Thinking Christian

In between welding a support structure for a class project and not doing my Calculus homework, I stumbled upon a website this morning: Thinking Christian.

My first glance at the posts tells me these people are still having difficulty understanding Intelligent Design. It’s 2009, guys. 2005′s Kitzmiller v. Dover is over.

Let me help them out:

Intelligent Design postulates that life is too complex to have evolved. Using some pseudo scientific terms, it tries to “prove” this:

Irreducible Complexity – The idea that there are some parts of life that are too complex to have evolved, that removing one part would make the whole thing inoperable. Their star child, the flagella, was violently refuted in the Dover case. Doesn’t work.

Besides that, all the ID movement consists of are negative arguments against Evolution. That’s it. They have no active research. They have no “new” ideas. All they do is try to refute Evolution. Since very few of the ID people have actual degrees that are even relevant to Evolution, they get ridiculed all the time.

Then, they claim this ridicule is controversy, demanding that it be, “taught to the children”.

But at this Thinking Christian website, the posts and comments go on and on and on about, “Oh well you are defining ID too much, it needs to be less defined, oh but not like that, well, see you are just assigning something that’s not really there…” and so forth to the point where my head explodes.

Take a look at this:

But this is a continuation of a previous post on the communication question, and whether “creationism” appended to “ID” helps us understand what ID really is. I argued that it confuses communication rather than clarifying it, because of ambiguities and contradictions between different versions of creationism (defined in that post) and ID (belatedly defined here). There is no denying those discrepancies, and I closed that last post by saying it’s an open-and-shut case against those who would carelessly tag ID as creationism.

Ha! A-hahahahaha! He really doesn’t get it. Apparently trials don’t matter when your side doesn’t win.

ID is creationism. But it’s not exactly creationism. No, that’s banninated from public schools. So, in order to get creationism in, they re-brand it as something that sounds scientific. Thus, Intelligent Design.

Of course they aren’t the exact same thing. But it’s a wedge. Speaking of wedges, do they not realize that this whole creationism is ID idea came from the Discovery Institute:

The wedge strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document,^[1] which describes a broad social, political, and academic agenda whose ultimate goal is to “defeat [scientific] materialism” represented by evolution, “reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”^[2] and to “affirm the reality of God.”^[3] Its goal is to “renew” American culture by shaping public policy to reflect conservative Christian, namely evangelical Protestant, values.^[4]

[...]

The Wedge strategy forms the governing basis of a wide range of Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns.

Wikipedia

The only reason they are even talking about ID is because of the Discovery Institute, so I see no reason why not to get our definition from the horse’s mouth. Conveniently, they also have all the evidence I need against them as well. That’s a real open and shut case.

The people on that site can babble on and on all they like. The bottom line is this:

Intelligent Design = Irreducible Complexity (false) = Must Be A Creator (false)

That’s the basis of any definition of ID that I’ve seen. It’s also the core of what’s ridiculed in the Dover case.