Wrong. We are discussing whether ID is creationism. And, specifically, we are discussing your claim that Dr. Faizal Ali of Toronto, Ontario, is the only person living on planet earth who believes it is. Are you still going to maintain that position when there are court documents showing you are wrong?
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Oh, look. Here is a book using the term “Intelligent Design Creationism” in its very title. Strange, I don’t see my name listed among the authors. Do you think I am using “Alvin Plantinga” and “William Dembski” as pen names, “Edward Robinson”?
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I do wonder how much of even that is true. First of all who should we count among the intelligent design theorists?
I assume that list includes Behe, Dembski, Meyer, Axe, Gauger, Ewert, Denton, Miller, Holloway, possibly Nelson, and who else? I’m not even sure which of these can be said to be ID theorists (having contributed to the development of ID ideas and concepts) as opposed to merely being ID proponents.
I assume most of these do accept an old Earth and universe, but how many other than Behe accepts common descent?
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Seems as if, by this definition, most of the “Third Way” or “Extended Synthesis” people are creationists, and your attempts to extract them seem forced. And we now lack a term to use in referring to actual creationists. Not very useful.
By no means. Behe is a biochemist, and saying that doesn’t legitimize his ID crap. Groups overlap in various ways, and you can’t make all your circles line up. We just need to agree on useful terms to use in talking about the various circles. Now, maybe it’s just because phylogenetics is my field, but I want to establish the most basic division as between those who believe that phylogeny is a thing and those who don’t. That, in my opinion, is the most useful distinction. Theistic evolution and Behe’s/Denton’s ID lie on the phylogeny side of that distinction. There is of course another division we could make between real science and pseudoscience, with Behe and Denton lumped in with the creationists on the wrong side of that one. But “ID” is a fine label for that bunch. ID intersects with creationism, but ID is not wholly contained within creationism (though it is mostly) .
Yes, I’m dubious about that as well. Gauger, for sure, has explicitly expressed doubts about common ancestry of humans and other apes.
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We can lump them together with ID’ers, YEC’s and OEC’s as “Science-Denying Crackpots”, sure. That’d work for me as well. Just don’t conflate them with people doing real science on the subject of evolution.
Although I will note that religious motivation is a key aspect of your definition, as well.
I can live that that, too.
Looks like an interesting book. But do the various ID folks in that book accept the label? Of course Johnson was definitely a creationist by my definition, and so is Dembski. Not quite sure about the others. But do they embrace the term in their contributions? It seems at odds with the often-repeated claim that ID is just science, nothing to do with religion here.
I doubt it. But it seems Eddie is going to have to retract his claim that I am the only person on earth who refers to “Intelligent Design Creationism.”
It does seem to harken back to a time when scientifically informed people thought ID’ers were different from other creationists and could be engaged in serious debate. Oh well.
Thank you. If only certain other people here were as willing to retract misreadings as you are!
Good question. The clearest of his autobiographical statements known to me is found in his essay in the volume Uncommon Dissent, edited by Dembski. Above, in answering John Harshman, I said that he indicated there that he was no longer Christian. I should modify that. He there indicated (in no uncertain terms) that he was no longer fundamentalist or creationist. He does not explicitly say that he is no longer Christian. However, he does say there that his “personal faith” “dwindled” as a result of his time spent studying religion in Israel. And his discussions of origins have never employed any religious language more definite than “God” – he never writes about Christ, Jesus, the Trinity, etc. He never indicates any belief that the Bible is the word of God, or divinely revealed, etc. And even the “God” language has greatly diminished in frequency since Nature’s Destiny, where the word appeared fairly often. His more recent books concern fine-tuning, and while they leave open the possibility that the fine-tuning was the work of God, they rarely speak directly of God. In contrast, in the vast majority of other books on ID published by Discovery, the authors speak frequently of God, and often specifically of the Christian God and the Bible. Nothing would prevent Denton from expressing the same kind of explicitly Christian piety. But he never does.
