolution” because in his day, it had teleological connotations that he wanted to avoid. You can find part of the story in Gilson’s book on Aristotle and Darwin. Anyhow, after Darwin, the term more and more carried anti-teleological connotations. There was some resistance to this, from early theistic evolutionists like Asa Gray, but they were shouted down, probably because biology during that period was still suffering terribly from physics-envy and thought that the way to become respected by other scientists was to ape the mechano-materialism of 19th-century physics (though ironically, in the 20th century physics was to become in some respects considerably less mechano-materialistic).
Certainly most theories of evolution from Darwin on have been mechano-materialistic, rejecting any real teleology in nature, but it has remained very common, in popular usage and even in casual usage among scientists (at least when they write for laymen), to think of “evolution” as a process of biological change, and in that usage, purported causes of evolution are not always in the front of the mind. You’re determined to wed the general process so tightly to current theory that it’s no longer permissible to use the word to refer to the process by itself, but I resist such linguistic tyranny. But then, I tend to resist all tyrannies.
This, from the guy who keeps lecturing me not to make artificial sharp divisions between disciplines. As if that kind of engineering could be done by someone who didn’t know a lot of science! (More than anyone here knows, about synthetic chemistry, anyway.)
He has written specifically about the difficulties in producing key molecules necessary for biological processes.
Silly caviling. You know that he would not regard “drift” as guided.
If anyone is blowing a gasket here, it’s the group of about ten obsessive (or is it compulsive?) atheists who can’t stop themselves from piling savagely on anything I write here. If a nobody like me can arouse such defensiveness, no wonder the atheists here fear the more formidable ID leaders and resort to the most desperate political means to neutralize their influence. In the meantime, their books keep selling, selling, selling, and books by Faizal Ali and Roy and Tim and Puck and Mercer and Paul King are nowhere to be seen on the Amazon science bestsellers list. I’m not blowing a gasket; I’m celebrating. And there are more great new books in the pipeline, I hear. Buy copies for all your friends!
Aren’t you putting the cart before the horse by stipulating “complex”?
That is one of the ones I haven’t read. I’ve read essays by Denton, none of which have led me to think there are good reasons to read further, but I have not read his books.
My suspicion is that some of these guys are not properly cdesign proponentsists at all – sometimes people just use language in some really weird ways, like the guy here who was just posting a definition of “creationist” that would exclude most YECs. James Shapiro, in a similar vein, has a habit of talking about “cognition” in cells but when one reads him more fully it’s clear that he just has a really odd notion of what that word means. Denton’s essays that I have seen are rather strange and disjointed, and he seems as though he has some weird orthogenetic notions which he doesn’t express very clearly, so what he may or may not mean by design-friendly remarks is not entirely clear to me. He may mean nothing other than some weird orthogenetic principle that’s somehow baked into the chemistry; I really don’t know.
But I shouldn’t think that a thorough denial of evolution or explicit affirmation of the story of Genesis are all that important to whether someone is a creationist or not. Since most YECs need evolution to work in order to explain how the Ark can have carried the seeds of all living diversity, it’s clear that excluding evolution from the definition of creationism doesn’t work (and, yes, I know: you keep equating evolution to “molecules to man” or “common descent” or some such thing, and asserting that this is what most people mean. I doubt that very much; it’s never been what I meant, nor is it a good summary of evolution in any event.). Requiring explicit mention of Genesis would exclude such people as Henry Morris, as per the quote given by @Faizal_Ali where Morris makes it clear that creationism is a position to be supported by science, not faith; and it would also exclude such people as the cdesign proponentsists, who merely “take the Fifth” when Genesis is raised. It would exclude all the non-Christian creationists. It would make the term quite useless, now referring to a really bizarre, ragtag, arbitrary band of intellectual misfits rather than to something coherent. I suggest that if you want to refer to that ragtag band, you should come up with a new word for them rather than trying to repurpose a perfectly useful existing term.
