@Eddie bragging about his undergrad chem marks from back during the Carter administration or whenever. Too funny.
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An example would seem appropriate here.
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Yeah, sure. When he said his name, I bet that was clear enough. But as soon as he started, you know… talking about the topic, you need to understand biochemistry.
I assumed you were being honest. Were you lying? Do you in fact know a great deal about molecular biology?
I am significantly more qualified than you.
Farina already did. In the videos you claim to have watched. This is simply a demonstration you didn’t understand the material.
Yes, that is actually a lie.
An understanding of scientific methodology tells me the opposite. Because I understand how science operates. You evidently do not. This is another demonstration you are out of your depth.
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How do you know that?
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A paper examining stratospheric temperature records concludes that human activity is causing climate change: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2300758120
Yet somehow he couldn’t figure out that no one has found dinosaur blood in dinosaur fossils, a claim that even you know enough to reject.
One does not need to know any biochemistry to see why Tour’s argument is invalid.
If one is attempting to demonstrate how chemical B could have been derived from chemical A on prebiotic earth, it is of no consequence that chemical A was bought off the shelf, since its origin is not what is being investigated.
I mean, do you also think chemists are cheating if the buy their Bunsen burners and test tubes at a store, rather than fabricating them with their bare hands from raw materials?
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You don’t need to know a “great deal” about molecular biology to understand a number of the statements made in Tour’s discussion. Many of them can be understood with just a knowledge of basic chemistry.
Even if true – and I’m beginning to doubt it – that wouldn’t prove you know more than Tour. Nor would it prove that you have detected any error in Tour. Certainly you have not shown a single error yet.
No, he did not. If you watched only Farina’s videos, you might come to that conclusion. But if you took the trouble to watch the response videos by Tour – you would know that he took up Farina’s videos in excruciating detail and refuted his charges.
What is your evidence for this charge? Did you write to the scientists in question, and did they tell you they made no use of purified, purchased chemicals in the reactions they ran? Send us scans of the replies of the scientists, please, or withdraw the charge of lying.
The first two words should be changed to: “A faulty understanding”.
Evidently not, since you don’t see the force of Tour’s point about using bought, purified chemicals.
You confuse “assertion” with “demonstration”. And speaking of being out of someone’s depth, a young biology student who has not yet managed to complete even a PhD program, and undertakes to correct one of the world’s greatest synthetic chemists on questions directly in his field (reactions, reaction products, chirality, chemical bonds, etc.) comes to mind.
At least “Professor Dave”, for all his brashness and personal immaturity, has the courage to show his face to James Tour and debate him – which is more than what you have done here. He’s cocky, with the generic cockiness of young males, but he doesn’t project the snooty superiority you affect here. Superiority you wouldn’t dare to affect if you were actually in a room with Tour, with your face and name known to him, as opposed to talking through an internet veil to a non-scientist such as myself.
You’ve produced nothing but assertion. Tour’s arguments against Farina are all up there. They stand unrefuted, by either Farina or by the “expert” scientists Farina called upon as his witnesses. You’ve not refuted a single one of them.
Do your homework before you expect anyone to agree with you. Produce the detailed list of Tour’s errors, keyed to minutes and seconds in each of his videos. I’ll send a note to Tour linking him to the PS or YouTube page where you put up your response. And as a PhD holder myself, I’ll even send a note to your PhD supervisor requesting him (or her) not to be too hard on you for being slow to get your dissertation work in, as you have been very busy writing blog posts against a decorated climatologist and against one of the world’s greatest synthetic chemists; I’m sure your supervisor will be very understanding of your priorities in the use of your research time.
This passage alone made it worthwhile to wade through Eddie’s lengthy rants.
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I’m sorry, I must have overlooked where you did this for all the errors you claim were made by Farina. Could you point me to where this was provided?
I will say that I know from experience that Tour responds to personal emails. And sometimes even includes his correspondent’s supervisor in the chain! 
