Not true. The entire ninth grade biology is evolutionary science based. The entire year. Then in most high school advanced Biology and AP Biology is offered which is a second year course in evolutionary science.
See Ken Miller’s 2019 textbook that I posted.
Those mainstream Christian Churches are evaporating, aging out. Won’t exist soon.
This is no longer important in the increasingly secular society we live in now. There are real issues and problems to be solved and this isn’t one of them.
The average middle-class churchgoers in a moderate Methodist church died and was buried last week. The church is being converted to a restaurant/bar.
FFRF is fighting everyday to make sure that this don’t happen in the United States. 
It’s not required by ID, and as you pointed out, the majority of ID advocates accept some form of evolution or even common descent. But a lot of the rhetoric in ID is “anti-Darwinism”, which for the conservative Christian public translates to anti-evolutionism. We can see an example happening right here in this forum - see the views of Greg in Welcome Greg to the Forum. He seems to be a YEC but is also sympathetic to ID. I have met quite a number of Christians like Greg before. They form a substantial part of the support base for ID.
You are astute in pointing out that many of the regular Biologos columnists are not famous scientists either. I agree that the ID camp contains more qualified people than the YEC camp, for example. But in that context I was also referring to the legions of non-Christian scientists of various backgrounds that all reject ID.
If you read Collins carefully it’s clear why. Collins and Behe both share the same conclusion - that God exists, but they have very different, in fact opposing methods of how to argue that conclusion (or not argue, as you’ve pointed out for the case of Collins). Francis’ counter-arguments against Coyne would be mutually exclusive to Behe’s, so it would be very awkward for them to be on the same team. In fact Behe would be a liability to Collins in a debate against the New Atheists because they would keep emphasizing that Behe’s arguments are bad science, which Collins would agree with.
I get what you’re saying, as there are some examples of people (such as Anthony Flew) who abandoned strict atheism after reading design arguments. But I can also see this working both ways, especially if ID has such a bad rep among the scientific community. (Much worse rep than many other fringe ideas, partially also due to its past political entanglements.) It could discredit Christianity instead.
Thanks. I will keep it in my reading list.
But why does that require a nested hierarchy? Why does this require everything with fur to also have three middle ear bones? Why does this require everything with feathers to also have flow through lungs?
You haven’t shown a single phylogeny with shared characteristics and derived characteristics. You can’t claim that these things fall into a nested hierarchy without showing the nested hierarchy.
@Eddie @dga471 Thanks for a thoughtful and informative conversation. I really enjoyed your discussion, content and style.
It seems that this is a keystone aspect of the discussion. It really starts with a willingness to evaluate all possibilities, to be inclusive on one hand and to participate in the community on the other. I could never articulate what you two have here, but the dialog is so incredibly refreshing. What we observe now is a wall of separation such that this kind of participation is not fostered at all. It seems to, instead, be suppressed. Allow those exploring design to pursue it in the lab. If this pursuit fails, it fails. The questions are answered. Encourage unbridled scientific exploration to the degree that no one can say either “it is not science, so we won’t allow it” or “if we only had the opportunity, we could have proved it.” Bring on the truth.
I would think that you, @Patrick, of all folks would want this to take place, because you are so sure that there’s nothing of substance to it anyhow. Why not encourage all kinds of scientific pursuit and let the experts sort it out? Until the pursuit itself is allowed and scientists can work together to seek the truth, this silly, circular conversation will continue.
It seems to me that the conception of the problem under discussion in this thread’s title is part of the problem. Since ID does not formally identify any particular designer, we should be speaking about the "theological implications of the anthropic premise of design or a ‘designer’ in ID arguments."
The question I posed to the ID principals, in a small public invitation to dialogue with their board nearing ten years ago now, still stands; "what is the advantage or heurism for scientific endeavor in proposing that a design framework be brought to bear on scientific explanations? Conversely, what can we show as being the worst errors that have arisen from a neo-Darwinian conception?"
My own mother, for example, had her thyroid gland near lethally irradiated into non-function by her own physician father, who wanted to forestall the potential unwanted outcomes of the “misoperation” of this, considered so at the time, “vestigial organ.” The appendix was also considered entirely vestigial, until we discovered that it serves as a vital replenishment repository for the reinfusion of essential bacteria for the reestablishment of a healthy gut biome post-injury.
As for the heurism of the employment of design thinking in order to suss out the operations of the inner cell, for example, or the intracellular signaling networks, or the intricacies of the information storage, timely retrieval, decoding, gene expression timing and regulated variations in DNA gene expression in the tightly-coordinated dance with death involved in translation to mRNA, and in cellular replication, for example, I’ll leave it to others to elucidate the mavels involved and the answer to the question as to whether admitting design as a conceptual impetus is heuristic. It certainly may be career-threatening, if admitted out loud.