I am sure the pedophiles find them so, and were it not for my own distaste for pedophiles I would never make such a comparison. Any time you compare some group to cdesign proponentsists, that group’s going to be offended.
Kindly explain why you believe that would not qualify as “micro-organisms to man.” Once you’ve done that, explain why, if it was found that this actually happened, it would not require one iota of change to any of the standard textbooks on evolution.
No, I just think one should be clear what one means when one speaks of evolution. And this is particularly the case when someone like Behe is writing what purports to be a book about science. I would think he would then be at pains to use the term as it is usually used in formal scientific discussion, and not how the average uneducated clod on the street uses it.
Your blatant hypocrisy in now advocating for using terms such that they have different meanings depending on context is duly noted. But I said I was tired of talking about that…
Yes. Which is why his personal misuse of the term “Darwinian” as meaning “unguided” is intended to deceive. Drift is both unguided, and non-Darwinian. This cannot be the case under Behe’s definition. Yet he persists in using that definition regardless.
Funny that you now see the insistence on rigor in the definition of terms as “silly caviling.” But intellectual consistency has never been your strong point, has it?
Ah: Denton’s remarks on Meyer’s latest obscenity do seem to bring some clarity to the question:
"Reviewing all relevant evidence from cosmology to molecular biology, Meyer builds an irrefutable ‘case for God.’ "
It’s a big tent, ID. Specifically, a big revival tent.
Well, I don’t think Shapiro calls himself an IDer, and I don’t think IDers call him that, though they think some of his ideas may support ID.
It is what most people mean, when they are talking about biological origins (as opposed to “the evolution of pop music” or the like) and you aren’t “most people,” so I don’t see the significance of your disagreement with common usage.
It doesn’t matter whether or not the affirmation is explicit, as long as it is there. You can’t see it in Morris’s arguments in his creation science books, but it’s clearly what he believes, as seen in statements written for devotional purposes. All creationists (in the popular US sense) take Genesis more or less literally. It’s their motivation, and it’s a baked-in commitment of their position. And given that, they can never accept evolution in the standard popular meaning of the term, even if they flirt with “microevolution” or “speciation” to deal with the problem of many species of dogs or deer after the Ark. (If you doubt this, ask those guys who think there was accelerated speciation after the Ark where they think Eve came from, whether man has ape ancestors, whether man evolved from slime, etc. You’ll find their thought hasn’t changed since the Scopes era.) Anti-evolution, like a literal Genesis, is baked into American creationism. My definition, based on empirical usage over several decades, and by both friends and foes of creationism, establishes this non-ideologically.
I don’t require explicit mention. You’re like Faizal, confusing literary tactics with belief. I’m talking about what all creationists believe, regardless of how they present or conceal their beliefs. All creationists believe that evolution (in the full sense, as popularly conceived) did not happen, and all creationists believe that Genesis is a more or less accurate chronicle of the origin of the world, life, and man. If you hold both of those beliefs, you are a creationist, whatever bells and whistles you may add on top of that; if you don’t hold both of those beliefs, you’re not a creationist, as the word has been popularly understood.
No, it wouldn’t. I would say that most ID proponents are creationists, whether they admit it or not. Creationism refers to what someone believes about origins.
No, it wouldn’t. It would still apply to everyone who rejects evolution and think that Genesis describes the origin of the world. That’s entirely coherent, and it clearly applies to probably over a hundred million Americans, not a “band of intellectual misfits,” so it’s useful.
I’m not referring to any ragtag band. When I refer to creationists, I’m referring to Ken Ham, Henry Morris, Duane Gish, Hugh Ross, and millions of their followers. You are mixing up “creationists” with “intelligent design proponents who are not creationists.” I would agree that, from your point of view, non-creationist IDers would look like a “ragtag band.” But I’m not repurposing any useful existing term. The two terms involved here, “creationism” and “intelligent design”, have already been defined clearly and usefully by their proponents. I gave those definitions in a reply to Faizal up above. I won’t repeat them there, but they are completely internally coherent, and they are the definitions employed by their own proponents, so those should be preferred to ad hoc definitions worked up by their enemies.
