Response to Faith with thr Bible

Bible texts: www.biblegateway.com

A. The Bible as Guide in Life and Liturgy (Sunday Readings)

B. The Bible in Dialogue with Questions of the Day

October 24  31^st Sunday of the Year (Year 1)

(November 14^th for Feast of Christ the King; A. Sunday Readings; B. Dialogue: Atheism, Monotheism, Divine Revelation)

 

A. The Bible as Guide. Readings for 31^st Sunday

 B. Dialogue with Questions of the Day: Genesis chapter 1-2, esp. 1:1-2:4; Darwinism, Natural Selection or/and Intelligent Design, rationes seminales (germinal principles or original factors)

 

Readings for 31^st Sunday

 a) Bible Readings God’s Word, immediacy and distanciation

 The document on the Liturgy of Vatican II speaks of the various ways in which Christ is present in his Church to carry out his plan of salvation. One is “He is present in His word, since it is He Himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in the Church”. This belief gives a sense of immediacy to the Scripture readings, as if a particular reading was addressed to each individual.

 While there is truth in this, the distance (of 2000 years or more) between the present-day hearer and the original text and its originally intended message and meaning must be borne in mind, both as an aid to overcome difficulties in understanding the text and to avoid too facile application to present-day personal or other situations.  In fact, understanding a particular reading in its original setting within an entire book can help us better appreciate its message for our own day.

 First Reading, from the prophet Malachi (Mal 1:14-2:2,8-10). For the background to this reading it may be well recall some of the dates of Jewish history given for an earlier Sunday’s liturgy (29^th Sunday, October 10):  Fall of Israel to Assyrian Empire 721 BC; Destruction of Jerusalem by Babylonians (Nebuchadnezzar) 586 BC; Babylonian Exile 586-539 BC; Cyrus the Persian (non-Semite; Indo-European) conquers Asia Minor and is about to conquer Babylon 540 BC. In 539 he permits the Jewish exiles to return home and rebuild the Temple. Work on rebuilding did not seriously begin until the reign of Darius (522-520), under the inspiration of the two prophets Haggai and Zechariah, with Zerubbabel, probably grandson of the last king of Judah, as governor. It was a period of great hope for the future, after the inspiring oracles of Second Isaiah. The rebuilding of the Temple was completed in 515. Soon afterwards matters seem to have changed from the worse. Zerubbabel disappears from the scene, probably removed by the Persian authorities who feared an attempt to restore the Davidic dynasty. The new governors of Judah would be Persians. The economic situation got worse and the population and priesthood probably got disheartened.  Diseased and maimed beasts were being offered as sacrifice in the Temple. The priesthood itself seems to have got lethargic and half-hearted with regard to Temple worship and instruction of the people, the priests (Levites) forgetting the  models and traditions that should inspire them, the covenant of God with Levi from which they believed they descended and the covenant of God with all Israel (with Abraham and Moses at Sinai). It is against this background that the book of Malachi, composed possibly between 515 and 450, and today’s reading should be understood as first intended. The message of the book, and this present reading, has a message for all ages, and for us today. As one commentator on the book of Malachi (M. Daniel Carroll R.) puts it at the end of his introduction: “The theme of worship and its connection with the call for exemplary leadership make the book of Malachi ever relevant. Today there is much interest in liturgical renewal. Liberation theology, for example, has stressed the inseparable link between worship and praxis. What is more, in an age of so much scandal among those in positions of religious authority, many look for those who might represent integrity and sound moral values”.

 

            When the present Sunday lectionary was published in 1969, this Sunday’s first reading was chosen as an Old Testament passage to go with the Gospel reading’s censure of the Pharisees. It has a much more poignant message for the Church in our own day.

 Second Reading (1 Thessalonians 2:7-9,13). To situate this reading better it may be well to recall what Paul has just said in the preceding verses (1 Thessalonians 2:3-6; New International Version (NIV): ^“3 For the appeal we make does not spring from error or impure motives, nor are we trying to trick you. ⁴ On the contrary, we speak as those approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel. We are not trying to please people but God, who tests our hearts. ⁵ You know we never used flattery, nor did we put on a mask to cover up greed—God is our witness. ⁶ We were not looking for praise from people, not from you or anyone else, even though as apostles of Christ we could have asserted our authority”.  In Paul’s world there were itinerant preachers and philosophers of different kinds, trying to win favour with their audiences. Paul is keen to differentiate himself, and preachers of the Christian Gospel, from these both in his message and in his way of life. The Christian message requires honesty in presentation and conformity to it in one’s life. Paul goes beyond ordinary Christian requirements in this. There was a Gospel principle, attributed to Christ himself, that those who preach the Gospel may live by the Gospel, that is by material support from believers. Paul worked with his hands, probably as a tent maker. Together with these principles of Christian apostolate, Paul was united with his churches by genuine affection. Paul is overjoyed, and thanks God, for the deep faith of his converts. They have accepted the Gospel (the word of God) for what it is – not just a proclamation of Christ’s saving work but a real power that makes the living of the Gospel in all that it demands (honesty, transparency, lack of “hypocrisy”,  play-acting) a living reality.

 

 

 

The Gospel (Matthew 23:7-9.12). This is the opening section of Jesus’ condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees. In this reading Jesus addresses to “the people and his disciples” a warning concerning the scribes and the Pharisees, who are said to occupy the chair of Moses. They are said to wear “broader phylacteries” and “longer tassels” (than others) to attract attention. A phylactery (a Greek word, safeguard, amulet) was a small case containing scripture verses, worn on the arm and forehead by the Jew while praying, as commanded in Deuteronomy 6:8 (Deut 6:6-8: Deuteronomy 6:6-8- New International Version (NIV): “⁶These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. ⁷ Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. ⁸ Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads”.  The “tassels” or fringes on garments were commanded by the Torah (Jewish Law, Pentateuch): Numbers 15:37-39– New International Version (NIV) “Tassels on Garments”: “³⁷The LORD said to Moses, ³⁸ “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘Throughout the generations to come you are to make tassels on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel. ³⁹ You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the LORD, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes” (see also Deuteronomy 22:12). Both usages were widely practised, also by Jesus; see Mat 9:20; 14:36. In the section in today’s Gospel reading Jesus condemns the ostentation of the scribes and Pharisees, and their devising new burdensome laws for the ordinary people.

 

            The Pharisees were a lay group whose origins go back to well before 100 BC. There were well known as meticulous interpreters of the traditional laws (of Moses) and also for having a tradition of their own with many observances of detail going beyond these laws. In Palestine in the time of Christ their numbers were about 6000, but their influence on popular opinion and piety far outweighed this. The scribes were trained lawyers, in the traditional religious laws and possibly other laws as well. While not necessarily of the Pharisee party, very many of them probably sympathized with them.

 

            During the public ministry, Jesus and his disciples were often in contact and dispute with the Pharisees. After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 Jewish thought and religion were reorganized under the influence of scribes, Pharisees and related groups, to become by AD 200 the Judaism we know today, with renowned leaders and teachers known as Rabbi, Abba (“Father”) and other titles. This is the renascent Judaism that the evangelist Matthew and his Christian community would have known. During Jesus’ ministry and after the resurrection it may have been their influence that explains the few Jewish converts to the early Church. In the next verse after today’s reading Jesus’ continues his diatribe (Mat 23:13; NIV): ¹³ “Woe to you, teachers of the law (=scribes) and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to”.

 

            In this reading the scribes and Pharisees are used as a foil to Matthew’s Christian community. Their behaviour should be the opposite of that condemned by Jesus, a community with no consciousness of status, in teaching or otherwise, one of transparency where behaviour mirrored belief. The early Church had teachers (Ephesians 4:11), one of the many gifts of the Risen Lord, intended to build up the Christian community in love. In Mat 13:52 Christ speaks of scribes of the kingdom of heaven.

 

            Before conversion the apostle Paul was a Pharisee: “as to the law a Pharisee, … as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:6). Reflecting on his own Jewish people’s failure to accept Christ, he says sadly (Romans 10:1-4, NIV):  “¹Brothers and sisters, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is that they may be saved. ² For I can testify about them that they are zealous for God, but their zeal is not based on knowledge. ³ Since they did not know the righteousness of God and sought to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness. ⁴ Christ is the culmination of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes”

 

Reflection on the three readings. (1)  With regard to the first (OT) reading recall Paul in Romans 15:4: “For whatever was written in former days (i.e. in the Old Testament) was written for our instruction, so that by the steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope”. Steadfastness, staying power, is a central part of Christian hope. The first reading reminds us of the ups and downs of a nation’s and an individual’s life: Great expectations, recessions, temptation to forget the demands of the original covenants; the presence of prophecy. (2) The second reading recalls the importance of not forgetting the central mission of the Christian religion: to continue the saving mission of Christ. (3) All readings stress the importance of transparency at all levels of Christian life, authority, clerics, religious, laity, so that in Paul’s words (2 Cor 4:6) Christians may be continuing witnesses to “the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.

 

(End of Guide to readings for 31^st Sunday of the Year)

 

 

B. Dialogue with Questions of the Day: Genesis chapter 1-2, esp. 1:1-2:4; Darwinism, Natural Selection or/and Intelligent Design, rationes seminales (germinal principles or original factors)

 

Internet links: Natural selection; Darwinism; intelligent design; rationes seminales

 

Some reflections on God and intelligent design:

 

See Jeremiah 18:2-6 and Roman 9:9:21

 

Jeremiah 18:2-6

 

New International Version (NIV)

 

² “Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.” ³ So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. ⁴ But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.

 

 ⁵ Then the word of the LORD came to me. ⁶ He said, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel.

 

 

 

Romans 9:19-21

 

New International Version (NIV)

 

 ¹⁹ One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?” ²⁰ But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’”^{[a] 21} Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?

 

 

 

 

Selections from Augustinus Hibernicus, On the Miracles of Holy Scripture (an Irish writer, writing in Latin, AD 655, in the translation of John Carey, King of Mysteries. Early Irish Religious Writings (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), pp. 51-74, 52-53. (selections), at

 

This, as the authority of the Book of Genesis confirms, was brought to pass in the course of the passing of six days, so that it can be maintained with complete certainty that on the sixth day everything pertaining to the disposition and arrangement of the creation was completed, For thus it is written: ‘And on the sixth day God completed all his works, and blessed the seventh day, because in it he rested from all his works. (Genesis 2:2)

 

 

 

From this it is understood that on the sixth day God completed all things, so that on the seventh day he may be seen to have ceased, not from toiling (a labore), but from working (ab opera). But since the Lord Jesus answered the Jews who were asking about rest on the Sabbath, saying ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working’ (John 5:17, we both believe that he finished all things on the sixth day and resed on the seventh, and also do not doubt that he is working until now. But we must consider more carefully how the same God can be considered to have finished the, and to be working now.

On the sixth day he completed his work on the natures of created things, but even now he does not cease to govern them; and on the seventh day he rested from the work of creation (ab opera creationis), but he never ceases from the exercise of government (a gubernationis regimine). For we are to understand that God was a Creator then (tunc -. Creator), but is a Governor now (nunc Gubernaror). Therefore if among created things we see anything new arise, God should not be thought to have created a new nature, but to be governing that which he created formerly. But his power in governing his creation is so great that he may seem to be creating a new nature, when he is only bringing forth from the hidden depths of its [existing] nature that which lay concealed within.

2:  ‘Govern’ is not an ideal translation here, but I hope that in the context it will make sense

 Genesis 1:1-2:24, especially 1:1-2:4a

New International Version (NIV)

Genesis 1

The Beginning

 

 ¹ In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ² Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

 

 ³ And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. ⁴ God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. ⁵ God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

 

 ⁶ And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” ⁷ So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. ⁸ God called the vault “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.

 

 ⁹ And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so. ¹⁰ God called the dry ground “land,” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” And God saw that it was good.
    ¹¹ Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. ¹² The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. ¹³ And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

 

 ¹⁴ And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, ¹⁵ and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. ¹⁶ God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. ¹⁷ God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, ¹⁸ to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. ¹⁹ And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

 

 ²⁰ And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” ²¹ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. ²² God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” ²³ And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

 

 ²⁴ And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. ²⁵ God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
    ²⁶ Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,^[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

 

 ²⁷ So God created mankind in his own image,
   in the image of God he created them;
   male and female he created them.

 

 ²⁸ God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
    ²⁹ Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. ³⁰ And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.
    ³¹ God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

 

Genesis 2

 

 ¹ Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.

 

 ² By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. ³ Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.

 

Adam and Eve

 

 ⁴ This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, when the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.

 

 ⁵ Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth^[b] and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, ⁶ but streams^[c] came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. ⁷ Then the LORD God formed a man^[d] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

 

 ⁸ Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. ⁹ The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

 

 ¹⁰ A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. ¹¹ The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. ¹² (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin^[e] and onyx are also there.) ¹³ The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush.^{[f] 14} The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

 

 ¹⁵ The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶ And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷ but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

 

 ¹⁸ The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

 

 ¹⁹ Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. ²⁰ So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals.

 

   But for Adam^[g] no suitable helper was found. ²¹ So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs^[h] and then closed up the place with flesh. ²² Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib^[i] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

 

 ²³ The man said,

 

   “This is now bone of my bones
   and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
   for she was taken out of man.”

 

 ²⁴ That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

 

Footnotes:

 

1. Genesis 1:26 Probable reading of the original Hebrew text (see Syriac); Masoretic Text the earth
2. Genesis 2:5 Or land; also in verse 6
3. Genesis 2:6 Or mist
4. Genesis 2:7 The Hebrew for man (adam) sounds like and may be related to the Hebrew for ground (adamah); it is also the name Adam (see verse 20).
5. Genesis 2:12 Or good; pearls
6. Genesis 2:13 Possibly southeast Mesopotamia
7. Genesis 2:20 Or the man
8. Genesis 2:21 Or took part of the man’s side
9. Genesis 2:22 Or part

 

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Darwinism

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

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This article is about concepts called Darwinism. For biological evolution, see evolution. For modern evolutionary theory, see modern evolutionary synthesis.

 

 

 

Charles Darwin in 1868

 

Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin.^[1][2][3]

 

The meaning of “Darwinism” has changed over time, and varies depending on who is using the term.^[4] In the United States, the term “Darwinism” is often used by creationists as a pejorative term in reference to beliefs such as atheistic naturalism, but in the United Kingdom the term has no negative connotations, being freely used as a short hand for the body of theory dealing with evolution, and in particular, evolution by natural selection.^[5]

 

The term was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in April 1860,^[6] and was used to describe evolutionary concepts, including earlier concepts such as Malthusianism and Spencerism. In the late 19th century it came to mean the concept that natural selection was the sole mechanism of evolution, in contrast to Lamarckism.^[4]

 

Around 1900 Darwinism was eclipsed by Mendelism until the modern evolutionary synthesis unified Darwin’s and Gregor Mendel‘s ideas. As modern evolutionary theory has developed, the term has been associated at times with specific ideas.^[4]

 

While the term has remained in use amongst scientific authors, it has increasingly been argued that it is an inappropriate term for modern evolutionary theory.^[7][8][9] For example, Darwin was unfamiliar with the work of Gregor Mendel,^[10] and as a result had only a vague and inaccurate understanding of heredity. He naturally had no inkling of yet more recent developments and, like Mendel himself, knew nothing of genetic drift for example.^[11]

 

Contents ·         1 Conceptions of Darwinism ·         2 19th-century usage ·         3 Other uses ·         4 See also ·         5 Notes ·         6 References ·         7 External links

 

[edit] Conceptions of Darwinism

 

 

As “Darwinism” became widely accepted in the 1870s, caricatures of Charles Darwin with an ape or monkey body symbolised evolution.^[12]

 

While the term Darwinism had been used previously to refer to the work of Erasmus Darwin in the late 18th century, the term as understood today was introduced when Charles Darwin‘s 1859 book On the Origin of Species was reviewed by Thomas Henry Huxley in the April 1860 issue of the Westminster Review.^[13] Having hailed the book as, “a veritable Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism” promoting scientific naturalism over theology, and praising the usefulness of Darwin’s ideas while expressing professional reservations about Darwin’s gradualism and doubting if it could be proved that natural selection could form new species,^[14] Huxley compared Darwin’s achievement to that of Copernicus in explaining planetary motion:

 

What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular? What if species should offer residual phenomena, here and there, not explicable by natural selection? Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a position to say whether this is, or is not, the case; but in either event they will owe the author of “The Origin of Species” an immense debt of gratitude…… And viewed as a whole, we do not believe that, since the publication of Von Baer’s “Researches on Development,” thirty years ago, any work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not only on the future of Biology, but in extending the domination of Science over regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated.^[6]

 

Another important evolutionariy theorist of the same period was Peter Kropotkin who, in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, advocated a conception of Darwinism counter to that of Huxley. His conception was centred around what he saw as the widespread use of cooperation as a survival mechanism in human societies and animals. He used biological and sociological arguments in an attempt to show that the main factor in facilitating evolution is cooperation between individuals in free-associated societies and groups. This was in order to counteract the conception of fierce competition as the core of evolution, which provided a rationalisation for the dominant political, economic and social theories of the time; and the prevalent interpretations of Darwinism, such as those by Huxley, who is targeted as an opponent by Kropotkin. Kropotkin’s conception of Darwinism could be summed up by the following quote:

 

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

 

— Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion.

