Interview with Bill Dembski (touches on Dover Trial, problems of ID, other topics of broad interest)

The analogy to Vaporware is quite apt.

I’m glad to see that, unless I am misreading him, @pnelson has a sense of humour about the Ontogenic Depth debacle.

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No, this seems more like apples and oranges. Listen to the video: Intelligent Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and beyond - #3 by pnelson.

I haven’t, and likely won’t watch, the video. Reason being: As far as I can see, ID 1.0 and 2.0 were also Vaporware: They had nice packaging and really slick ads and other marketing material. But the program itself was just a bunch of nonsense that did nothing.

Or am I missing something?

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Which of those paper(s) provides positive evidence for the Design of biological life? All I saw was more of the usual “evolution can’t do this so Design wins by default”.

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I’ll run the video in a bit, but yeesh. Watching Stephen Meyer in his usual act of being the David Duke of Creationism gives me the willies. I may need an anti-inflammatory afterwards.

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Not much. It seems a key tenet of 3.0 is to abandon that MacGuffin.

Do I really have to watch a 90 min video of Axe and Meyer? Or would you be willing to provide a summary of what 3.0 is supposed to be?

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That video was pretty typical stuff for the DI. Who’d have guessed that an organization which has promoted malignant pseudoscience for decades would produce more of the same?

I think the funniest bit had to be when they started arguing that because work was now being done by humans to design biological nano-machines, this somehow validated ID – as though the view that they are arguing against is that intelligent beings cannot design things. I have often heard that particular weird position taken by the sorts of wandering ID mystics who comment on Amazon threads, but I don’t think I’d seen the DI dip that low on that topic before.

And then, of course, questions from the audience like “we ain’t related to monkeys, is we?” and “how do we get this into the schools?” It’s not the best crowd of people.

As for the “3.0” part, my suspicion is that they figured that if what they’ve done before was 1.0 and 2.0, adding those together gets 'em to 3.0. More of the same, as it will always be.

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I think you are just forgetting all the times they made arguments along the lines of “If SETI is taken seriously as science, then ID should be, too.”

I’m sorry, but I love how we’re all pretending this is/could be a legitimate enterprise. Dembski said it himself. Logos theory, etc. cdesign proponentsists. The pre/post Edwards v Aguillard word swaps. “The ID Movement” was always a PR campaign first, second, and third.

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Citation please. Are you quote mining him?

July/August 1999 issue of Touchstone journal, though he’s said similar things elsewhere. I don’t think quoting someone to indicate the that they honestly mean the thing they are quoted as saying constitutes a quote mine.

Of course, one could argue that’s just one person’s opinion, which is certainly true. Which leaves the rest of the considerable body of evidence that the ID movement is about rebranding first and science, well, maybe not second, but third? I’m sure it’s somewhere on the list…they’ll get to it eventually.

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Speaking for myself, I think it’s more of a could-have-been than a “could”. I think that the Culture Wars (and a significant proportion of their membership who are far more Culture Warriors than scientists) is too much of a feature of the DI’s makeup for it to have much chance of changing now.

Could it have been different? Possibly (though I am by no means certain). What if, instead of coalescing around Johnson, with Denton and Behe being on the more ‘sciency’ fringe of the operation, it had instead coalesced around Denton and/or Behe? It might then have been more science-orientated (if still on the scientific fringe), rather than so politico-religious and Culture Wars. Something more akin to the Third Way group (who, I will admit, I cannot remember hearing anything of recently) perhaps.