Original article [Note: This is an account of the ferry conference that Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Project organized and put on July 1. Unfortunately, the Cascadia Project is not mentioned here, but the group that it launched, the Puget Sound Passenger Ferry Coalition, is.] SEATTLE — With her eyes cast back in a memory and her voice tipped with nostalgia, Gig Read More ›
The votes are not all tallied from the Nov. 5, 2002, elections – an historic milestone since, not since President Teddy Roosevelt has a Republican President gained seats in both the Senate and House in an off-year election. And there are vastly different ideas about whether the lame-duck session of Congress will feature a shift to the Republicans in the Read More ›
Would you prefer a United States where the typical family income was $100,000 per year but the top 5 percent averaged $500,000 a year or five times the typical family, or a United States where the typical family income was $30,000 a year but the top 5 percent averaged only $60,000 or twice that of the typical family? Your answer Read More ›
Original We tend to consider speculation about extraterrestrials to be a recent phenomenon, a task forced on us by the scientific knowledge weve gained during the last century. Its rather surprising, perhaps, to find out that the debate about whether there is extraterrestrial life stretches back just shy of two and a half millennia. Given the antiquity of the question, Read More ›
Original article [Note: This is an account of the ferry conference that Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Project organized and put on July 1. Unfortunately, the Cascadia Project is not mentioned here, but the group that it launched, the Puget Sound Passenger Ferry Coalition, is.] SEATTLE — With her eyes cast back in a memory and her voice tipped with nostalgia, Gig Read More ›
Regardless of how Tuesday’s election comes out, this region and state must have a long-term transportation strategy based on new investment. Past years of neglect of roads and transit are going to grind down economic recovery and everyone’s quality of life unless major, sustained efforts are made to catch up. The outcomes of Referendum 51, Initiative 776 and the Seattle Read More ›
Original article Don Sorenson was one of hundreds of drivers inching toward the Edmonds ferry terminal hoping to catch the 4:30 p.m. boat to Kingston. But when the ferry filled up, the line came to a halt, and Sorenson settled in to bake in the sunshine in his pickup to wait second in line for the next boat. Having driven Read More ›
You are walking along a beach, a strange bottle washes up, you open it, and out pops an economic genie. The genie says, “If you give me $100, I will guarantee that the American economy will grow at 6 percent a year (roughly double the rate of the last 30 years), we will have full employment and no inflation, and Read More ›
AMERICANS LOVE ANIMALS. We coo over and coddle our cats and dogs as if they were children. We paste “Save the Whales” bumper stickers on our cars. We groan in empathetic sadness if a squirrel darts into the road in front of a car. We flock to national parks to catch fleeting glimpses of bears, elk, and antelope. We anthropomorphize Read More ›
Keynote address delivered at RAPID Conference (Research and Progress in Intelligent Design), Biola University, La Mirada, California, 25 October 2002. The aim of this conference was to examine the current state of intelligent design research.
Recently I asked a well-known ID sympathizer what shape he thought the ID movement was in. I raised the question because, after some initial enthusiasm on his part three years ago, his interest seemed to have flagged. Here is what he wrote:
An enormous amount of energy has been expended on “proving” that ID is bogus, “stealth creationism,” “not science,” and so on. Much of this, ironically, violates the spirit of science. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. But on the other side, too much stuff from the ID camp is repetitive, imprecise and immodest in its claims, and otherwise very unsatisfactory. The “debate” is mostly going around in circles. The real work needs to go forward. There is a tremendous ferment right now in the “evo/devo” field, for instance. Some bright postdocs sympathetic to ID (and yes, I know how hard a time they would have institutionally at many places) should plunge right into the thick of that. Maybe they are at this very moment: I hope so!
Every now and again we need to take a good, hard look in the mirror. The aim of this talk is to help us do just that. Intelligent design has made tremendous inroads into the culture at large. Front page stories featuring our work have appeared in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, and so on. Television, radio, and weeklies like Time Magazine are focusing the spotlight on us as well. This publicity is at once useful and seductive. It useful because it helps get the word out and attract talent to the movement. It is seductive because it can deceive us into thinking that we have accomplished more than we actually have.
Two animating principles drive intelligent design. The more popular by far takes intelligent design as a tool for liberation from ideologies that suffocate the human spirit, such as reductionism and materialism. The other animating principle, less popular but intellectually more compelling, takes intelligent design as the key to opening up fresh insights into nature. The first of these animating principles is purely instrumental — it treats intelligent design as a tool for attaining some other end (like defeating materialism). Presumably if other tools could more effectively accomplish that end, intelligent design would be abandoned. The second of these animating principles, by contrast, is intrinsic — it treats intelligent design as an essential good, an end in itself worthy to be pursued because of the insights it provides into nature.
These animating principles can work side by side, and there is no inherent conflict between them. Nonetheless, there is a clear order of priority. Unless intelligent design is an intrinsic good — unless it can be developed as a scientific research program and provide sound insights into the natural world — then its use as an instrumental good for defeating ideologies that suffocate the human spirit becomes insupportable. Intelligent design must not become a “noble lie” for vanquishing views we find unacceptable (history is full of noble lies that ended in disgrace). Rather, intelligent design needs to convince us of its truth on its scientific merits. Then, because it is true and known to be true, it can become an instrument for liberation from suffocating ideologies — ideologies that suffocate not because they tell us the grim truth about ourselves but because they are at once grim and false (Freud’s psychic determinism is a case in point)….
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