Comment

Melanie Phillips Takes a Wrong Turn on 'Intelligent Design' Creationism

950
FoundingFather5/04/2009 1:54:19 pm PDT

As for her claim that intelligent design is not based on religion, this is incredibly easy to refute. All we have to do is read the very words of the people who promote ID, starting with the man considered the father of the movement, Phillip E. Johnson:

This [the intelligent design movement] isnt really, and never has been, a debate about science, its about religion and philosophy.

OK, then in that case Darwinism is all about atheism:

Richard Lewontin’s January 9, 1997 article, Billions and Billions of
Demons <;, which is a review of
Carl Sagans book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the
Dark contains the oft-quoted line about not allowing a Divine Foot in
the door. The entire paragraph in which this line appears is worth
quoting. It seems to me to be the best statement of the philosophical
foundation for the Darwinian fundamentalist perspective:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common
sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between
science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite
of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its
failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and
life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for
unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment,
a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and
institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material
explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we
are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create
an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce
material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter
how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is
absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent
Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in
God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is
to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be
ruptured, that miracles may happen.