And is contradicted by top fellow Ider
In his Feb. 7 New York Times column, discussed by me here, Michael Behe claims intelligent design is “not a religiously based idea.” He goes on to claim that “intelligent design itself says nothing about the religious concept of a creator.”
But in the book “Debating Design,” coedited by Michael Ruse and leading ID proponent and lecturer William Dembski, their introduction says:
”Intelligent Design is the hypothesis that in order to explain life it is necessary to suppose the action of an unevolved intelligence. One simply cannot explain organisms … by natural causes … or a consequence of evolution, such as an evolved extraterrestrial intelligence.” (Page 3, emphasis added.)
The coeditors do, it is true, go on to state:
”Although most supporters of Intelligent Design are theists, it is not necessarily the case that a commitment to Intelligent Design implies a commitment to a personal God or indeed to any God that would be acceptable to the world’s major religions.
This appears to let ID off the hook as religion, right?
Not quite, in my opinion, and it ties in with my contention that Ruse let Dembski off the hook here.
That statement above while theoretically acknowledging that some IDers might be nontheists of some undefined stripe, does not explicitly say that there are any agnostic or atheist IDers. Nor does it explicitly say that ID does not imply a commitment to any sort of traditional personal God, nontraditional personal God, impersonal God or Force, or any other “object of ultimate concern.”
No, unlike Michael Ruse, I’m not a PhD in philosophy, but nonetheless (without knowing the background of how this introduction was hammered out), here’s where I think he let Dembski off the hook.
First of all, he should have insisted on the language of the introduction being tightened up in the way I have suggested.
Second, he should have challenged Dembski to name names of atheist or agnostic IDers.
In any future debate, panel discussion, etc., I hope the Darwinian side does just that, given even the smallest opening to do so.
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