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Sure, here’s a few that come to mind.
All timestamps from this video:
20:20-25:35
Tour claims the NMR spectrum “should look like” his D-Ribose spectra, and that the spectrum Benner actually published contains “billions of compounds”, not mere noise. Dave shows a response from William Suggs, a professor emeritus of Chemistry, supporting Dave’s contention that Tour’s interpretation is quite wrong, there are definitely not “billions of compounds”, the wiggles really are just noise, and the fact that the spectrum is showing ribose borate not ribose is highly relevant.
28:15-30:35
Tour claims DAP isn’t prebiotically relevant, citing papers on human-directed chemcial synthesis, and he writes on his slide that he was “unable to track one down”, in reference to a prebiotic-like route to DAP. However, as Dave shows, there is in fact at least one paper describing a prebiotically plausible origin for DAP. Why couldn’t Tour find/debunk this paper? Does he attempt to do so in response?
39:30-41:02
Tour claims that 2’,5’ and 3’5’-RNA duplexes would be toxic to prebiotic life because they adopt A-form helical structure that would act as small-interfering RNAs (siRNAs) and “shut the biochemical process down”. Dave points out that the way modern siRNAs work to inhibit gene expression is by interacting with highly specialised proteins and enzymes that incude the cleavage of mRNA. There’s no indication that such proteins would be relevant or present in prebiotic conditions, so the fact that such duplexes have an inhibitory role today does not mean they would have had a similar function in the prebiotic context.
Before emailing Tour, why don’t we hear your response to these points? You have previously indicated that Tour has responded to all the points Dave made, so you should be able to provide your own timestamps from Tour’s videos. If you feel that you need to contact Tour to get further clarification, can you really continue to claim that he’s already responded to all these points to your satisfaction?
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Evidently you do. Seeing as you couldn’t tell he was wrong. Thank you for demonstrating my point.
Your inability to recognize that Farina is right is not evidence that he is wrong. It is evidence that you don’t understand chemistry.
I have…
He did not.
The way chemistry works.
You’ve misunderstood the point.
If we were talking about you, you’d be correct. What a first that would be.
Another demonstration of your lack of understanding.
Ironic, given that your entire argument hinges on Tour’s assertions in the absence of demonstration.
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Btw you have no idea how often I encounter his basic misconception coming from creationists. They constantly think Tour has shown that X could not happen/be available on a prebiotic Earth, but when they then reference Tour as substantiating that view in some video, we find Tour saying “haven’t shown evidence that X was available.” This is the basic bait-and-switch Tour constantly does.
Scientists haven’t yet shown X (the part Tour says) → X isn’t possible (how his creationist fans close the inference.)
We then point out that’s a God of the gaps argument, and Tours fans now complain that Tour hasn’t said the words “don’t know therefore God.” So we ask them why they think X isn’t possible and, well, they usually run away instead of answering. Eddie has already run away instead of answering. He would love to answer but knows he can’t. I will not be proven wrong.
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When one of the world’s greatest synthetic chemists tells me that certain chemicals are not found in a pure state in nature, I tend to trust him. But if he’s wrong, tell me which of the pure reactants singled out by Tour can be found in nature, and where one can find them. In undersea volcanic vents, for example? In the Greenland icecap? On meteorites? Oh, wait, you haven’t listened to the video series yet, so you don’t even know what chemicals he is referring to, and therefore you can’t answer that question…
This is either insincere caviling (which would be completely consistent with your usual style of debate here), or indicates that you don’t grasp what it is that origin of life research is attempting to prove. If it’s the latter, ask yourself whether Bunsen burners would be likely to self-assemble on a pre-biotic earth, and then try really, really hard to make the parallel with the purified chemicals to which
Tour is referring. I realize that you said that you only took one university course on biology in your entire life, but this is chemistry rather than biology, and maybe you did a little more of chemistry.
