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But I have been posting a request every day on every crevo thread for ten days -- asking ID proponents to outline their points of agreement with mainstream science. I'm trying to locate some common ground upon which to base a dialog.... So far I have not received one response that was not insulting. Not a single ID poster will tell me what they would teach in science classes. What core findings of science they accept. What procedures and methodologies.

Dear js1138, I'm sorry your challenge is falling on deaf ears. To do justice to it would require a thoughtful, comprehesive effort which, frankly, I just don't have the time to do right now. But maybe I can get the ball rolling and make a few suggestions.

First of all, I would not in any way want it said that ID is "antievolutionary" or in any way seeks to "replace" classical (or "mainstream") evolutionary theory. That would be a grotesque misrepresentation. Most scientists working in the ID field (I'd say the overwhelming majority) do not regard evolution per se as controversial.

Perhaps it would be good to mention that, to the extent that Darwinist evolutionary theory is based on the Newtonian model of the universe, in which everything can be explained in terms of force-field driven relations in nature as governed by the physical laws of motion and Newtonian gravity, any further development of the theory may be overly constrained by the materialist view. Indeed, science today often uncritically accepts the materialist presupposition -- although it has never as far as I know been subject to experimental test. This may operate as a constraint on the types of scientific searches that can and will be made to further elucidate problems in biology. To me, it seems awareness of a potential methodological constraint can only improve scientific methodologies.

I would also point out that Darwin's theory maintains that a random process can give rise to purposeful biological outcomes. There are logical objections that can be made against this supposition. In any case, I am not aware that the theory itself has ever taken a serious look at whether randomness is something (objectively) real or something (subjectively) apparent to an observer. This is an epistemological issue. Darwin's theory does seem to rest on a number of points that have not yet been critically clarified, but whose clarification could shed light on the soundness of Darwin's method and the results he obtained.

My own view (not that it really matters, and I'm not writing school curricula nor textbooks anyyway, so who cares?) is that Darwin's insights with respect to microevolution probably will hold up against future challenges. But the macroevolutionary assumption of a Common Ancestor for all species looks to me to be on shaky ground -- for epistemological reasons. No one's ever seen the common ancestor, nor ever likely will.

If Darwinism has a weak point, it would be due to the fact that, as a historical science, many of its findings cannot be directly observed. It will be argued that many of Darwin's predictions have been experimentally observed. But here is a simple epistemological fact of life: One designs an experiment with an intended result in mind; and one selects and qualifies evidence, and constrains the experimental conditions in such a way as to reach that result.

With the CA, what I think we have is a hypothesis that has extraordinary explanatory power, and that is a major reason for its success. But then Genesis has extraordinary explanatory power, too. That doesn't make Genesis "science."

So I guess what I would say to biology students at the high school level (or rather, their parents and school boards) would be something like this: If materialism is true, then quite likely Darwinism is bullet-proof. But if it is not, then quite possibly the theory needs some updating -- in particular to reflect more recent discoveries in the physical sciences, such as relativity theory, quantum theory, and information science.

These latter fields do not bet the whole farm on "matter in its motions." Indeed, non-corporeals (mathematics, consciousness, fields, et al.) -- that is, immaterial things -- receive due consideration as a matter of course.

If ID were to be taught at all at the high school level, I probably wouldn't put it in biology class. What I'd like to see instead as a regular part of the H.S. science curriculum is a new course that maybe we could call "Scientific Cosmology." It would be devoted to the various cosmologies that science has been producing of late -- multiworlds, multiuniverses, parallel universes, etc. -- as well as some of the "stranger" perplexities that have been unearthed by relativity theory and quantum theory (the observer problem, non-locality, superposition, probability theory, theories of gravity, etc., etc.). The course would simply provide a general overview of some of the leading-edge recent scientific findings in fields outside of biology which, in the final analysis, may be relevant to the question, "What is life?" -- to biology, that is -- and thus to evolutionary theory in principle.

Lastly, it probably wouldn't hurt to remind students that Darwinism does not explain the origin of life, just the "origin of species." Darwin assumed that God made life, and then presumably withdrew from the scene; and then Darwin stepped in and explained "what happened to it" thereafter.

Maybe not all students (or their parents) would appreciate the question of the origin of life. Essentially, this seems to me a spiritual question that doesn't belong in science class. But we must recognize the question/problem is there all the same; and I'll tell you, when I was 15 or so, I was vitally interested in that question [still am!]....

But what would it hurt to acknowledge the obvious -- that life in the universe had an origin, a beginning? And that Darwinism doesn't deal with this question?

Well, FWIW. Lunch hour's over; must get back to work. Thanks for writing, js1138!