If you still think I’m wrong, you’re welcome to do a counter-study, covering the same time period and the same range of sources, showing that “creationism” never meant what I said it meant. My article is up here on the site, and I’ve linked to it several times, so you can study it to your heart’s content, and then show its defects.
That doesn’t mean that he understands it, though. After all, you manage to write many pages here that display a profound misunderstanding of both evolution and science itself.
No, the repeated glossing-over and omissions of neutral evolution represent a profound misunderstanding and/or refusal to understand. That applies to both you and Behe.
The philosopher’s God, perhaps, but not “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob”; and certainly Denton does not believe that Genesis describes the origin of the world, as anyone who has read his books knows, and certainly Denton has affirmed molecules-to-man evolution, so he still gets scratched from the list of creationists.
Of course, if any belief in God makes ID a “revival tent”, then I guess Ken Miller and Francis Collins, who also believe in God, belong in the revival tent, too. And in the past, Collins at least has shown an openness to fine-tuning arguments such as the ones Denton employed, so you’re going to have a problem doing what you’d like to do, i.e., put evolutionist Denton in the revival tent and keep evolutionist Collins outside of it.
You’re concerned about terms being diluted until they have no meaning, but if anyone who believes in God is a “creationist” then the term “creationist” becomes so broad as to be useless, applying to billions of people around the world, and losing all connection with either Genesis or evolution. But we already have a word for belief in God in that broad sense: “theist”. Ken Miller and Francis Collins are theists. “Creationist” should be reserved (as it long has been in the USA in popular discussions of origins) for a specific group of theists who reject evolution and read Genesis literally. And that moves Mike Behe out of the creationist column and into the theist column, along with Collins and Miller. Denton, too, though perhaps in Denton’s case “deist” would be a more precise term than “theist”.
True, but of course I’m not suggesting that at all (well, except for my previous point: that neither dependence on Genesis nor complete denial of evolution is a good criterion). Rather, it is hard to imagine anyone saying what Denton said about Meyer’s Hopeless Monster III without being a creationist.
I’m sure I am welcome to do that, but I am sure that there wouldn’t be much point. It is of course always possible to find contexts in which a term has been used more narrowly than in other contexts, and it is also true that usages change as people adjust their behavior: when creationists were content to be called creationists, it was not necessary to call the cdesign proponentsists “creationists” because the phenomenon of “creationists who deny being creationists” didn’t yet exist. I am content to stick with the current usage, historical surveys notwithstanding.
By “the current usage,” you of course mean “the current usage” among (a) anti-IDers; and (b) about .001 of 1% of the American population, the people who debate these issues 24/7.
Again, you equate belief in God (theism) with “creationism.” That’s like saying someone who believes in the existence of mammals must also believe in unicorns, on the grounds that unicorns are a species of mammal. You’ve no warrant for saying that because Denton thinks Meyer has made a good argument for the God of the philosophers, Denton personally believes in the God of the fundamentalists. And his writings of course show that he doesn’t believe in the God of the fundamentalists.
I’ve already granted that the ID movement contains “creationists who deny being creationists,” but that does not negate the fact that the ID movement also contains “non-creationists who deny being creationists.” All that I have contended is that such people exist in the ID group. And I’ve never contended they’re more than minority. A reasonable person would have said, a year or more ago, when this first came up, “OK, there are a few non-creationists in ID,” and saved us all lots of time and friction. But I’m not dealing with reasonable people here (though on this point, John Harshman was reasonable); I’m dealing with people so politically incensed that they think telling slight untruths is warranted for the greater cause. And that’s the difference between a philosopher or scholar, on the one hand, and an ideologue or culture warrior, on the other.