# Is ID Just About Atheism vs. Theism?

**URL:** <https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/is-id-just-about-atheism-vs-theism/9803>\
**Category:** Side Conversation\
**Tags:** Design, Communication, Society\
**Created:** [March 5, 2020, 2:41pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/is-id-just-about-atheism-vs-theism/9803 "2020-03-05T14:41:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1

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**Author:** ![Jordan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/discourse.peacefulscience.org/jordan/32/756_2.png) [@Jordan](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/u/Jordan)\
**Post date:** [March 5, 2020, 2:41pm UTC](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/is-id-just-about-atheism-vs-theism/9803/1 "2020-03-05T14:41:43Z")

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> [@Did Swamidass Punt on Innovation?](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/did-swamidass-punt-on-innovation/9745/41):
>
> Well, when that post re-opens, as they all do eventually, feel free to jump in and type the magic words that will either persuade the ID Creationists to describe their hypothesis, or to admit they have no hypothesis and finally accept the fundamental scientific facts of evolution.

Since ID is primarily a philosophical/theological argument, I honestly don’t know it would affect evolutionary science one way or another. Leaving aside the attempts to insert itself into education, ID could all be true and it wouldn’t change evolutionary science any more than the Resurrection would change the practice of medicine. So what if God “poofed” bacterial flagella into existence? That doesn’t practically change common descent or neutral theory, etc. any more than one person being raised from the dead changes the idea that dead people stay dead. It simply becomes an outlier in the data. Until ID presents a competing scientific hypothesis it’s nothing more than a philosophical/theological argument about the limits of science, MN, divine action and a historical argument from incredulity about the _exact_ origin a few particular features in nature. Those are all internal theist debates that don’t have a whole lot to do with science itself.

The whole ID vs evolution debate is really theism vs atheism, so as @gbrooks9 likes to regularly point, what’s the point? Why should evolutionary biologists even care about ID, let alone spend hours and hours banging their head against the wall trying to refute it? There are much better arguments in that battle than ID and evolutionary science. This is what, in my opinion, @swamidass is showing in all of this. The ID folks expect a defense of an essentially atheistic worldview and @swamidass doesn’t give it to them. I think that confuses and frustrates them. He sort of dismantles the faux battle lines and exposes the “debate” as largely irrelevant.

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