The American Spectator

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More on ID

By J. Peter Freire on 11.18.05 @ 5:34PM

From a reader:

TAS -- I beg you to stop with this ID nonsense.

Maybe George could comment, but one thing that I've noted since I got started here at the Spectator is a desire to doggedly pursue arguments to their philosophical ends. Many thought the Spectator was just beating a dead horse by reporting on Clinton; but if the magazine was trying to score political points and make itself look good, it would have eventually rescinded its stories or pretended it never happened, tucked its tail in, and headed back to Bloomington.

What Dan Peterson did in his article was simply provide a basis for debate; before reading it, even I was not yet annealled into the fold of critics of Darwinism. ISI put out a very good book on the topic, called Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing. There's a reason they refer to intellectuals here.

There are a lot of doctrinaire varieties who chime in on the subject, doing so unhelpfully in the course of serving either side. But just because they use moderated beliefs doesn't mean their way of voicing them isn't extreme. In fact, the so-called "extreme" sides are the ones with the greatest intellectual beef; Wilson's book, which George discusses here provides a convincing argument that Darwin wasn't willing to interweave religion and evolution as so many others have tried to do for him. That appears to be an intellectually honest position. Why is it that the intelligent design position is consistently considered to fall short of that?

topics:
Religion