This has not been a good year for the Discovery Institute. I'm sure book sales to their core creationist audience of Biblical literalists are steady. And, as Barbara Forrest has shown, they're hoping the Louisiana State Education Act, which is directly based on their own template for state public education policy, allows Fundamentalists in at least one state to disallow biology science textbooks that teach evolution.
But that's not the same thing as having one of your Institute Fellows get a paper published in Nature. Or Cell. Or Science. It's not the same thing as celebrating a grant from the NSF to pursue some promising research.
The Discovery Institute has from its beginning claimed it would in short order get actual scientists to consider intelligent design as a viable scientific theory, by publishing peer-reviewed articles in the leading science journals.
But they've failed. And no matter how much cheering the Institute Fellows get from friendly audiences at Bible schools and church socials, the reality is: this was not the way things were supposed to turn out.
And now, they're losing the Catholics.
This past year, prominent Catholic conservative intellectuals at once ID-friendly magazines and web sites, started to break their silence about the vapidity of intelligent design.
First, Edward Feser, professor of philosophy at Pasadena College, began posting a series of essays showing up the hollow philosophical shell at the heart of intelligent design. Feser's main point is that, at least for Catholics, ID is hopelessly devoid of solid metaphysical grounding:
The problems are twofold. First, both Paleyan "design arguments" and ID theory take for granted an essentially mechanistic conception of the natural world. What this means is that they deny the existence of the sort of immanent teleology or final causality affirmed by the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic tradition, and instead regard all teleology as imposed, "artificially" as it were, from outside.
Feser's posts are detailed, well-researched, and an excellent resource for any Christian parent confused by the contradictory claims of ID proponents.
Next, University of Delaware physicist Stephen M. Barr decided it was time to be frank: intelligent design, he wrote in First Things, has been a disaster:
What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the movement must be judged not only a failure, but a debacle.
There have, of course, been weak attempts by Discovery Institute flaks to claim Aquinas as an ally in support of their argument for design; indeed some claim that Aquinas' Fifth Argument is the classic argument for design. But this does not stand up to scrutiny, as philosopher-blogger Brandon Watson has pointed out:
The problem is that the Fifth Way is not actually a design argument. The phrase translated by 'designedly' here is actually ex intentione; but ex intentione does not signify design but orientation. The Fifth Way is actually an argument not from design but from the fact that there's any causation at all. On Aquinas's scholastic adaptation of Aristotle, the end or final cause is what selects the effect for the efficient cause -- in other words, it is what answers the question, "Why does this cause produce this effect rather than some other effect?" The disposition of the cause to the end is its intentio. The word is associated in the medieval imagination with archery: the aim of the arrow is its intentio. So the argument of the Fifth Way is roughly that because nonintelligent things act regularly in order to achieve an end, they must achieve their end not a casu, by chance, but ex intentione, by being disposed to it. But things not capable of determining their own ends have to be, in the end, disposed to them by things capable of determining ends, namely, intelligences. So what is supposed to be at stake in this argument is not design but any sort of causation that is not due to deliberate self-determination; what's being examined is the very possibility of bodies having effects at all. This is perfectly general; final causes are for Aquinas the explanation for the fact that efficient causation occurs at all.
The 13th century Dominican theologian would have been as puzzled by intelligent design proponents as today's Dominican biologists are.
Father Nicanor Austriaco, a biologist and Dominican who has his own lab at Providence College, published a paper in 2003 called In Defense of Double Agency in Evolution: A Response to Five Modern Critics (not available online, alas) in the Rome-based Catholic journal, Angelicum, showing just how comprehensively evolution can be accommodated in a true Catholic philosophical and theological tradition.
For Austriaco, the tradition is clear. "When double agency is cast within the classical framework of Western theism especially as it was articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas," he wrote, "it remains a coherent and fruitful theological explanation for divine action in an evolving world." No watchmaker in the sky is required in the simplistic sense that ID proponents insist is the only explanation standing ... between Christian children and certain atheism.
"When we talk about evolution," Austriaco told me in a recent interview, "most people think that to affirm that evolution is a contingent process, is to necessarily exclude divine providence." But this is simply not the case, he argues. "The irony about the intelligent design debate today, is that the intelligent design proponents, like the Darwinists, presuppose an opposition between chance and design. They necessitate an opposition between chance and design. If it's design, it cannot be chance. If it's chance, it cannot be design. There is no option -- and there are philosophical reasons why the moderns can't come up with this -- there is no option, no one thinks about the possibility of talking about God's design working through chance, through contingency."
Needless to say, Catholics like Fr. Austriaco, Professors Feser and Barr, are not the kind of Christians whose views are welcome at the Discovery Institute. [It goes without saying that Brown biology professor Kenneth Miller might as well be Public Enemy No. 1.]
So, all is not well in Seattle. For Christians who support solid science education, that's something to celebrate. The more the vapid arguments of the Discovery Institute are exposed, the smaller and smaller their audience will become.