 

[edit] 19th-century usage

 

“Darwinism” soon came to stand for an entire range of evolutionary (and often revolutionary) philosophies about both biology and society. One of the more prominent approaches, summed in the 1864 phrase “survival of the fittest” by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, later became emblematic of Darwinism even though Spencer’s own understanding of evolution (as expressed in 1857) was more similar to that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck than to that of Darwin, and predated the publication of Darwin’s theory in 1859. What is now called “Social Darwinism” was, in its day, synonymous with “Darwinism” — the application of Darwinian principles of “struggle” to society, usually in support of anti-philanthropic political agenda. Another interpretation, one notably favoured by Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, was that “Darwinism” implied that because natural selection was apparently no longer working on “civilized” people, it was possible for “inferior” strains of people (who would normally be filtered out of the gene pool) to overwhelm the “superior” strains, and voluntary corrective measures would be desirable — the foundation of eugenics.

 

“	And so a Darwinian ‘left’ and a Darwinian ‘right’ were in place before most people had grasped the Darwinian middle, which was where the maker was.	”
—Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life[15]

 

In Darwin’s day there was no rigid definition of the term “Darwinism”, and it was used by opponents and proponents of Darwin’s biological theory alike to mean whatever they wanted it to in a larger context. The ideas had international influence, and Ernst Haeckel developed what was known as Darwinismus in Germany, although, like Spencer’s “evolution”, Haeckel’s “Darwinism” had only a rough resemblance to the theory of Charles Darwin, and was not centred on natural selection at all.

 

While reaction against Darwin’s ideas is nowadays often^{[citation needed]} thought^{[by whom?]} to have been widespread immediately, in 1886 Alfred Russel Wallace went on a lecture tour across the United States, starting in New York and going via Boston, Washington, Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska to California, lecturing on what he called “Darwinism” without any problems.^[16]

 

[edit] Other uses

 

The term Darwinism is often used in the United States by promoters of creationism, notably by leading members of the intelligent design movement, as an epithet to attack evolution as though it were an ideology (an “ism”) of philosophical naturalism, or atheism.^[17] For example, Phillip E. Johnson makes this accusation of atheism with reference to Charles Hodge‘s book What Is Darwinism?.^[18] However, unlike Johnson, Hodge confined the term to exclude those like Asa Gray who combined Christian faith with support for Darwin’s natural selection theory, before answering the question posed in the book’s title by concluding: “It is Atheism.”^[19][20][21] Creationists use the term Darwinism, often pejoratively, to imply that the theory has been held as true only by Darwin and a core group of his followers, whom they cast as dogmatic and inflexible in their belief.^[22] Casting evolution as a doctrine or belief, as well as a pseudo-religious ideology like Marxism,^[23] bolsters religiously motivated political arguments to mandate equal time for the teaching of creationism in public schools.

 

However, Darwinism is also used neutrally within the scientific community to distinguish modern evolutionary theories, sometimes called “NeoDarwinism”, from those first proposed by Darwin. Darwinism also is used neutrally by historians to differentiate his theory from other evolutionary theories current around the same period. For example, Darwinism may be used to refer to Darwin’s proposed mechanism of natural selection, in comparison to more recent mechanisms such as genetic drift and gene flow. It may also refer specifically to the role of Charles Darwin as opposed to others in the history of evolutionary thought — particularly contrasting Darwin’s results with those of earlier theories such as Lamarckism or later ones such as the modern synthesis.

 

In the United Kingdom the term retains its positive sense as a reference to natural selection, and for example Richard Dawkins wrote in his collection of essays A Devil’s Chaplain, published in 2003, that as a scientist he is a Darwinist.^[24]

 

·         Darwinism (book)

 

·         Modern evolutionary synthesis

 

·         Neo-Darwinism

 

·         Neural Darwinism

 

·         Social Darwinism

 

·         Darwin Awards

 

·         Pangenesis – Charles Darwin’s hypothetical mechanism for heredity

 

·         Universal Darwinism

 

[edit] Notes

 

1.      ^ John Wilkins (1998). “How to be Anti-Darwinian”. TalkOrigins Archive. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/anti-darwin.html. Retrieved 19 June 2008. 

 

2.      ^ “Expelled Exposed: Why Expelled Flunks » …on what evolution explains”. National Center for Science Education. http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/contest/on-what-evolution-explains. Retrieved 22 December 2008. 

 

3.      ^ based on an European Southern Observatory release (9 December 2006). “Galactic Darwinism :: Astrobiology Magazine – earth science – evolution distribution Origin of life universe – life beyond :: Astrobiology is study of earth science evolution distribution Origin of life in universe terrestrial”. http://www.astrobio.net/news/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2169&theme=Printer. Retrieved 22 December 2008. 

 

4.      ^ ^{a b c} Joel Hanes. “What is Darwinism?”. TalkOrigins Archive. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/darwinism.html. Retrieved 19 June 2008. 

 

5.      ^ Scott, Eugenie C.; Branch, Glenn (16 January 2009). “Don’t Call it “Darwinism””. Evolution: Education and Outreach (New York: Springer) 2 (1): 90. doi:10.1007/s12052-008-0111-2. ISSN 1936-6434. http://www.springerlink.com/content/n47h34357743w4p0/?p=e3b030036a4d442a8ce393291fe0688f&pi=9. Retrieved 17 November 2009. 

 

6.      ^ ^{a b} Huxley, T.H. (April 1860). “ART. VIII.- Darwin on the origin of Species”. Westminster Review. pp. 541–70. http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=side&itemID=A32&pageseq=29. Retrieved 19 June 2008. “What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular?” 

 

7.      ^ John Wilkins (1998). “How to be Anti-Darwinian”. TalkOrigins Archive. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/anti-darwin.html. Retrieved 27 June 2008. 

 

8.      ^ Ruse, Michael (2003). Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 293. ISBN 0674016319. http://books.google.com/?id=SHWaeRiRD-cC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22michael+ruse%22+darwinism. Retrieved 18 July 2008. 

 

9.      ^ Olivia Judson (15 July 2008). “Let’s Get Rid of Darwinism”. New York Times. http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/lets-get-rid-of-darwinism/. 

 

10.  ^ Sclater, Andrew (June 2006). “The extent of Charles Darwin’s knowledge of Mendel”. Journal of Biosciences (Bangalore, India: Springer India / Indian Academy of Sciences) 31 (2): 191–193. doi:10.1007/BF02703910. PMID 16809850. http://www.springerlink.com/content/w112307246x77t37/. Retrieved 3 January 2009. 

 

11.  ^ Laurence Moran (1993). “Random Genetic Drift”. TalkOrigins Archive. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genetic-drift.html. Retrieved 27 June 2008. 

 

12.  ^ Browne 2002, pp. 376–379

 

13.  ^ “The Huxley File § 4 Darwin’s Bulldog”. http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/guide4.html. Retrieved 29 June 2008. 

 

14.  ^ Browne 2002, pp. 105–106

 

15.  ^ Gopnik 2009, p. 152.

 

16.  ^ “Evolution and Wonder – Understanding Charles Darwin – Speaking of Faith from American Public Media”. http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/darwin/transcript.shtml. Retrieved 27 July 2007. 

 

17.  ^ Scott, Eugenie C. (2008). “Creation Science Lite: “Intelligent Design” as the New Anti-Evolutionism”. In Godfrey, Laurie R.; Petto, Andrew J.. Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond. New York: W. W. Norton. pp. 72. ISBN 0-393-33073-7. http://biology.ucf.edu/~clp/Courses/seminar/papers/07-Scott-scientists_confront-cs_lite.pdf 

 

18.  ^ Johnson, Phillip E.. “What is Darwinism?”. http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/wid.htm. Retrieved 4 January 2007. 

 

19.  ^ Matthew, Ropp. “Charles Hodge and His Objection to Darwinism”. http://www.theropps.com/papers/Winter1997/CharlesHodge.htm. Retrieved 4 January 2007. 

 

20.  ^ Hodge, Charles. “What is Darwinism?”. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19192/19192-8.txt. Retrieved 4 January 2007. 

 

21.  ^ Hodge, Charles (1874). What is Darwinism?. Scribner, Armstrong, and Company. OCLC 11489956. 

 

22.  ^ Sullivan, M (2005). “From the Beagle to the School Board: God Goes Back to School”. Impact Press. http://www.impactpress.com/articles/spring05/sullivanspring05.html. Retrieved 18 September 2008. 

 

23.  ^ “Darwinism should be allowed to collapse and end up on the ash heap of history”. http://www.docstoc.com/docs/20835072/Darwinism-should-be-allowed-to-collapse-and-end-up-on-the-ash-heap-of-history. 

 

24.  ^ Sheahen, Laura. Religion: For Dummies. BeliefNet.com, interview about 2003 book.

 

[edit] References

 

·         Browne, E. Janet (2002). Charles Darwin: Vol. 2 The Power of Place. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0712668373. 

 

·         Gopnik, Adam (2009). Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life. London: Quercus. ISBN 9781847249296. 

 

[edit] External links

 

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Intelligent design

 

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This article is about intelligent design as promulgated by the Discovery Institute. For other uses, see Intelligent design (disambiguation).

 

For the philosophical “argument from design”, see Teleological argument.

 

Intelligent design (ID) is the proposition that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”^[1][2] It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, presented by its advocates as “an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins” rather than “a religious-based idea”. It avoids specifying that the hypothesized intelligent designer is God.^[3] Its leading proponents are associated with the Discovery Institute, a politically conservative think tank,^{[n 1][4]} and believe the designer to be the Christian God.^{[n 2][n 3]}

 

ID seeks to redefine science in a fundamental way that would invoke supernatural explanations, a viewpoint known as theistic science. It puts forward a number of arguments, the most prominent of which are irreducible complexity and specified complexity, in support of the existence of a designer.^[5] The scientific community rejects the extension of science to include supernatural explanations in favor of continued acceptance of methodological naturalism,^{[n 4][n 5][6][7]} and has rejected both irreducible complexity and specified complexity for a wide range of conceptual and factual flaws.^{[8][9][10][11][12][13]}

 

Intelligent design was developed by a group of American creationists who revised their argument in the creation–evolution controversy to circumvent court rulings such as the United States Supreme Court Edwards v. Aguillard ruling, which barred the teaching of “creation science” in public schools as breaching the separation of church and state.^{[14][n 6][15]} The first significant published use of intelligent design was in Of Pandas and People, a 1989 textbook intended for high-school biology classes.^[16] From the mid-1990s, intelligent design proponents were supported by the Discovery Institute, which, together with its Center for Science and Culture, planned and funded the “intelligent design movement“.^{[17][n 1]} They advocated inclusion of intelligent design in public school curricula, leading to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, where U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science, that it “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents”, and that the school district’s promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.^[18]

 

Contents ·         1 History o    1.1 Origin of the concept o    1.2 Origin of the term §  1.2.1 Of Pandas and People ·         2 Concepts o    2.1 Irreducible complexity o    2.2 Specified complexity o    2.3 Fine-tuned Universe o    2.4 Intelligent designer ·         3 Movement o    3.1 Religion and leading proponents o    3.2 Reaction from other creationist groups o    3.3 Polls o    3.4 Film ·         4 Creating and teaching the controversy o    4.1 Neo-creationism o    4.2 Theistic science o    4.3 Inter-faith outreach o    4.4 Defining science o    4.5 Peer review o    4.6 Intelligence as an observable quality o    4.7 Arguments from ignorance o    4.8 God of the gaps ·         5 Kitzmiller trial o    5.1 Reaction ·         6 Status outside the United States o    6.1 Europe o    6.2 Relation to Islam o    6.3 Australia ·         7 See also ·         8 Notes ·         9 References ·         10 Further reading

 

History

 

Origin of the concept

 

See also: Argument from poor design, Teleological argument, and Watchmaker analogy

 

The concept of intelligent design, the teleological argument, is one of three basic religious arguments for the existence of God which have been advanced for centuries (the others being the ontological argument and the cosmological argument). In the 13th century Thomas Aquinas argued that natural things act to achieve the best result, and as they cannot do this without intelligence, an intelligent being must exist, setting the goal and providing direction, and this being is God. The version formulated in 1802 by William Paley used the watchmaker analogy to argue that complexity and adaptation in nature demonstrated God’s benevolent and perfect design, for the good of humans. Paley’s natural theology strongly influenced scientists of the time, who took for granted the assumption that God had designed nature and were open to a deistic interpretation that this design was implemented by laws. Charles Darwin struggled with the problem of evil and poor design in nature, and though his natural selection explained adaptation without the need for a designer, he was still inclined to think that everything resulted from designed laws. The theistic evolution of Asa Gray contributed to wide acceptance of evolution,^[19] and by 1910 it was not a topic of major religious controversy in America.^[20]

 

In the 1920s Fundamentalist Christianity took up opposition to evolution, and effectively suspended teaching of evolution in U.S. public schools. In the 1960s, after evolution was reintroduced into the curriculum, Young Earth creationists promoted Creation Science as “an alternative scientific explanation of the world in which we live”, which frequently invoked the design argument to explain complexity in nature. These explanations prefigured the intelligent arguments of irreducible complexity, even featuring the bacterial flagellum. Attempts to introduce this in schools led to court rulings that creation science is religious in nature, and thus cannot be taught in public school science classrooms.^[21]

 

Intelligent design also has Paley’s argument from design at its centre, and shares other arguments with creation science but differs in avoiding overt literal Biblical references such as the age of the Earth and Noah’s Flood.^[21] Unlike Paley’s openness to deistic design through laws, the point of intelligent design is to establish repeated miraculous interventions in the history of life. This raises theological difficulties; for those who believe that God’s design must be perfect and should not need such changes, the claim to be scientific implies that science can test religion, and the problem of evil of a lack of miraculous intervention to reduce suffering.^[20] Intelligent design proponents avoid the problem of poor design in nature by insisting that we have simply failed to understand the perfection of the design, or by proposing that designers do not necessarily produce the best design they can, and may have unknowable motives for their actions.^[22]

 

Philosopher Barbara Forrest writes that the intelligent design movement began in 1984 with the publication by Jon A. Buell’s the Foundation for Thought and Ethics of The Mystery of Life’s Origin by Charles B. Thaxton, a chemist and creationist. Thaxton held a conference in 1988, “Sources of Information Content in DNA,” which attracted creationists such as Stephen C. Meyer.^[23]

 

In March 1986, a review by Meyer used information theory to suggest that messages transmitted by DNA in the cell show “specified complexity” specified by intelligence, and must have originated with an intelligent agent.^[24] In November of that year Thaxton described his reasoning as a more sophisticated form of Paley’s argument from design.^[25] At the Sources of Information Content in DNA conference in 1988 he said that his intelligent cause view was compatible with both metaphysical naturalism and supernaturalism,^[26]

 

Intelligent design avoids identifying or naming the intelligent designer—it merely states that one (or more) must exist—but leaders of the movement have said the designer is the Christian God.^{[n 2][n 3][27][n 7][n 8]} Whether this lack of specificity about the designer’s identity in public discussions is a genuine feature of the concept, or just a posture taken to avoid alienating those who would separate religion from the teaching of science, has been a matter of great debate between supporters and critics of intelligent design. The Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District court ruling held the latter to be the case.