If I said “all” I was writing sloppily. He has certainly responded to “many”. And if I left the impression that he has refuted Dave on every point, I was again writing sloppily. It’s very rare that one person is always right and the other always wrong. But it’s not hard to see who gets the better of an argument overall. I mean, look, Faizal’s beloved Leafs (presuming he has Toronto sports patriotism) managed to win a game, before being beaten in their recent series. You can be right on some points but wrong on more.
Anyhow, though I watched the whole series, I did not take notes and write down timestamps, never anticipating that I would one day be arguing about details with anyone. So when I said Tour crushed Dave, I was giving an overall summary, not pretending to have actually counted up all the points on which each person was right or wrong. And I certainly don’t have time now to go back over a dozen videos and collect the statements.
I also don’t expect anyone here to agree with me when I say that someone on the ID side defeated someone else in debate. No atheist here would ever admit that under any circumstance. No atheist here would ever grant that Tour was right on even one point against Dave. All the atheists here are rabidly partisan and it’s just automatic for them that anyone identified as an ID person must be shown to be completely wrong on everything.
The difference between me and Crispr is that I admitted from the start that I was giving just an educated layman’s impression (albeit I know some basic chemistry), whereas Crispr is posing as an authority in an area where he isn’t an authority. Crispr is saying he knows Tour is wrong on every single point. Yet he hasn’t yet given even one point.
As for your examples, did you first check the whole series to see if Tour, on his own videos, has responded to the points you raise? You link to Dave’s video, but you don’t say whether or when Tour responded to it.
Anyhow, I have no problem admitting Tour might be wrong on single points. On your first point, he sometimes exaggerates in his impatience, so “billions” could easily be wrong. On the second point, however, it’s interesting that Dave could scrape up only one paper, and “prebiotically plausible” is always a subjective judgment, and a pretty low standard. You seem to be faulting Tour for not discovering that paper, but that doesn’t prove the origin suggestion in the paper is very “plausible.” All kinds of people come up with “plausible” pathways to things, e.g., the flagellum, which seem “plausible” only to some people and not to others. If you want to score a minor fault against Tour for not finding one paper, then bully for you, but what’s more important is the argument in that paper; it should be discussed, not merely cited, by Dave. As for the third point, Dave may be right, but again, I’d like to hear Tour’s responses.
You’re giving me points to which Tour has not responded, or else points to which he may have responded but you’re failing to present his response. All I can say is that when I watched the series, there were a number of points where Dave claimed that Tour had made errors, and Tour responded in detail to those claims, and, as far as I could see, show that he had made no error. He also in many places showed that Dave had made an error either in interpreting what he read, or in failing to see the weaknesses in the arguments he was borrowing from other scientists. At those points Tour showed the exact pages of the articles Dave was using, highlighting key words and chemical expressions, and discussed the chemical reactions involved at a much more detailed level than Dave was doing. At those points in the discussion, one could see the difference between a verbally clever blogger with an imperfect knowledge of the chemistry (Dave), and a trained scientist who gets down to technical nitty-gritty and pins details down precisely.
Again, I’m quite comfortable with admitting that Tour could have made mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. But I maintain my original view, i.e., that if all the videos are taken into account, Tour gets the better of the debate. I don’t expect anyone here to agree with that.
In terms of discussion style, however, it’s obvious that Dave is a show-off, boastful individual, whose character is well revealed in the following blurb, under the video:
“James Tour is back at it again, folks! He didn’t like my response to his ridiculous series on abiogenesis, exposing him as a complete fraud with no clue what he’s talking about on this topic. After some time off to lick his wounds, he’s returned with another hot pile of stylized garbage, which means it’s time to show in even greater detail not just how stupid James is when he attempts to discuss this topic, but also what an unbelievably malicious liar he is. Let’s go through the new series and highlight all the lies and all the stupid together, shall we?”
