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  Topic: Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker< Next Oldest | Next Newest >  
Jason Spaceman



Posts: 163
Joined: Nov. 2005

(Permalink) Posted: Dec. 03 2005,22:02   

Quote
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Published: December 4, 2005

TO read the headlines, intelligent design as a challenge to evolution seems to be building momentum.

In Kansas last month, the board of education voted that students should be exposed to critiques of evolution like intelligent design. At a trial of the Dover, Pa., school board that ended last month, two of the movement's leading academics presented their ideas to a courtroom filled with spectators and reporters from around the world. President Bush endorsed teaching "both sides" of the debate - a position that polls show is popular. And Pope Benedict XVI weighed in recently, declaring the universe an "intelligent project."

Intelligent design posits that the complexity of biological life is itself evidence of a higher being at work. As a political cause, the idea has gained currency, and for good reason. The movement was intended to be a "big tent" that would attract everyone from biblical creationists who regard the Book of Genesis as literal truth to academics who believe that secular universities are hostile to faith. The slogan, "Teach the controversy," has simple appeal in a democracy.

Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement's credibility.


Read it here.

   
tacitus



Posts: 118
Joined: May 2005

(Permalink) Posted: Dec. 04 2005,09:12   

Nice to see some conservative Christians being honest about the prospects of ID becoming acceptable science.

The future of ID is bleak indeed if they can't even get their own supporters to invest the time and money into the research that any respectable scientific endeavour requires.

It's not as though they lack the resources. Even forgetting the millions of dollars the Discovery Institute throws away on publicity and politics, the religious community is awash with the sort of cash needed to start up an ID research program.

If you add up the annual incomes of the top dozen or so fundamentalist organizations that have supported the cause of ID in words (run by people like D. James Kennedy, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson) you'll find the total comes to something north of $500 million dollars. That's half-a-billion dollars... PER YEAR!

And yet, there has not been one single attempt to seed an Intelligent Design research program in any of the many sympathetic religious colleges around the country.

Pat Robertson himself has managed to create a post-graduate law school which has been apparantly been (all too) effective in churning out conservative religious lawyers who now fight for his causes all the way up to the Supreme Court. It can be done.

So what about intelligent design? How much would it cost to start an intelligent design research program? A couple of million per year? A fraction of one percent of their resources to "change the face of science as we know it, and to crush the evils of materialism, for ever?" Why not? Sounds like a bargain to me.

But there's not a peep, not a red cent being thrown that way... from anyone. And that's all I need to know that ID is thoroughly bankrupt.

  
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