Sure. But they’re largely citation-mined, the analog of quote-mined. Fairly often, the works cited don’t say what they’re recruited to support. This is particularly glaring in Darwin’s Doubt.
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I agree that if Denton were in fact a creationist, he should be called that, regardless of his wishes. But as I have shown above, in an inductive study of the history of the term, his views are incompatible with “creationism” as the term is normally used. So you are either dead wrong, or you are arbitrarily using a non-standard meaning of “creationism” – in which case no one here is obliged to go along with your definition.
Well, that’s a plausible criticism, and can be handled on a case-by-case basis, by comparing what the texts say with how the ID writers use them. But it’s certainly not the case that the ID writers haven’t read any evolutionary theory since 30 or 40 years ago, which is what I took Faizal Ali to be claiming.
Not clear. You don’t have to read something to cite it. It looks mostly as if IDers scan rather than read, looking for juicy quotes.
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The same could be said about 90% of the critics of ID writing who post hostile comments about Behe, Denton, Meyer, etc. on the internet. But from many long conversations with the ID leaders, I’m convinced that they do actually read the articles rather than just skim them; whether they interpret them correctly can only be settled on a case by case basis.
There’s no such thing, Eddie. That’s why your mentioning it was, and still is, ridiculous.
Tell that to Cambridge University:
https://www.graduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/directory/cvpcpdpsy
Have you done so, despite your relentless touting of their competence?
He didn’t claim anything of the sort.
Has your hero Meyer ever addressed the fact, published 20 years ago, that the ribosome is a ribozyme? That this was predicted by the RNA World hypothesis? Why did he deny this empirical fact in his book, which has a chapter allegedly devoted to the RNA World hypothesis, if there’s any ID post hoc explanation of it?
Has your hero Behe, given his love of the prokaryotic flagellum as a poster child for his (never stated explicitly) hypothesis that IC structures cannot arise from evolution, ever cited or addressed this paper?
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/1014.long
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Faizal Ali is in Canada, not the UK.
But you’ve made it abundantly clear from your own writing that ID is pseudoscience.
Why is there any need to read further if you can’t cite a single ID hypothesis that makes empirical predictions, while rambling on for pages about “ID theorists”?
Irrelevant. Many people gain their qualifications in one country, and then teach in another. For all I know, Faizal Ali might have studied at Cambridge and then come to Canada. I don’t know his biography.
In any case, your statement was not country-specific; it was absolute and unqualified. You wrote:
And you were wrong. Are you, the vaunted “empiricist,” who claims he bows to “data,” willing to admit that you simply made an error?
Yep!
Are you willing to admit that:
Was a baseless assumption?
And that you have no empirical basis for claiming:
, because the presence of citations is no indication that the citer has read or understood them?
I already conceded to Faizal Ali that I made an error in assuming he had a Ph.D. But I wasn’t in error in thinking that, if he did have a Ph.D., it could have been in Psychiatry. Such a degree exists. So your “correction” was itself in need of correction.
See your statements quoted above.
And by the way, you’re wrong even about Canada. Three Canadian universities also offer Ph.D.s in Psychiatry. Have a look at the list at:
So Faizal Ali could have done a Ph.D. in Psychiatry even in Canada.
I can’t say much for your research diligence on this point.
Yep. The horror. It’s a good thing that unlike you, I learn from making errors.
I didn’t do any research and I have zero experience with psychiatry. I do, however, know how medical schools work and do research in biology, two subjects on which you have opined incorrectly.
So we know that I can admit an error; what about you?
Why would you think such a thing?
Again, whataboutism is not a useful response.
I’ve never spoken to them, just read their works. That suggests scanning.
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“We are taking an intuition most people have [the belief in God] and making it a scientific and academic enterprise. We are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as creator.”
“Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit, so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.”
“So the question is: ‘How to win?’ That’s when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the ‘wedge’ strategy: ‘Stick with the most important thing’ —the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, ‘Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?’ and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do.”
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It would be useful if people made appropriate use of it. You made the point that some ID writers seem to superficially skim articles and then misinterpret them. Implied in that complaint is that this is not a good practice and should be discontinued. I was agreeing with you that it’s not good practice (if and when it occurs) and should be discontinued; I was simply adding to your point by saying that others, not just ID people, do this. I did not intend that remark as a justification for any foul committed by ID people, on the grounds that other people do the same. But it would promote less partisan discussion if some people on the anti-ID side occasionally noted misreadings by people in their own camp.
I’m grateful, by the way, for the fact that you jumped in to challenge an uncharitable misreading of one of my remarks (about bacteria to man evolution). More generally, I have found your mode of response to me in the past two days or so to be constructive. Maybe we can keep that going in the future. All the best for the New Year.
What is your point in quoting Johnson? To prove that he conceived of ID as having a religious purpose? I grant that this was his intention. But he also says that he wants to make the design intuition into a scientific and academic enterprise. That means that whatever the motivation behind the effort, the arguments used must be acceptable to scientists and academics who do not share Johnson’s religious assumptions. And that has been my point, not that ID folks don’t have religious motivations (most of them do, as do the New Atheists, the TEs, the creationists, etc.), but that they have tried to publish arguments that don’t start from religious assumptions, and don’t slip in religious premises. Thus, whatever may be the scientific flaws in books like The Edge of Evolution, No Free Lunch, Darwin’s Doubt and so on, the argument in them is free from appeals to the authority of Genesis etc. So right away, that’s a huge improvement on Creation Science and the like.
Note also that while I think Johnson is right that ultimately the idea of design will lead to an idea of God, God doesn’t appear as a required assumption of the enterprise, nor is it slipped in as a premise along the way. It appears as an implication of the design conclusion; that is, the design argument gives support to the idea of God, but prior belief in God is not required by any design arguments.
Antony Flew was persuaded of the existence of God by design arguments; he had formerly been an outspoken atheist, so he didn’t bring religious premises into his reasoning. He just followed the logic of the argument, concluded there was a designer, and then talked about God. It’s that sort of person that Phil Johnson hoped could be reached – the person who does not have any religious prejudice in favor of design, but is open to arguments for design.
I don’t see any threat to science, or democracy, or freedom of religion, if someone reasons about nature, concludes that there is design in nature, and then goes on to conclude that there must be a God of some kind who is the author of the design. If that reasoning were forced upon children in schools as “the truth,” I would be against such teaching. But I don’t see anyone on the ID side calling for such an imposition of force. Even Johnson calls not for indoctrination in design, but for “getting the issue of intelligent design into the schools” – that is, he would like to see the issue discussed and debated there, which is different from replacing teaching about evolution with teaching about design. But Discovery isn’t even asking for that – not for the near future, anyway.