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To: Coyoteman
The reason I asked that question is that I don't believe there is a difference between intelligent design and creationism, and the book Of Pandas and People is one of the reasons why.

Well you have to be disabused of that notion then.

As the IDEA Center quotes from major ID proponent, William Dembski :

William Dembski writes:

"The most obvious difference is that scientific creationism has prior religious commitments whereas intelligent design does not. ... Intelligent design ... has no prior religious commitments and interprets the data of science on generally accepted scientific principles. In particular, intelligent design does not depend on the biblical account of creation." (William Dembski, The Design Revolution, pg. 40)

"Intelligent design begins with data that scientists observe in the laboratory and nature, identifies in them patterns known to signal intelligent causes and thereby ascertains whether a phenomenon was designed. For design theorists, the conclusion of design constitutes an inference from data, not a deduction from religious authority." (William Dembski, The Design Revolution, pg. 42-43)

"Natural causes are too stupid to keep pace with intelligent causes. Intelligent design theory provides a rigorous scientific demonstration of this long-standing intuition. Let me stress, the complexity-specification criterion is not a principle that comes to us demanding our unexamined acceptance--it is not an article of faith. Rather it is the outcome of a careful and sustained argument about the precise interrelationships between necessity, chance and design." (William Dembski, No Free Lunch, pg. 223)

These statements are not just bluffs on the part of Dembski, who has published extensive work grounding his critique of neo-Darwinism in empirical arguments. Intelligent design theory is based upon these empirical arguments that life was designed. Dembski's 1998 peer-reviewed Cambridge University Press book The Design Inference lays out a detailed argument for detecting design without making any discussions of religious scripture nor any reliance upon religious arguments. It is difficult to imagine how such an explicit attempt to put forth empirically-based arguments could be implicitly based upon religious scripture.
274 posted on 05/31/2008 8:52:39 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

I am agnostic about ID. But I do agree that it is disingenuous for Darwinians to ascribe a religously motivated anthromorphism to the ID people without conceding that Darwinianism is likewise something generated by human beings and human beings with a view. We are kind of stuck on how much is subjective and how much objective about any theory or even any observation.
After all, quantum theory is at bottom as mysterious as the theory of transubstantiation. We can describe the veil, but not the lady behind it. That is, assuming that what is behind it is a lady.


276 posted on 05/31/2008 12:43:17 PM PDT by RobbyS (Ecce homo)
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