 

Origin of the term

 

Of Pandas and People was the first modern intelligent design book. Rethinking Schools magazine characterizes it as “pseudo-science,” rejected by most scientists.^[28]

 

See also: Timeline of intelligent design

 

The phrase “intelligent design” can be found in an 1847 issue of Scientific American,^[29] in an 1850 book by Patrick Edward Dove,^[30] and in an 1861 letter from Charles Darwin.^[31] The Paleyite botanist George James Allman used the phrase in an address to the 1873 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science:

 

“No physical hypothesis founded on any indisputable fact has yet explained the origin of the primordial protoplasm, and, above all, of its marvellous properties, which render evolution possible—in heredity and in adaptability, for these properties are the cause and not the effect of evolution. For the cause of this cause we have sought in vain among the physical forces which surround us, until we are at last compelled to rest upon an independent volition, a far-seeing intelligent design.”^[32]

 

The phrase can be found again in Humanism, a 1903 book by one of the founders of classical pragmatism, F.C.S. Schiller: “It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of evolution may be guided by an intelligent design”. A derivative of the phrase appears in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967) in the article titled, “Teleological argument for the existence of God”: “Stated most succinctly, the argument runs: The world exhibits teleological order (design, adaptation). Therefore, it was produced by an intelligent designer”.^[33] Robert Nozick (1974) wrote: “Consider now complicated patterns which one would have thought would arise only through intelligent design”.^[34] The phrases “intelligent design” and “intelligently designed” were used in a 1979 philosophy book Chance or Design? by James Horigan^[35] and the phrase “intelligent design” was used in a 1982 speech by Sir Fred Hoyle in his promotion of panspermia.^[36]

 

Use of the terms “creationism” versus “intelligent design” in sequential drafts of the book Of Pandas and People^[37]

 

The modern use of the words “intelligent design”, as a term intended to describe a field of inquiry, began after the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), ruled that creationism is unconstitutional in public school science curricula. A Discovery Institute report says that Charles Thaxton, editor of Of Pandas and People, had picked the phrase up from a NASA scientist, and thought “That’s just what I need, it’s a good engineering term”.^[38] In drafts of the book over one hundred uses of the root word “creation”, such as “creationism” and “creation science”, were changed, almost without exception, to “intelligent design”,^[16] while “creationists” was changed to “design proponents” or, in one instance, “cdesign proponentsists“. [sic]^[37] In June 1988 Thaxton held a conference titled “Sources of Information Content in DNA” in Tacoma, Washington,^[26] and in December decided to use the label “intelligent design” for his new creationist movement.^[39] Stephen C. Meyer was at the conference, and later recalled that “the term came up”.^[40]

 

Of Pandas and People

 

Of Pandas and People was published in 1989, and was the first book to make frequent use of the phrases “intelligent design,” “design proponents,” and “design theory”, thus representing the beginning of the modern “intelligent design” movement.^[41] “Intelligent design” was the most prominent of around fifteen new terms it introduced as a new lexicon of creationist terminology to oppose evolution without using religious language.^[42] It was the first place where the phrase “intelligent design” appeared in its present use, as stated both by its publisher Jon Buell,^[21][43] and by William A. Dembski in his expert witness report.^[44]

 

The National Center for Science Education has criticized the book for presenting all of the basic arguments of intelligent design proponents and being actively promoted for use in public schools before any research had been done to support these arguments.^[41] Although presented as a scientific textbook, Philosopher of science Michael Ruse considers the contents “worthless and dishonest”. An ACLU lawyer described it as a political tool aimed at students who did not “know science or understand the controversy over evolution and creationism.” One of the authors of the science framework used by California Schools, Kevin Padian, condemned it for its “sub-text”, “Intolerance for honest science” and “incompetence”.^[28]

 

Concepts

 

Irreducible complexity

 

Main article: Irreducible complexity

 

The concept of irreducible complexity was popularised by Michael Behe, in his 1996 book, Darwin’s Black Box.

 

The term “irreducible complexity” was introduced by biochemist Michael Behe in his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, though he had already described the concept in his contributions to the 1993 revised edition of Of Pandas and People.^[41] Behe defines it as “a single system which is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning”.^[45]

 

Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap to illustrate this concept. A mousetrap consists of several interacting pieces—the base, the catch, the spring and the hammer—all of which must be in place for the mousetrap to work. Removal of any one piece destroys the function of the mousetrap. Intelligent design advocates assert that natural selection could not create irreducibly complex systems, because the selectable function is present only when all parts are assembled. Behe argued that irreducibly complex biological mechanisms include the bacterial flagellum of E. coli, the blood clotting cascade, cilia, and the adaptive immune system.^[46][47]

 

Critics point out that the irreducible complexity argument assumes that the necessary parts of a system have always been necessary and therefore could not have been added sequentially.^[8][9] They argue that something that is at first merely advantageous can later become necessary as other components change. Furthermore, they argue, evolution often proceeds by altering preexisting parts or by removing them from a system, rather than by adding them. This is sometimes called the “scaffolding objection” by an analogy with scaffolding, which can support an “irreducibly complex” building until it is complete and able to stand on its own.^{[n 9]} Behe has acknowledged using “sloppy prose”, and that his “argument against Darwinism does not add up to a logical proof”.^{[n 10]} Irreducible complexity has remained a popular argument among advocates of intelligent design; in the Dover trial, the court held that “Professor Behe’s claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large”.^[10]

 

Specified complexity

 

Main article: Specified complexity

 

In 1986 Charles Thaxton, a physical chemist and creationist, used the term “specified complexity” from information theory when claiming that messages transmitted by DNA in the cell were specified by intelligence, and must have originated with an intelligent agent.^[24] The intelligent design concept of “specified complexity” was developed in the 1990s by mathematician, philosopher, and theologian William Dembski.^[48] Dembski, Research Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Cultural Engagement at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, states that when something exhibits specified complexity (i.e., is both complex and “specified”, simultaneously), one can infer that it was produced by an intelligent cause (i.e., that it was designed) rather than being the result of natural processes. He provides the following examples: “A single letter of the alphabet is specified without being complex. A long sentence of random letters is complex without being specified. A Shakespearean sonnet is both complex and specified”.^[49] He states that details of living things can be similarly characterized, especially the “patterns” of molecular sequences in functional biological molecules such as DNA.

 

William Dembski proposed the concept of specified complexity.^[50]

 

Dembski defines complex specified information (CSI) as anything with a less than 1 in 10¹⁵⁰ chance of occurring by (natural) chance. Critics say that this renders the argument a tautology: complex specified information cannot occur naturally because Dembski has defined it thus, so the real question becomes whether or not CSI actually exists in nature.^{[51][n 11][52]}

 

The conceptual soundness of Dembski’s specified complexity/CSI argument has been widely discredited by the scientific and mathematical communities.^[11][13][53] Specified complexity has yet to be shown to have wide applications in other fields, as Dembski asserts. John Wilkins and Wesley Elsberry characterize Dembski’s “explanatory filter” as eliminative, because it eliminates explanations sequentially: first regularity, then chance, finally defaulting to design. They argue that this procedure is flawed as a model for scientific inference because the asymmetric way it treats the different possible explanations renders it prone to making false conclusions.^[54]

 

Richard Dawkins, another critic of intelligent design, argues in The God Delusion that allowing for an intelligent designer to account for unlikely complexity only postpones the problem, as such a designer would need to be at least as complex.^[55] Other scientists have argued that evolution through selection is better able to explain the observed complexity, as is evident from the use of selective evolution to design certain electronic, aeronautic and automotive systems that are considered problems too complex for human “intelligent designers”.^[56]

 

Fine-tuned Universe

 

Main article: Fine-tuned Universe

 

Intelligent design proponents have also occasionally appealed to broader teleological arguments outside of biology, most notably an argument based on the fine-tuning of universal constants that make matter and life possible and which are argued not to be solely attributable to chance. These include the values of fundamental physical constants, the relative strength of nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity between fundamental particles, as well as the ratios of masses of such particles. Intelligent design proponent and Center for Science and Culture fellow Guillermo Gonzalez argues that if any of these values were even slightly different, the universe would be dramatically different, making it impossible for many chemical elements and features of the Universe, such as galaxies, to form.^[57] Thus, proponents argue, an intelligent designer of life was needed to ensure that the requisite features were present to achieve that particular outcome.

 

Scientists have generally responded that this argument cannot be tested and is therefore not science but metaphysics. Some scientists argue that even when taken as mere speculation, these arguments are poorly supported by existing evidence.^[58] Victor J. Stenger and other critics say both intelligent design and the weak form of the anthropic principle are essentially a tautology; in his view, these arguments amount to the claim that life is able to exist because the Universe is able to support life.^[59][60][61] The claim of the improbability of a life-supporting universe has also been criticized as an argument by lack of imagination for assuming no other forms of life are possible. Life as we know it might not exist if things were different, but a different sort of life might exist in its place. A number of critics also suggest that many of the stated variables appear to be interconnected and that calculations made by mathematicians and physicists suggest that the emergence of a universe similar to ours is quite probable.^[62]

 

Intelligent designer

 

Main article: Intelligent designer

 

Intelligent design arguments are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid identifying the intelligent agent (or agents) they posit. Although they do not state that God is the designer, the designer is often implicitly hypothesized to have intervened in a way that only a god could intervene. Dembski, in The Design Inference, speculates that an alien culture could fulfill these requirements. Of Pandas and People proposes that SETI illustrates an appeal to intelligent design in science. In 2000, philosopher of science Robert T. Pennock suggested the Raëlian UFO religion as a real-life example of an extraterrestrial intelligent designer view that “make[s] many of the same bad arguments against evolutionary theory as creationists”.^[63] The authoritative description of intelligent design,^{[n 12]} however, explicitly states that the Universe displays features of having been designed. Acknowledging the paradox, Dembski concludes that “no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life”.^[64] The leading proponents have made statements to their supporters that they believe the designer to be the Christian God, to the exclusion of all other religions.^{[n 2][n 3][27]}

 

Beyond the debate over whether intelligent design is scientific, a number of critics argue that existing evidence makes the design hypothesis appear unlikely, irrespective of its status in the world of science. For example, Jerry Coyne asks why a designer would “give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes” (see pseudogene) and why he or she would not “stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species”. Coyne also points to the fact that “the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different” as evidence that species were not placed there by a designer.^[65] Previously, in Darwin’s Black Box, Behe had argued that we are simply incapable of understanding the designer’s motives, so such questions cannot be answered definitively. Odd designs could, for example, “have been placed there by the designer … for artistic reasons, to show off, for some as-yet undetectable practical purpose, or for some unguessable reason”. Coyne responds that in light of the evidence, “either life resulted not from intelligent design, but from evolution; or the intelligent designer is a cosmic prankster who designed everything to make it look as though it had evolved”.^[65]

 

Some intelligent design proponents such as Paul Nelson avoid the problem of poor design in nature by insisting that we have simply failed to understand the perfection of the design. Behe cites Paley as his inspiration, but he differs from Paley’s expectation of a perfect Creation and proposes that designers do not necessarily produce the best design they can. Behe suggests that, like a parent not wanting to spoil a child with extravagant toys, the designer can have multiple motives for not giving priority to excellence in engineering. He says that “the argument for imperfection critically depends on a psychoanalysis of the unidentified designer. Yet the reasons that a designer would or would not do anything are virtually impossible to know unless the designer tells you specifically what those reasons are.” This reliance on inexplicable motives of the designer makes intelligent design scientifically untestable. Phillip E. Johnson puts forward a core definition that the designer creates for a purpose, giving the example that in his view AIDS was created to punish immorality and was not caused by HIV, but such motives cannot be tested by scientific methods.^[22]

 

Asserting the need for a designer of complexity also raises the question “What designed the designer?”^[66] Intelligent design proponents say that the question is irrelevant to or outside the scope of intelligent design.^{[n 13]} Richard Wein counters that the unanswered questions an explanation creates “must be balanced against the improvements in our understanding which the explanation provides. Invoking an unexplained being to explain the origin of other beings (ourselves) is little more than question-begging. The new question raised by the explanation is as problematic as the question which the explanation purports to answer”.^[52] Richard Dawkins sees the assertion that the designer does not need to be explained, not as a contribution to knowledge, but as a thought-terminating cliché.^[67][68] In the absence of observable, measurable evidence, the very question “What designed the designer?” leads to an infinite regression from which intelligent design proponents can only escape by resorting to religious creationism or logical contradiction.^[69]

 

Movement

 

Main article: Intelligent design movement

 

The Discovery Institute‘s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture used banners based on “The Creation of Adam” from the Sistine Chapel. Later it used a less religious image, then was renamed the Center for Science and Culture.^[70]

 

The intelligent design movement is a direct outgrowth of the creationism of the 1980s.^[15] The scientific and academic communities, along with a U.S. federal court, view intelligent design as either a form of creationism or as a direct descendant that is closely intertwined with traditional creationism;^{[71] [n 14][72][73][74][75]} and several authors explicitly refer to it as “intelligent design creationism”.^{[15][76][n 15][77]}

 

The movement is headquartered in the Center for Science and Culture (CSC), established in 1996 as the creationist wing of the Discovery Institute to promote a religious agenda^{[n 16]} calling for broad social, academic and political changes. The Discovery Institute’s intelligent design campaigns have been staged primarily in the United States, although efforts have been made in other countries to promote intelligent design. Leaders of the movement say intelligent design exposes the limitations of scientific orthodoxy and of the secular philosophy of naturalism. Intelligent design proponents allege that science should not be limited to naturalism and should not demand the adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses out-of-hand any explanation that includes a supernatural cause. The overall goal of the movement is to “defeat [the] materialist world view” represented by the theory of evolution in favor of “a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”.^{[n 16]}

 

Phillip E. Johnson stated that the goal of intelligent design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept.^{[n 7][n 17]} All leading intelligent design proponents are fellows or staff of the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture.^[78] Nearly all intelligent design concepts and the associated movement are the products of the Discovery Institute, which guides the movement and follows its wedge strategy while conducting its Teach the Controversy campaign and their other related programs.

 

Leading intelligent design proponents have made conflicting statements regarding intelligent design. In statements directed at the general public, they say intelligent design is not religious; when addressing conservative Christian supporters, they state that intelligent design has its foundation in the Bible.^{[n 17]} Recognizing the need for support, the institute affirms its Christian, evangelistic orientation: “Alongside a focus on influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidences that support the faith, as well as to ‘popularize’ our ideas in the broader culture.”^{[n 16]}

 

Barbara Forrest, an expert who has written extensively on the movement, describes this as being due to the Discovery Institute’s obfuscating its agenda as a matter of policy. She has written that the movement’s “activities betray an aggressive, systematic agenda for promoting not only intelligent design creationism, but the religious world-view that undergirds it”.^[79]

 

Religion and leading proponents

 

Although arguments for intelligent design are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid positing the identity of the designer,^{[n 18]} the majority of principal intelligent design advocates are publicly religious Christians who have stated that in their view the designer proposed in intelligent design is the Christian conception of God. Stuart Burgess, Phillip E. Johnson, William Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer are evangelical Protestants, and Michael Behe is a Roman Catholic, while Jonathan Wells is a member of the Unification Church. Phillip E. Johnson has stated that cultivating ambiguity by employing secular language in arguments that are carefully crafted to avoid overtones of theistic creationism is a necessary first step for ultimately reintroducing the Christian concept of God as the designer. Johnson explicitly calls for intelligent design proponents to obfuscate their religious motivations so as to avoid having intelligent design identified “as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message”.^{[n 19]} Johnson emphasizes that “the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion”; “after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact […] only then can ‘biblical issues’ be discussed”.^{[n 20]}

 

The strategy of deliberately disguising the religious intent of intelligent design has been described by William Dembski in The Design Inference.^[80] In this work Dembski lists a god or an “alien life force” as two possible options for the identity of the designer; however, in his book Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, Dembski states that “Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners don’t have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. But the conceptual soundness of the theory can in the end only be located in Christ.”^[81] Dembski also stated, “ID is part of God’s general revelation […] Not only does intelligent design rid us of this ideology (materialism), which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I’ve found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ”.^[82] Both Johnson and Dembski cite the Bible’s Gospel of John as the foundation of intelligent design.^{[27][n 17]}

 

Barbara Forrest contends such statements reveal that leading proponents see intelligent design as essentially religious in nature, not merely a scientific concept that has implications with which their personal religious beliefs happen to coincide.^{[n 21]} She writes that the leading proponents of intelligent design are closely allied with the ultra-conservative Christian Reconstructionism movement. She lists connections of (current and former) Discovery Institute Fellows Phillip Johnson, Charles Thaxton, Michael Behe, Richard Weikart, Jonathan Wells and Francis Beckwith to leading Christian Reconstructionist organizations, and the extent of the funding provided the Institute by Howard Ahmanson Jr., a leading figure in the Reconstructionist movement.^[83]

 

Reaction from other creationist groups

 

Not all creationist organizations have embraced the intelligent design movement. According to Thomas Dixon, “Religious leaders have come out against ID too. An open letter affirming the compatibility of Christian faith and the teaching of evolution, first produced in response to controversies in Wisconsin in 2004, has now been signed by over ten thousand clergy from different Christian denominations across America. In 2006, the director of the Vatican Observatory, the Jesuit astronomer George Coyne, condemned ID as a kind of ‘crude creationism’ which reduced God to a mere engineer.”^[84] Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, a proponent of Old Earth creationism, believes that the efforts of intelligent design proponents to divorce the concept from Biblical Christianity make its hypothesis too vague. In 2002 he wrote: “Winning the argument for design without identifying the designer yields, at best, a sketchy origins model. Such a model makes little if any positive impact on the community of scientists and other scholars… The time is right for a direct approach, a single leap into the origins fray. Introducing a biblically based, scientifically verifiable creation model represents such a leap.”^[85]

 

Likewise, two of the most prominent Young Earth creationism organizations in the world have attempted to distinguish their views from intelligent design. Henry M. Morris of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) wrote, in 1999, that ID, “even if well-meaning and effectively articulated, will not work! It has often been tried in the past and has failed, and it will fail today. The reason it won’t work is because it is not the Biblical method.” According to Morris: “The evidence of intelligent design… must be either followed by or accompanied by a sound presentation of true Biblical creationism if it is to be meaningful and lasting.”^[86] In 2002, Carl Wieland of Answers in Genesis (AiG) criticized design advocates who, though well-intentioned, “left the Bible out of it” and thereby unwittingly aided and abetted the modern rejection of the Bible. Wieland explained that “AiG’s major ‘strategy’ is to boldly, but humbly, call the church back to its Biblical foundations… [so] we neither count ourselves a part of this movement nor campaign against it.”^[87]

