In fact, yes. I bought a copy not long ago. I saw it referenced in another book, and the passages quoted sounded very interesting. I haven’t read it yet, but I intend to. But thanks for thinking of me. It’s good to know you have my educational best interests at heart.
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No, validated theory.
So what? Why are you talking about what Huxley said to Darwin over 100 years ago? Haven’t you read anything more recent on evolution?
You haven’t shown that when he wrote “evolution” what he really meant was “one neo-Darwnian mechanism, but not actual evolution”. You haven’t even shown (contrary to your previous claim), that he placed the word “Darwinian” in front of “evolution” or nearby it. Regardless of what you have (or more likely haven’t), read, the subject is what Behe wrote in this particular book, specifically this particular section of this book.
As I asked Bill, why would he be talking about Darwinism anyway, instead of talking about the modern evolutionary synthesis? Why would he be talking about an outdated theory abandoned decades ago? In trying to defend him, you make him look ridiculous.
Unsubstantiated denial isn’t much of an argument.
You seem to be referring to the time when I used the term “creationist” to describe you, and to describe the Discovery Institute and their ID agenda, and claimed I was using it as an insult. You appealed to Christy to back you up.
Christy replied pointing out I had qualified my use of the word “creationist” very clearly, and saying you were “manufacturing accusations and charges”. Here are her words.
I think about three times in this thread Jon has said he considers TE/EC, YEC, and ID to all be creationist in the sense of believing God created humanity in his image, and he isn’t using it as an insult. I’m an “anyone” and I think you are manufacturing accusations and charges here. You do oppose Neo-Darwinian evolution. All the time. Why is this such a feather-ruffling thing?
She also pointed out that your claim that some random unidentified people would read my use of the word “creationist” and think it meant something other than what I meant, was illegitimate. She said your “imagined audience is most likely indeed imaginary”. Here are her words.
That’s not super relevant seeing that you are 70+ posts in and are having a conversation with one person, and this imagined audience is most likely indeed imaginary.
She also agreed with me that DI is a creationist organization, saying that if they are lumped in with Ham and Ross it’s because of what they publish on their own site. Here are her words.
Last time you tried to convince me that their website was not promoting creationist rhetoric and propaganda, you were unsuccessful, Eddie, and I’m not going to waste any more of my time pointing out to you examples of what is plain and obvious to anyone who spends any time reading evolution news and views. It is Discovery Institute’s own fault that they are lumped in with Ham and Ross because of what they publish on their website, it’s not because mean people on BioLogos misrepresent them.
She also pointed out the hypocrisy of the Discovery Institute in claiming they are not creationist, while they (in her words), “litter their website with the exact same Creationist-flavor propaganda”. Here are her words.
Sure. People who say one thing (We have nothing to do with Creationism) and then do another (litter their website with the exact same Creationist-flavor propaganda designed to create in readers a distrust and rejection of mainstream science and to promote the idea that evolution is a theory in crisis) tend to elicit that kind of reaction because people resent hypocrisy. (Or better, what may look like hypocrisy to someone not as informed and well-read as you are on this issue.)
So your memory seems somewhat poor, shall we say. The funny part was when you acknowledged that you would call Dembski and Meyer “ID creationists”. So after having complained bitterly that I had called them creationists, you ended up calling them creationists yourself.
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Because I’ve seen the list of presentations and read some of the proceedings, and so I know who wrote the papers presented there.
I didn’t need to. I recognised most of the names, and even if I hadn’t various knowledgeable people at the NCSE and Panda’s Thumb and other sites investigated the conference at the time, even going so far as to list the authors and whether they were YEC, OEC or other.
No, I’m just much better at Googling than you are.
YEC’s who (co-)authored presentations there included Andrew McIntosh, Jorge ‘welcher’ Fernandez, John Oller, John Sanford, John Baumgadner and Robert Compton.
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Michael Callen has asked us not to dredge up old debates from BioLogos and restage them here, so I won’t try to justify myself in full. I did not say that Christy agreed with me about everything. Here is where she agreed with me:
“I agree with you Eddie that you have been using the term creationism and creationist in their normal senses.”
