Eddie,
Does ID have churches? Or are you referring to Christians/Catholics/Muslims who equate the IDer with God/Allah?
what so destructive about New Atheists?
who do you think are the people of the highest culture and social position in the US: the Obamas? the Trumps? or the Clintons? Or Mark Zuck? How about Warren Buffet? Stephen Hawkins? Richard Dawkins? How about Paul Ryan? the Pope? I would like to know your list of US people of highest culture and social position. Please only list people alive today.
because otherwise, it wouldn’t be science. For it to be scientific, it has to be a natural materialistic process.
I don’t think so. We live in a twitter world now. Life needs to be explained in 140 characters.
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Indeed I can see how a “proof of God” could send us back into a more Biblical reality where pretty much everyone believes in some “form of god” or “gods” and the debates are more about “who has the real God” rather than about whether God exists or not. The Bible contains many stories and examples of people struggling with just this type of question so it would certainly not be unprecedented if it were to happen again. Unfortunately, I can also see how a “proof of God’s existence” would create an “arms race” to devise “tests of divine intervention” that would then be used to score points about whose “god” is the best candidate for God - essentially a modern version of the ancient animal and human sacrifices as means to “define” God and attempt to control / find out what He does and does not do in response to our actions. I’m afraid that would not necessarily be a better state of affairs than where we currently are, but I do see your point as to how that could be consistent with the Bible.
As it is, ID has come to be in a difficult position with respect to the general public’s perception of its claims. While ID is very different from creationism, it seems like most people do not understand the distinction and thus see the very public Dover Trial as the Christian “opening salvo on rational thought”. So while I do acknowledge that ID proponents have promoted some healthy questioning of neo-Darwinist claims, the continued claims to being a scientific approach may also be contributing to prolonging this rift in society. On the positive side, there is at least some consensus between ID and TE/EC on an honest reading of much of the scientific literature and on not proposing ultra-literal interpretations of the Bible so there are certainly common causes to both approaches.
Bravo… another great turn of the phrase!
George
While I agree with you that there are challenges in communicating complex concepts (to anyone, not just the public), I would note that a big reason why ID ideas don’t gain traction is because the fail to convince the scholars in their corresponding fields of study. This matters because if those scholars were supportive of the ID models then the models would be much more easily accepted on the recognized authority of those scholars. This is one reason why Francis Collins’s support of BioLogos is important, and arguably more important because of his position at NIH and in the human genome project than by his intellectual contributions alone. Not to minimize the latter but the public’s perception is likely more affected by his professional position than by his book.
Since I argue that proposed models should be acceptable to scholars in the specialty, and also because of my personal interests, I hesitate to pick up books whose proposed models may not have gone through peer review and may already be outdated or proven incorrect by subsequent research. One of the great features of PubMed-indexed publications is that it’s easy to track who cites who and thus follow a “thread” of research as new results come out. However, if I search PubMed for publications by the contributors to the ID section of the Ruse/Dembski collection I find zero publications for Dembski, zero publications for Behe after 2010 and one 1988 publication for Bradley. There are many publications for “Meyer SC [author]” but those are actually for Sara C Meyer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, not ID’s Stephen C Meyer.
Now I presume that you are not one to claim that there is a “conspiracy” of the “academic establishment” against ID theories - if that’s the case then why wouldn’t any of these proposed formal models be published in PubMed-indexed journals?
Moderators,
Have a Happy New Year. Let’s begin again, shall we? Am I persona grata? I hope that Latin is all right. 
Do you think that ID people could raise the money if they wanted to do the research to get the ball rolling? What kind of grants have they tried to get?
I was not asking for any information. She volunteered it.
thanks for these links and all the best for 2016 and beyond
I will agree with you that the reactions to ID proponents has sometimes been excessive. I remember empathizing with Michael Behe when his department at Lehigh produced a statement distancing themselves from his position. I also agree that reviewers, for either grant proposals of research papers, do have their own biases and personal preferences that often get in the way of objective reviews (on all fronts, not just when reviewing ID proposals/manuscripts).
That said, I unfortunately must agree with the reviewers in that a precise formal definition of irreducible complexity and intelligent design do not seem to exist. I went beyond PubMed to IEEEXplore/GoogleScholar and even to Behe/Meyer’s websites but still did not find any such technical definition making testable/falsifiable predictions. What I did find as one of the only four manuscripts published in BioComplexity (ID’s own journal) in 2014 was a paper by Ewert on “Digital Irreducible Complexity: A Survey of Irreducible Complexity in Computer Simulations”, which was troublesome in two major ways.
First, there is a sense that the lack of precise definitions serves ID by “moving the goal posts” whenever it suits their immediate purposes. The paper states the following, where emphasis indicates points where the extra requirements seem specifically crafted to make IC harder to falsify:
In most of the models considered, defining the roles of the parts is not possible. In the Steiner trees or geometric model it would be difficult to argue that any sort of mechanism is actually involved. The workings of the digital ear circuit are not understood and Behe has noted that understanding the mechanism is a prerequisite to identifying irreducible complexity. Ev has a recognizer gene and binding sites; however, that only identifies two roles in the system, not several. [Ewert 2014]
Second, and arguably much more worrisome, is the statement on page 7:
It is possible to evolve irreducibly complex systems using a model carefully constructed toward that end. The irreducible complexity indicates the design of the model itself. It does not show that Darwinian processes can account for irreducible complexity.
This statement essentially makes ID a tautology - if it can ever be shown that IC can be an emergent property of a system then the design is in the system itself. By the same principle, if we could definitively show that extant organisms can emerge from Darwinian processes then the argument would shift to the design being “evident” in Darwinian processes themselves. This essentially makes ID a tautology of unclear purpose other than an expression of preexisting beliefs.
All in all, I’d say that what ultimately makes ID difficult to accept by the scientific community is the lack of a well-defined model with testable and falsifiable predictions. Arguments such as Stephen Meyer’s response to BioLogos’s review of Darwin’s Doubt only reinforce this view that testability and falsifiability are not concepts that he worries much about. Yes, there were some biases in parts of the review but the core issue remains the same - ID has good points on the limits of Darwinism but unfortunately offers no testable alternatives.
This may also be our last exchange of the year, so I wish you and yours a blessed and happy 2016.
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Best Wishes for the New Year in spite of our past differences. Let’s put them behind us, shall we? The tennis ball is in your court now. 