Intelligent Design updates: latest Nov 1, 2k5

Clickup the title of this blog entry, and afterward maybe you'll want to re-read the original blog entry of Friday, October 21, 2005 > Intelligent Design: Science: The Wrath of NoGod (naturalistic religion + money + technique) = bigotry of scientific guilds.

Further, it's important to correct the impression given that creationism is a minor phenomenon among the belief systems of American Christians, and Americans more generally. Not so! Creationism may be minor among that minority of American Christians and Americans generally who are certified scientists. However, that fact shrinks into relative insignificance alongside another fact: 81 percent of Americans reject evolutionism.

Many adults in the United States agree with the principles of creationism, according to a poll by CBS News. 51 per cent of respondents say God created human beings in their present form. ¶ Conversely, 30 per cent of respondents believe human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, but God guided this process, while 15 per cent think God had no part in the evolution of man.

That is to say, Creation by a Divine Creator, either in the belief-system of creationists (using a false hermeneutics of the Biblical account) or in the belief-system of those who ascribe to evolution, not as an Ism but as a guided process by the Divine Creator - together these constitute 81 percent of the American population. Only 15 percent believe in the unguided atheistic naturalistic neo-Darwinist religion of evolutionism. How many Americans are certified scientists in one discipline or another the guilds of which claim their disciplines as constitutional to evolutionism? How many of that number of scientists are not actually competent to judge the detailed exacting scientific work that goes into giving evolutionary theory (guided or naturalistic) any semblance of scientific credibility? - as against, you know, the huge proportion of scientists who actually make their judgment on the basis of authorities in their guilds and disciplines, or on those of some other sciences?

The fraction of the fraction of scientists competent to judge gets down to well below 1% of the American population. Yet, they are determining what teachers in schools may teach on the basis of textbooks the teachers cannot possibly validate. So, why should taxpayer-supported teachers in government schools who can't possibly know the science by allowed to determine the choice of the neo-Darwinist religious perspective as the basis on which to avoid prospecting in the potentials of the idea of Intelligent Design (so what if ID is not yet a settled theory, it is a credible viewpoint with nearly one hundred years of American philosophical-scientitifc history). And, if ID is not yet established as a theory as some claim, including some ID-minded scientists themselves, then why should not funds to evolutionist scholars, guilds, journals, and teachers associations be cut in half; and the remaining half of these funds re-directed to non-evolutionist scholars, guilds, journals, and groupings of science teachers in schools - so as to create a genuinely "level playing-field" in which a genuine debate may unfold thru-out society, a debate not predetermned by the contrived monopoly of funding that generates a dogmatic scientific orthodoxy without real critical thawt and courageous dissent. Yes, I endorse the prosthesis view on free speech regarding evolutionism and ID in the schools, but within the contours outlined here.

As to the percentages in the Angus Reid poll, another 5 percent goes unlabelled, so let's treat that as filling out the statistical margin of error, extrinsic to percentages of the opinion divide between a Divine Creator and evolutionism raised as a substitute no-god and arrogating to itself alone the value of scientificity.

Besides the update and correction above, I should also call attention to the one-sided presentation of just one line of development in the Christian critical reflection on evolutionism. Here I can only mention a very important interview in a Roman Catholic news source, Zenit with Jesuit Father Edward Oakes, a theology professor at the University of St. Mary of the Lake. The interview comes from Zenit in two parts. Evolution in the Eyes of the Church (Part 1 - The Importance of Definitions, July 27, 2005; and Part 2 - Reconciling Science and Faith, July 28, 2005. The background to the Zenit interviews of Oakes have to do with an earlier widely-read article:

It isn't often that cardinals from another continent get space in the op-ed pages of The New York Times.

Such was the case on July 7 when Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna and principal editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, tried on the opinion page of the NYT to clarify the Church's teachings in regard to the theories of Charles Darwin. His statements ignited a firestorm of commentary.

Schönborn's article, "Finding Design in Nature," NYT, July 7, 2005, and a NYT frontpage article two days later, "Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution", July 9, 2005, are part of a story of journalistic manipulation and distortion, says Oakes.

For one thing, the Church has no "doctrine" on evolution, any more than it has a doctrine on tectonic plates or a magisterial teaching on how human consciousness arises from the electrical firings inside the neurology of the brain. These matters are both beyond the competence of the magisterium and are irrelevant to salvation, anyway.

Secondly, even if the magisterium did have an official teaching on evolution, it does not officially revise its "views" on matters of science by having a cardinal, however "leading," writing an article "in propria persona" -- on his own behalf -- and using an op-ed piece in a secular newspaper to boot.

That said, I believe that Cardinal Schönborn's essay "Finding Design in Nature" in the July 7 issue of the Times makes a valid point, roughly the reverse side of the coin of what Pope John Paul II said in his now-famous letter to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October of 1996.

John Paul said at the time that "evolution" -- which, as Cardinal Schönborn rightly notes, the Holy Father left undefined -- can no longer be considered merely a "hypothesis" because so much data have now come in to confirm the theory.

