It just dawned on me that ID is dead.
Dembski is off all radar. He doesn’t even show up in the search box at South Carolina bible college or whatever. The last post on the Design Inference is a year old.
Meyer’s book went up like a firework and came down with the stick.
Most of the static websites are moribund. UD has banned virtually all dissenters. The few brave enough to wander over to TSZ bail out after a couple of rounds. The biologic institute inflates its “selected publications” with publications that have nothing to do with the biologic institute and seems to be doing no more than pretending to produce output.
Bio-Complexity is moribund.
Behe doesn’t seem to have much to say.
The big guys won’t come out to debate. The small ones mostly won’t leave heavily censored sites. Even the UD newsdesk peddles 6 year old stories as “news”.
And all the threads are about religion. Or tossing coins.
I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before.
It’s dead.
Posted at “After the Bar Closes on Jan. 05 2014,16:37 by Febble (Elizabeth Liddle)
Does anyone feel like extending or disputing Lizzie’s analysis? What other burning topics are others bothered by? Climate change? Unchecked exploitation of finite resources? Habitat destruction and extinction? I guess many commenters were drawn to this blog by a shared scepticism over “Intelligent Design”. Do we have any other shared interests? Now that ID has declined into insignificance, has TSZ lost it’s raison d’être?
And think of how much life and promise it once had.
Stillborn is closer to the truth.
Glen Davidson
I agree with Glen — the intelligent design movement was mildly intriguing for a while, but intelligent design as a theory was stillborn.
I haven’t been very active here of late because my interests have shifted — I’m still working on the issues I developed in my book, and lately I’ve been working on all sorts of other stuff. I’ve gotten interested in philosophy of race, the politics of mass incarceration, and I’ll probably be working on the significance of torture for ethics in light of the Senate report. Lately I’ve also been really interested in the metaphysical implication of self-organizing systems. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been a bit unfocused this semester!
Still, TSZ has slowly coalesced into a decent little intellectual community over the years, and it would be a shame to allow it to dissolve just because the intelligent design movement is dead. I have no doubt that there’s still a lot of life in us yet!
It’s pretty close to correct.
I did purchase Dembski’s latest book. He is now admitting that it is religion and admitting that it has no appeal to materialists. He hopes to recruit some anti-materialist atheists such as Thomas Nagel, but I think he will have very few takers.
Neither UD nor ENV are trying very hard to conceal that it is all religion. I think the ID balloon has popped.
And meanwhile the wicked witch has run away from her own website, yelling, “Its dead, dead I tell you…I am mmmmmelting…..ahhh”
Keep dreaming.
Looks like TSZ is dead.
But in true skeptical fashion, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”
I’ll be back after Jan 5 2015. Febble, yet another false prophet in the long list of false prophets.
Neil and KN,
If ID is dead, where are all of those flourishing Darwin websites, and Darwin books that are selling like hotcakes (as Stephen Meyer chuckles…I guess you all don’t look at Amazon)? What exactly is NOT dead about Darwinism? Even atheists are throwing Dawkins under the bus.
Don’ t the words that Lizzie wrote about the IDists not being brave enough to stick around at TSZ sound really funny now, since SHE is not even brave enough to stick around, and its her website!!
Then we must all be living in THE TWILIGHT ZONE.
This because YEC/ID had such, I say, such, I insist, such a great year.
Great debates, famous new books, story after story of desperation to silence/stop ID /YEC in one way or another.
DEAD???
So much territory has been conquored its just where to go from here.
If iD was based on small numbers of thinkers actions then its possible , month by month, that the ID movement seems to rise/fall based on those actions.
however its based in reality on all the people persuaded and interested in seeing ID concepts take their place in thought on origin matters. Eventually to remove from place the other side.
I go on UD and its full of great ideas that attack the other side on every side.
ID/YEC folks should come to this forum and rumble.
You guys go over to UD!
ID is established and won’t be removed unless those in position admit defeat. NO ID thinkers admit defeat. YEC sees itself as already won. thats how we think.
some threads here lately have been funky.
I find of late lots of evolutionist forums/blogs not active.
Are they losing too??
i don’t see evolution sticking around much more then 15 years.
yet i do wonder whats the knockout blow against them.
I try the methodology approach, did here on TSZ, but people don’t understand methodology concepts relative to science.
They can’t separate biology from geology because of a special case of biology captured by geology in a moment of time.
So evolutionists, sincerely, imagine they are DOING biology sci but really its not bio sci at all. likewise i find ID people do this especially since they use the cambrian explosion so much. Yet its geology too even though making a excellent point.
Knockout punch? hmmm.
Its up to evos to prove their case to a hugh disbelieving public.
What is there for a creationist to sink his teeth into??
Creationists have to work so hard to get audiences. UYet we got the good stuff.
