Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Getting Intelligent Design Straight

I finished a draft of the chapter on Last Days Delusions, but true to form, I just have to start another chapter before cleaning the last one up. I love multi-tasking, hence the way I read 5 books at a time and write the same way. I was having a conversation with my father--a kind of ID-controversy guru--and asked him about Michael Behe (a leading ID proponent) and some of the things he said in his newest book, The Edge of Evolution. Behe is roundly attacked by staunch evolutionists, but guess what? What I suspected is true. He is officially a theistic evolutionist! Not of the Darwinian variety, of course, since that is what ID theorists critique--and in my mind, rightly so. Nevertheless, I found an interview of him on the Internet (during my conversation--I just love how quickly we can find stuff these days), and he said common design is not as good as an explanation of common descent as an evolutionary model is. He's not a Darwinist, but he still believes in evolution! What's the difference? I explain that in the chapter in my book. Point is that most of his ID colleagues disagree with him. You can be an ID theorist and still be an evolutionist (for that matter, you can be agnostic too, like David Berlinski). The media doesn't get it.

So, why don't all the other theistic evolutionists (Ken Miller, Brown U., Francis Collins, Head of Genome Project) applaud people like Behe? It appears it's not evolution per se, that is the god of science, but Darwinism. I will explore this later.