Perhaps the most galling thing about proponents of intelligent design is that they're liars. In his decision in the Dover case, Judge John E. Jones detailed at length how the ID pushers on the school board lied repeatedly under oath about their intentions, for example, as I detailed in my last posting.
But this doesn't just represent a personal failing of a few people; rather, this kind of intellectual dishonesty is at the heart of ID. Take for example William Dembski, the author of several books on ID and one of the foremost ID pimps. In his blog entry regarding the possible (and now realized) outcomes of the Dover case and their significance, he wrote:
Unfortunately, members of the Dover school board have, through their actions, conflated ID with an apparent religious agenda. For instance, it doesn’t help the ID side that William Buckingham, then a member of the Dover school board, in trying to get the Dover policy adopted, remarked: “Two thousand years ago somebody died on the cross, can’t somebody stand up for him?”
So they "conflated ID with an apparent religious agenda"--obviously a serious error, in Dembski's view. But the error certainly wasn't based on the fact that the conflation was false, as Dembski's own writings make clear. For example, one of Dembski's books is Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology (wait--"theology"? I thought ID proponents were supposed to avoid conflating ID with a religious agenda). The first chapter of the book is entitled "Recognizing the Divine Finger," and deals extensively with how we would recognize the actions of God (Dembski's capital, not mine) in the world. Later in the book Dembski states that "Christ is never an addendum to a scientific theory, but always a completion" and "the conceptual soundness of a scientific theory cannot be maintained apart from Christ."
Dembski is a fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, whose Wedge Strategy states: "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." It goes on to say that one of the governing goals of the ID movement is "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God." And Dembski has openly written that "intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration."
Oops...it sure looks to me like he may have conflated ID with an apparent religious agenda. Or in other words, he admitted openly that ID's purpose is to advance a religious agenda. It's frankly a little baffling that someone who has so clearly associated ID with religion should also take the position that it's a mistake to associate ID with religion, but this only points out the deep and inherent intellectual dishonesty of the ID movement. Their goal is to advance a religious agenda by replacing actual science with theology disguised as science, but to achieve that goal (in the United States, anyway, with its inconvenient Establishment clause) they have to dissemble about their true intentions. And so a movement that's fundamentally predicated on lies wants to position itself as a source of scientific truth.
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