 

Polls

 

Several surveys were conducted prior to the December 2005 decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover, which sought to determine the level of support for intelligent design among certain groups. According to a 2005 Harris poll, 10% of adults in the United States viewed human beings as “so complex that they required a powerful force or intelligent being to help create them”.^[88] Although Zogby polls commissioned by the Discovery Institute show more support, these polls suffer from considerable flaws, such as having a very low response rate (248 out of 16,000), being conducted on behalf of an organization with an expressed interest in the outcome of the poll, and containing leading questions.^[89][90][91]

 

A May 2005 survey of nearly 1500 physicians in the United States conducted by the Louis Finkelstein Institute and HCD Research showed that 63% of the physicians agreed more with evolution than with intelligent design.^{[n 22]}

 

A series of Gallup polls in the United States from 1982 through 2008 on “Evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design” found support for “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced formed of life, but God guided the process” of between 35% and 40%, support for “God created human beings in pretty much their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so” varied from 43% to 47%, and support for “human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced formed of life, but God had no part in the process” varied from 9% to 14%. The polls also noted answers to a series of more detailed questions.^[92]

 

Film

 

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed sparked further controversy in 2008. This documentary, hosted by Ben Stein, focuses on professors who have been asked to leave or have left numerous institutions because, the film insinuates, of their beliefs in Intelligent Design. One of the film’s first screenings resulted in Paul “PZ” Myers, an interviewee in the film, being asked to leave the theater. There have also been allegations from some interviewees that interviews were recorded many times in order to get the exact phrasing required by the producer. The production company, Premise Media, also has helped finance some religious films such as The Passion of the Christ.^[93][94]

 

Creating and teaching the controversy

 

It has been suggested that this section be split into a new article titled Intelligent design and science. (Discuss)

 

Main article: Teach the Controversy

 

The intelligent design movement states that there is a debate among scientists about whether life evolved. The movement stresses the importance of recognizing the existence of this supposed debate, seeking to convince the public, politicians, and cultural leaders that schools should “Teach the Controversy“.^[95] In fact, there is no such controversy in the scientific community; the scientific consensus is that life evolved.^{[96][97][98][99]} Intelligent design is widely viewed as a stalking horse for its proponents’ campaign against what they say is the materialist foundation of science, which they argue leaves no room for the possibility of God.^[100][101]

 

Neo-creationism

 

Main article: Neo-creationism

 

Advocates of intelligent design seek to keep God and the Bible out of the discussion, and present intelligent design in the language of science as though it were a scientific hypothesis.^{[n 18][n 20]} However, among a significant proportion of the general public in the United States the major concern is whether conventional evolutionary biology is compatible with belief in God and in the Bible, and how this issue is taught in schools.^[102] The public controversy was given widespread media coverage in the United States, particularly during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in late 2005 and after President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea of teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in August 2005. In response to Bush’s statement and the pending federal trial, Time magazine ran an eight-page cover story on the Evolution Wars in which they examined the issue of teaching intelligent design in the classroom.^[103][104] The cover of the magazine featured a parody of The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel. Rather than pointing at Adam, Michelangelo’s God points at the image of a chimpanzee contemplating the caption reading “The push to teach ‘intelligent design’ raises a question: Does God have a place in science class?”.^[105] In the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, the court ruled that intelligent design was a religious and creationist position, finding that God and intelligent design were both distinct from the material that should be covered in a science class.^{[n 6]}

 

Theistic science

 

Main article: Theistic science

 

Empirical science uses the scientific method to create a posteriori knowledge based on observation and repeated testing of hypotheses and theories. Intelligent design proponents seek to change this fundamental basis of science^[106] by eliminating “methodological naturalism” from science^[107] and replacing it with what the leader of the intelligent design movement, Phillip E. Johnson, calls “theistic realism“.^{[n 23]} Some have called this approach “methodological supernaturalism”, which means belief in a transcendent, nonnatural dimension of reality inhabited by a transcendent, nonnatural deity.^[108] Intelligent design proponents argue that naturalistic explanations fail to explain certain phenomena and that supernatural explanations provide a very simple and intuitive explanation for the origins of life and the universe.^{[n 24]} Proponents say evidence exists in the forms of irreducible complexity and specified complexity that cannot be explained by natural processes.^[1] They also hold that religious neutrality requires the teaching of both evolution and intelligent design in schools, saying that teaching only evolution unfairly discriminates against those holding creationist beliefs. Teaching both, they argue, allows for the possibility of religious belief, without causing the state to actually promote such beliefs. Many intelligent design followers believe that “Scientism” is itself a religion that promotes secularism and materialism in an attempt to erase theism from public life, and they view their work in the promotion of intelligent design as a way to return religion to a central role in education and other public spheres. Some allege that this larger debate is often the subtext for arguments made over intelligent design, though others note that intelligent design serves as an effective proxy for the religious beliefs of prominent intelligent design proponents in their efforts to advance their religious point of view within society.^{[109][n 25][110]}

 

Intelligent design has not presented a credible scientific case, substituting public support for scientific research.^[111] If the argument to give “equal time for all theories” were actually practiced, there would be no logical limit to the number of mutually incompatible supernatural “theories” regarding the origins and diversity of life to be taught in the public school system, including intelligent design parodies such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster “theory”; intelligent design does not provide a mechanism for discriminating among them. Philosopher of biology Elliott Sober, for example, states that intelligent design is not falsifiable because “[d]efenders of ID always have a way out”.^[112][113] Intelligent design proponent Michael Behe concedes “You can’t prove intelligent design by experiment”.^[102]

 

The inference that an intelligent designer created life on Earth, which advocate William Dembski has said could alternately be an “alien” life force,^[80] has been compared to the a priori claim that aliens helped the ancient Egyptians build the pyramids.^[114][115] In both cases, the effect of this outside intelligence is not repeatable, observable or falsifiable, and it violates the principle of parsimony. From a strictly empirical standpoint, one may list what is known about Egyptian construction techniques, but one must admit ignorance about exactly how the Egyptians built the pyramids.

 

Inter-faith outreach

 

Supporters of intelligent design have also reached out to other faith groups with similar accounts of creation with the hope that the broader coalition will have greater influence in supporting science education that does not contradict their religious views.^{[n 24]} Many religious bodies have responded by expressing support for evolution. The Roman Catholic church has stated that religious faith is fully compatible with science, which is limited to dealing only with the natural world^[116]—a position described by the term theistic evolution.^[117] While some in the Roman Catholic Church reject Intelligent design for various philosophical and theological reasons,^[118][119] others, such as Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, have shown support for it.^{[120][121][122]} The arguments of intelligent design have been directly challenged by the over 10,000 clergy who signed the Clergy Letter Project. Prominent scientists who strongly express religious faith, such as the astronomer George Coyne and the biologist Ken Miller, have been at the forefront of opposition to intelligent design. While creationist organizations have welcomed intelligent design’s support against naturalism, they have also been critical of its refusal to identify the designer,^{[123][124][125]} and have pointed to previous failures of the same argument.^[126]

 

Rabbi Natan Slifkin directly criticized the advocates of intelligent design as presenting a perspective of God that is dangerous to religion.^[127] Those who promote it as parallel to religion, he asserts, do not truly understand it. Slifkin criticizes intelligent design’s advocacy of teaching their perspective in biology classes, wondering why no one claims that God’s hand should be taught in other secular classes, such as history, physics or geology. Slifkin also asserts that the intelligent design movement is inordinately concerned with portraying God as “in control” when it comes to things that cannot be easily explained by science, but not in control in respect to things which can be explained by scientific theory.^[127] Kenneth Miller expressed a view similar to Slifkin’s: “[T]he struggles of the Intelligent Design movement are best understood as clamorous and disappointing double failures—rejected by science because they do not fit the facts, and having failed religion because they think too little of God.^[128]

 

Defining science

 

Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.^{[129][130][131][132]} The boundaries between what is and what is not to be considered science, known as the demarcation problem, continues to be debated among philosophers of science and scientists in various fields.^[133]

 

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that “creationism, intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life or of species are not science because they are not testable by the methods of science.”^[134] The U.S. National Science Teachers Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have termed it pseudoscience.^{[n 26][71][n 14]} Others in the scientific community have concurred,^{[n 27]} and some have called it junk science.^{[n 28][135]} For a theory to qualify as scientific,^{[n 29][136][n 30]} it is expected to be:

 

·         Consistent

 ·         Parsimonious (sparing in its proposed entities or explanations, see Occam’s Razor)

 ·         Useful (describes and explains observed phenomena, and can be used predictively)

 ·         Empirically testable and falsifiable (see Falsifiability)

 ·         Based on multiple observations, often in the form of controlled, repeated experiments

 ·         Correctable and dynamic (modified in the light of observations that do not support it)

 ·         Progressive (refines previous theories)

 ·         Provisional or tentative (is open to experimental checking, and does not assert certainty)

 

For any theory, hypothesis or conjecture to be considered scientific, it must meet most, and ideally all, of these criteria. The fewer criteria are met, the less scientific it is; and if it meets only a few or none at all, then it cannot be treated as scientific in any meaningful sense of the word. Typical objections to defining intelligent design as science are that it lacks consistency,^[137] violates the principle of parsimony,^{[n 31]} is not scientifically useful,^{[n 32]} is not falsifiable,^{[n 33]} is not empirically testable,^{[n 34]} and is not correctable, dynamic, provisional or progressive.^{[n 35][n 36][n 37]}

 

Critics also say that the intelligent design doctrine does not meet the Daubert Standard,^[138] the criteria for scientific evidence mandated by the US Supreme Court. The Daubert Standard governs which evidence can be considered scientific in United States federal courts and most state courts. Its four criteria are:

 

·         The theoretical underpinnings of the methods must yield testable predictions by means of which the theory could be falsified.

 

·         The methods should preferably be published in a peer-reviewed journal.

 

·         There should be a known rate of error that can be used in evaluating the results.

 

·         The methods should be generally accepted within the relevant scientific community.

 

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, using these criteria and others mentioned above, Judge Jones ruled that “… we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents”.

 

At the Kitzmiller trial, philosopher Robert T. Pennock described a common approach to distinguishing science from non-science as examining a theory’s compliance with methodological naturalism, the basic method in science of seeking natural explanations without assuming the existence or nonexistence of the supernatural.^[139] Intelligent design proponents criticize this method and argue that science, if its goal is to discover truth, must be able to accept evidentially supported, supernatural explanations.^[5] Additionally, philosopher of science Larry Laudan and cosmologist Sean Carroll argue against any a priori criteria for distinguishing science from pseudoscience.^[140][141] Laudan, as well as philosopher Barbara Forrest, state that the content of the hypothesis must first be examined to determine its ability to solve empirical problems.^[142][143] Methodological naturalism is therefore an a posteriori criterion due to its ability to yield consistent results.^[142][143]

 

Peer review

 

The failure to follow the procedures of scientific discourse and the failure to submit work to the scientific community that withstands scrutiny have weighed against intelligent design being accepted as valid science.^[144] The intelligent design movement has not published a properly peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal.^[144]

 

Intelligent design, by appealing to a supernatural agent, directly conflicts with the principles of science, which limit its inquiries to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data and which require explanations to be based on empirical evidence. Dembski, Behe and other intelligent design proponents say bias by the scientific community is to blame for the failure of their research to be published.^[145] Intelligent design proponents believe that their writings are rejected for not conforming to purely naturalistic, non-supernatural mechanisms rather than because their research is not up to “journal standards”, and that the merit of their articles is overlooked. Some scientists describe this claim as a conspiracy theory.^[146] Michael Shermer has rebutted the claim, noting “Anyone who thinks that scientists do not question Darwinism has never been to an evolutionary conference.” He noted that scientists such as Joan Roughgarden and Lynn Margulis have challenged certain Darwinist theories and offered explanations of their own and despite this they “have not been persecuted, shunned, fired or even expelled. Why? Because they are doing science, not religion.”^[147] The issue that supernatural explanations do not conform to the scientific method became a sticking point for intelligent design proponents in the 1990s, and is addressed in the wedge strategy as an aspect of science that must be challenged before intelligent design can be accepted by the broader scientific community.

 

Critics and advocates debate over whether intelligent design produces new research and has legitimately attempted to publish this research. For instance, the Templeton Foundation, a former funder of the Discovery Institute and a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that it asked intelligent design proponents to submit proposals for actual research, but none were ever submitted. Charles L. Harper Jr., foundation vice-president, said: “From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don’t come out very well in our world of scientific review”.^[148]

 

The only article published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal that made a case for intelligent design was quickly withdrawn by the publisher for having circumvented the journal’s peer-review standards.^[149] Written by the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture Director Stephen C. Meyer, it appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington in August 2004.^[150] The article was a literature review, which means that it did not present any new research, but rather culled quotations and claims from other papers to argue that the Cambrian explosion could not have happened by natural processes. The choice of venue for this article was also considered problematic, because it was so outside the normal subject matter (see Sternberg peer review controversy^{[n 38]}). Dembski has written that “perhaps the best reason [to be skeptical of his ideas] is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program.”^[151] In a 2001 interview, Dembski said that he stopped submitting to peer-reviewed journals because of their slow time-to-print and that he makes more money from publishing books.^[152]

 

In the Dover trial, the judge found that intelligent design features no scientific research or testing.^[153] There, intelligent design proponents cited just one paper, on simulation modeling of evolution by Behe and Snoke,^[154] which mentioned neither irreducible complexity nor intelligent design and which Behe admitted did not rule out known evolutionary mechanisms.^[155] Michael Lynch called the conclusions of the article “an artifact of unwarranted biological assumptions, inappropriate mathematical modeling, and faulty logic”.^[156] In sworn testimony, however, Behe said: “There are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred”.^[157] As summarized by the judge, Behe conceded that there are no peer-reviewed articles supporting his claims of intelligent design or irreducible complexity. In his ruling, the judge wrote: “A final indicator of how ID has failed to demonstrate scientific warrant is the complete absence of peer-reviewed publications supporting the theory”.^[144]

 

The Discovery Institute insists that a number of intelligent design articles have been published in peer-reviewed journals,^[158] including in its list the two articles mentioned above. Critics, largely members of the scientific community, reject this claim, stating that no established scientific journal has yet published an intelligent design article. Rather, intelligent design proponents have set up their own journals with peer review that lacks impartiality and rigor,^{[n 39]} consisting entirely of intelligent design supporters.^{[n 40]}

 

Intelligence as an observable quality

 

The phrase intelligent design makes use of an assumption of the quality of an observable intelligence, a concept that has no scientific consensus definition. William Dembski, for example, has written that “Intelligence leaves behind a characteristic signature”. The characteristics of intelligence are assumed by intelligent design proponents to be observable without specifying what the criteria for the measurement of intelligence should be. Dembski, instead, asserts that “in special sciences ranging from forensics to archaeology to SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), appeal to a designing intelligence is indispensable”.^[159] How this appeal is made and what this implies as to the definition of intelligence are topics left largely unaddressed. Seth Shostak, a researcher with the SETI Institute, disputed Dembski’s comparison of SETI and intelligent design, saying that intelligent design advocates base their inference of design on complexity—the argument being that some biological systems are too complex to have been made by natural processes—while SETI researchers are looking primarily for artificiality.^[160]

 

Critics say that the design detection methods proposed by intelligent design proponents are radically different from conventional design detection, undermining the key elements that make it possible as legitimate science. Intelligent design proponents, they say, are proposing both searching for a designer without knowing anything about that designer’s abilities, parameters, or intentions (which scientists do know when searching for the results of human intelligence), as well as denying the very distinction between natural/artificial design that allows scientists to compare complex designed artifacts against the background of the sorts of complexity found in nature.^{[n 41]}

 

As a means of criticism, certain skeptics have pointed to a challenge of intelligent design derived from the study of artificial intelligence. The criticism is a counter to intelligent design claims about what makes a design intelligent, specifically that “no preprogrammed device can be truly intelligent, that intelligence is irreducible to natural processes”.^[161] This claim is similar in type to an assumption of Cartesian dualism that posits a strict separation between “mind” and the material Universe. However, in studies of artificial intelligence, while there is an implicit assumption that supposed “intelligence” or creativity of a computer program is determined by the capabilities given to it by the computer programmer, artificial intelligence need not be bound to an inflexible system of rules. Rather, if a computer program can access randomness as a function, this effectively allows for a flexible, creative, and adaptive intelligence. Evolutionary algorithms, a subfield of machine learning (itself a subfield of artificial intelligence), have been used to mathematically demonstrate that randomness and selection can be used to “evolve” complex, highly adapted structures that are not explicitly designed by a programmer. Evolutionary algorithms use the Darwinian metaphor of random mutation, selection and the survival of the fittest to solve diverse mathematical and scientific problems that are usually not solvable using conventional methods. Intelligence derived from randomness is essentially indistinguishable from the “innate” intelligence associated with biological organisms, and poses a challenge to the intelligent design conception that intelligence itself necessarily requires a designer. Cognitive science continues to investigate the nature of intelligence along these lines of inquiry. The intelligent design community, for the most part, relies on the assumption that intelligence is readily apparent as a fundamental and basic property of complex systems.^[162]

 

Arguments from ignorance

 

Eugenie Scott, along with Glenn Branch and other critics, has argued that many points raised by intelligent design proponents are arguments from ignorance.^[163] In the argument from ignorance, a lack of evidence for one view is erroneously argued to constitute proof of the correctness of another view. Scott and Branch say that intelligent design is an argument from ignorance because it relies on a lack of knowledge for its conclusion: lacking a natural explanation for certain specific aspects of evolution, we assume intelligent cause. They contend most scientists would reply that the unexplained is not unexplainable, and that “we don’t know yet” is a more appropriate response than invoking a cause outside science.^[163] Particularly, Michael Behe‘s demands for ever more detailed explanations of the historical evolution of molecular systems seem to assume a false dichotomy, where either evolution or design is the proper explanation, and any perceived failure of evolution becomes a victory for design. Scott and Branch also contend that the supposedly novel contributions proposed by intelligent design proponents have not served as the basis for any productive scientific research. Philosopher of science Bradley Monton defends Behe on this point, noting that Behe does not view every complex biological system whose evolution is currently unknown as irreducibly complex.^[164] This shows, Monton continues, that Behe is not appealing to ignorance, but is “giving a positive argument that it’s unlikely for such systems to evolve without an intelligent designer.”^[164]

 

God of the gaps

 

Intelligent design has also been characterized as a God-of-the-gaps argument,^[165] which has the following form:

 

·         There is a gap in scientific knowledge.