Do you admire this kind of writing in a scientist, evograd? Is that the way your grad school professors teach you to express your scientific differences with others? Is that the way they teach you to address a senior colleague with hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and all kinds of professional honors?
Perhaps many of the science grad students here, being on the young side and thus having a sort of hormonal kinship with Dave, admire this kind of rude bravado, but to me as an older person, long having outgrown the need to try to bully my opponents into submission, I find it shallow, vulgar, unprofessional, and adolescent. Why aren’t the professional scientists on this site denouncing this kind of presentation? Why are they celebrating it, or at least tacitly condoning it? It says a lot about the professionalism (or lack thereof) of the scientists here that they never speak against this kind of thuggish approach to intellectual debate, and quite often join in on the thuggery themselves.
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How does he know? Write him and ask for me. Please.
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Well, of course, that is irrelevant to the research under discussion. But don’t worry your pretty little head about that, “Eddie.” Nonetheless, exactly what qualifies a synthetic chemist to know what did or did not exist on prebiotic earth?
When he says, “We’re finding red blood cells, and I’m not talking about fossilized stuff, red blood cells from T. rex, that is supposed to have (sic) died off 70 million years ago”, do you also believe him then? Or does he suddenly and temporarily cease to be “one of the world’s greatest synthetic chemists” at that moment?
Maybe go back are re-read my original comment so you can come up with a relevant response.
I’m not a Leafs fan. Having grown up in a francophone area of Winnipeg, my heart belongs to the Jets and the Habs. Which does not mean I am any the less long-suffering at the moment, of course.
That’s another one for your hypocrisy scorecard, @John_Harshman.
Believe it or not, some people actually judge a scientific presentation on its content, rather than on the tone in which a person speaks. I guess that’s why you need Youtube debates in order to determine who is correct in a scientific disagreement.
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If you really believe that, you’re more lost than I thought. You could be right that ideological biases might prevent us from ever believing Tour was 100% right, but prevent us from accepting he was right on even a single point? Give us a little credit.
Come now Eddie, we can all read your previous posts, you’re not exactly as humble as you pretend with this comment. Crispr is certainly quite confident that Tour is wrong, but you are equally sure that Dave is wrong, as is clear from these two comments of yours, which are just two of many:
Moving on…
No, I haven’t looked to see if Tour has responded. That’s what I was hoping you would tell me, since you seemed so confident that he had.
Billions might have been an exaggeration if the reality was millions or thousands. If the reality was that the peaks he was referring to weren’t molecules at all, but merely noise, that’s a mistake more substantial than impatient exaggeration, don’t you think?
I agree, the most important point is whether the proposed prebiotic pathway really is plausible or not, but once again, it’s a little embarrassing for Tour to explicitly say he looked but couldn’t find any such papers, when simply googling the keywords “prebiotic pathway DAP” very quickly returns the paper in question (a short review paper that cites others actually doing the experiments). Especially since Tour makes a big song and dance about there being no such pathway in the literature and ridiculing the authors as a result.
You asked us for specific points, I provided some examples. If you’d rather present your own examples of where you think Tour refuted Dave, go right ahead and provide your own timestamps and descriptions in your own words.
Dave goes a bit over the top with the insults and sarcasm for my personal taste, but let’s not pretend that Tour is himself a model of the “proper” academic in this regard either. His content about the origin of life (both his responses to Dave and other content) is absolutely full of vitriol, condescension, and ridicule of his “colleagues” and their work. You’re yourself have demeaned the eminent scientists that appear in Dave’s videos as merely “Dave’s scientist-idols” and accused them of “bluffing” AKA lying with the intention to deceive the audience.
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Oh and by the way
This is you realizing he probably doesn’t know it but instead of conceding this you want to switch the burden of proof to me, to prove his assumption wrong. The assumption you uncritically bought into with an appeal to his mere credentials as a chemist. Which doesn’t magically give him knowledge of the early Earth.
