I wasn’t intending it as a formal logical argument, so your criticism is irrelevant. There is such a thing as “common sense”, and your mechanical mode of reasoning (black/white, on/off) fails to pick it up. On the view that Discovery is anti-evolution, it would not make sense for Discovery to so strongly highlight the work of Denton, even if doing so would not contradict any rule of logic.
Dead wrong. It is very relevant. One of the two key elements in my definition of creationism is acceptance of Genesis (and the Bible generally) and basing arguments about nature on Genesis. Since ID proponents don’t do that, they are lacking one of the two key elements of creationism. And since some ID proponents are evolutionists, ID cannot be said to uniformly exhibit the other key element, which is anti-evolutionism.
I’ve been razor-sharp and direct. And I even highlighted a quotation where Behe directly addresses Eugenie Scott’s misuse of the label “creationist” regarding himself. The fact that you don’t read or understand clear and explicit statements that are right in front of your eyes is not my problem.
An official definition is not necessary, as long as ID proponents indicate clearly that common descent is a possible position for an ID proponent – as they have done many times. I have many times provided Discovery statements (if not here, then on BioLogos, when you were present) indicating that ID does not preclude acceptance of common descent. You pretend that such statements don’t exist, so either you haven’t read them, or you are willfully blocking them out. But here is one for you:
“Does this mean that proponents of intelligent
design are committed to species being suddenly or
specially created from scratch, with all evolutionary
change taking place subsequent to such special
creations and limited strictly to small-scale, within-species
change? No. Intelligent design is compatible
with the creationist idea of species being suddenly
created from scratch. But it is also compatible with
the Darwinian idea of new species arising from old
through successive generations of offspring gradually
diverging from a parental type, or what Darwin
called “descent with modification.” What separates
intelligent design from materialistic accounts of
evolution is not whether organisms evolved, but
what was responsible for their evolution—purely
material mechanisms or the activity of intelligence.”
Dembski and Wells, The Design of Life, General Notes CD, p. 24
And here is another:
“I first need to make clear that living things can be the product both of intelligent design and of common descent. If the designer chose to guide the process of gradual change from species to species, that would be both common descent and intelligent design. In other words, intelligent design theory does not require that common descent is false.”
Ann Gauger, Evolution News and Views, Nov. 1, 2018, at:
And here is still another:
"As those of us at Discovery Institute have emphasized for a long time, intelligent design is not incompatible with the idea that living things share a common ancestor. In other words, one can believe that nature displays evidence of intentional design, and still believe in common descent.
"Indeed, I would argue that one of the forebears of the modern intelligent design movement is none other than Alfred Russel Wallace, who is credited with Darwin as co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Wallace believed that nature displayed powerful evidence of design by an overruling intelligence. Today, Discovery Institute has a number of affiliated scholars who similarly affirm the idea of common descent, including biologist Michael Behe and geneticist Michael Denton. Denton makes his views clear in his book Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis, which Discovery Institute Press published earlier this year.
“Of course, we have other affiliated scholars who are strongly critical of universal common descent, the claim that all living things are descended from one original primordial organism. I think that our diversity on this issue is a good thing.”
John West (top man at Discovery), Evolution News and Views, May 14, 2016
I could multiply these almost at will, but these examples, from top people at Discovery and in the ID community, are more than sufficient to establish the point that one can accept evolutionary change and still be an ID proponent.
I have no doubt that you will try to do some sophisticated word-twisting to make out that these statements don’t mean what they would appear to mean to any normal user of the English language, but people who aren’t partisans will, after reading them, grant that Discovery and ID theory allow for acceptance of common descent from a single ancestor, that ID theory is not in principle anti-evolution, even though many individual ID theorists do reject evolution. And in any case, if I wished I could drown you in more statements, and then you would have to explain all those away, too. But it’s not worth my time to do more than this. I’m not writing these examples for you, anyway, since I know from years of experience that you are too partisan ever to to withdraw a point; I’m writing them for others here who have open minds, and are willing to let ID proponents speak for themselves, rather than through the filter of partisans like you.