If creationists are finally the smarter ones then we must do a smarter job of proving evolution wrong even if its unfair we have to do that.
Anyways the announcement of ID/YEC death is much exaggerated.
How does ID produce life? If ID is not dead, how does ID explain life coming into existence?
By the way, science is not measured in terms of “websites”. It’s measured in terms of “explaining things”. Name one (1), ONE, thing you can satisfactorily explain with ID.
And goodbye. There is no way you can answer these questions.
Robert Byers,
Can you describe the explanation, form ID or YEC to any biological feature or living organism? Can you explain how, according to ID or YEC, it came into existence?
Because if you can’t explain that, then:
– ID EXPLAINS NOTHING although it is “established”, sure…
– that’s a reason why ID/YEC folks DO NOT come to this forum and rumble.
Really? Can you describe that reality? Can you describe how life is intelligently designed, how does the process take place?
Isotope ratios!
Are you ever going to engage the evidence, or will you just continue to chant “it works”?
That’s a strange question from someone who has been complaining that Wikipedia is a Darwin site.
byers said: “ID/YEC folks should come to this forum and rumble.”
Yeah, they should, but most are way too cowardly to do so, and the so-called ‘leaders’ of ID are the most cowardly of all.
“You guys go over to UD!”
Most or all of us have gone there and most of us have been banned (in some cases multiple times) just for asking questions, disagreeing with the IDiots, refuting IDiotic claims, and/or pointing out the truth about IDiots and their theocratic agenda.
phoodoo,
phoodoo, your weird and obsessive hatred of Darwin is showing. Instead of wasting your life imagining Darwin as Satan, you and your ‘fellow traveler ilk’ (Hi gordo!) should get up to date on evolutionary theory (what you creationists call “Darwinism”) and other aspects of science. You should also realize that websites, books, scientific papers/journals, TV shows, etc., that pertain to evolution/evolutionary theory (including Darwin’s ideas and findings), and other aspects of nature and science are quite popular. And of course whether science is ‘popular’ or not, it beats the hell out of believing in nightmarish religious drivel.
Robert Byers,
Methodology? Ha ha! Your ‘methodology’ is to say something (eg high water pressure can turn mud into rock) which is completely amenable to experimental analysis, does not stand up to that analysis, and then … just say it again.
And it is curious that you find such common cause with ID, since it takes great pains to distant itself from YEC – many of its proponents accept things you do not – eg, that the Cambrian ‘explosion’ actually does represent fossilisation of some of the oldest animals on earth, that there was a 4 billion year time frame, that Common Descent is a reality … the sole reason you trumpet ID is because it is inimical to ‘Darwinism’.
What, another 15? Yep, any minute now … [whistle] … just you watch …
Creodont2,
I have to be honest, and say that I do not think that cowardice is the root of it. After all, how brave does one have to be to type on a computer? I simply think they are comfortable where they are. Plenty of Creationists take the fight out of the bunker – for example Sandwalk is riddled with an endless stream of carbon-copy in-yer-face types (not all of them socks of each other). But people who settle in UD simply … like it there.
That they are reduced to yeah, but how do you know random is really random suggests they may have reached the smallest possible gap available.
ID: I’m just an old has-been.
Skeptic: Were you ever famous?
Got to be at least a couple of OPs there, at least!
It’s all part of their plan. Next thing you’ll be quoting from it!
I don’t know why BioLogos doesn’t get more recruits from UD. Perhaps it is a bit too Christian and liberal.
Certainly UD has dropped all pretense that ID is not religiously motivated.
A large part of its output and I suspect the majority of ID skeptics posting here were motivated by their oppostion to ID as science. That claim is rarely made these days and there are no new developments in ID to comment on. We don’t have O’Leary’s skills in finding the ID spin to any story on the news wires
Did you forget to finish the sentence? Back after Febble what?
Don’t you differentiate? Barry Arrington was sort-of confirming ID is Old Earth rather than YEC.
here
phoodoo is right. Just look at all the pro-Darwin websites that are about to close up shop:
Science
Nature
Nature Genetics
MBE
Max Plank Institute
Harvard
Yale
NIH
Broad Institute
Sanger Center
And that’s just a small sample of hundreds, all equally poised on the brink of collapse. It’s gonna be a rout, I tell you.
It persists as a rhetorical movement, the bastard son of creation science. Creationists having had their monopoly on origins destroyed by science and historical evidence have been looking to have “their science” for some time, even if it is strongly rejected by the scientific community – that’s not the point, the layperson wont know that and this is evidenced by them writing books for the masses rather that scientific papers.