 

·         The gap is filled with acts of God (or intelligent designer) and therefore proves the existence of God (or intelligent designer).^[165]

 

A God-of-the-gaps argument is the theological version of an argument from ignorance. A key feature of this type of argument is that it merely answers outstanding questions with explanations (often supernatural) that are unverifiable and ultimately themselves subject to unanswerable questions.^[166] Philosopher of science Bradley Monton states that Behe’s claim of irreducible complexity is a positive claim rather than an argument from ignorance, and therefore not a God-of-the-gaps argument.^[164]

 

Historians of science observe that the astronomy of the earliest civilizations, although astonishing and incorporating mathematical constructions far in excess of any practical value, proved to be misdirected and of little importance to the development of science, because they failed to inquire more carefully into the mechanisms that drove the heavenly bodies across the sky.^[167] It was the Greek civilization that first practised science, although not yet a mathematically-oriented experimental science, but nevertheless an attempt to rationalize the world of natural experience without recourse to divine intervention.^[168] In this historically motivated definition of science any appeal to an intelligent creator is explicitly excluded for the paralysing effect it may have on the scientific progress.

 

Kitzmiller trial

 

Main article: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District

 

Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District was the first direct challenge brought in the United States federal courts against a public school district that required the presentation of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. The plaintiffs successfully argued that intelligent design is a form of creationism, and that the school board policy thus violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.^[169]

 

Eleven parents of students in Dover, Pennsylvania, sued the Dover Area School District over a statement that the school board required be read aloud in ninth-grade science classes when evolution was taught. The plaintiffs were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU) and Pepper Hamilton LLP. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) acted as consultants for the plaintiffs. The defendants were represented by the Thomas More Law Center.^[170] The suit was tried in a bench trial from September 26 to November 4, 2005, before Judge John E. Jones III. Ken Miller, Kevin Padian, Brian Alters, Robert Pennock, Barbara Forrest and John Haught served as expert witnesses for the prosecution. Michael Behe, Steve Fuller and Scott Minnich served as expert witnesses for the defense.

 

On December 20, 2005, Judge Jones issued his 139-page findings of fact and decision, ruling that the Dover mandate was unconstitutional, and barring intelligent design from being taught in Pennsylvania’s Middle District public school science classrooms. The eight Dover school board members who voted for the intelligent design requirement were all defeated in a November 8, 2005, election by challengers who opposed the teaching of intelligent design in a science class, and the current school board president stated that the board does not intend to appeal the ruling.^[171]

 

In his finding of facts, Judge Jones made the following condemnation of the Teach the Controversy strategy:

 

“Moreover, ID’s backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous, and at worst a canard.”

 

Reaction

 

Judge Jones himself anticipated that his ruling would be criticized, saying in his decision that:

 

“Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.”^[172]

 

As Jones had predicted, John G. West, Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute, said:

 

“The Dover decision is an attempt by an activist federal judge to stop the spread of a scientific idea and even to prevent criticism of Darwinian evolution through government-imposed censorship rather than open debate, and it won’t work. He has conflated Discovery Institute’s position with that of the Dover school board, and he totally misrepresents intelligent design and the motivations of the scientists who research it.”^[173]

 Newspapers have noted with interest that the judge is “a Republican and a churchgoer“.^{[174][175][176][177]}

 Subsequently, the decision has been examined in a search for flaws and conclusions, partly by intelligent design supporters aiming to avoid future defeats in court. In the Spring of 2007 the University of Montana Law review published three articles.^[178] In the first, David K. DeWolf, John G. West and Casey Luskin, all of the Discovery Institute, argued that intelligent design is a valid scientific theory, the Jones court should not have addressed the question of whether it was a scientific theory, and that the Kitzmiller decision will have no effect at all on the development and adoption of intelligent design as an alternative to standard evolutionary theory.^[104] In the second Peter Irons responded, arguing that the decision was extremely well reasoned and spells the death knell for the intelligent design efforts to introduce creationism in public schools,^[179] while in the third, DeWolf et al. answer the points made by Irons.^[180] However, fear of a similar lawsuit has resulted in other school boards abandoning intelligent design “teach the controversy” proposals.^[15]

 

In April 2010, the American Academy of Religion issued Guidelines for Teaching About Religion in K-12 Public Schools in the United States, which included guidance that creation science or intelligent design should not be taught in science classes, as “Creation science and intelligent design represent worldviews that fall outside of the realm of science that is defined as (and limited to) a method of inquiry based on gathering observable and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.” However, they, as well as other “worldviews that focus on speculation regarding the origins of life represent another important and relevant form of human inquiry that is appropriately studied in literature or social sciences courses. Such study, however, must include a diversity of worldviews representing a variety of religious and philosophical perspectives and must avoid privileging one view as more legitimate than others.”^[181]

 

Status outside the United States

 

Europe

 In June 2007 the Council of Europe‘s “Committee on Culture, Science and Education” issued a report, The dangers of creationism in education, which states “Creationism in any of its forms, such as ‘intelligent design’, is not based on facts, does not use any scientific reasoning and its contents are pathetically inadequate for science classes.”^[182] In describing the dangers posed to education by teaching creationism, it described intelligent design as “anti-science” and involving “blatant scientific fraud” and “intellectual deception” that “blurs the nature, objectives and limits of science” and links it and other forms of creationism to denialism. On October 4, 2007, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly approved a resolution stating that schools should “resist presentation of creationist ideas in any discipline other than religion”, including “intelligent design”, which it described as “the latest, more refined version of creationism”, “presented in a more subtle way”. The resolution emphasises that the aim of the report is not to question or to fight a belief, but to “warn against certain tendencies to pass off a belief as science”.^[183]

 In the United Kingdom, public education includes Religious Education as a compulsory subject, and there are many faith schools that teach the ethos of particular denominations. When it was revealed that a group called Truth in Science had distributed DVDs produced by the Discovery Institute affiliate Illustra Media^{[n 42]} featuring Discovery Institute fellows making the case for design in nature,^[184] and claimed they were being used by 59 schools,^[185] the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) stated that “Neither creationism nor intelligent design are taught as a subject in schools, and are not specified in the science curriculum” (part of the National Curriculum, which does not apply to independent schools or to education in Scotland).^[186][187] The DfES subsequently stated that “Intelligent design is not a recognised scientific theory; therefore, it is not included in the science curriculum”, but left the way open for it to be explored in religious education in relation to different beliefs, as part of a syllabus set by a local Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education.^[188] In 2006 the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority produced a Religious Education model unit in which pupils can learn about religious and nonreligious views about creationism, intelligent design and evolution by natural selection.^[189][190]

 On June 25, 2007, the UK Government responded to an e-petition by saying that creationism and intelligent design should not be taught as science, though teachers would be expected to answer pupils’ questions within the standard framework of established scientific theories.^[191] Detailed government “Creationism teaching guidance” for schools in England was published on September 18, 2007. It states that “Intelligent design lies wholly outside of science”, has no underpinning scientific principles, or explanations, and is not accepted by the science community as a whole. Though it should not be taught as science, “questions about creationism and intelligent design which arise in science lessons, for example, as a result of media coverage, could provide the opportunity to explain or explore why they are not considered to be scientific theories and, in the right context, why evolution is considered to be a scientific theory”. However, “Teachers of subjects such as RE, history or citizenship may deal with creationism and intelligent design in their lessons”.^{[n 5]}

 The British Centre for Science Education lobbying group has the goal of “countering creationism within the UK” and has been involved in government lobbying in the UK in this regard.^[192] Northern Ireland‘s Department for Education says that the curriculum provides an opportunity for alternative theories to be taught. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)—which has links to fundamentalist Christianity—has been campaigning to have intelligent design taught in science classes. A DUP former Member of Parliament, David Simpson, has sought assurances from the education minister that pupils will not lose marks if they give creationist or intelligent design answers to science questions.^[193][194] In 2007, Lisburn city council voted in favor of a DUP recommendation to write to post-primary schools asking what their plans are to develop teaching material in relation to “creation, intelligent design and other theories of origin”.^[195]

 Plans by Dutch Education Minister Maria van der Hoeven to “stimulate an academic debate” on the subject in 2005 caused a severe public backlash.^[196] After the 2007 elections she was succeeded by Ronald Plasterk, described as a “molecular geneticist, staunch atheist and opponent of intelligent design”.^[197] As a reaction on this situation in the Netherlands, in Belgium the President of the Flemish Catholic Educational Board (VSKO) Mieke Van Hecke declared that: “Catholic scientists already accepted the theory of evolution for a long time and that intelligent design and creationism doesn’t belong in Flemish Catholic schools. It’s not the tasks of the politics to introduce new ideas, that’s task and goal of science.”^[198]

 Relation to Islam

 Muzaffar Iqbal, a notable Muslim in Canada, signed the Scientific Dissent list of the Discovery Institute.^[199] Ideas similar to intelligent design have been considered respected intellectual options among Muslims, and in Turkey many intelligent design books have been translated. In Istanbul in 2007, public meetings promoting intelligent design were sponsored by the local government,^[200] and David Berlinski of the Discovery Institute was the keynote speaker at a meeting in May 2007.^[201]

 Australia

 The status of intelligent design in Australia is somewhat similar to that in the UK (see: Education in Australia). When the former Australian Federal Education Minister, Brendan Nelson, raised the notion of intelligent design being taught in science classes, the public outcry caused the minister to quickly concede that the correct forum for intelligent design, if it were to be taught, is in religious or philosophy classes.^[202] The Australian chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ distributed a DVD of the Discovery Institute’s documentary Unlocking the Mystery of Life to Australian secondary schools.^[203] The head of one of Australia’s leading private schools supported use of the DVD in the classroom at the discretion of teachers and principals.^[204]

 

See also

 

 

 

Creationism portal

 ·        Abiogenesis

 ·        Argument from poor design

 ·        Clockwork universe theory

 ·        Cosmological argument

 ·        Creation science

 ·        Evolution

 ·        Flock of Dodos

 ·        Flying Spaghetti Monster

 ·        Haldane’s dilemma

 ·        ‘Intelligent Design’ class ruled illegal

 ·        Intelligent falling

 ·        List of works on intelligent design

 ·        Neo-Creationism

 ·        Old Earth creationism

 ·        Raëlian intelligent design

 ·        Santorum Amendment

 ·        Watchmaker analogy

 Notes

 

1.      ^ ^{a b} “Q. Has the Discovery Institute been a leader in the intelligent design movement? A. Yes, the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Q. And are almost all of the individuals who are involved with the intelligent design movement associated with the Discovery Institute? A. All of the leaders are, yes.” Barbara Forrest, 2005, testifying in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial. TalkOrigins Archive. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Trial transcript: Day 6 (October 5), PM Session, Part 1.; 2005 [cited 2007-07-19].

 §  “The Discovery Institute is the ideological and strategic backbone behind the eruption of skirmishes over science in school districts and state capitals across the country”. In: Jody Wilgoren. Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive. The New York Times. August 21, 2005 [cited 2011-04-20].

 §  American Civil Liberties Union. Who is behind the ID movement?; September 16, 2005 [cited 2007-07-20].

 §  Kahn, JP. The Evolution of George Gilder. The Author And Tech-Sector Guru Has A New Cause To Create Controversy With: Intelligent Design. The Boston Globe. July 27, 2005 [cited 2007-07-19].

 §  “Who’s Who of Intelligent Design Proponents” (PDF). Science & Theology News. November 2005. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=602. Retrieved 2007-07-20. 

 §  “The engine behind the ID movement is the Discovery Institute”. Attie, Alan D.; Elliot Sober, Ronald L. Numbers, Richard M. Amasino, Beth Cox4, Terese Berceau, Thomas Powell and Michael M. Cox (2006). “Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action”. Journal of Clinical Investigation (A publication of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.) 116 (5): 1134–8. doi:10.1172/JCI28449. PMC 1451210. PMID 16670753. http://www.jci.org/articles/view/28449. Retrieved 2007-07-20. 

 2.      ^ ^{a b c} “the writings of leading ID proponents reveal that the designer postulated by their argument is the God of Christianity”. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , Ruling p. 26. A selection of writings and quotations of intelligent design supporters demonstrating this identification of the Christian God with the intelligent designer are found in the pdf Horse’s MouthArchived June 27, 2008 at the Wayback Machine (PDF) by Brian Poindexter, dated 2003.

 3.      ^ ^{a b c} William A. Dembski, when asked in an interview whether his research concluded that God is the Intelligent Designer, stated “I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God”. Devon Williams (December 14, 2007). “CitizenLink: Friday Five: William A. Dembski”. Focus on the Family. http://www.citizenlink.org/content/A000006139.cfm. Retrieved 2007-12-15. 

 4.      ^ See: 1) List of scientific societies explicitly rejecting intelligent design 2) Kitzmiller v. Dover page 83. 3) The Discovery Institute’s A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism petition begun in 2001 has been signed by “over 700 scientists” as of August 20, 2006. A four day A Scientific Support for Darwinism petition gained 7733 signatories from scientists opposing ID. The AAAS, the largest association of scientists in the U.S., has 120,000 members, and firmly rejects ID. More than 70,000 Australian scientists and educators condemn teaching of intelligent design in school science classes List of statements from scientific professional organizations on the status intelligent design and other forms of creationism. According to The New York Times “There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth”. Dean, Cordelia (September 27, 2007). “Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin”. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/science/27expelled.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin. Retrieved 2007-09-28. 

 5.      ^ ^{a b} “Teachernet, Document bank”. Creationism teaching guidance. UK Department for Children, Schools and Families. September 18, 2007. http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/docbank/index.cfm?id=11890. Retrieved 2007-10-01. “The intelligent design movement claims there are aspects of the natural world that are so intricate and fit for purpose that they cannot have evolved but must have been created by an ‘intelligent designer’. Furthermore they assert that this claim is scientifically testable and should therefore be taught in science lessons. Intelligent design lies wholly outside of science. Sometimes examples are quoted that are said to require an ‘intelligent designer’. However, many of these have subsequently been shown to have a scientific explanation, for example, the immune system and blood clotting mechanisms. Attempts to establish an idea of the ‘specified complexity’ needed for intelligent design are surrounded by complex mathematics. Despite this, the idea seems to be essentially a modern version of the old idea of the “God-of-the-gaps”. Lack of a satisfactory scientific explanation of some phenomena (a ‘gap’ in scientific knowledge) is claimed to be evidence of an intelligent designer.” 

 6.      ^ ^{a b} “ID is not a new scientific argument, but is rather an old religious argument for the existence of God. He traced this argument back to at least Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, who framed the argument as a syllogism: Wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer.” “This argument for the existence of God was advanced early in the 19th century by Reverend Paley” (the teleological argument) “The only apparent difference between the argument made by Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defense expert witnesses Behe and Minnich, is that ID’s ‘official position’ does not acknowledge that the designer is God.” Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , Ruling, p. 24.

