Friday, June 13, 2008

William Demsbki and long-term memory.

William Dembski, one of the chief proponents of intelligent design, seems to have a surprisingly poor memory. In a post from his blog he talks about how the proponents of theistic evolution are attacking intelligent design. (Theistic evolution is the idea that evolution occurred as scientists describe it but that there is some overarching deity who set things in motion in an essentially non-testable way. In TE the deity is often credited with adding souls into humans) Dembski as well as the commentators at his heavily censored blog seem to be under the impression that this was some sort of attack launched with no provocation by the TE proponents against innocent ID. Dembski seems to forget that as early as 1995 he said "Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution." And that isn't his only comment of that sort. For example, Dembski has also said ""As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is American evangelicalism's ill-conceived accommodation to Darwinism." (I'm not going to bother addressing the issue that the prominent proponents of TE are generally Jews and Catholics more than evangelicals).

Oh, and while I'm at it: it isn't that complicated why proponents of TE think that ID is undermining Christianity (one of the things you complain about in your post) I'm not even going to bother trying to have fun with the massive hypocrisy based on the many comments by you and other ID-proponents complaining that evolution undermines good ol' Christian, American values. TE proponents think it undermines Christian values because they think ID involves lying. You know, that whole don't bear false witness thing that the ID proponents ignored at the Dover trial and elsewhere? Furthermore, ID like its close creationist cousins forces people to make a choice between science and religion. Understandably that gets TEists upset.

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