This was in reply to my lengthy word-study of actual usage (as opposed to the Burkean usage) of the terms, posted at (The Popular Use of "Creationist" and "Creationism" in American Debates over Origins - General Discussion - The BioLogos Forum). Anyone who wishes to recover the whole context would have to start from that page, and then work backwards to the previous discussions which led to my posting of my essay. I don’t recommend reading the hundreds of posts in several threads of that dispute, where we argue back and forth, but my word study itself might be a useful reference tool for some. It’s grayed out, but can still be read by clicking in the appropriate spot.
Is that the complete list? It comes out to less than half of the total.
But the way you represented her agreement with you made it look like she agreed with you about everything. In reality she agreed with you about how you were using the term, and said that the way I was using the term was also perfectly ok; she even cited Biologos as an example in my favor. You somehow forgot to mention that, and completely misrepresented the facts.
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Emphasis added:
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To be more precise, she agreed that the way I was using the term was the normal use of term in popular usage:
Yes, she also said that if people qualified their use of the term, so that readers knew what was meant, then different usage was OK, too. But way back on the original thread (which I would have to dig up) you used the term without qualification with a meaning that was different from typical usage in these debates, and it was that usage that I was protesting, not out of any pedantry but because your usage was misleading readers there about the position of Behe and/or Discovery. Anyhow, the place to debate this is not here.
Fine, but you still haven’t justified the “half” figure. Are you planning to do so? Or leave it as an undefended assertion? I don’t care what the number is, personally; I’m merely pointing out that you haven’t documented it yet. And if you want to modify your statement to “a significant fraction of the papers…” or the like, go ahead. I’m not holding you to anything.
But let’s say for the sake of argument that at one particular conference half the papers were by YECs. So what? That doesn’t prove it is characteristic of ID leadership across the board. If you look at the Discovery Fellows, I think you will find that YECs account for nowhere near half. So what is your point, exactly? We already knew that ID embraced evolutionist, YEC, and OEC positions. Among the rank and file followers, YEC may be the most popular position, but that’s not clear, and we have no accurate figures. Among the leaders at Discovery, it looks as if OEC is the predominant position. Indeed, there might be more “undeclareds” than YECs among the Fellows and executive.
So again, what would you find instructive even if you had complete figures for each camp, from top to bottom of the movement? What do we learn from that?
Well if you don’t care, I won’t bother. Anyone who does care can easily find out for themselves, or ask me themselves. I’ve already documented more YECs among the authors than you thought were at the entire conference.
So you, who claim to have attended those presentations, couldn’t tell they were being given by young earth creationists. When religious beliefs weren’t mentioned, the arguments of young earth creationists and intelligent design advocates proved indistinguishable.
The point is the same point I made at the start of this thread - that the arguments made by creationists and IDers are the same, and the main difference between them is that creationists usually announce their religious intent, whereas IDers do not.
You are now evidence that this is true, because when the creationists were not mentioning their religion, making that difference unobservable, you couldn’t tell the creationists and IDers apart.
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I don’t care, but I’m asking anyway. What’s the number?
Obviously false. The context of your original remark was about the authors of the papers, not the number of attendees at the conference. When I said that I could think of only two for sure, I was talking about authors of the papers. And even then I didn’t say there weren’t more than two.
Major confusion on your part here. With regard to the conference (a different thing from the topic question above), I was not making a distinction between “creationists” and “IDers.” I was making distinction between different kinds of IDers – YEC-IDers, OEC-IDers, and evolutionist-IDers. All of them were represented at the conference. So if you meant “evolutionist-IDers” vs “creationist-IDers” you had better say so.
Next, you are confusing persons with positions. ID as a position is distinguishable from creationism. That doesn’t mean the same person can’t hold to both. A conservative isn’t automatically a vegetarian, but a person can be both. And an IDer isn’t automatically a creationist, but the same person can be both. So the existence of YEC-creationists doesn’t establish that ID is the same thing as creationism. It merely establishes that the two positions aren’t incompatible. So it wouldn’t matter if everyone at the conference happened to be YEC, that wouldn’t prove that all ID proponents everywhere were creationists. The way you establish whether or not two things are the same is not to look at non-required similarities between the two, but to examine their essences. The essences of ID and of any form of creationism are different. The material I linked to above explains how. But you won’t discuss the statements.