 7.      ^ ^{a b} Phillip Johnson: “Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of Intelligent Design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.” Johnson 2004. Christianity.ca. Let’s Be Intelligent About DarwinArchived June 8, 2007 at the Wayback Machine. “This isn’t really, and never has been a debate about science. It’s about religion and philosophy.” Johnson 1996. World magazine. Witnesses For The Prosecution. “So the question is: “How to win?” That’s when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the “wedge” strategy: “Stick with the most important thing”—the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. That means concentrating on, “Do you need a Creator to do the creating, or can nature do it on its own?” and refusing to get sidetracked onto other issues, which people are always trying to do.” Johnson 2000. Touchstone magazine. Berkeley’s Radical An Interview with Phillip E. Johnson at the Wayback Machine (archived June 9, 2007)

8.      ^ Stephen C. Meyer: “I think the designer is God …” (Darwin, the marketing of Intelligent Design. Nightline, ABC News, with Ted Koppel, August 10, 2005); Nancy Pearcey: “By contrast, design theory demonstrates that Christians can sit in the supernaturalist’s “chair” even in their professional lives, seeing the cosmos through the lens of a comprehensive biblical worldview. Intelligent Design steps boldly into the scientific arena to build a case based on empirical data. It takes Christianity out of the ineffectual realm of value and stakes out a cognitive claim in the realm of objective truth. It restores Christianity to its status as genuine knowledge, equipping us to defend it in the public arena”. (Total Truth, Crossway Books, June 29, 2004, ISBN 1-58134-458-9, pp. 204–205)

 9.      ^ For example, Bridgham et al. showed that gradual evolutionary mechanisms can produce complex protein-protein interaction systems from simpler precursors. Bridgham et al.. Evolution of Hormone-Receptor Complexity by Molecular Exploitation. Science. 2006;312(5770):97–101. doi:10.1126/science.1123348. PMID 16601189.

 10.  ^ Devolution. The New Yorker. May 30, 2005. This article draws from the following exchange of letters in which Behe admits to sloppy prose and non-logical proof: Discovery Institute. Has Darwin met his match? Letters—An exchange over ID; March 26, 2003 [cited 2006-11-30].

 11.  ^ Some of Dembski’s responses to assertions of specified complexity being a tautology can be found at William A. Dembski. “Another way to detect design”. ARN. http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/wd_anotherwaytodetectdesign.htm. 

 12.  ^ Dembski. Discovery Institute. Questions About Intelligent Design. “The theory of Intelligent Design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.“

 13.  ^ IDEA “One need not fully understand the origin or identity of the designer to determine that an object was designed. Thus, this question is essentially irrelevant to intelligent design theory, which merely seeks to detect if an object was designed … Intelligent design theory cannot address the identity or origin of the designer—it is a philosophical / religious question that lies outside the domain of scientific inquiry. Christianity postulates the religious answer to this question that the designer is God who by definition is eternally existent and has no origin. There is no logical philosophical impossibility with this being the case (akin to Aristotle‘s ‘unmoved mover’) as a religious answer to the origin of the designer…” FAQ: Who designed the designer? FAQ: Who designed the designer?

 14.  ^ ^{a b} American Association for the Advancement of Science. Professional Ethics Report [PDF]; 2001. “Creationists are repackaging their message as the pseudoscience of intelligent design theory.”

 15.  ^ Robert T. Pennock. Wizards of ID: Reply to Dembski. In: Robert T. Pennock. Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; 2001. ISBN 0-262-66124-1. “Dembski chides me for never using the term “intelligent design” without conjoining it to “creationism”. He implies (though never explicitly asserts) that he and others in his movement are not creationists and that it is incorrect to discuss them in such terms, suggesting that doing so is merely a rhetorical ploy to “rally the troops”. (2) Am I (and the many others who see Dembski’s movement in the same way) misrepresenting their position? The basic notion of creationism is the rejection of biological evolution in favor of special creation, where the latter is understood to be supernatural. Beyond this there is considerable variability…” p. 645–667.; Pennock, Robert T.. Tower of Babel: Evidence Against the New Creationism. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; 1999.

 16.  ^ ^{a b c} “The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a ‘wedge’ that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the ‘thin edge of the wedge,’ was Phillip Johnson’s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. Michael Behe’s highly successful Darwin’s Black Box followed Johnson’s work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”. Wedge Document Discovery Institute, 1999. (PDF file)

17.  ^ ^{a b c} “I have built an intellectual movement in the universities and churches that we call The Wedge, which is devoted to scholarship and writing that furthers this program of questioning the materialistic basis of science. […] Now the way that I see the logic of our movement going is like this. The first thing you understand is that the Darwinian theory isn’t true. It’s falsified by all of the evidence and the logic is terrible. When you realize that, the next question that occurs to you is, well, where might you get the truth? […] I start with John 1:1. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was intelligence, purpose, and wisdom. The Bible had that right. And the materialist scientists are deluding themselves.” Johnson 1999. Reclaiming America for Christ Conference. How the Evolution Debate Can Be Won

 18.  ^ ^{a b} “…intelligent design does not address metaphysical and religious questions such as the nature or identity of the designer,” and “…the nature, moral character and purposes of this intelligence lie beyond the competence of science and must be left to religion and philosophy”. In: Discovery Institute. Truth Sheet # 09-05 Does intelligent design postulate a “supernatural creator? [cited 2007-07-19].

 19.  ^ Phillip Johnson. ‘Keeping the Darwinists Honest’ an interview with Phillip Johnson. 1999. “Intelligent Design is an intellectual movement, and the Wedge strategy stops working when we are seen as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message. […] The evangelists do what they do very well, and I hope our work opens up for them some doors that have been closed”.

 20.  ^ ^{a b} Phillip Johnson. Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. 1999. “…the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion…. This is not to say that the biblical issues are unimportant; the point is rather that the time to address them will be after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact”. The Wedge

 21.  ^ Barbara Forrest. Expert Testimony. Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial transcript, Day 6 (October 5) “What I am talking about is the essence of intelligent design, and the essence of it is theistic realism as defined by Professor Johnson. Now that stands on its own quite apart from what their motives are. I’m also talking about the definition of intelligent design by Dr. Dembski as the Logos theology of John’s Gospel. That stands on its own. […] Intelligent design, as it is understood by the proponents that we are discussing today, does involve a supernatural creator, and that is my objection. And I am objecting to it as they have defined it, as Professor Johnson has defined intelligent design, and as Dr. Dembski has defined intelligent design. And both of those are basically religious. They involve the supernatural”.

 22.  ^ According to the poll, 18% of the physicians believed that God created humans exactly as they appear today. Another 42% believed that God initiated and guided an evolutionary process that has led to current human beings. The poll also found that “an overwhelming majority of Jewish doctors (83%) and half of Catholic doctors (51%) believe that intelligent design is simply “a religiously inspired pseudo-science rather than a legitimate scientific speculation”. The poll also found that “more than half of Protestant doctors (63%) believe that intelligent design is a “legitimate scientific speculation”.
“Majority of Physicians Give the Nod to Evolution Over Intelligent Design” (Press release). http://www.hcdi.net/News/PressRelease.cfm?ID=93. Retrieved 2007-10-08. 

 23.  ^ Phillip E. Johnson. Access Research Network. Starting a Conversation about Evolution: Johnson, Phillip; August 31, 1996 [cited 2008-10-18]. “My colleagues and I speak of ‘theistic realism’—or sometimes, ‘mere creation’—as the defining concept of our [the ID] movement. This means that we affirm that God is objectively real as Creator, and that the reality of God is tangibly recorded in evidence accessible to science, particularly in biology.”

 24.  ^ ^{a b} Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator; March 25, 2001 [cited 2007-07-22]. “[Phillip E. Johnson quoted]: We are taking an intuition most people have and making it a scientific and academic enterprise…. We are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as creator.”

 25.  ^ The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Let’s Be Intelligent About Darwin; January 10, 2003 [archived 2007-06-08; cited 2007-07-23]. “[Phillip E. Johnson quoted]: Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of Intelligent Design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.”

 26.  ^ National Science Teachers Association, a professional association of 55,000 science teachers and administrators “National Science Teachers Association Disappointed About Intelligent Design Comments Made by President Bush” (Press release). National Science Teachers Association. August 3, 2005. http://www.nsta.org/about/pressroom.aspx?id=50794. “We stand with the nation’s leading scientific organizations and scientists, including Dr. John Marburger, the president’s top science advisor, in stating that intelligent design is not science….It is simply not fair to present pseudoscience to students in the science classroom.” 

 27.  ^ Evolution critics seek role for unseen hand in education. Nature. 2002;416(6878):250. doi:10.1038/416250a. PMID 11907537. “But many scientists regard ‘intelligent design’ as pseudoscience, and say that it is being used as a Trojan Horse to introduce the teaching of creationism into schools”

 28.  ^ Attie, A. D.. Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action. Journal of Clinical Investigation. 2006;116(5):1134–1138. doi:10.1172/JCI28449. PMID 16670753. PMC 1451210.

 §  H. Allen Orr. Devolution—Why intelligent design isn’t; 2005 May. “Biologists aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re alarmed because intelligent design is junk science.”

 §  Robert T. Pennock Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism.

 §  Mark Bergin. Junk science; February 25, 2006.

 29.  ^ Scientific Method in Practice. Cambridge UP; 2003. ISBN 0-521-01708-4. Chapters 5–8. Discusses principles of induction, deduction and probability related to the expectation of consistency, testability, and multiple observations. Chapter 8 discusses parsimony (Occam’s razor)

 30.  ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , 4: whether ID is science. The ruling discusses central aspects of expectations in the scientific community that a scientific theory be testable, dynamic, correctible, progressive, based upon multiple observations, and provisional,

 31.  ^ Intelligent design fails to pass Occam’s razor. Adding entities (an intelligent agent, a designer) to the equation is not strictly necessary to explain events. See, e.g., Branden Fitelson, et al.. How Not to Detect Design–Critical Notice: William A. Dembski The Design Inference. In: Robert T. Pennock. Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. MIT Press; 2001. p. 597–616.

 32.  ^ See, e.g., Department of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University. Thoughts on Evolution and Intelligent Design; 2005. “Q: Why couldn’t intelligent design also be a scientific theory? A: The idea of intelligent design might or might not be true, but when presented as a scientific hypothesis, it is not useful because it is based on weak assumptions, lacks supporting data and terminates further thought.”

 33.  ^ The designer is not falsifiable, since its existence is typically asserted without sufficient conditions to allow a falsifying observation. The designer being beyond the realm of the observable, claims about its existence can be neither supported nor undermined by observation, making intelligent design and the argument from design analytic a posteriori arguments. See, e.g., Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). Ruling, p. 22 and p. 77.

 34.  ^ That intelligent design is not empirically testable stems from the fact that it violates a basic premise of science, naturalism. See, e.g., Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). Ruling, p. 22 and p. 66.

 35.  ^ Intelligent design professes to offer an answer that does not need to be defined or explained, the intelligent agent, designer. By asserting a conclusion that cannot be accounted for scientifically, the designer, intelligent design cannot be sustained by any further explanation, and objections raised to those who accept intelligent design make little headway. Thus intelligent design is not a provisional assessment of data, which can change when new information is discovered. Once it is claimed that a conclusion that need not be accounted for has been established, there is simply no possibility of future correction. The idea of the progressive growth of scientific ideas is required to explain previous data and any previously unexplainable data. See, e.g., the brief explanation in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). p. 66.

 36.  ^ “Nobel Laureates Initiative” (PDF). The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. September 9, 2005. http://media.ljworld.com/pdf/2005/09/15/nobel_letter.pdf. Retrieved 2007-07-19.  The September 2005 statement by 38 Nobel laureates stated that: “Intelligent design is fundamentally unscientific; it cannot be tested as scientific theory because its central conclusion is based on belief in the intervention of a supernatural agent”.

 37.  ^ Intelligent Design is not Science: Scientists and teachers speak out. 2005 October [archived 2006-06-14; cited 2009-01-09]. University of New South Wales. The October 2005 statement, by a coalition representing more than 70,000 Australian scientists and science teachers said: “intelligent design is not science” and called on “all schools not to teach Intelligent Design (ID) as science, because it fails to qualify on every count as a scientific theory”.

 38.  ^ The Sternberg peer review controversy and several similar academic disputes are the subject of the 2008 documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed“.

 39.  ^ Is It Science Yet?: Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution [PDF]. Washington University Law Quarterly. 2005 [cited 2007-07-18];83(1). “ID leaders know the benefits of submitting their work to independent review and have established at least two purportedly “peer-reviewed” journals for ID articles. However, one has languished for want of material and quietly ceased publication, while the other has a more overtly philosophical orientation. Both journals employ a weak standard of “peer review” that amounts to no more than vetting by the editorial board or society fellows.”

 40.  ^ TalkOrigins Archive. Index to Creationist Claims; 2006. “With some of the claims for peer review, notably Campbell and Meyer (2003) and the e-journal PCID, the reviewers are themselves ardent supporters of intelligent design. The purpose of peer review is to expose errors, weaknesses, and significant omissions in fact and argument. That purpose is not served if the reviewers are uncritical”

 41.  ^ “For human artifacts, we know the designer’s identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer’s abilities, needs, and desires. With ID, proponents assert that they refuse to propose hypotheses on the designer’s identity, do not propose a mechanism, and the designer, he/she/it/they, has never been seen. In that vein, defense expert Professor Minnich agreed that in the case of human artifacts and objects, we know the identity and capacities of the human designer, but we do not know any of those attributes for the designer of biological life. In addition, Professor Behe agreed that for the design of human artifacts, we know the designer and its attributes and we have a baseline for human design that does not exist for design of biological systems. Professor Behe’s only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies”.—Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , p. 81

 42.  ^ Illustra Media. WIRED Magazine response [cited 2007-07-13]. “It’s also important that you read a well developed rebuttal to Wired’s misleading accusations. Links to both the article and a response by the Discovery Institute (our partners in the production of Unlocking the Mystery of Life and The Privileged Planet)”

 

References

 

1.      ^ ^{a b} Discovery Institute. Top Questions-1.What is the theory of intelligent design? [cited 2007-05-13].

 2.      ^ Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center. Primer: Intelligent Design Theory in a Nutshell [PDF]; 2004 [cited 2007-05-13].

 §  Intelligent Design network. Intelligent Design; 2007 [cited 2007-05-13].

 3.      ^ The Creationists, Expanded Edition. Harvard University Press; 2006. ISBN 0-674-02339-0. p. 373, 379–380.

 4.      ^ “Science and Policy: Intelligent Design and Peer Review”. American Association for the Advancement of Science. 2007. http://www.aaas.org/spp/dser/03_Areas/evolution/issues/peerreview.shtml. Retrieved 2007-07-19. 

 5.      ^ ^{a b} Stephen C. Meyer and Paul A. Nelson (May 1, 1996). “CSC – Getting Rid of the Unfair Rules, A book review, Origins & Design”]. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1685. Retrieved 2007-05-20. 

 §  Phillip E. Johnson (August 31, 1996). “Starting a Conversation about Evolution”. Phillip Johnson Files. Access Research Network. http://www.arn.org/docs/johnson/ratzsch.htm. Retrieved 2007-05-20. 

 §  Stephen C. Meyer (December 1, 2002). “The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design: The Methodological Equivalence of Naturalistic and Non-Naturalistic Origins Theories”. Ignatius Press. http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1780. 

 §  Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , Whether ID Is Science

 §  Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , Lead defense expert Professor Behe admitted that his broadened definition of science, which encompasses ID, would also include astrology.

 §  See also “Evolution of Kansas science standards continues as Darwin’s theories regain prominence”. International Herald Tribune. February 13, 2007. http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/13/america/NA-GEN-US-Kansas-Evolution-History.php. Retrieved 2007-05-20. 

 6.      ^ Nature Methods Editorial. An intelligently designed response. Nat. Methods. 2007;4(12):983. doi:10.1038/nmeth1207-983.

 7.      ^ Mark Greener. Taking on creationism. Which arguments and evidence counter pseudoscience?. EMBO Reports. 2007;8(12):1107–1109. doi:10.1038/sj.embor.7401131. PMID 18059309.

 8.      ^ ^{a b} John H. McDonald’s “reducibly complex mousetrap”

 9.      ^ ^{a b} David Ussery, “A Biochemist’s Response to ‘The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution’”

 10.  ^ ^{a b} Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , p. 64.

 11.  ^ ^{a b} Rich Baldwin. Information Theory and Creationism; 2005.

 12.  ^ Mark Perakh. Dembski ‘displaces Darwinism’ mathematically — or does he?; 2005.

 13.  ^ ^{a b} Jason Rosenhouse. How Anti-Evolutionists Abuse Mathematics [PDF]. The Mathematical Intelligencer. Fall 2001;23(4):3–8.

 14.  ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , Context pg. 32 ff, citing Edwards v. Aguillard, 482 U.S. 578 (1987).

 15.  ^ ^{a b c d} Washington, D.C.: Center for Inquiry, Office of Public Policy. Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals. [PDF]; 2007 May [cited 2007-08-06].

 16.  ^ ^{a b} Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , pp. 31–33.

 17.  ^ Discovery Institute. Media Backgrounder: Intelligent Design Article Sparks Controversy; September 7, 2004.

 §  James M. Kushiner. Berkeley’s Radical; 2002 June.

 §  Jodi Wilgoren. Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive [PDF].. August 21, 2005.

 §  Discovery’s Creation. Seattle Weekly. February 1, 2006 [cited 2007-07-27].

 18.  ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , Conclusion of Ruling.

 19.  ^ R.T., Pennock, (2000). Tower of Babel: the evidence against the new creationism. City: MIT Press. pp. 60, 68–70, 242–245. ISBN 0-262-66165-9. 
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , Ruling pp. 24–25.

