Chris recently noted:
> Technically, ID does not imply creationism, but there are *very* few who
> are not creationists in a general way, and these *are* the ones who are
> mainly behind the attempts at inflicting ID theory on children as science.
The arguments re ID continue, with little hope for significant progress. One
of the chief reasons, I would suggest, is that there is no common
understanding of what it means "to be (intelligently) designed." For this
state of affairs I hold the most vocal proponents of ID responsible
(Johnson, Dembski, Behe, Nelson, Meyer, Wells, et al.).
A couple of weekends ago I spoke at a conference on ID at which Bill Dembski
was the ID representative. Because I have been complaining to Bill and other
ID proponents for years about their lack of candor regarding what it means
to say that "X was intelligently designed," I paid particular attention to
Bill's presentation for his use of either "designed" or "intelligently
designed." In the absence of an explicit definition, we are left to search
for the term's effective meaning in the subtext of what is said. Following
is a list of the diverse spectrum of differing ways in which these
equivalent terms were employed within the course one lecture.
"To be (intelligently) designed" is:
1. to be planned and made.
2. to be created.
3. to display a recognizable pattern.
4. to be intended.
5. to be made, constructed or assembled.
6. to be performed by an intelligent agent.
7. to display specified complexity.
8. to be irreducibly complex.
9. not to be accomplishable by any natural means.
10. to be planned for a purpose.
11. to be designed in the same way as a watch is designed.
12. to be the product of an innovative effort.
13. to be engineered.
When all the rhetoric is over, however, the fundamental working meaning of
ID is most evident in the examples offered for "empirical evidence that X
was designed." Nearly all such "evidences" have as an essential component
the assertion that, "since object X has quality Y, it could not have been
assembled (for the first time) by any natural means."
Once again I say that what its proponents (strategically and misleadingly)
call "Intelligent Design Theory" is nothing other than "NOn-Natural Assembly
Theory." Furthermore, since ID really means NONA, all talk of "natural"
designers (assemblers) is irrelevant to what the chief proponents of NONA
(mislabeled 'ID') are striving for.
Howard Van Till
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