Kenneth Miller, Intelligent Design, Constitution Twisting and then maybe some science Part 1.

Kenneth Miller on the Collapse of Intelligent Design

He's showing [24:00] how the Kansas Board of Education rejected naturalistic definitions of science. Obviously they want to preserve the supernatural component. But it seems to me they are misjudging the problem here and making their own situation harder. The problem with evolution is that it doesn't STICK to naturalistic assumptions and methods, although it happily embraces the concept as if it applied to evolution theory. But that's an illusion. Evolution theory relies on imaginative speculative homological/analogical and other nonscientific methods which it mistakes for evidence. We should ALL stick to the naturalistic ground rules and we should insist on identifying every deviation from them, because evolution doesn't hold up on that basis. We should keep hammering away at this fact. So the school board's attacking naturalism unfortunately undercuts their own strength and adds credence to the illusion that evolution is supported by tons of evidence from naturalistic science.

By the way, I'm not a follower of Intelligent Design, I'm a Biblical Creationist who takes Genesis literally, but ID's proposition that design implies a designer is indisputably true, it seems to me, axiomatic, and there's nothing about that definition that goes outside naturalistic assumptions: Look at nature, recognize design, conclude it must have a designer. We don't have to get into the nature OF the designer at that point. Likewise I appreciate their formulation of Irreducible Complexity as evidence against incremental evolution of complex living systems such as the flagellum-propelled bacterium. Evolutionists of course knock themselves out answering these claims and assert with a great deal of heat and elaborate cogitation how it's wrong wrong wrong and wrong again, but WATCH HOW THEY DO IT, watch carefully, learn not to take their reasoning as uncritically as people do. It's all smoke and mirrors. It's all speculative hypothetical imaginative reasoning about how it COULDAMAYBEPOSSIBLY happened by natural selection, with very little that even comes close to being ACTUAL EVIDENCE.

But Miller's next topic is what I want to think about now.

However, I am still reeling from Miller's reminder that the verdict in Kansas was that Intelligent Design is "Unconstitutional." This is nuts but I'm going to have to take up the political side of all this at some other time. Well, maybe I should give a hint here:

I'm not for creationists trying to change the public schools, because it's a huge hassle that only makes for hostility between separate parts of the community and this is not going to go away as long as evolution is as entrenched as it is. I do believe that IDers and creationists are acting on their rights under the First Amendment and that these very rights are denied by such a verdict as came down against ID in Kansas, which was a classic case of government prohibiting the free exercise of religion which the First Amendment specifically disallows, and interfering with their citizen rights to have a say in their community. Citizen concerns unconstitutional indeed! It's the citizens the Bill of Rights were meant to protect from government but they're knocking themselves out these days protecting government from the citizens, things are that upside down.

BUT this particular conflict has many tentacles, and one of them is the whole question of whether we should have public education in the first place. There's some good thinking on this going back to the 19th century I should dig up whenever I get around to this discussion, but the gist is that you can't have uniform education for both believers and unbelievers -- the unbelievers will always win and the right of believing parents to instruct their own children will be taken out of their hands. A scriptural expression of this is the command not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers (I Cor. 6:14).

So what we need is for Christians to remove their children completely from the public schools and find other methods of education. This should be Number One Priority, with committed energetic focus on inventing ways this can be done with minimal problems, and no compromising. Leave the public schools to the evolutionists and take pains to give Christian children a much higher level of education than the public schools can give anyway. Christianity was the inspiration for universal education in the first place, so we need to get back to that concept. Ultimately the unbelievers should benefit from whatever solutions we come up with too.

Anyway, NOW I want to get to Kenneth Miller's next topic, how the number of chromosomes in the ape and human genomes shows we're related.

Next post.