 20.  ^ ^{a b} Padian, K.; Matzke, N. (2009). “Darwin, Dover, ‘Intelligent Design’ and textbooks”. Biochemical Journal 417 (1): 29. doi:10.1042/bj20081534. PMID 19061485.  edit .pdf

 21.  ^ ^{a b c} Eugenie C. Scott. Biological design in science classrooms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. May 15, 2007 [cited 2009-06-02];104(Suppl 1):8669–8676. doi:10.1073/pnas.0701505104. PMID 17494747. PMC 1876445.

 22.  ^ ^{a b} R.T., Pennock, (2000). Tower of Babel: the evidence against the new creationism. City: MIT Press. pp. 245–249, 265, 296–300. ISBN 0-262-66165-9. 

 23.  ^ Forrest, Barbara. Know Your Creationists: Know Your Allies

 24.  ^ ^{a b} Stephen C. Meyer. Access Research Network. We Are Not Alone; 1986 March [cited 2007-10-10].

 25.  ^ Charles B. Thaxton, Ph.D.. Christian Leadership Ministries. DNA, Design and the Origin of Life; November 13–16, 1986 [cited 2007-10-10].

 26.  ^ ^{a b} Charles B. Thaxton. In Pursuit of Intelligent Causes: Some Historical Background; June 23–26, 1988, revised July 1988 and May 1991 [cited 2007-10-06].

 27.  ^ ^{a b c} Dembski: “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory,” Touchstone Magazine. Volume 12, Issue 4: July–August, 1999

 28.  ^ ^{a b} Leon Lynn. Rethinking Schools Online; Winter 1997/98 [cited 2009-02-08].

 29.  ^ Nick Matzke. The Panda’s Thumb. The true origin of “intelligent design”; August 14, 2007 [cited 2010-01-21].
Journals: Scientific American (1846–1869) [cited 2010-01-21].

 30.  ^ Dove, Patrick Edward, The theory of human progression, and natural probability of a reign of justice. London, Johnstone & Hunter, 1850. LC 08031381 “Intelligence-Intelligent Design”.

 31.  ^ Charles Darwin. Letter 3154—Darwin, C. R. to Herschel, J. F. W., 23 May 1861; May 23, 1861.

 32.  ^ The British Association. The Times. September 20, 1873:10; col A..

 33.  ^ William P. Alston. In: Paul Edwards. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York City, London: Macmillan Publishing Company, The Free Press, Collier Macmillan Publishers; 1967. ISBN 0-02-894990-0.

 34.  ^ Robert Nozick. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. USA: Basic Books; 1974. ISBN 0-465-09720-0. p. 19.

 35.  ^ James E. Horigan. Chance or Design?. Philosophical Library; 1979.

 36.  ^ Nicholas Timmins. Evolution according to Hoyle: Survivors of disaster in an earlier world. January 13, 1982:22. “F. Hoyle stated in a 1982 speech: ‘…one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design.'”

 37.  ^ ^{a b} Nick Matzke. National Center for Science Education. NCSE Resource — 9.0. Matzke (2006): The Story of the Pandas Drafts; 2006 [cited 2009-11-18]. *Nick Matzke. National Center for Science Education. Missing Link discovered!; 2006 [archived 2007-01-14; cited 2009-11-18].

 38.  ^ Jonathan Witt. Discovery Institute. Evolution News & Views: Dover Judge Regurgitates Mythological History of Intelligent Design; December 20, 2005 [cited 2007-10-05].

 39.  ^ DarkSyde. Daily Kos: Know Your Creationists: Know Your Allies; March 11, 2006 [cited 2007-10-05].

 40.  ^ William Safire. On Language: Neo-Creo. The New York Times. August 21, 2005 [cited 2009-12-20].

 41.  ^ ^{a b c} Nick Matzke. National Center for Science Education. NCSE Resource; 2004 [cited 2007-09-24].

 42.  ^ Richard P. Aulie. National Association of Biology Teachers. A Reader’s Guide to Of Pandas and People; 1998 [cited 2007-10-05].

 43.  ^ Nick Matzke; Jon Buell (October 13, 2005). “I guess ID really was “Creationism’s Trojan Horse” after all”. The Panda’s Thumb. http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2005/10/i_guess_id_real.html. Retrieved 2009-06-02. 

 44.  ^ William A. Dembski. Expert Witness Report: The Scientific Status of Intelligent Design [PDF]. March 29, 2005 [cited 2009-06-02].

 45.  ^ Behe, Michael (1997): Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference [1]

 46.  ^ Irreducible complexity of these examples is disputed; see Kitzmiller, pp. 76–78, and Ken Miller Webcast

 47.  ^ The Collapse of “Irreducible Complexity” Kenneth R. Miller Brown University [2]

 48.  ^ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1090909-3,00.html

 49.  ^ Dembski. Intelligent Design, p. 47

 50.  ^ William Dembski, Photo by Wesley R. Elsberry, taken at lecture given at University of California at Berkeley, 2006/03/17.

 51.  ^ Branden Fitelson, Christopher Stephens, Elliott Sober. How Not to Detect Design: A review of William A. Dembski’s The Design Inference—Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities [PDF]. Cambridge University Press; 1998.

 52.  ^ ^{a b} Richard Wein. Not a Free Lunch But a Box of Chocolates: A critique of William Dembski’s book No Free Lunch; 2002.

 53.  ^ Mark Perakh. Dembski ‘displaces Darwinism’ mathematically – or does he?; 2005.

 54.  ^ John S. Wilkins, Wesley R. Elsberry. The Advantages of Theft over Toil: The Design Inference and Arguing from Ignorance. Biology and Philosophy. 2001;16:711–724. doi:10.1023/A:1012282323054.

 55.  ^ Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin; 2006. ISBN 0-618-68000-4.

 56.  ^ Evolutionary algorithms now surpass human designers. New Scientist. July 28, 2007.

 57.  ^ Guillermo Gonzalez. The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing; 2004. ISBN 0-89526-065-4.

 58.  ^ The Panda’s Thumb. review of The Privileged Planet

 59.  ^ Is The Universe Fine-Tuned For Us? Victor J. Stenger. University of Colorado. (PDF file)

 60.  ^ Victor J. Stenger. University of Colorado. The Anthropic Principle [PDF].

 61.  ^ Joseph Silk. Our place in the Multiverse. Nature. September 14, 2006;443(7108):145–146. oi:10.1038/443145a.

 62.  ^ See, e.g., Gerald Feinberg and Robert Shapiro. A Puddlian Fable. In: Huchingson. Religion and the Natural Sciences. 1993. p. 220–221.

 63.  ^ R.T., Pennock, (2000). Tower of Babel: the evidence against the new creationism. City: MIT Press. pp. 229–229, 233–242. ISBN 0-262-66165-9. 

 64.  ^ LeaderU. The Act of Creation: Bridging Transcendence and Immanence.

 65.  ^ ^{a b} The Case Against Intelligent Design [PDF]. The New Republic. August 22–29, 2005 [archived 2006-06-18];233(8/9):21–33.

 66.  ^ Donald E. Simanek. Intelligent Design: The Glass is Empty.

 67.  ^ Jason Rosenhouse. Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Who Designed the Designer?.

 68.  ^ Richard Dawkins. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. p. 141.

 69.  ^ See, e.g., Joseph Manson. Intelligent design is pseudoscience; September 27, 2005.; Rev Max (July–August 2006). “The Incredibly Strange Story of Intelligent Design”. New Dawn Magazine (97). 

 70.  ^ NCSE Resource; August 29, 2002 [cited 2007-10-07].

 71.  ^ ^{a b} David Mu. Trojan Horse or Legitimate Science: Deconstructing the Debate over Intelligent Design [PDF]. Harvard Science Review. Fall 2005;19(1). “For most members of the mainstream scientific community, ID is not a scientific theory, but a creationist pseudoscience“.”

 72.  ^ Conclusion of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Ruling

 73.  ^ Wise, D.U., 2001, Creationism’s Propaganda Assault on Deep Time and Evolution, Journal of Geoscience Education, v. 49, n. 1, p. 30–35.

 74.  ^ Marcus R. Ross. Who Believes What? Clearing up Confusion over Intelligent Design and Young-Earth Creationism [PDF]. Journal of Geoscience Education. May, 2005;53(3):319–323.

 75.  ^ Ronald L. Numbers. The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; November 30, 2006. ISBN 0-674-02339-0.

 76.  ^ Forrest, B.C. and Gross, P.R.. Evolution and the Wedge of Intelligent Design: The Trojan Horse Strategy. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2003. ISBN 0-19-515742-7.

 77.  ^ Eugenie Scott. The Creation/Evolution Continuum. NCSE Reports. 1999;19(4):16–17, 23–25.; Scott, Eugenie C.. Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press; 2004. ISBN 0-520-24650-0.

 78.  ^ Discovery Institute fellows and staff. “Center for Science and Culture fellows and staff”. http://www.discovery.org/csc/fellows.php. 

 79.  ^ Barbara Forrest. The Wedge at Work: Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics; 2001.

 80.  ^ ^{a b} William Dembski, 1998. The Design Inference.

 81.  ^ Dembski, 1999. Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, p. 210.

 82.  ^ William Dembski. Intelligent Design’s Contribution to the Debate Over Evolution: A Reply to Henry Morris; 2005.

 83.  ^ Center for Inquiry, Office of Public Policy. Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals. A Position Paper [PDF]; 2007 May.

 84.  ^ Dixon, Thomas (2008). Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-19-929551-7. 

 85.  ^ H. Ross. Pasadena, California: Reasons to Believe. More than intelligent design; 2002 [cited April 25, 2007].

 86.  ^ Henry M. Morris. Santee, California: Institute for Creation Research. Design is not enough!; 1999 [cited April 25, 2007].

 87.  ^ Carl Wieland. Answers in Genesis. AiG’s views on the Intelligent Design movement; 2002 [cited April 25, 2007].

 88.  ^ Harris Interactive. Nearly Two-thirds of U.S. Adults Believe Human Beings Were Created by God; July 6, 2005 [cited 2007-07-13].

 89.  ^ New Mexicans for Science and Reason. Sandia National Laboratories says that the Intelligent Design Network (IDNet-NM/Zogby) “Lab Poll” is BOGUS! [cited 2007-07-13].

 90.  ^ Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. [www.csicop.org/doubtandabout/polling/ Polling for ID]; September 11, 2003 [archived 2008-03-27; cited 2007-02-16].

 91.  ^ David Harris. Salon.com. [blogs.salon.com/0001092/2003/07/30.html ‘Intelligent Design’-ers launch new assault on curriculum using lies and deception] [archived 2003-08-16; cited 2007-07-13].

 92.  ^ Gallup, “Evolution, creationism, intelligent design,”. Retrieved 24 August 2010.

 93.  ^ Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed (2008).

 94.  ^ New Anti-Evolution Film Stirs Controversy.

 95.  ^ Shaw, Linda. Does Seattle group “teach controversy” or contribute to it?. Seattle Times. March 31, 2005.

 96.  ^ National Association of Biology Teachers. NABT’s Statement on Teaching Evolution [archived 2006-09-27].

 97.  ^ The Interacademy Panel on International Issues. IAP Statement on the Teaching of Evolution [PDF]; June 21, 2006 [cited 2008-10-17]. Joint statement issued by the national science academies of 67 countries, including the United Kingdom‘s Royal Society.

 98.  ^ From the world’s largest general scientific society:

 §  “Statement on the Teaching of Evolution” (PDF) (Press release). American Association for the Advancement of Science. February 16, 2006. http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/pdf/0219boardstatement.pdf. Retrieved 2008-10-17. 

 §  Pinholster, Ginger (February 19, 2006). “AAAS Denounces Anti-Evolution Laws” (Press release). American Association for the Advancement of Science. http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2006/0219boardstatement.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-17. 

 99.  ^ Dixon, Thomas (2008). Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 102. ISBN 978-0-19-929551-7. 

 100.         ^ Intelligent design a Trojan horse, says creationist. Sydney Morning Herald. November 27, 2005 [cited 2007-07-29].

 101.         ^ Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Intelligent Design: Creationism’s Trojan Horse; 2005 February [cited 2007-07-29].^{[dead link]}

 102.         ^ ^{a b} The Evolution Wars. Time. August 7, 2005 [cited 2007-07-23].

 103.         ^

 §  National Center for Science Education. “The evolution wars” in Time; August 11, 2005 [cited 2009-11-18].

 §  Journalism and the Debate Over Origins: Newspaper Coverage of Intelligent Design. Journal of Media and Religion. 2006;5(1):49–61. doi:10.1207/s15328415jmr0501_3.

 §  Television wildlife programming as a source of popular scientific information: a case study of evolution. Public Understanding of Science. 2006;15:131–152. doi:10.1177/0963662506060588.

 §  Answers in Genesis. Time for evolution wars; 2005-08-10 [cited 2009-02-16].

 104.         ^ ^{a b} DeWolf, David K. Intelligent Design Will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover [PDF]. University of Montana Law Review. May 4, 2007;68(1).

 105.         ^

 §  Does God have a place in class?: Intelligent design ignites great debate. Calgary Herald. 2005-08-25 [cited 2009-02-16].

 §  The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Regnery Publishing; 2006. ISBN 1-59698-013-3. p. 273.

 §  The Evolution Wars: Who Is Fighting with Whom about What?. In: Robert B. Stewart. Intelligent Design: William A. Dembski & Michael Ruse in Dialogue. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press; 2007. ISBN 0-8006-6218-0.

 106.         ^ Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection. Philo. 2000 [cited 2007-07-27];3(2):7–29.

 107.         ^ Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law and Education. InterVarsity Press; 1995. ISBN 0-8308-1929-0.[Johnson positions himself as a “theistic realist” against “methodological naturalism”.]

 108.         ^ See, for instance: University of Texas, Austin. Methodological Naturalism and the Supernatural; 1997 February [archived 2008-01-14; cited 2007-07-27].

 109.         ^ Witnesses For The Prosecution [Reprint by Leadership U.]. World (magazine). November 30, 1996 [cited 2007-07-23];11(28):18.

 110.         ^ The Foundation for Thought and Ethics, Dallas Christian Leadership, and the C. S. Lewis Fellowship. Darwinism: Science or Philosophy [PDF]; 1992 March [cited 2007-07-23].

 111.         ^ Giberson, Karl (December 5, 2005). “Intelligent design’s long march to nowhere”. Science & Theology News (The Free Republic). 

 112.         ^ What is wrong with intelligent design? [PDF]. Quarterly Review of Biology. 2007 [cited 2007-07-23];82(1):3–6. doi:10.1086/511656. PMID 17354991.

 113.         ^ Science Daily. What Is Wrong With Intelligent Design?; February 23, 2007 [cited 2007-07-23].

 114.         ^ Franklin & Marshall College. Natural Providence (or Design Trouble) [PDF]; Forthcoming [cited 2007-07-23].

 115.         ^ Creighton University. What is the position of the NRCSE on the teaching of intelligent design [ID] as an alternative to neo-Darwinian evolution in Nebraska schools? [cited 2007-07-23].

 116.         ^ Bring You To. Catechetical Lecture at St. Stephan’s Cathedral, Vienna [Reprint]; October 2, 2005 [cited 2007-07-22]. “Purpose and design in the natural world, [has] no difficulty […] with the theory of evolution [within] the borders of scientific theory.”

 117.         ^ National Center for Science Education. The Creation/Evolution Continuum; December 7, 2000 [cited 2009-11-18].

 118.         ^ National Council of Churches. Science, Religion, and the Teaching of Evolution in Public School Science Classes [PDF]; 2006 March [cited 2007-07-17].

 119.         ^ Creighton University. Intelligent Design as a Theological Problem [Reprint]; 2002 [cited 2007-07-21].

 120.         ^ Matt Young, Taner Edis (2006–2003). Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism. Rutgers, The State University. ISBN 978-0-8135-3872-3. http://books.google.com/?id=hYLKdtlVeQgC&pg=PR7&dq=archbishop+of+Vienna+intelligent+design#v=onepage&q=archbishop%20of%20Vienna%20intelligent%20design&f=false. Retrieved 2010-12-02. “An influential Roman Catholic cardinal, Cristoph Schonborn, the archbishop of Vienna, appeared to retreat from John Paul II’s support for evolution and wrote in The New York Times that descent with modification is a fact, but evolution in the sense of “an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection” is false. Many of Schonborn’s complaints about Darwinian evolution echoed pronouncements originiating from the Discovery Institute, the right-wing American think tank that plays a central role in the ID movement (and whose public relations firm submitted Schonborn’s article to the Times).” 