The problem with ID is it doesn’t move forward. Anything they’ve generated has either been debunked or can’t / won’t be tested. This is because the smarter ones know it is a crock, the emperor’s tailors have a living to make and think they’re doing God’s work. The fact that they couldn’t take Templeton money because they couldn’t find any experiments to do says it all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation#Intelligent_design
The community of cheerleaders and notsobrights will persist at UD, the actual leaders having long since fled the island in their airplane, leaving the cargo-cult natives to build straw replicas held together with the oil of ad hominem. And, as always, the demise of Darwinism is imminent.
Motto: In the same location since 1803.
Unfortunately it seems ID’s ambition didn’t meet my timeline for them:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/04/17/a-better-timeline/
– Phillip E Johnson, World Magazine, 30 November 1996.
– William Dembski in ‘Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science & Theology’ (Intervarsity Press, 1999)
Dembski’s book addresses a burning question,
They have always had to speak with two mouths. In case anyone was wondering why Dembski didn’t testify at the Dover trial.
Alan Fox,
It is pro-evolution. They are creationists for religious reasons. I don’t get why you don’t know why.
I guess it’s because I’m a non-smoker.
UD’s short-lived “amnesty” policy signalled that the site and perhaps the movement were losing steam big time. Over the past few weeks, the UDers have been badly outmatched by the scientifically lliterate (e.g., keith s, zachariel, etc.). It’s been so bad that I imagined the “amnesty” was intended to be a kind of suicide by cop: I expect at some time in the near future, Barry and KF, who by comparison seem like ID heavyweights will retire away from UD because they are “too busy” to continue waging the just war.
Some 2014 Books:
Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation; Bill Nye
Amazon: #480 in Books, #1 in Creationism (Published mid November)
Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, Steven Meyer (Published June)
Amazon: #5444 in books, #2 in Creationism
The Evolution Revolution – Why Thinking People are Rethinking the Theory of Evolution –by Dr. Lee M. Spetner
#367,931 in Books, No category ranks…..
Being As Communion: A Metaphysics of Information
by William A. Dembski-#103,143 in books, #49 in logic
Its off thread.
its hard to sink ones teeth into isotopes.
Naw. Nothing to do with evolutionary evidence or anything.
Chump change.
Creodont2,
I like creodonts. I say they are merely varieties of other creatures and not a real order of their own. just like marsupials are just placentals with pouches. i wrote an essay’Post flood Marsupial mIgration Explained’ by Robert Byers. Just google.
Using the IDiot’s tag and demanding what others TRUE MOTIVES are is not the way to be welcomed.
UD wants smart opponents but not malice. Then everyone is sensitive. (Well i’m not). I’m banned from the Meyers and Coyne web things for no good reason. Except i kick their ass and they probably know it.
Apologize or next door and play fair. People who engage in these logty concepts tend to see themselves as smarter then average and so ALREADY are not happy about being told their wrong. Adding spite to it provokes anger.
Evolutionists dislike me, most, because I tell them , very well, they are wrong. I never abuse or insult or say they are dumb. I ignore the evil/dumb.
Yet I still get anger. so if i was normal nasty or worst I would never break through the lines. creationists have to be more savvy to survive. many creationists give up the internet talk wars.
Evolutionists likewise bet beat up if they are nasty.
negotiate and agree to boundaries. uD will welcome you home. They are and should be more christian.
its christmas. A general amnesty might be allowed.
Allan Miller,
Ouch. The water pressure idea is fine. its just what the others must say. or rather everyone must account for the pressure to squeeze the underlying sediment into stone. wE just speed it up.
We know yEC is different from iD. there is so much common cause, say 70%, that we are able to gang up.
I love iD as it fulfills predictions that eventually non YEC folks would see evolution etc as bogus and aggressively intellectually start to destroy it.
When its over they will be opponents but right now the common foe is targeted.
Well they are different. However iD articulates very well yEC in basic points.
So they will never fail. They will never need to retreat. they figured things out and more importantly they questioned establishment thought.
They will never be persuaded again that evolution shaped biology.
no evidence is given but instead a authority claim.
ID is off thread in a thread about ID? Can you explain that?
What topic should be a thread about so that asking what ID explains is on-thread, so that we can open that thread?
It has everything to do with the age of the earth and how the strata were laid down, however.
As a Young Earth Creationist who believes in a recent Global Flood, you had better be interested in the issue. Never mind about evolution; the earth could be completely sterile and your geological claims would still be refuted by the isotope evidence I mentioned.
As I understand it, evidence for ID is off thread in a thread about ID because ID has none and never needed any.
More seriously, why does it never bother them that they lack evidence? It’s because they accept basically homiletic “evidence” as sufficient for what is, after all, merely religious doctrine. Thus, it’s apologetics. Evidence was never at issue, what mattered was that their “way of knowing,” religious belief, be credited as being at least equal to science, probably better.
So we can throw evidence at ID all day and at worst it might dent an argument or two. Hardly matters to them, because it’s just a defense of religion against big bad science, and they’ll merely throw up another “argument,” shift the old one slightly and reuse it, or, more likely, just repeat the same old BS again when the discussion in which it was torn apart has died down.
