You may or may not have heard, but Ben Stein the lawyer, writer, playwright, comedian has produced and launched a movie/documentary that is looking fantastic titled, “Expelled – No intelligence allowed.”   The famous teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off , has pulled out a whammy that will wake up the Western World to the reality of the evolutionary science white tower suppression against more valid creationist theories and facts.
The truth of God’s creation cries out to us through every facet of nature and discovery, and yet those scientists, mathematicians, physicists, etc. that postulate and believe in devine creation and intelligent design are being pressured, suppressed, ridiculed, excluded and fired from places that give them a voice.Â
It seems that any entrenched oligarchy that feels threatened by a more valid and evident theory reacts swiftly to protect its existence and funding. This has been going on since the so called “Scopes Monkey-trials” that preported to kill the idea of an intelligent Designer, and which was bolstered largely by the media. Now it seems that the tide has come full- circle! The suppression has been coming from the evolution-side since the 60’s and now a law-trained media-type who believes in God is using a movie medium to kick the goads the other way!!
I for one am pumped, stoked, and so glad to see a little glimmer of light in what has been a dark time in science. It is time for the clay to stop telling the Potter He doesn’t exist!
The problem with “Intelligent Design” is not that it is facing an “oligarchy”. The problem with “Intelligent Design” is that it is not science. This is most evident in the fact that ID proponents sought to convince a Kansas school board to redefine the very meaning of science because “Intelligent Design” does not qualify using the actual definition of the term.
Moreover, your use of the phrase “divine creation” and the concept of “God” illustrates another problem with the “ID” movement: its own backers don’t actually understand what it is.
Intelligent Design as defined by Michael Behe — who is the man who coined the term and essentially started the movement — postulates that all extant biodiversity emerged from common ancestry; that is, everything that exists today can be traced as decending from a single parent species, if not a single parent organism. It states quite clearly that the primary mechanism of this emergence was the process of evolution; that organisms changed over generations due to copying errors and genetic sharing combined with environmental pressures selecting certain genetic features over others by way of giving those features greater reproductive success. Behe then states that some genetic changes, that some physiological structures, cannot be explained by this mechanism of evolution, and postulates that a “designer” of unknown origin, nature and motive “designed” these particular physiological traits using some unknown implementation process.
That’s it. There’s no appeal to the “divine” in Intelligent Design as it was originally conceived. Behe even stated under oath that the “designer” may well be dead by now. Despite that, a large number of ID proponents somehow think that it’s all about a divine creator, and quite often the specific creator deity that they believe exists. There are two possible reasons for this.
The first is that ID proponents don’t do any actual research, even of the cause that they themselves advocate. In this case, they carry no credibility on any subject.
The second is that ID itself has no concrete definition, and that it can mean whatever the hell anyone wants it to mean. In this case, it has no business in any serious discussion, because you cannot honestly evaluate a subject whose very definition is subject to the whim of whomever is presenting it.
Finally, if “ID” is in fact a study of the divine, then it cannot be science. Science is the study of the natural universe. It can only address natural events and causes. Divine events or causes are outside of the natural, and thus outside of the realm of scientific inquiry. Studying them is fine, but such a study is not science, and claiming that such a study is scientific is dishonest.
Hi Dimensio!
Thank-you for posting. Sorry for the delay in my response it seems many other things in life surround me limiting my time on the internet especially outside of work.
At any rate, in response to your comments I would like to make it very clear that I am a Creationist from the get go. I believe specifically that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob created the world and the universe we see by His word. And His creative power is not only displayed throughout the universe, it is also in us. This creativity comes out in everything we do, even in our analysis of the world around us and in our own postulations as to how that world got here.
So in short when I speak of Intelligent Design, I mean just what it sounds like, that an Intelligent being designed the universe from the atom to the apple.
I was not aware that Michael Behe defined Intelligent Design, but rather “irreducible complexity” which is often used by IDists to show why an Intelligent Designer is a more valid hypothesis than random chance with natural selection.
As to the argument over the validity of creation as a part of science, I believe that the argument is moot because all our scientific analysis is affected by our origin presuppositions. In reality, all we have is the present we do not have the past or the future in science, but our analysis of the present is greatly affected by our understanding of the past and the future.
For example, we unearth a fossilized dinosaur in Alberta and neither the creationist nor the evolutionist disagrees that it must have existed in history. But the creationist looks to see where the animal lived, when it lived and how it died and marvels at God’s creative work with devine creation in mind, a known timeline of creation, and a knowledge of the worldwide flood that covered the earth and fossilized millions of creatures. The evolutionist on the other hand looks at the life, timeline, and death through completely different evolutionary spectacles of a long timeline, no worldwide flood though there may have been some disaster, and a view to where it must have fit into the evolutionary tree of life.
Which is more scientific?
Drawing on my original statement that a Creator created us and we are therefore creative, means that we must always subject our creativity to the plumb line of the Creator. He is our compass, our lighthouse, our guiding star. Without the reference point our creativity takes us into udder confusion, we get lost in a sea of our own inacurracy and misunderstanding and can no longer be truthful in any of our analysis because we are blind fully and completely.
ID is not a study of the Devine, but an analysis of the “created” from basic building blocks to the complexity of the cell to the vastness of the universe.
The medium is the message don’t you know, and God has written Himself everywhere!
Hmm… I read blogs on a similar topic, but i never visited your blog. I added it to favorites and i’ll be your constant reader.