 121.         ^ Ronald L. Numbers (2006). The creationists: from scientific creationism to intelligent design. Random House. ISBN 978-0-674-02339-0. http://books.google.com/?id=GQ3TI5njXfIC&pg=PA395&dq=archbishop+of+Vienna+intelligent+design#v=onepage&q=archbishop%20of%20Vienna%20intelligent%20design&f=false. Retrieved 2010-12-02. “Miffed by Krauss’s comments, officers at the Discovery Institute arranged for the cardinal archbishop of Vienna, Cristoph Sconborn (b. 1945), to write an op-ed piece for the Times dismissing the late pope’s statement as “rather vague and unimportant” and denying the truth of “evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense-an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection.” The cardinal, it seems, had received the backing of the new pope, Benedict XVI, the former Joseph Ratzinger (b. 1927), who in the mid-1980s, while serving as prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, successor to the notorious Inquisition, had written a defense of the doctrine of creation agasint Catholics who stressed the sufficiency of “selection and mutation.” Humans, he insisted, are “not the products of chance and error,” and “the universe is not the product of darkness and unreason. It comes from intelligence, freedom, and from the beauty that is identical with love.” Recent discoveries in microbiology and biochemistry, he was happy to say, had revealed “reasonable design.”” 

 122.         ^ Parliamentary Assembly, Working Papers: 2007 Ordinary Session. Council of Europe Publishing. 2008-04-25. ISBN 978-92-871-6368-4. http://books.google.com/?id=imUrkSP_5sUC&pg=PA66&dq=archbishop+of+Vienna+intelligent+design#v=onepage&q=archbishop%20of%20Vienna%20intelligent%20design&f=false. Retrieved 2010-12-02. “Christoph Schonborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, published an article in The New York Times stating that the declarations made by Pope John Paul II could not be interpreted as recognising evolution. At the same time, he repeated arguments put forward by the supporters of the intelligent design ideas.” 

 123.         ^ Answers in Genesis. Intelligent design: is it intelligent; is it Christian?; February 4, 2006 [cited 2007-07-21].

 124.         ^ Reasons to Believe. More Than Intelligent Design [cited 2007-07-21].

 125.         ^ “The “Intelligent Design” Distraction” (Press release). Harun Yahya International. 2007. http://www.harunyahya.com/new_releases/news/intelligent_design.php. Retrieved 2007-07-20. 

 126.         ^ Answers in Genesis. AiG’s views on the Intelligent Design Movement; August 30, 2002 [cited 2007-07-20].

 127.         ^ ^{a b} Natan Slifkin (2006). The Challenge of Creation (New York: Yashar Books) 288 ff.

 128.         ^ Miller, Kenneth. Debating Design. Cambridge University Press; 2004. The Flagellum Unspun. p. 95.

 129.         ^ “Online dictionary”. Merriam-Webster. http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/science. Retrieved 2009-05-22. “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method . . . such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena” 

 130.         ^ Popper 2002, p. 3.

 131.         ^ Wilson, Edward (1999). Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Vintage. ISBN 0-679-76867-X. 

 132.         ^ Ludwik Fleck (1935), Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact reminds us that before a specific fact ‘existed’, it had to be created as part of a social agreement within a community.

 133.         ^ Cover, J.A., Curd, Martin (Eds, 1998) Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, 1-82.

 134.         ^ National Academy of Sciences. Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences; 1999.

 135.         ^ Junk Science. Macmillan; 2006. ISBN 978-0-312-35241-7. p. 210 ff.

 136.         ^ Research Methods in Psychology. 8th ed. Wadsworth Publishing; 2005. ISBN 0-534-60976-7. Chapter 2. Discusses the scientific method, including the principles of falsifiability, testability, progressive development of theory, dynamic self-correcting of hypotheses, and parsimony, or “Occam’s razor”.

 137.         ^ See, e.g., Mark Perakh. Talk.reason. The Dream World of William Dembski’s Creationism; 2005; p. 54–65.

 138.         ^ PZ Myers, Pharyngula.org. Creationism and the Daubert test?; May 21, 2005.

 139.         ^ Pennock, Robert T. “Can’t philosophers tell the difference between science and religion?: Demarcation revisited.” Synthese, Vol. 178, no 2, 2007, pp. 177-206. http://www.springerlink.com/content/k305581557n60r31

 140.         ^ Laudan, Larry (1983). “The Demise of the Demarcation Problem”. In Cohen, R.S.; Laudan, L.. Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 76. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. pp. 111–127. ISBN 90-277-1533-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=AEvprSJzv2MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9027715335&cd=1#v=onepage&q=Demise&f=false 

 141.         ^ Carroll, Sean. “What Questions Can Science Answer?”. 2009. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/07/15/what-questions-can-science-answer

 142.         ^ ^{a b} Laudan, Larry. “Normative Naturalism”. Philosophy of Science, Vol. 57, no. 1, March 1990, pp. 44-59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/187620

 143.         ^ ^{a b} Forrest, Barbara. “Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection.” Philo, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall-Winter 2000), pp. 7-29 http://www2.selu.edu/Academics/Faculty/bforrest/ForrestPhilo.pdf

 144.         ^ ^{a b c} Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , 4. Whether ID is Science, p. 87

 145.         ^ Free Speech on Evolution Campaign Main Page Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture.

 146.         ^ John Hawks Weblog. The President and the teaching of evolution; 2005 August [cited 2007-07-19].

 147.         ^ Skeptic: eSkeptic: Thursday, April 17, 2008

 148.         ^ Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker. The New York Times. December 4, 2005 [cited 2007-07-19].

 149.         ^ Statement from the Council of the Biological Society of Washington at the Wayback Machine (archived September 26, 2007)

 150.         ^ Meyer, S.C.. The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. 2004 [cited 2007-05-10];117(2):213–239.

 151.         ^ Design Inference Website. Is Intelligent Design a Form of Natural Theology?; 2001 [cited 2007-07-19].

 152.         ^ Darwinism Under Attack; December 21, 2001 [cited 2008-12-10].

 153.         ^ Ruling, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 4: whether ID is science

 154.         ^ Simulating evolution by gene duplication of protein features that require multiple amino acid residues. Protein Science. October 2004 [cited 16 March 2009];13(10):2651–2664. doi:10.1110/ps.04802904. PMID 15340163. PMC 2286568.

 155.         ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). 4: whether ID is science

 156.         ^ Simple evolutionary pathways to complex proteins. Protein Science. September 2005;14(9):2217–2225. doi:10.1110/ps.041171805. PMID 16131652.

 157.         ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, October 19, 2005, AM session Kitzmiller Testimony, Behe

 158.         ^ Discovery Institute. Peer-Reviewed, Peer-Edited, and other Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design (Annotated); 2007 July [cited 2007-07-17].

 159.         ^ Detecting Design in the Natural Sciences; 2002 April [cited 2007-07-18].

 160.         ^ Space.com. SETI and Intelligent Design; 2005 December [cited 2007-07-18]. “In fact, the signals actually sought by today’s SETI searches are not complex, as the ID advocates assume. […] If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality”

 161.         ^ Darwin in Mind: Intelligent Design Meets Artificial Intelligence; 2001 March/April [archived 2001-10-18; cited 2007-07-17].

 162.         ^ Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center. Primer: Intelligent Design Theory in a Nutshell; 2007 [cited 2007-07-14].

 163.         ^ ^{a b} National Center for Science Education. “Intelligent Design” Not Accepted by Most Scientists; 2002 September [cited 2009-11-18].

 164.         ^ ^{a b c} Monton, Bradley (2009). Seeking God in Science. Broadview Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-1-55111-863-5. 

 165.         ^ ^{a b} Del Ratzsch (2005) “Teleological Arguments for God’s Existence”, Section 4.3, The “Intelligent Design” (ID) Movement, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

 166.         ^ See, for instance: Man Come Of Age: Bonhoeffer’s Response To The God-Of-The-Gaps. Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. 1971;14:203–220.

 167.         ^ Colin A. Ronan. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the World’s Science. p. 61.

 168.         ^ Colin A. Ronan. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the World’s Science. p. 123.

 169.         ^ Intelligent Design on Trial: Kitzmiller v. Dover. National Center for Science Education. October 17, 2008

 170.         ^ Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. (United States District Court for the middle district of Pennsylvania 2005). Text

 171.         ^ Judge Rules Against ‘Intelligent Design’. The Washington Post. December 21, 2005 [archived 2007-09-28; cited 2007-09-03].

 172.         ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005). , pp. 137–138.

 173.         ^ Discovery Institute. Dover Intelligent Design Decision Criticized as a Futile Attempt to Censor Science Education; December 20, 2005 [cited 2007-09-03].

 174.         ^ Judge rules against ‘intelligent design’. December 20, 2005 [cited 2008-10-17]. Associated Press. MSNBC.

 175.         ^ Godless: The Church of Liberalism; September 21, 2006 [cited 2007-09-03].

 176.         ^ National Center for Science Education. Discovery Institute tries to “swift-boat” Judge Jones; January 4, 2006 [cited 2009-11-18].

 177.         ^ Intelligent design policy struck down. Dallas Morning News. December 20, 2005 [cited 2007-09-03].

 178.         ^ Articles: Editor’s Note: Intelligent Design Articles [PDF]. University of Montana Law Review. April 10, 2007 [cited 2008-10-16];68(1).

 179.         ^ Irons, Peter. Disaster In Dover: The Trials (And Tribulations) Of Intelligent Design [PDF]. University of Montana Law Review. April 27, 2007 [cited 2008-10-16];68(1).

 180.         ^ DeWolf, David K; West, John G; Luskin, Casey. Rebuttal to Irons [PDF]. University of Montana Law Review. April 27, 2007 [cited 2008-10-16];68(1).

 181.         ^ National Center for Science Education. American Academy of Religion on teaching creationism; July 23, 2010 [cited 2010-08-09].

 182.         ^ Council of Europe. The dangers of creationism in education [cited 2007-08-03].

 183.         ^ National Center for Science Education. NCSE Resource—Council of Europe approves resolution against creationism; October 4, 2007 [cited 2009-11-18].

 §  Council of Europe firmly opposes creationism in school. 2007-10-04 [cited 2007-10-05]. Reuters.

 184.         ^ Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute. Unlocking the Mystery of Life; July 15, 2004 [cited 2007-07-13].

 185.         ^ Revealed: rise of creationism in UK schools. Guardian (London). November 27, 2006 [cited 2008-10-17].

 186.         ^ ‘Design’ attack on school science. September 29, 2006 [cited 2007-07-13]. BBC News.

 187.         ^ Parliament of the United Kingdom. Written Answers; November 1, 2006 [cited 2007-07-13].

 188.         ^ Parliament of the United Kingdom. Schools: Intelligent Design; December 18, 2006 [cited 2007-07-13].

 189.         ^ NCSE. NCSE Resource—Guidance on creationism for British teachers; September 25, 2007 [cited 2009-11-18].

 190.         ^ Qualifications and Curriculum Authority for England. How can we answer questions about creation and origins? [PDF]; 2006 [cited 2007-10-01].

 191.         ^ Prime Minister’s Office. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. NoCreSciEd – epetition reply; 21 June 2007 [cited 2007-07-13].

 192.         ^ Lengagne, Guy. Council of Europe, Doc. 11297. The dangers of creationism in education; June 8, 2007 [cited 2008-10-17].

 193.         ^ The creation of a new Giant’s Causeway row; November 30, 2007 [cited 2011-07-16].

 194.         ^ Henry, Lesley-Anne. Tussle of Biblical proportions over creationism in Ulster classrooms. Belfast Telegraph. September 26, 2007 [cited 2007-10-01].
* Viewpoint: The world, according to Lisburn folk. Belfast Telegraph. September 27, 2007 [cited 2007-10-01].

 195.         ^ Dup Call For Schools To Teach Creation Passed By Council—Lisburn Today. Ulster Star. September 26, 2007 [cited 2008-10-17].

 196.         ^ Enserink, Martin. Evolution Politics: Is Holland Becoming the Kansas of Europe?. Science. June 3, 2005;308(5727):1394b. doi:10.1126/science.308.5727.1394b. PMID 15933170.

 197.         ^ Cabinet ministers announced (update 2). February 13, 2007 [cited 2008-05-31]. DutchNews.nl.

 198.         ^ De Morgen, May 23, 2005

 199.         ^ National Center for Science Education. Cloning Creationism in Turkey [cited 2009-11-18].

 200.         ^ Edis, Taner. History of Science Society. Islamic Creationism: A Short History; 2008 January [cited 2011-04-20].

 201.         ^ Jones, Dorian L. ISN Security Watch. Turkey’s survival of the fittest; March 12, 2008 [cited 2008-03-13].

 202.         ^ Intelligent design not science: experts. Sydney Morning Herald. October 21, 2005 [cited 2007-07-13].

 203.         ^ http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2005/s1447202.htm

 204.         ^ http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/school-backs-intelligent-design-dvd/2005/10/27/1130400306721.html

 

Further reading

 

·        Gross PR; Forrest B. Creationism’s Trojan Horse: the Wedge of Intelligent Design. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Oxford University Press; 2004. ISBN 0-19-515742-7. Preview at Google Books

 ·        Humes E. Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America’s Soul. New York, N.Y: ECCO; 2007. ISBN 0-06-088548-3.

 ·        Edis T; Young M. Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press; 2006. ISBN 0-8135-3872-6. Preview at Google Books

 ·        Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design. New York: Henry Holt; 2007. ISBN 978-0-8050-8306-4.

 ·        Slack G. The Battle over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board in Dover, PA. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; 2007. ISBN 0-7879-8786-7. Preview at Google Books

 ID perspectives

·        Access Research Network

 ·        Design Inference: The website of William A. Dembski

 ·        Discovery Institute, Center for Science and Culture (Hub of the intelligent design movement)

 ·        EvolutionNews.org Discovery Institute website tracking media coverage of intelligent design.

 ·        ID The Future A multiple contributor weblog by Discovery Institute fellows.

 ·        International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID)

 ·        Uncommon Descent William Dembski’s blog

 Non-ID perspectives

 ·        Scientific American – 15 Answers to Creationist Questions

 ·        ACLU site on Intelligent Design

 ·        Intelligent Design? Special feature in the Natural History magazine

 ·        Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Design Arguments for the Existence of God

 ·        National Center for Science Education What Is Intelligent Design Creationism?

 ·        Resolution from the American Association for the Advancement of Science

 ·        Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences Second Edition (1999)

 ·        Talk Origins Archive (Archive of the UseNet discussion group talk.origins)

 ·        139 page in-depth analysis of intelligent design, irreducible complexity, and the book Of Pandas and People by the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District judge

 ·        Kitzmiller: An Intelligent Ruling on ‘Intelligent Design’, JURIST

 ·        ID and Creationism

 ·        The Design Argument Elliott Sober, 2004.

 ·        Natural ‘Knowledge’ and Natural ‘Design’ by Richard Dawkins

 Media articles

 ·        Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial A PBS-NOVA documentary on the Dover, PA Intelligent Design trial in 2005.(PBS)

 ·        Discovery’s Creation An overview of the origin of the intelligent design movement. (Seattle Weekly)

 ·        Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate between paleontologist Peter Ward and Stephen Meyer co-founder of the Discovery Institute

 ·        Intelligent Design Deja Vu What would “intelligent design” science classes look like? All we have to do is look inside some 19th century textbooks. (The Washington Post)

 ·        How the media have covered ID^{[dead link]} (Columbia Journalism Review)

 ·        Banned in biology class: intelligent design (Christian Science Monitor)

 ·        Devolution (The New Yorker)

 ·        The Evolution Debate (The New York Times)

 ·        Debating Evolution in the Classroom (NPR)

 ·        Darwin Victorious (TIME)

 ·        Intelligent Design: Scientific Inquiry or Religious Indoctrination? (Justice Talking)

 ·        Intelligent Judging—Evolution in the Classroom and the Courtroom (New England Journal of Medicine)

 

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rationes seminales

 Subject Philosophy

 

DOI: 10.1111/b.9781405106795.2004.x

 Extract

 

Ancient greek philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science [Latin, from the Greek logoi spermatikoi , germinal principles or original factors] A notion employed by the Stoics, Neoplatonists , and Augustine It is usually translated as seminal reason or seminal virtue By this term Augustine meant the seeds, potential powers , or causes of the subsequent developments in the physical order after God ‘s creation . Change is simply the realization of what already exists virtually. These seeds were themselves created by God when he created the world. The view was intended to reconcile the tension between the belief that God created all things and the evident fact that new things are constantly developing, for according to this view, the development of every new thing is simply the unfolding of what has been in the world from the beginning. It is a metaphor, derived from the growth of a plant, which is the realization of the seed’s latencies. The concept was possibly influenced by Plato ‘s theory of recollection , according to which knowledge involves remembering what one already knew. This term was later developed by the Franciscans to oppose Aristotelian naturalism. “Augustine aptly termed rationes seminales all those active and passive powers that are the originative sources of the coming into being of natural things and of their changing.” Aquinas, … log in or subscribe to read full text

 Bibliographic Details

 

The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy

 

Edited by: NICHOLAS BUNNIN and JIYUAN YU
eISBN: 9781405106795
Print publication date: 2004

 Table of Contents

 

The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy

 

• rational self-interest,
• rational theology,
• rationalism
• rationality
• Hume
• rationes seminales
• ravens paradox,
• Rawls, John (1921–2002)
• ready-to-hand
• real definitios