Heck, we can even ask how he knows that chemical would need to exist in a purified form to undergo a reaction relevant to the origin of life?
Yes I know what he usually says, about how if there are certain chemical species present it would compete in the reaction elucidated by the authors of the paper he’s complaining about. That just raises a new question: How does he know those species would be present?
He insists we’re clueless about the origin of life, yet appears to be clueless about the fact that our large ignorance about the early Earth, and possible interactions between physical circumstances and chemistry, leaves a vast field of potential undiscovered physical-chemical processes open to elucidation. Ironic.
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Evograd:
I grant you that Tour can sometimes be too aggressive in his language. In fact, we had a discussion here, way back, where people were upset that he said origin of life researchers were “lying”, and I agreed that the word “lying” was not productive of good discussion, because it implies a dishonest motive. I’d have preferred that he said they were “exaggerating the evidence for their claims” or “failing to note the evidence against their claims,” or the like. (And similarly, when a number of people here over the years have claimed that certain ID people are “lying” or “dishonest” – instead of just making an error, or reasoning badly, or not doing enough research – I would like others here to have chided such people, the way they chided Tour, but I’ve never seen that happen – hence my frequent references to a double standard.)
I’d like to, but as far as I can tell, Crispr is saying that on every point where Tour and Dave disagree, Tour is wrong and Dave is right. And remember, he claims to have watched the whole series of videos. So he watched the whole series, and didn’t see even a single point where Tour was right against Dave? How likely would it be that one person is wrong on every point and the other right on every point, (a) given any pair of interlocutors, on any subject, and (b) given this particular case, where one of the interlocutors is a world-class synthetic chemist, and he is writing about bonds, reactions, products, cross-reactions, chirality, etc.? If Tour makes, say, 100 claims against Dave, and he is wrong 100 times out of 100, how did Tour ever get to be a world-class synthetic chemist, with hundreds of publications and all those awards and elite memberships? With that sort of track record (0 out of 100 on questions of basic chemical reactions), he’d never have even got tenure, let alone had such a successful career. It doesn’t add up. So perhaps Crispr could improve the conversation by acknowledging one or two places where Tour was right. He could still argue that Dave got the better of Tour in the debate, but his apparent (if not explicitly stated) view that Tour was wrong about everything where the two disagreed, makes Crispr look like a dogmatic partisan.
Yes, you are right that Crispr and I have been exchanging firm assertions, rather than discussing specific statements, and that’s not productive.
I’ve already conceded that Tour could be wrong on a point, maybe on several points. When someone gets “on a roll” in an argument, sometimes, after saying a number of things are true, they start “ad libbing” and saying things that are not correct; that happens to most people, sooner or later. Tour gets impassioned in his arguments and I could see where he might sometimes be “winging it” – throwing in a quick extra point that he hasn’t looked up or thought out. But gee, does “Dave”, who is equally impassioned and equally confident that he could never make a mistake, never “wing it” and go beyond what he can demonstrate? Does he never make an error in chemistry due to ignorance or imperfect understanding? How likely is that?
Anyhow, I am looking up some scientific material relevant to Tour’s arguments, and when I get time, I will come back to certain key points in the videos and discuss them with my homework done, so that I’m not merely asserting that Tour is right but able to explain why he is right – on those key points at least. Can’t say when it will be.
In the meantime, it will be interesting to see whether Crispr softens his stance or maintains the hard line. As it stands, he gives the impression of wanting negate everything Tour says, and maybe not so much to disagree with Tour as to “take me down a peg” for daring to say anything at all about chemistry. With Crispr it seems to be all about “who knows more about chemistry” (him or me) rather than being 100% fair to Tour. Tour’s all wrong, and I don’t see it because I’m not (like Crispr) qualified to judge. But why Tour is wrong – not a peep from him about that. I don’t care if Crispr thinks he knows more than I do; I’m used to that around here (we had Classics major here who hadn’t taken a science course since tenth grade, and he was sure he knew more than I did), but I think it would be pretty arrogant of him to assert that he knows more than Tour does. Which it seems to me he is implicitly asserting, if he really believes that Tour is wrong on every point where he disagrees with Dave, since only a very inferior chemist could be wrong so often.