Which of these three groups are creationists, in your view? Bear in mind that you’ve already identified Meyer and Dembski as creationists.
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If you read my word study on the term, or even if you don’t, but just follow my regular and consistent usage, the answer is obvious. YEC-IDers are creationists and OEC-IDers are creationists. Evolutionist-IDers are not creationists. It’s implicit in the way I’ve consistently used the term “creationist.”
And of course, it goes without saying, by the hyphenated names, that all of these groups are also within the ID fold. ID is conceptually distinguishable from creationism, but the two positions can be held by the same person. Meyer and Dembski are both ID proponents and creationists. But what makes them creationists is something above and beyond what being ID proponents commits them to.
I could make up my own taxonomy and say “There are morons, and then there is a subpopulation within that group called ‘ID-morons.’” Would I then have demonstrated that all ID’ers are morons? If not, why should we care how you have personally decided to classify them?
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But given that your definition of ID is opposed to what you call “the Darwinian explanation of evolution”, in what sense are they “Evolutionsist-IDers”? You have previously said that the common bond between YEC-IDers, OEC-IDers, and what you call “evolutionist IDers” is their opposition to what you call “anti-Darwinism”. You have also said previously that your objection to evolutionary theories is whether or not they meet your theological requirements, specifically with regard to providence and divine sovereignty. So it’s clear your anti-evolutionism is theological rather than scientific, putting you in the same camp as Ken Ham.
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Scientists who are keenly interesting in origins issues read the technical papers.
Then be stunned. In the mean time, I will be reading about Wagner’s research in peer reviewed articles.
You could discuss Denton’s book, but you don’t.
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Since you don’t care, I won’t waste my time checking.
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The answer to that is so obvious that shouldn’t need even to ask it. I defined evolution as “descent with modification.” That is Joshua’s definition as well. Behe accepts descent with modification, and therefore is an evolutionist by my definition. One can be an evolutionist without being a “neo-Darwinist.” One can be an evolutionist while questioning the correctness of any particular account of evolutionary mechanism.
No; theological considerations are not my only concern, and you couldn’t possibly be unaware of that, having interacted with me for some years. I think that some versions of evolutionary theory explain evolution in terms of mechanisms that are not only scientifically inadequate but also at least potentially pose problems for Christian theology. I think that any purely or even primarily “Darwinian” explanation of evolution has both problems. I spent years outlining this in great detail on BioLogos, and I don’t want to do it all over again here, especially since so many of the same people are here and already know my views. And of course, many of the scientists here have agreed that classical neo-Darwinism is now regarded as inadequate even on the science side. But classical neo-Darwinism is the still the default popular exposition of evolution, as we see in Ken Miller, Richard Dawkins, etc. So the ID folks have done a service by poking holes in it, in popular books read by the same people who read Dawkins and Miller.
Also, it’s not “my” theological requirements that are at stake. I don’t belong to some little sect off the mainstream of Christianity that I invented myself or that someone else invented in the past 150 years or so. It’s the central stream of historical Christian thought I’m concerned about. Jon Garvey has the same concerns.
Right away this is wrong, and I don’t even have to read the rest of the sentence, since my position is not anti-evolutionary. If wrote, “so it’s clear that your Catholicism…” you could cut me off right away on the grounds that you’re not Catholic. You have the bad habit of insisting that people believe something even when they tell you they don’t. That’s not good-faith debate and it’s certainly not a Christian approach to the treatment of other people.
I just discussed one aspect of it with Argon, on another thread. He was interested enough in front-loading hypotheses to acquire some detailed knowledge of what Denton had said (I don’t know if he read the whole book, but he appears to know the rough contents of it), and he made some specific remarks, to which I responded.
Which I never denied. But you never explained why all the greatest figures in evolutionary theory for the past 150 years, including Futuyma, have written books and read many books on the subject, and why you don’t follow their example.
In other words, you don’t have the information handy. You made a claim of “half” without the facts either in front of you, or in your memory. And now you refuse to back up your claim, when asked. That pretty well tells the story.