Book review by the Managing editor of Wilberforce Forum's quarterly, Findings
"Skepticism’s Prospects for Unseating Intelligent Design,” a 2002 article by Dembski
Posted on 04/26/2004 9:42:08 AM PDT by Mr. Silverback
BreakPoint listeners have heard me speak many times over the years about the intelligent design movement. Intelligent design is the argument by scientists that the world shows clear signs that it was designed and is not simply the result of random evolution.
This is one of the biggest cultural shifts in recent history, especially now with school boards across the country debating this very question and affirming the need to teach both sides of this controversy.
How did this come about? It’s been developing for years, and a new book recounts the intelligent design movement’s history.
Doubts about Darwin: A History of Intelligent Design, written by rhetorical historian Thomas Woodward, tells the stories of four founders of the intelligent design movement—Michael Denton, Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Dembski—and how they used brilliant rhetorical strategy to break down Darwinism.
Woodward notes that his reason for writing the history is that it nurtures “the health of science itself and . . . the civic health of American society.” What’s at stake, you see, is no less than “supreme cultural authority,” says Woodward. At the heart of the origin debates is “our notions . . . of what it means to be human.”
The motivation for these four founders of the design movement to instigate this “reformation within science” is a passion for intellectual truth-telling. “Design sees itself,” writes Woodward, “as . . . doing its best to restore epistemic integrity.”
Woodward begins with biochemist Michael Denton. Denton set the tone, purpose, and value of the fight against Darwinism in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.
Next he examines legal scholar Phillip Johnson, this year’s Wilberforce Award recipient. Phil Johnson began reading Darwin and realized two things: the immense cultural implications if the Darwinian worldview was proved false and, as a result of his legal training, just how easy it was to prove it false. Johnson put Darwinon trial and forced Darwinians in the academy onto the defensive.
Woodward then turns to biologist Michael Behe, author of the “anti-Darwinist bomb,” Darwin’s Black Box. When Behe read Denton’s book, he experienced “the greatest intellectual shock of his life.” For years, Behe believed in Darwin’s empirical proof because he had been taught it throughout his education. Behe’s “conversion,” so to speak, caused him to rethink biochemical systems, and he coined the term irreducible complexity to describe systems that would cease to work if any part was missing.
Finally Woodward comes to mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski. Dembski has discovered that telling the truth is never wrong, but sometimes it is costly, and that Christian institutions themselves are not immune from Darwinian stranglehold on truth. Even fellow colleagues at Baylor University have worked to “shut down” Dembski’s dissent.
Woodward makes it clear that telling the truth never hurts the Christian cause. Intelligent Design’s purpose isn’t to stop good scientific practices. Instead the goal is to open the stifling Darwinian atmosphere to new possibilities.
Doubts about Darwin is an exciting history lesson. While there are “no truces in view,” says Woodward, these fighters are working toward intellectual freedom. And their stories can inspire you as you face your school board, colleagues, or biology professors.
Book review by the Managing editor of Wilberforce Forum's quarterly, Findings
"Skepticism’s Prospects for Unseating Intelligent Design,” a 2002 article by Dembski
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To the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time and I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats and they're coming to take me away, ha haaa!!!
To the happy home, with trees and flowers and chirping birds and basket weavers who sit and smile and twiddle their thumbs and toes and they're coming to take me away, ha haa!!!
To the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time... (fade out into mumbles)
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On the other hand, it does keep them off the street, I suppose.
By the way, if Dembski has been persecuted (given a named chair at a major University without the usual tedium of a record of external funding, refereed publications, or progress from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor), then please persecute me.
Lacking a scientific strategy, this seems the usual Creationist mode. Coulson doesn't seem to know the difference.
Yes, who'd have thought so many creationists would go "under cover" and pretend to be secular skeptics of evolution? (I'm not sure I've ever met a real secular skeptic of evolution even yet.)
The Discovery Institute is to creationism what the National Lawyer's Guild is to communism: a front organization.
I seem to recall a previous post of yours - something like "every year, the same four guys convert to ID" ;)
Meanwhile, real scientists carry on doing real work, based on evolutionary theory.
I was paraphrasing from The Quixotic Message:
Greater and greater numbers of scientists are joining the ID movement, which is why we keep referring to the same three year after year.
As a lawyer myself, all I have to say is- legal training is about as useful for dealing with science as a PhD in genetics is for arguing in front of the Supreme Court.
In the absence of hard data as to the origin of life, what would you have us do? Do you apply the same standard elsewhere? Were the physicists who developed quantum mechanics 'dodging the underlying question' because they did not have an explanation for the structure of the atomic nucleus?
How so? Evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. Evolution cannot occur without life. Life MUST exist. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
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