Perhaps a hypothetical example will help illustrate why many people see ID in these terms.
Imagine there was an organization whose stated purpose was to advance religiously neutral “design” arguments. This organization claimed that their scientists were simply making scientific claims about design in nature, and were not trying to advocate for a specific deity behind that design. However, with only one exception, every single scientist in this organization was a devout Muslim. And many of these Muslim scientists would frequently appear alongside Muslim apologists on public stages, videos, books, and other materials. Not only that, but the main online publication of this organization would frequently feature discussions on Islamic theology and Quranic interpretation.
Would it be reasonable to conclude that the position of this organization really had nothing to do with advancing the Muslim faith?
My objection is to the claim that the only reason people have for believing in ID is religious apologetics. It may turn out that one of their reasons for believing ID is the advantage of religious apologetics. But then we have a different set of circumstances.
The Christians who believe in ID-without-the-desire-for-Religious-Apologetics are pretty much those who support BioLogos.
They believe God is involved in the outcome of Creation because God is the creator. They aren’t just trying to convince Evolutionists to abandon Evolution.
@Bilbo Can I ask you if you have ever wanted to know this ID? Does this awe inspiring creation that points to a creator, also give you a yearning to want to know that creator? Do you believe this creator wants to know you or has any interaction with it’s creation since the creation? Or did this creator just create the universe, and let it go without any personal interaction with it?
This is how I pretty much began my personal journey that lead me to my current faith in God.
I disagree with that. I think it is pretty clear that the founder of BioLogos saw a great divide between his beloved religion (Christianity) and his belioved science, that he wanted to educate those that both can be reconciled. Meaning the purpose of BioLogos was to reconcile ID with religious apologetics. But it is not to discount religious apologetics in any way.
“BioLogos invites the church and the world to see the harmony between science and biblical faith as we present an evolutionary understanding of God’s creation.”
Just me trying to learn from one who has ID views. As I am sheltered and have not had many chanced to ask an ID that. But I know just like Christians or atheists, even among our own views we have differences. I could have asked you as a representative of ID what ID believes, but I thought not to.
Saying that I don’t believe it is that much different than EC. But I can’t really say that if I don’t know much about it.
It is interesting so hear your frustrations. The atheist crowd has support on their side, and the YEC crowd has their support. But the EC crowd is ‘fighting’ atheist one one front, and YEC on the other. Where it appears that ID is fighting Christianity and Atheist too. I can see that being a very rough spot to be in, and admire you for having the perseverance to stick to it despite opposition on many fronts.
I do not think my BioLogos description has much to do with Behe. While I am examining your claim that he offered his Evolutionary credentials in another book, we still have the matter of his fixation on De-volution - - which is a bogus claim.
Okay, that helps. The basic view of ID is that there is evidence of intelligent design in features of the natural world - usually meaning the biological world. There are differing views within the ID camp. Mike Gene would be at one extreme. He favors the hypothesis that somebody designed the first living organisms, and designed them so that they would tend to evolve in a certain direction by neo-Darwinian means. Mike Gene is probably a Christian, and probably thinks that God would be the designer. But he doesn’t think there is sufficient evidence to determine the identity of the designer. Michael Behe is a Catholic, who was a theistic evolutionist, and became convinced that intelligent designer occurred not only in the origin of life, but also throughout the course of evolution. He believes that the designer is God, but again, he thinks the evidence is insufficient to determine the identity of the designer. I think most of the people at the Discovery Institute would be Old Earth creationists. But not all. Paul Nelson, for example, is a YEC. Most ID proponents are Christians, though there are some Jews, Muslims, and agnostics. I prefer to think of myself as somebody who tries to follow Jesus…rather imperfectly, I’m afraid.
I would add that I think most ID proponents think there is insufficient evidence to determine who the designer is, though most of them believe it is God.
I’m not a moderator, but just a warning: The folks on the Forum are a loose hodgepodge of folks with varying positions, anywhere from Unitarian Universalist to Anabaptist to Reformed to Episcopal and everything in between and beyond, including several kind-hearted atheists who hang out in our midst and put up with us, not to mention visiting friends from other origins camps. We approach Biblical hermeneutics differently, sometimes vastly differently. We have differing views of providence and Adam & Eve and every other relevant subject under the sun.
