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)….
Read More ›Original article A new wave in foot ferry leadership, the Puget Sound Passenger Ferry Coalition, will make its official debut on Tuesday at a conference aboard the Royal Argosy at Pier 66 in Seattle. The coalition is a loose, unofficial group of lawmakers, transit leaders and private business, a veritable who’s who in the local world of maritime transportation. While Read More ›
With deflation under control, the case for a U.S. economic comeback gets stronger every day. But the conventional wisdom is that two of our most important and hardest hit sectors, technology and telecom, have so much capacity and so little confidence that it will be many years before they return to health. Telecom investment is down 75% since 2000, there Read More ›
During the past decade, SUVs seemed to take over the roads. Average incomes rose. The price of gas remained relatively low. And yet, despite all that, per-capita gasoline consumption in Washington actually dropped 2 percent, according to a new report from the Seattle think tank Northwest Environment Watch. The report attributes the decline mostly to “smart-growth” policies aimed at reining Read More ›
In his paper “The Design Argument,” Elliott Sober predicts that “human beings will eventually build organisms from nonliving materials.”[1] In that case, we could obtain clear evidence that certain organisms resulted from intelligent design whereas earlier we might have thought they were due to a Darwinian process. I consider a similar possibility in chapter 6 of No Free Lunch. Such Read More ›
Discovery Institute’s immediate past board chairman, John Miller, will be a guest Tuesday, July 1, on the Fox News Channel’s top-rated “O’Reilly Factor,” hosted by television firebrand Bill O’Reilly. Miller left his post with Discovery early this year after his appointment to direct the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the State Department. He was a leading Read More ›
First the prequel: In the immediate aftermath of the passing of China’s revolutionary leaders, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, a claque of left-wing hardliners known as the “Gang of Four” sponsored by Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, launched an effort to block pro-market reforms. They did not succeed, and China began a long, robust economic expansion. America’s has its own “Telecom Read More ›
When President Bush selected bioethicist and author Leon R. Kass to head the President’s Council on Bioethics, many were outraged. Kass, a critic of human cloning, was accused of being a Luddite who would use his position to stack the council deck against “scientific progress.” But that is not how Kass viewed his mandate. He envisioned that the council would Read More ›
Original article Maritime, transit and government leaders plan to hold a daylong floating forum July 1 to launch a coalition that will help create a network of passenger-only ferries plying Western Washington waters. A key theme will be how to create private/public partnerships that can make future passenger-only ferries financially viable. Private operators here contend they can’t operate regular passenger Read More ›