My claim is that optimized design will tend toward a hierarchal structure and that is what we are observing. Inheritance does not explain differences where design does.
They share software and components. All the computers use semiconductors, resistors, capacitors etc. The main branching is against the operating system used. Also in microprocessor families.
I would be interested in seeing the evidence that backs up this claim.
Sharing parts is not a nested hierarchy. For example, if a species had feathers, tidal lungs, a single middle ear bone, and mammary glands this species would share features with birds and mammals. This would also violate a nested hierarchy. It isn’t simply sharing parts. It is the PATTERN of shared parts that matters. Unless you show that the pattern of shared parts actually produces a nested hierarchy you can’t claim that it does.
The claim is backed up by computers creating a hierarchal structure.
No, it wouldn’t because you would just change the hierarchal structure to reflect this reality. The new classification maybe mammabirds 
I will look forward to you showing us this hierarchial structure. Until then, your claim has yet to be backed up.
It would be a gross violation of the nested hierarchy. Period.
I showed you the hierarchal structure with the 2 mac families. Your need to look at that and respond .
The nested hierarchy is a human construct. You can change it based on new data.
This is what a hierarchial structure looks like:
This is what we need to see with your Mac families. We need to see the organization of the computers and the features you are basing the branches on.
I do encourage all kinds of scientific pursuits. Science moves forward based on results and funding. If ID were really science, they would have little trouble getting funding as someone somewhere would have the vision to see the scientific and technological benefits to mankind in doing the inquiry. I see a lot of efforts in science being funded but not so much in ID.
You are setting the hierarchal requirement to look like the one you are observing with living organisms. With a different design we may get a different hierarchal structure. In the case of macs it is close. Start with the bottom based being the apple 2 which shares passive components and most semiconductors with all the new computers and then two branches that share a windows type os but different software and one with a different processor. Then these also branch between laptops and desk tops. A hierarchal structure which is very similarity base on the principle of component compatibility yet differences based on different uses.
Isn’t that the whole point? You are saying that design will produce the same hierarchial structure as that seen in life, are you not?
Just sharing features is not a hierarchial structure, as already discussed. You need to show the tree and the features the branches are based on.
I agree with your general point about the confounding of anti-evolutionism with ID in the public mind. I even agree that ID people haven’t always done enough to combat this misperception. But here, I hope you and I can discuss these things as theoretical men, not as analysts of culture-war activity. The interesting parts of ID are its thoughts on design detection, its critique of neo-Darwinism, its highlighting of the latest results of secular thought on evolutionary mechanism, and its broader methodological ruminations. I’m interested in ID as part of a general intellectual movement, including many non-ID scientists and thinkers, interested in reformulating thought on evolution, the nature of life, and scientific method. I like discussing things at the high level. All the stuff about courts and ENV columns etc. depresses me.
Not in all cases. Collins argues for God, for example, from the existence of moral conscience, an approach which Behe would not disagree with. Also, on the origin of life, Collins has remained open to the possibility that it might require some special intervention, i.e., because it seems to be a stretch that it happened by accident. Behe also would find it a stretch that it happened by accident. And on the fine-tuning of the cosmos they would have some common ground. It is really mainly on evolutionary biology that they would disagree, and even there, not on age of the earth or even common descent, but only on mechanisms. And it would an odd thing if disagreement over the mechanisms of evolution should be enough to prevent two Christians from working together against two atheists.
Also, in such a scenario, Behe and Collins would have weeks or months of notice, and they could get together and hammer out a best common strategy for the debate. It’s not as if they would be yanked out of their offices and told they would be debating Coyne and Myers in an hour.
In fact, however, even before his NIH appointment, Collins was deeply averse to meeting ID people on stage, even as an opponent. I saw him speaking on podcasts, etc., and he would speak against ID people (usually misrepresenting their views in some way), but I never saw him speaking to ID people. So the main reason such a teaming would not take place is partisanship – a disinclination of Collins to even try to find common ground with fellow-Christians – the very opposite of the approach here at Peaceful Science, where Joshua tries to find common ground not only with ID folks but even YECs. Thus, for all Collins’s gentleness as a person (and he seems to be a nice guy), he behaves tribally when it comes to ID. The ID folks rub him the wrong way. It’s that tribal dislike between ID and TE that prevents them from working together, even against enemies that would destroy them both if they could, and thus makes them less effective Christian witnesses against atheism than they could be.
No thats not the claim. The same design will produce the same structure. Wouldn’t you expect a different hierarchal structure from a different design?
I have please read the description carefully. A hierarchal structure is base on similarities and differences where the differences are increased with the branching process and all are contained in the mac description.