ID can never die because of its failure as a science–which it was never meant to be–but its corpse rots just a little more each day from exhaustion and boredom.
Glen Davidson
Robert Byers,
That’s why I emphasised water pressure. One vital element of the petrification process is the removal of interstitial water from the sediment. You can’t do this with water, for reasons that should be obvious but I doubt are.
Imagine having a cylinder of some length – say it’s a thousand miles long, with one end on the ground and the rest towering into space. You go to the top and pour water and mud in. The mud sinks to the bottom. Then you top the cylinder up to its brim with water. You’ve created a thousand miles of water pressure over that mud. That’s one hundred times the pressure you’d get at the bottom of the Marianas Trench if the globe were flooded to the height of Everest. Would the sediment at the bottom change to rock? No. How about you pour some sand in. Would it turn to rock as it sank? No, it wouldn’t.
It requires a mechanism for removal of interstitial water – and time. Water pressure cannot turn sediment into rock directly.
They don’t lack evidence. They have plenty of evidence. What they don’t have is a theory.
ID can never live because it explains nothing. The basic proposition of ID states “certain features of the universe and of life are best explained by means of an intelligent cause”. When someone can formulate that explanation, ID will come to life. In the meantime, having no explanation means you have nothing.
Guillermoe,
What evidence?
Oh, you know, the “fine tuning of the universe”, the “impossibility of finding a working protein randomly” and the “improbability of the cell coming together randomly”.
That sort of evidence.
OMagain,
And “We see design every day. You just know it when you see it”.
ID is strong and slowly growing in strength. Those who think its dying are confusing it with science. Its not. Its a rhetorical exercise and its rhetoric changes and improves continuously. The goal of ID is to undermine the non-supernaturalist view that’s taken over in the West. To this end they’ve developed a series of complex and esoteric lines or argument that are enough to give any intellectual Christian who dabbles in them an excuse to fool themselves into believing that the possibility of the existence of a miracle working God is still an open question in science. The work of the DI also provides material for any school board that wants to “teach the controversy” about evolution.
It seems to me Meyer is will to debate often…and he wins most of those debates. Most people with real jobs can’t devote the time to studying all the topics they’d need to to effectively debate him
“The work of the DI also provides material for any school board that wants to “teach the controversy” about evolution.”
Simply at odds with reality. I doubt there will be a Kitzmiller2 – its expensive, usually fatal to school board members who support it and DI has shown its ‘stars’ chicken out before the main event.
I can’t tell really because I am still trying to understand it. They seem to have determine that something intelligent somehow is responsible of certain features of the universe and life.
Apparently, there is a lot of evidence proving that effectively it was “something” and indeed it was “somehow”. “Intelligent” is, of course, just plain common sense.
Dembski’s “collapse” is always just right around the corner — yep, any day now, just you wait . . .
Or in the very recent past:
Maybe if we’re generous, it could yet happen in 2014, slightly over ten years but close enough for approximation.
It really didn’t take him too long after that “prediction” that he started backpedaling, babbling about entrenched interests, blah blah, that could prevent the prediction from coming true. What, he didn’t “know” the ID conspiracy theories in mid-2004?
Still, I think that the most telling thing about his forecast had nothing to do with ID finding the magic evidence, or driving home the “evidence” that they supposedly have, but the triumph over godless “Darwinism.” No, it wasn’t that ID was such great science that it would make poofless evolution look like a child’s toy, it was the end of the Satanic beast that troubles them that would occur. Finally. Then the Age of
AquariusJesus will commence.Creationism inherently contains the threat of censorship and banning of science, because the goal is always to destroy evolution, not to compete with it (they seem to realize that they can’t, at some level). Creationists may not think that they’re out to ban the theory of evolution, but many of them would never stop until it was gone, which at present could only happen by legal proscription (to any meaningful extent).
The old “Darwinism will collapse” in a decade or two also has the wonderful advantage of devaluing it so that creationists never have to learn about it. Why bother? It’s practically in the dustbin already, may as well stick with confirmation bias and revel in the soon-triumph of ID, or whatever version of creationism at the time glibly promises the goods. They never do learn it, of course, since it’s just evil anyway (a very few like Wells do learn, but hold it away from any kind of real thinking).
I guess I just thought this was a good time for us to remember the passing of yet another prediction of the end of the Great Evil. Lord knows it’s not going to be emblazoned onto a pinned post at UD now that time is up.
Glen Davidson
The prediction died five years ago. Since then it’s been moldering. Robert is taking the Ghostbusters 2 advice and putting his prediction 15 years out, so that most of us will not be here to laugh.
I can be more careful yet. TOE will die in the same year we achieve practical faster than light travel.