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June 24, 2005
Thou Shall Not Take The Name Of Intelligent Design In Vain
According to John West, Utah State Senator D. Chris Buttars has "hijacked" the word "design" as in "Intelligent Design" and turned it into, of all things, creationism by calling it "Divine Design" and wanting it to be part of Utah school's science curriculum. Holy baloney, Buttars dared to call it by its true name! He broke the eleventh commandment, "Thou shall not take the name of Intelligent Design in vain." Here, in part, is what West says on the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture website.
While it's frustrating when critics of intelligent design mischaracterize what ID is about, it's even worse when people billing themselves as friends of ID do the same thing. As the term "intelligent design" has increasingly entered the public discourse, the number of people misusing the term to advance their own agendas by calling it "design" has increased. Take the recent proposal by a Utah legislator for something he calls "divine design," by which he clearly seems to mean creationism.
Ed Brayton, on his own website, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, on The Panda's Thumb, and on In the Agora gives a list of Intelligent Design advocates' statements that may have led Senator Buttars to make the all too reasonable connection between Intelligent Design and Divine Design. As Ed points out, the Wedge document which outlines the goals and methods of John West's institution says the following,
Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature. [emphasis added]
In fact, the Wedge document opens with these words,
The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences.
And it gives the governing goals for the Institute as follows,
- To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
- To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
There is no doubt that the current efforts of the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture remains true to these goals. Just read the various statements from the likes of William Dembski, Nancy Pearsey or Phillip Johnson quoted by Ed. The Horse's Mouth provides an still larger set of evidence, with good documentation, for the true goals and motives of those who now want to claim that they are only pursuing scientific objectives.
West makes the following cynical criticism of Sen. Buttars,
If this legislator wants to promote creationism, he should say so plainly.
But John West, PhD in Government from Claremont Graduate University and B.A. in Communications from the University of Washington, works for an Institute whose founding goals include, I repeat,
To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.
Dr. West needs to spend more time worrying about the integrity of his institution and less time being frustrated about creationists hijacking creationism to advance creationism.
Posted by Duane Smith at June 24, 2005 7:29 PM | Read more on Evolution |
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