Follow John Farrell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnWFarrell
Intelligent design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Explaining the Science of Intelligent Design
intelligent design - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com
"Intelligent Design" Not Accepted by Most Scientists | NCSE
Intelligent Design: Humans, Cockroaches, and the Laws of Physics
I'm surprised Catholics have any truck with Intelligent Design. Evolution is a Protestant problem whose roots are in the Reformation, when various sects that grew out of the Reformation, turned their backs on 1500 years of serious thought and discussion by Church philosophers and theologians. Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Armenian and others with long Christian traditions have always held that belief is based on a mix of the Bible, Tradition and the Magisterium (theologians and philosophers) of the Church. Even Augustine writing in 400AD thought of the Bible as an allegory.
So why are Catholics lending any credence to this debate, this is a Bible based Protestant issue. If they can't find an answer maybe its time to turn to the 1500 years of Council teachings, philosophers and writers they turned their back on.
No it won't. Those people don't understand or care about actual scientific reasoning. If they did, they never would ask for creationism to be included in a science class to begin with.
This sounds like ID.
Anyone can Google ' intelligent design court findings' and see for themselves.
It has been found to violate the establishment clause again and again, and the teaching and discussion of Evolution does not.
The scientific study of Evolution is valid science.
Creationism/ID is just bible study for public schools.
The genome is known to literally respond directly to the environment in one generation completely bypassing accidental mutations. Mutations are much too slow to be of any use at all.
Simply untrue. You have no clue of what you're talking about. The evidence is readily available online - but you won't investigate it. Or, you'll claim you have investigated it, and found it lacking. In any case, it's much more comfortable for yo to remain in your fantasy.
Thats the department that teaches evolutionary biology at the university of Illinois. Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary Biologist.
It's unemployment city for scientists who admit to being believers, or who question the party gentleman's agreements.
Where do you get such idiotic notions?
Its a fundamentalist Protestant issue.
Do you not see that these changes produced by "isolation" as each genitic pool changed/adapted is exactly what Evolution is. You admit these 'differances' that took place over a few hundred thousand yeas (much less according to some Religionist) .
Wouldn't these changes because of isolation and adaption to changing environments ,over billions of years , eventually sometimes lead to entirely new species ?.
Every being in this world is differant(AFAIK). No two beings produce an ofspring exactly like either parent.
Depending on the genetic make up of each isolated pool, and the natural selection of the surviving
life to adapt to it's changing ( differing) environment gives us the very 'differance' you talk about.
With Noah's sons you have described evolution though just a tiny nano secound of time/change in the grand scale of the Universe.
You seem to have taken hold of an attractive idea and now must shape or discount any new informantion to fit your preconcieved conclusion. Try this. Let the evidence lead you to an opinion, not vice verca.
Of course change if from combining genes and producing a offspring different from either parent .And different from all othe creatures. And over the eons when the changes/differences become great enough, we call them 'new species'.
We all share a 'Lucy' type being as an ancestor. Every being is different, change upon change over the centuries and here we are.
It is in plain sight for all to see. But you got to get your head out of "The Book".
The crux of the ID debate, which is underscored by this article, is that ID doesn't really make any positive arguments that would lead us to adopt a particular theory of how things came to be the way they are, other than by divine intervention. Divine intervention which of course does not have to follow the regularities that a scientific theory does so generates few testable predictions, requires divine agency rather than physical and potentially replicable processes (so is utterly useless to we humans, unless there are gods among us),
and ultimately provides little to no basis for discriminating between different (potentially ludicrous) cosmogonies. Divine intervention also provides no explanation for the origins of the divine - the standard to which it holds the physical world. Even if we got Daleri and others to agree that man came from monkey
all the way down to primordial soup, they would still have the origins of the universe, they would still maintain
that everything has to have a first cause, that the order in the universe requires an intelligent plan and design,
and that God is exempted from these requirements.
If you want to call God the measure of our ignorance perhaps I might agree with you, but most creationists have (ludicrous)
There is still no way for the genome to get new information. It can only corrupt or warp the information that it already has.
Big meat eating dinosaurs didn't do so well. Little furry ,burrowing warm blooded creatures survived. OR God loved little furry animals and was bored with Big Ugly ones.
That's what I said. Dawkins defers evolution to some other time and place. Bacteria is still not enough supposed accomplished evolution.
If (since) there is no bacteria on Mars, that should be a real wake-up call for you.
They like to send their students so they don't look so silly.
Intelligence does not come from having no intelligence.
I can't make it easier to understand than that.
"I understand more than all my teachers because I consider all of the testimonies that were left for me to see." (Paraphrased)
I did not make up any of the evidence. It was already there for me to observe.
That means there is a very knowledgeable Maker because working machine parts cannot design themselves, make themselves to work or order themselves by themselves.
Why exactly are we engaging in this "fun" little exercise?