Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

However, I do suggest that you spend some time reading about the history of ID before you try to convince folks what its NOT. (It kinda makes you look really ignorant)

Yeah, I happen to believe there is a God. But I haven't used that as an argument. YOU are the one bringing that up.

I don't give a damn about that history, I haven't studied it nor am I interested in doing so.

Ive probably posted this several tims before but these are some new "debators" who claim that ID has nothing to do with religion. This is S. Jay Goulds 1994 review of Philip Johnsons DARWIN ON TRIAL.

Although the word has its legitimate uses, you will not find me speaking of design, simply because — as I’ve made abundantly clear in previous articles — organisms cannot be understood as having been designed, machine-like, whether by an engineer-God or a Blind Watchmaker elevated to god-like status. If organisms participate in a higher life, it is a participation that works from within — at a deep level the ancients recognized as that of the logos informing all things. It is a sharing of the springs of life and being, not a mere receptivity to some sort of external mechanical tinkering modeled anthropocentrically on human engineering.

...as long as word using humans are around !

Phillip Johnson, I should explain, is the scourge of the Darwinians. Trained as a lawyer, he has taken on evolution and its acolytes with true nineteenth-century vigour. His Darwin on Trial has the old man tried, convicted, and led away in chains well before you reach the bibliography. If Thomas Henry Huxley was Darwin's bulldog, then Johnson is Creationism's terrier - always snarling at the heels and regarding kicks and curses as friendly invitations to further combat.

Michael Ruse, I should also explain, is the Darwinian's Darwinian. I see adaptation everywhere and natural selection is its only cause. I look upon Richard Dawkins as a bit of a wimp, especially when turning to humans he starts spouting silly nonsense about memes and such things. Give me a good honest selfish gene and a struggle for existence any day.

Like many of my generation, I grew up thinking that science is the way, the truth, and the life - and Karl Popper is its prophet, to mix up metaphors. I thought that there is a real world out there, that science's job is to map this world, and by george it does a pretty good job at it. Then in the 1960s, along came Thomas Kuhn with his Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and nothing was ever quite as simple after. The main thing that Kuhn did for me, as he did for others, was to send me scurrying to the real science and its history. As one who was already interested in the conceptual nature of biology, that meant going to Darwin and the Origin of Species, and the rest (as they say) really is history.

Or at least, for me it is history being used to try to understand the nature of science - past, present, and future...But here and now let me share with you my discovery.. that evolution from its birth two and a half centuries ago has been a vehicle for social and cultural and religious values, as much as (and often a great deal more than) it has been a straight objective scientific theory. Now I am not saying that it never can be such a theory - more on this at a later time - but I am saying that it very often has not been such a theory. Secular philosophy or religion would be a better description.

As you will know, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has an annual meeting with public symposia, and several years ago (early 1990s) I was invited to participate in a symposium on Creationism and the threat to evolution. Coming at the end of a three-hour symposium, nursing a hangover from a night spent well but not wisely, listening to one after another of my evolutionism friends declaim the iniquities of Creationism and the pure virtues of evolution, something within me snapped.

To the horror of Eugenie Scott (of the National Center for Science Education) who had organized the session, instead of joining in the hymn of praise I switched sides somewhat and I castigated us evolutionists for our hypocrisy. I pointed out that religious though the Creationists undoubtedly are, anyone who thinks that evolutionists are not likewise religious -- and right in the middle of their evolutionism -- is very naïve, or self-deceiving, or dishonest indeed.


Now let me say that, large though my ego may be, I am never too proud to take instruction and advice from any source and any quarter. One's critics are far more use to an intellectual than one's friends. What I need, what we all need, is opposition not agreement. One of the wisest things that my father ever said to me was that the person in the majority was the person in the wrong, so if it was indeed the influence of Phil Johnson - who argues with every breath that Darwinism is not true science but a secular religion - who finally pushed me over the edge when I found myself on a panel with one contributor after another preaching the virtues of Darwinism, then let me be the first to thank him publicly and openly.

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.” (Nietzsche)

So is evolution nothing but a religion, existing simply to match Michael Ruse and Phillip Johnson in an unending battle to the end? A lot of people are pretty cross with me for (as they see it) traitorously letting down the side. [They say that] I of all people - someone who stood up for evolution as an ACLU witness at the Creationism trial in Arkansas in 1981 - should know that the Phillip Johnsons are out there, like sharks circling, looking for traces of blood and ready to pounce. Whatever I may think privately about evolution, I should keep my thoughts to myself. Some of the reviews of Monad to Man have been really quite hostile.

My own feelings are quite otherwise. I do not think evolution is simply secular religion. I think it is a wonderful, wonderful theory, and I shall be telling you why. But unless we who love science are prepared to be as critical as are our enemies about our science, then in the end we are no better than they. Popper may not always have been right about science, but he was right that one must always be prepared to put to the test the most cherished and dearly held of thoughts and beliefs. The day we cease to do that will be a sad day for both science and religion.