His public presentation of his religious beliefs never goes further than a sort of Deism. If he is a Christian of some sort, he’s an odd sort of Christian, nothing like most of the Protestant ID proponents. And having been raised in a fundamentalist home (OEC regarding creation doctrine), he certainly knows the basic lingo of Christianity and knows that a Christian is supposed to proclaim his faith, not hide it under a bushel. If he were still a Christian, it would be very odd for him not to indicate this, at least in passing.
Thus, I conclude that he is at best a very maverick and ambiguous Christian, if he is Christian at all. However, I think he still believes in God, but I think that his belief in God is now grounded in his study of the fine-tuned characteristics of nature, not on the authority of the Bible or any holy book. God appears to be for him a conclusion, not a starting assumption. This is very different from creationism, in which God (and not just God, but Christianity and the Bible) is a starting assumption. The creationist thinks that a mind created the world because the Bible tells him so; Denton thinks that a mind created the world because his reasoning from nature leads him to that conclusion. This is what I can make of his religious thought from his public statements.
No, have not said that you are the only person on earth who believes that ID is creationism. I have said that you are the only person on earth who thinks that Denton is a creationist and fundamentalist. Of course, I am exaggerating slightly. There probably are a few others who think that, e.g., members of the NCSE or people who write comments on blog sites like this. But I don’t know a single person who has read (not heard about, but read) Nature’s Destiny and has come away concluding that Denton is a creationist or fundamentalist. The only atheist posting here who appears to have actually read ND is John Harshman, and he does not agree that Denton is a creationist. You, who have not read it, are convinced that he is. I think the conclusion to be drawn from this contrast is fairly obvious.
I never said that nobody used the term. I said that the use of the term, when applied to people like Behe and Denton, is not in line with a hundred years of typical usage of the word “creationism” in popular discussions of origins. And I demonstrated that, with a detailed study of how the word had been used up to the time your NCSE friends etc. started stretching the meaning of “creationism” beyond its typical use, in order to further their political agenda. I realize of course that you have no respect for the proper historical study of the use of words, and prefer to assign meanings arbitrarily or to follow the usage of those who do.
I agree with both the reasoning and the conclusion here.
You’re still not following. Let me simplify it for you.
Denton is a prominent member of the ID Movement.
And the position that ID is a form of creationism is one with widespread support, not just in popular discussion but in the scholarly and peer-reviewed literature, as I have demonstrated.
If you’d care to cite someone who has made a persuasive argument that Denton should not be considered part of ID movement, I’d be interested to see it. But I am not holding my breath.
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The other thing you keep forgetting: Like most scientifically informed people acquainted with the ID Creationist movement, I consider every member of that movement to be a lying sack of excrement. So to quote Denton’s own protestations and denials regarding his religious beliefs and motivations is a completely irrelevant and ineffective response to my position.
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But not the evidence.
Why don’t you want to admit that Denton’s first book was laughable, because it was based on the straw man of describing the nested hierarchy as linear?
Has Denton formally retracted his pre-1985 pratfalls? If not, why should we ignore them?
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You are implying a syllogism here, but your syllogism is not well-formed. To help you out, I’ll give you the classical model for a syllogism:
Premise 1 (general): All men are mortal.
Premise 2 (specific): Socrates is a man.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.
Now, apply this model to what you are trying to say about Denton and creationism. Your apparent argument (which you haven’t made, but only muddled around) is something like this:
Premise 1: A lot of people (the people I happen to agree with) say that ID is a form of creationism.
Premise 2: Denton is a prominent ID theorist.
Conclusion: Therefore, Denton is a creationist.
Now that your argument is made explicitly, it’s obvious why it is unreliable. The first premise should be, where possible, something universally accepted, such as “all men are mortal”, but you have a premise that is not universally accepted, and not even close to universally accepted. It’s accepted only by a group of people (Scott, Pennock, etc., and people who cite Scott, Pennock, etc.) who are known to have a highly partisan culture-war stake in the discussions. So the whole syllogism rests on shaky ground.