Not one of us speaks for some sort of official BioLogos position. You would do better to interact with individuals here as interested individuals and not as representatives of BioLogos… because they are not that.
That sounds like something else I was unfamiliar with. I asked about Unitarian Universalist, which sounds very similar. To which I am still not 100% in comprehension of, but it sounds like there is no religious creed, they just search for truth. ID sounds like that in that there is no religious creed, but they are in believe in a creator/designer. Does that offend if I say creator? Or are they seen as synonyms?
It does sound very agnostic to me, in that one believes something is there, but not sure as to what.
Is there a difference between a theistic evolutionist and a Evolutionary Creationist? Or is a theistic evolutionist same as ID, in where the theistic deity is unknown/unproven?
As Larry Bunce discusses, the ID movement grew out of the failure of Creation Science and their attempts to have it taught in science classes in public schools. ID was an attempt to disguise creationism in the clothes of science, to make it sound more “sciency”.
“We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
It is pretty hard to unring that bell. The origins of ID are pretty clear. The organization that wrote the Wedge Document, the Discovery Institute, is still the dominant organization within ID with the same cast of characters that were responsible for the Wedge Document.
The major criticism I have is aimed towards scientists who are knowledgeable in the biological sciences and to specific claims they make. There are many cases where evidence is ignored or misrepresented, and that tends to make people ask why they do this. In many cases there is an outright rejection of evolution from the get go without any consideration of the evidence.
It also depends on how you define “believe”.
There is a difference between reasonable and scientific. There is a huge different between intuitive and scientific. For example, quantum mechanics completely violates human intuition, yet it happens to be a very well supported scientific theory. In fact, I would argue that the invention of the scientific method was a direct result of human intuition being faulty and wrong in many cases. Can I fault people for thinking that ID might be a reasonable or intuitive explanation? Not at all. The same applied for Geocentrism, Luminiferous ether, Phlogiston, and many other explanations that we now know are wrong. People shouldn’t have been faulted for thinking that the Sun moved about the Earth since that is what human intuition led us to believe.
Yes. This is a huge problem I have with ID. Taken as read, the message I hear from them is “Something we can’t identify, did something we can’t specify, so evolution isn’t true”. I don’t see how that gets me any closer to God, and I don’t see the scientific value either.
Oh really. I was misunderstanding ID then. I thought ID was like EC, but not tied to God.
So ID does not believe in evolution? But they aren’t religious? So an intelligent designer just poofed (forgive the lack of better term) ort universe into being how many years ago? Or does ID believe in the big bang, but not evolution? I am so lost on this concept.
I believe in an intelligent designer, so I thought I was ID. I just happen to believe that intelligent designer is God of the Bible, which makes me EC too, but I thought I was ID?
We usually distinguish Intelligent Design from intelligent design. Note the lowercase letters in the latter. Intelligent Design refers to a specific movement that includes the Discovery Institute and specific people such as Michael Behe and Bill Dembski. They believe that the work of the designer (not necessarily God, they claim) is scientifically detectable. For example, they claim the bacterial flagellum was intelligently designed. On the other hand, intelligent design is what all Christians (and some other faiths) believe in–that the world was brought forth by God the creator.
Much of it depends on the specific ID proponent. For example, Behe claims that evolution can’t produce irreducibly complex systems, therefore an intelligent designer must do it. He extended this idea with the claim that the emergence of new biological systems was highly improbable since it required multiple and very specific mutations that couldn’t occur through chance. With Behe, I can only conclude that he believes God intervenes and produces specific mutations from time to time in order to push evolution one way or another. In Behe’s view, evolution is not intelligent design, and he seeks evidence for ID by looking for things that evolution can’t produce.
I’m not an EC, so I will leave it to ECs to define what it is. However, if my understanding is correct then EC leans away from God intervening in nature in contradiction to how natural processes would do things. ID leans towards an interventionist God where the intervention can be distinguished from natural processes.