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Dr. Egnor Outs ID

By John Pieret

Science and religion don't address entirely separate aspects of human experience. There is one truth about the world. The truth about the natural world is obviously a part of metaphysical truth. Science addresses the truth about the natural world, and religion addresses the deeper metaphysical truth. There are no separate magesteria, despite Stephen J. Gould's spin. If God made the world, then intelligent design is true, assuming that the artifacts of His designing intelligence can be recognized as such. If there is no God, and the world just came to be, then Darwinism is true, because ID and Darwinism are just the affirmative and the negative answer to the same question: is there evidence for design in biology?

Well, so much for the business that ID says nothing about who the "Designer" is.

The effort to separate religion and science is disingenuous. All major scientific theories have religious implications, and all religious beliefs have implications for science. The court-imposed Darwinist monopoly on public education has had profound impact on religious belief and discourse in this country, and it is a major factor in the culture war. The effort by the NAS and many other Darwinists to separate religion and science and to advocate the compatibility between religion and Darwinism is to deny the profound religious motivation and consequences of their own largely atheist ideology ? an ideology that candid Darwinists/atheists, such as Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, Myers, and Moran, are delighted to proclaim. The faux-separation of science from its inherent religious origins and implications is an effort to mitigate the legal and public relations backlash against the obvious atheist proselytizing in our science classrooms.

Either our natural world is the product of intelligent agency, or it is not. And that's a scientific question. Using court-ordered censorship, Darwinists have succeeded in establishing a monopoly on instruction about biology and human origins in public schools. That instruction is inherently religious, because all scientific theories begin with religious (metaphysical) premises and draw religious (metaphysical) conclusions. Ideas have premises and consequences.

Of course there are a few people ... oh, the Pope comes to mind ... who might dispute the notion that evolution is incompatible with faith or that the proposition that you can catch God in a net of science's making is anything other than "poor theology and poor science." But more importantly, Egnor is proclaiming that all major scientific theories are religious in nature and, therefore, are incapable of being taught in public schools. Or maybe he is just adding Constitution-denial to his science-denial.

Once on a roll, he cannot seem to stop himself:

Scientific understanding is based on metaphysical understanding, which is religion. Science and religion are indispensable to one another. The question is whether practitioners of science and religion, which describes all of us to a greater or lesser extent, are honest about the religious foundations and implications of our scientific opinions.

Now it's not just "all major scientific theories" that are religious, it is the very enterprise of science itself. It is interesting to contemplate a Church of Science with Egnor as high priest.

Obviously it matters whether or not God exists, and whether or not He created the universe and man. It matters theologically, it matters philosophically, it matters historically, it matters ethically, it matters politically, and it matters scientifically. It matters scientifically because science is the search for truth about the natural world, and if it was designed by an intelligent agent, that's the truth about it, and it's a scientific truth, and it matters.

But, as we all know, because the discovery Institute told us so, ID has nothing at all to do with religion, it's all about the science ...

It's just that science and religion are the same thing.

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P.S. I'm keeping a copy of this webpage and I suggest everyone else does too. You know, just in case a memory hole should open up unexpectedly in the vicinity.
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Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on February 12, 2009 (boomark / email).