A Challenge For Defenders of ID

A defender of intelligent design writes:

I would ask: how many books by ID proponents have you read?

Darwin's Black Box?
The Edge of Evolution?
Signature in the Cell?
Darwin's Doubt?
Nature's Destiny?

If all you've read are the fumbling critiques by folks like Dawkins, Matzke, talkorigins etc. then perhaps you shouldn't be so dismissive.

He then goes on to demand:

putting aside the historical origins of the ID movement, do you agree that one can conceptually distinguish design inferences from the supernatural? And if not, then why not?

Intelligent Design - Lying for Jesus

Ask any Intelligent Design adherent if ID is creationism, and he will invariably tell you that it isn't.  Discovery Institute says:

Does Discovery Institute favor including the Bible or creationism in science classes or textbooks?

No. Discovery Institute is not a creationist organization, and it does not favor including either creationism or the Bible in biology textbooks or science classes.

Is intelligent design theory the same as creationism?

No. Intelligent design theory is simply an effort to empirically detect whether the "apparent design" in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations.

Of course, the ID adherent is lying.

McGrew and Boghossian Debate on Faith

In a recent debate about Boghossian's book, A Manual for Creating Atheists, Tim McGrew and Peter Boghossian disagreed on the definition of 'faith'.  Boghossian had given two definitions in his book, the first being "belief without evidence", and the second being "pretending to believe what you don't know".  It is understandable that Christians take exception to these definitions, because they are not consistent with what any Christian would say faith means to him.  One commenter said of Boghossian: "his idiosyncratic definition of faith is just that - i.e., made up and totally bogus" and calls him "arbitrary, pigheaded, and dogmatic".  Is this commenter being unfair?

Theistic Arguments Series:  Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

This is part of a series of posts on arguments commonly used by theists.  Because I am a naturalist, I believe that all arguments that purport to prove theism or disprove naturalism are flawed.  Plantigna's argument against naturalism is no exception.  Saints and Sceptics recently summarized it this way:

Am I a gnu?

This is something of a parting note to the folks at Victor Reppert's DI, as well as a new beginning for my efforts at expressing my ideas on my own terms.  I had the mistaken impression that public blogs are open forums for the exchange of ideas.  I was urged to leave Victor's blog, I think, for the crime of being a 'gnu', as they call it.