What you need is a prior syllogism in which “ID is a form of creationism” is the conclusion, derived from two well-established premises. If you had a previous demonstration that “ID is a form of creationism”, you could then employ that as your first premise in the above syllogism. But until you can provide such a demonstration, the above syllogism is without force.
Being a generous sort, I’ll even give you hand in constructing the syllogism you need to validate your argument:
Premise 1: Creationism is the belief that X and that Y and that Z…
Premise 2: Intelligent design affirms beliefs X and Y and Z…
Conclusion: Therefore, intelligent design is a form of creationism.
This would give you the conclusion you need, which could then be transferred to the position of first premise in your original syllogism.
So all you have to do now is define “creationism.”
But of course, you have to do that in a non-circular way. If you deliberately rig the definition of creationism in such a way that it guarantees your conclusion, you’re cheating. You have to provide a definition of “creationism” that enjoys broad-based support in the culture, not just at the NCSE or at Panda’s Thumb, and a definition that was already well-accepted before the debate over ID ever arose. That is, you have to look at how millions of Americans, holding a very wide range of views on origins, have actually used the word “creationism” in books, articles, talks, broadcasts, and the like, over a considerable period of time (not just the brief period of time since the Dover Trial heated up public discussions and generated a lot of polemics), going back at least to the time (early 20th century) when the term “creationism” started to become part of public discourse.
So you have two options. You can either do original philological research yourself, and produce an empirically based general definition of “creationism”; or you can rely on someone else who has already done that research, and hence can save you time and effort.
I’m happy to wait a few months if you choose to do the original philological research yourself; in that case, we can defer the evaluation of your argument until then.
However, if you’d like to get to the argument faster, you can use an already existing study.
I happen to know of an already existing study of the meaning of “creationism”, which meets all the criteria set forth above (covering a long time-span going back to early days of the term, drawn from the usage of people of a very wide range of differing views on origins, already well-established in the culture before ID came along, etc.). You are welcome to use it to obtain your definition of creationism. Just let me know, and I’ll provide you with the link to it. 
Don’t be a dick. Just post the damn link.
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No, my argument would be:
P1: All ID proponents are creationists.
P2: Michael Denton is an ID proponent
C: Therefore, MIchael Denton is a creationist.
Does that help?
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I’d formulate it as:
P1: ID is a form of Creationism.
P2: Michael Denton promotes ID.
P3: We call people who promote Creationism “Creationists”.
C: Michael Denton is a Creationist.
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Another committed partisan, as the rest of his article (and much else that he has produced over the years) shows, and hardly objective. However, he does say two correct things in his opening sentences:
1-- the relationship between ID and creationism is “complex”;
2-- in significant respects, they are not the same.
In your own account, there is no complex relationship, and there are no significant differences. There is complete identity between the two, no difference at all in the substance of what they assert. The only difference, in your view, is rhetorical: ID disguises itself as something other than creationism, even though in fact it is nothing but creationism. So your own account goes against what Ruse says here. You’d better find another “authority” to quote at me.
But of course, arguments from authority carry no weight with me. Even if a really good philosopher, like Immanuel Kant or David Hume, as opposed to third-rate also-rans like Ruse, Pennock, Forrest, etc. asked me to accept their view on authority, I wouldn’t do it. Only philological evidence carries weight with me. Prove to me, based on the way the term “creationism” has been used for nearly a century in popular discussions over origins, that intelligent design is indistinguishable from creationism, and I’ll gladly yield the point.
The first premise is not established. Give me the syllogism by which you established the first premise.
That’s assuming the very thing to be proved. You haven’t ever studied logic, I gather.
I see. So let’s summarize your position in a syllogism:
P1 Anyone (even a scholar respected and widely-published enough to be chosen to write the section on “Creationism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) who disagrees with me (an anonymous guy on the internet who, as far as anyone knows, has never even managed to complete an undergrad degree in anything) is a “committed partisan” whose views should be dismissed out of hand.
P2 Michael Ruse disagrees with me.
C Therefore, Michael Ruse is a “committed partisan” whose views should be dismissed out of hand.
Work for you?
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