Tell me which chemical substances you would like me to ask Tour about. I wouldn’t waste his time asking about a vague generality. If you don’t know, watch the videos, and write down the names when they come up, and then relay them back to me, and I’ll write to him.
If anyone is still looking for the original James Tour interview where he discusses the age of the universe and dinosaur soft tissue, as well as Biblical approaches to dating Adam, he has it on his own web site. He does not commit to a position. Go to 44:00 for the discussion in question.
I am a layperson with zero scientific publications, awards, tenure, or elite memberships. I am not a world-class synthetic chemist. Yet if I were asked, how old is the earth? - I could answer without equivocation, and reasonably substantiate the reasons why. This is not an arrogant claim; many millions of people have been through year one science on their life paths, and in a technological society with abundant access to information, the tools required to evaluate the age of the rock upon which you stand is available to any informed and educated individual.
Scientists, of course, become very specialized, but in general, should at minimum retain the awareness of an informed layperson concerning well established scientific data and principles in general. Not just the dinosaurs, but the multiple ice ages, the megafauna, Permian ecology, the trilobites, the early Cambrian, all represent distinct and extended epochs in their own right, and add up to immense time.
If pressed, most DI associates seem to land on conventional ages for the universe, but it is like pulling molars to get them to spit it out. I would surmise this is to not alienate the YEC contingent among their supporters.
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Thanks for this, Ron. This is useful information.
I went to the full Tour video. It clarified the mystery of the “cut” to which Joel Duff referred. In the original video, after Tour says “I know this area of science”, there is a minute or two of other stuff before he starts talking about red blood cells in dinosaur fossils. So the “I know this area of science” referred to molecules and reactions pertaining to the origin of life; it wasn’t linked to blood and dinosaur fossils. Once that is seen, Tour’s remark about dinosaurs and blood cells seems less like an arrogant overreach; he takes the report about the blood cells from others, and believes it to be correct, but he doesn’t assert it on the grounds of “I know this area of science”.
To be fair to Duff, he acknowledges there is a cut there, but in the end Duff’s presentation still leaves one feeling that Duff wants the reader to link the two spliced moments as evidence of Tour’s “overreach”. It’s too bad Duff didn’t track down the full video before doing his presentation. I’m not saying it affects Duff’s overall argument, but it would have been better if he could have presented the Tour segment in its full context. Anyhow, thanks for providing that context, and also for the whole Tour video, because Tour says some interesting things in it.
Yes, I too could have, back in my days of freshman physics when we were studying radioactivity and doing calculations based on it, given the standard arguments for the age of the earth, and argued them with some cogency. (My physics and math are rusty now!) And I’d be very surprised if Tour didn’t also take freshman physics en route to his chemistry degrees, so I imagine he knows in rough outline the standard arguments from radioactivity. But as he says in the interview, it’s not his area; he doesn’t know the nitty-gritty physics the way he knows molecules and reactions, so he doesn’t want to say that it’s beyond doubt that the earth is 4.5 (or whatever) billion years old.
His point, I think, is that some scientists think it’s beyond doubt that life originated on earth via unguided chemical reactions, and that he knows from his own work in chemistry that this claim is not beyond doubt; so how does he know that if he put the same time into nuclear physics and dating, he might not come across reasons to doubt there? Epistemologically, it’s a rational position to take: scientists should not say anything is beyond doubt unless it’s smack in the middle of their research area (and even then, they should be cautious, since sometimes the greatest scientific certainties have been overthrown).