The problem is that this very short letter brought some misinterpretations of its own in its wake -- because of the obnoxious way some Darwinians like to hijack the word "evolution" for their own atheistic purposes -- and it is those false conclusions, as I see it, that the cardinal was trying to warn against.

For the remainder of the two part interview, I leave it to intersted readers to explore a most interesting contribution. But before letting go, I pause to note that Oakes makes the same mistake I did earlier in my earlier blog entry on ID, the matter corrected at the beginning of this update.

if "creationism" means six-day creation as a few Christian fundamentalists still hold, then there is no chance in the world that the Catholic Church will join that cause. But "creationism" can also refer to the total ontological dependence of the universe on God's creative act of will, and nothing in the theory of evolution can threaten that essential doctrine of the Catholic faith.

The erroneoous statement here is simply that only "a few Christian fundamentalists still hold" to the creationist view of 1.) the sciences of life [biology], formation of the earth's crust [geology], and the latter's correlative science of water dynamics [hydrology]. And of 2.) the normative considerations in any science of interpretation of the Bible, particularly the first chapters of The Book of Genesis [Biblical hermeneutics, Genesis 1-3 hermenutics]. Unfortunately, for both Oakes and myself, the Angus Reid poll these Christian fundamentalists in America at least are not "a few," but the vast majority. And, their number must include a large number of Roman Catholics.

Another strategy must be found than one of dismissal of the creaitonist viewpoint, however mistaken it may be. Neo-Darwinism and all the school teachers dependent on its claims for a substitute-religion of evolutionism, has over-played its hand and brawt the long-time horizon itself into disrepute. It is distrusted by people who have nothing to do with fundamentalist churches, so-called "Creation Science," and other creationist groupings and institutions.

In addressing

Many Catholic scientists ... including Kenneth Miller, biology professor at Brown University and author of Finding Darwin's God [, Oakes notes that they] have requested a clarification from the Holy See on this issue [of how far we may be permitted to go with Darwin], claiming that from a strictly scientific standpoint, Darwin's description of biological origins is not incompatible with Catholic teaching. Do these scientists have a legitimate point?

Now, in Part 2 of the interview with Prof Dr Oakes, he disavows Intelligent Design and posits it in opposition to evolution, making no distinction such as James McCosh [a neo-Augustinian proponent of guided evolution] and Herman Dooyeweerd [a neo-Augustinian who revived what I call A's "time-staggered-releases capsule" view, a view resolutely based on a primary distinction between creatio ex nihilo vs realization in staggered moments across a long period of time. Instead, Oakes falls back on Thomistic recaps of Aristotle, and does so in a long boring passage that takes up too much space in this second part of the interview, which shrivels down into a real disappointment as a contribution to the evalution of ID by Roman Catholics. In the end, Oaks shoots his position in the foot and confounds all the creationist and ID Catholics who will in the end find Oaks out on a limb and a disppointment. Oakes never deals with the essential issue of biotic laws; to my mind, that means a reformed ID emerging as a fully developed theory in tandem with the path of research pioneered by Dr Uko Zylstra is far superiour to the Oakes / Miller orientation that the Catholic faithful in America so resoundingly reject. Still, creationism is not the answer, nor the problem; while Oakes' "Darwinist Catholicism" is part of the problem, not the solution. At the same time, Oaks without mentioning it, seems properly allergic to the neo-Darwinism of Richard Dawkins. So, to revert to eo-Darwinism, Oakes must move in a regressive direction to a position which no longer has any clout, just as Oakes reverts to Scholasticism with its elaborate system of embroideries on Aristotle. I do not mean to fawlt altogether the Aristotelian distinction between primary cause, and secondary causes, which not only recurs in Aquinas and the Westminster Confession of Faith, but which James McCosh used so fruitfully to stake out his neo-Augustinian approach that underlays his book of 1850, The Method of Divine Government which established Christian "theistic evolution" years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. McCosh was also an early proponent of Intelligent Design, which is not a latterday movement ex nihilo and de novo. - Owlb

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Natural History magazine

conducts 1st scholarly debate on ID vs EV0

evolution: science and belief

The authors who contributed to this Natural History report are:

Richard Milner and Vittorio Maestro, ed. (introduction)
Michael J. Behe, Ph.D. (ID) and Kenneth R. Miller, Ph.D. (EVO)
William A. Dembski, Ph.D. (ID) and Robert T. Pennock, Ph.D. (EVO)
Jonathan Wells, Ph.D. (ID) and Eugenie C. Scott, Ph.D. (EVO)
Barbara Forrest, Ph.D. (overview)

Further info: ActionBioscience.org has added "learn more links" to this report which consist of author-recommended links to online information to help readers learn more about each author's views. An "educator resources" section has also been created by ActionBioscience.org that includes additional links and an original class lesson for high school students through college undergraduates to accompany this report. Links can be accessed at the end of each author's comments or by scrolling to the bottom area of this web page.