Religion & Law

Kidding Who?

By John Pieret

In the Food for the Soul blog at The Christian Post, described as "A blog about books, news and other forms of Christian media matter important to the faith community," one Randal Rauser, associate professor of historical theology at Taylor Seminary, complains about "How intelligent design is misrepresented by its friends."

Specifically, he kvetches that Expelled, after making the point through Paul Nelson (a young-Earth creationist) that "Intelligent design is a minimal commitment scientifically to the possibility of detecting intelligent causation," then goes on to undermine the point in ways he will explain in his next post. But this is what he says about what ID should be thought to be:

[S]ince the sole commitment in ID is to the detection of intelligent causation, you could be an atheist and an ID theorist; it matters not one whit to the theory whether that intelligence is divine.

The importance of this point cannot be overstated because once you realize that ID is a minimalistic claim which is unconnected to any explicitly religious doctrine, you can begin to see that ID might well belong in the science classroom (and even more importantly, in the science lab).

ID requires a designer who can visualise all possible combinations of chemistry over billions of years. If that isn't a supernatural designer, I'll eat my epistemological hat!

Full post as published by Thoughts in a Haystack on June 10, 2009 (boomark / email).