I myself agree with you that all the evidence put together, not just radioactive dating but other things, indicates a very old earth. So I would not characterize your claim, or anyone’s claim, as “arrogant”. You’re just stating what, in your view, the evidence seems to point to. You’re not posing as an oracle of scientific Truth; you’re just indicating your conclusion and the evidence that leads you to it. And that’s fine; I think intelligent laymen have the right to make general judgments of that kind, within the context of an admission of their fallibility.
I’m not sure that most of them make as much difficulty as that. I think it depends on how you phrase your question. If you phrase it as “What does ID say about the age of the earth?” you will get a cautious, qualified answer, but usually if you phrase it as, “What do you, Steve Meyer, currently believe to be the approximate age of the earth?”, you will usually get a direct answer. I think the reasons for this difference are: (a) each ID proponent wants to be careful not to presume to speak for other ID proponents; and (b) ID as such is not about the age of the earth but about design detection, and since the age of the earth is no part of the theory, why allow the discussion to move into an area of no concern, thus deflecting attention from design arguments?
So I think that if you pose the question as a purely personal one, you will get fairly quick answers from Behe, Dembski, Meyer, Luskin, Hugh Ross, Denton, and a whole host of them. But if you pose it as a question for the institution (ID theory as such, or the DI as an institution), you will get the sort of guarded, sluggish answer you are talking about.
It’s doubtless true that if ID insisted on an old earth it would alienate its YEC adherents, but it’s not as if the OEC-IDers are being sneaky and not letting they YEC-IDer know what they really think about the age of the earth. There is full transparency among them and they all know pretty much what all other ID proponents believe. You might find a puzzling hesitation on the question from George (Cornelius) Hunter, but I can’t think of many other ID leaders (other than Tour, and I’m not sure he even calls himself an IDer) who would not be clear if asked.
Privately, I’ve had dozens of conversations with YEC-IDers in which we have frankly admitted our differences on the age of the earth. There’s nothing secretive or sneaky going on, no attempt by OECs to keep YECs in the fold by not speaking about the age of the earth; but there is nothing to be gained by quarreling about the earth’s age, since past experience shows that very few OECs and very few YECs are going to budge, and the quarrel just gets in the way of the OECs and YECs working together on what they do agree on: design inferences.
For YECers the age of the earth is not a matter for science only, but must conform to the YEC way of reading Genesis. Being free of the YEC way of reading Genesis, I’m free of any constraints regarding the age of the earth, and am therefore free to consider the science without regard for what Genesis says. I’m glad I have that freedom; I would not like the constraint on thought that YEC would impose on me. I don’t like any intellectual constraints imposed on me.
That’s why I like the ID community better than all the other origins communities: atheist/materialist, YEC, OEC, and TE/EC, each of which would impose at least one “truth” on me that is considered absolutely non-negotiable. Within ID you can, depending on your own assessment of the data, think the earth is old or young, think that species evolved from earlier species or were created separately, think that man evolved from apes or was created separately. And you can have friendly dialogue with other IDers who think differently from yourself. In fact, you don’t even have to firmly believe that there is design in nature; you just have to be open to the possibility that design might be detected in nature.
Of all the “origins” communities, ID is the freest, the widest-ranging, and the most intellectually stimulating. There is very little “orthodoxy”, other than that “Darwinian” mechanisms are an insufficient explanation for major organic change, that the unguided origin of life is not proved, and that there might be demonstrations or strong indications of design in nature, either through fine-tuning arguments or IC/SC arguments or both. And there’s no ID religion, some IDers being Catholics, some Jews, some Protestants, some Muslims, some Deists, some agnostics, etc., so there’s complete religious freedom as well. ID allows one to keep one’s mind and heart open.
If there are religiously or scientifically narrow IDers, that’s not imposed on them by ID, but by their own particular self-limiting intellectual or religious choices. I breathe quite freely in a room full of IDers, in a way I could not in a roomful of people from any other origins camp. So it very much fits in with my Socratic approach to life.