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Monday, October 10, 2005

Why ID Will Win

Douglas Kern has an article at Tech Central Station titled Why Intelligent Design is Going to Win. He writes:

It doesn't matter if you like it or not. It doesn't matter if you think it's true or not. Intelligent Design theory is destined to supplant Darwinism as the primary scientific explanation for the origin of human life. ID will be taught in public schools as a matter of course. It will happen in our lifetime. It's happening right now, actually.

He then goes on to posit five claims in support of his thesis:

1) ID will win because it's a religion-friendly, conservative-friendly, red-state kind of theory, and no one will lose money betting on the success of red-state theories in the next fifty to one hundred years.

2) ID will win because the pro-Darwin crowd is acting like a bunch of losers.

3) ID will win because it can be reconciled with any advance that takes place in biology, whereas Darwinism cannot yield even an inch of ground to ID.

4) ID will win because it can piggyback on the growth of information theory, which will attract the best minds in the world over the next fifty years.

5) ID will win because ID assumes that man will find design in life -- and, as the mind of man is hard-wired to detect design, man will likely find what he seeks.

The text of the article gives supporting arguments for each of the above five assertions. It's pretty interesting.

We'd like to suggest a sixth reason: ID will win because it's obvious to everyone who isn't blinded by a materialist bias that life is such an unlikely phenomenon in any universe even minutely different from our own that the sense that our world is quite probably the product of purposeful intent is overwhelming.

Once it seeps into the public consciousness and discourse that the universe is the result of intentional engineering rather than blind, purposeless forces the correlative idea that the obvious design in the biosphere is also a consequence of intelligent agency will become much more easily accepted.

Indeed, when the public becomes aware that Intelligent Design is a kind of philosophical Grand Unifying Theory, uniting the earth, space, and biological sciences under the teleological umbrella, it will gain a purchase on the public imagination that will could make it virtually irresistable.