ENV has published a bit of press for Stephen Meyer’s upcoming book:
That sounded interesting, and it is even available for pre-purchase over at Amazon. I was somewhat excited to see if the ID community has something new coming out, but alas, it is more of the same. This is from the sales copy at Amazon:
Really? These arguments have been around forever. How can the Discovery Institute advertise this as the “new frontier”?
As long as there is easy money to be made from the IDCer rank and file the DI will keep repackaging the same old bull.
But ID isn’t about religion, no siree bob. 
And 2 and 3 are in tension with one another 
I have noticed that as well. If the universe is fine tuned for life, then why all of the arguments against abiogenesis? Also, couldn’t God fine tune the universe so that evolution produces genetic information? If the new ID position is that abiogenesis and evolution occur spontaneously and are responsible for the biology we see, then they have ceded a lot of the territory they once claimed.
It’s certainly not a problem in Michael Denton’s scheme of things. Denton argues that universe was designed at its origin specifically to give rise to life.
This is a good paper that details the problem Meyer faces
http://tedposton.org/Documents/usersguide.pdf
Maybe that is the new part? Perhaps the are giving up on the anonymous designer strategy?
Which puts the DI in an interesting dilemma when they laud all the “papers that support intelligent design” - the list includes papers arguing that natural abiogenesis is impossible given current physics, chemistry, etc and requires a designer, as well as papers from Denton saying that the fact that the current laws of physics, chemistry etc make abiogenesis so easy that the laws themselves must have been designed!
Actually I’m really curious now. If they give up on the anonymous designer, that would be new and a really good move for them. No one ever bought that gambit, but they have kept up the ruse for 25 years. It is like watching Santa Claus every year, but every one even the kids knows it’s just uncle Bob in a beard. If they drop the Gambit, it would enable actually theological conversation with them too.
Any word on this @pnelson?
Not really - if the DI were to admit that they’ve been deliberately deceiving everyone about ID for two decades, that rather dampens any further discussion since you’d never know* whether they were just pushing a different Big Lie.
*Ok, you probably would, given their total inability to hide their motives previously.
It was only anonymous in official statements, rarely in churches or behind the doors.
At this point, the DI coming out and admitting the designer is God would have the same impact as the WWE coming out and saying their wrestling matches are scripted.
It would make for more honest post-match interviews.
The only real change that could happen … that would really change the psychology of the whole movement would be if Discovery simply Rejected All Attempts to Influence American Politics regarding Creationism.
That’s the only thing that would help to build trust between Discovery and the science community … and even that would take a long time to effectuate.