Every now and then the Discovery Institute lets the mask slip away and they admit the true nature of their crusade. This is one of those times. Their new post is In Supporting Discovery Institute This Christmas Season, Please Consider All That Hangs in the Balance, written by Klinghoffer. It appears to be just another of their annual fund raising posts, but when we read the thing, we see that it’s much more. We’ll give you some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis.
Klinghoffer begins by taking a swipe at Theistic evolution:
Let’s be honest. Scientists, media commentators, and clergy are fooling themselves when they reassure you it’s a perfectly plausible view that “God used evolution” to create life. At the back of their mind, they must know they’re fooling themselves. Of course, one could develop a guided form of evolution that would be compatible with theism, but the mainstream evolutionary theory adopted by Darwinian biologists today specifically excludes that option. The arch-Darwinists see this clearly.
Then he discusses some criticism by an “arch-Darwinist” regarding something written by the National Center for Science Education, which implied a compatibility between faith and evolution. Klinghoffer explains:
Obviously there can be nobody, no intelligent being, “behind” a randomly driven material process that bears no evidence or indication of guidance or purpose. To think otherwise requires a powerful will deceive to yourself.
Klinghoffer knows that God would never use evolution. He says:
That is why, as our colleague John West demonstrated with empirical rigor in the recent study [link omitted], Darwinian theory has worked so effectively as a “universal acid” on traditional ideas about God and about man’s place in the cosmos.
Ah, so that’s the reason the Discoveroids are so opposed to evolution. No surprise there. It’s spelled out in their founding manifesto, the Wedge strategy. You can read the actual document at the NCSE website: The Wedge Document. Here’s a scan of the original: The Wedge. It’s a pdf document which begins with a graphic of Michelangelo’s God creating Adam. It starts with a long Introduction:
The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. … Yet a little over a century ago, this cardinal idea came under wholesale attack by intellectuals drawing on the discoveries of modern science.
[…]
Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies. … Bringing together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences, the Center explores how new developments in biology, physics and cognitive science raise serious doubts about scientific materialism and have re-opened the case for a broadly theistic understanding of nature.
Okay, back to Klinghoffer. Here’s where the flasher opens his coat and exposes himself. Klinghoffer completely rips aside the Discoveroids’ flimsy scientific facade. To make the revelation even more dramatic, we’ll put the important part in red font:
On the question of Darwin versus design, a great deal hangs in the balance — ultimate questions about our lives, their value and meaningfulness. That’s why today, I am asking you to support the work of Discovery Institute.
Intelligent design is not a program of apologetics. ID is, instead, a no-holds-barred search for the truth about life’s origins. That’s why it’s so powerful, and so feared. However, the scientific results it returns are crucial to any convincing, objective account of man as a creature of God.
Yeah, they’re a science think tank. He adds a bit more:
At Evolution News [the Discoveroids’ creationist blog], where I’m privileged to serve as editor, our contributors don’t write much about theology (unlike, interestingly, some of our atheist interlocutors). … Everyone understands, however, whether you’re an evolutionist or an intelligent design advocate, what follows from a dispiriting conclusion that life was not designed.
What would that be — the Lake of Fire? Anyway, the rest of his post is a plea for money, so we’ll quit here. Fun, wasn’t it?
Copyright © 2016. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
“…some criticism by an “arch-Darinist” regarding…”
Typo alert. Or just a big fan of Bobby?
“Everyone understands, however…what follows from a dispiriting conclusion that life was not designed.”
Yeah, the sense that you really belong here because you arose from here.
I suggest that one see whether the exact same reasoning applies with at least as much force to the issue of whether the individual human stands in a special relationship with one’s creator (and sustainer and redeemer).
Is it atheism, materialism or naturalism to accept the sciences which explain the processes of reproduction, growth, development or metabolism?
“Everyone understands, however, whether you’re an evolutionist or an intelligent design advocate, what follows from a dispiriting conclusion that life was not designed.”
In other words, it doesn’t really matter what’s true. Klinghoffer argues for religion’s utility instead of its truth, whatever that may mean for an individual. (And it means something different for everyone.) I guess that’s what all good theocrats do.
I’d like to believe Cleveland scored three runs in the bottom of the 10th in the 7th game of the World Series, because it feels good to root for champions. But, it doesn’t make it so.
Ken Phelps says: “Typo alert.”
Fixed. Thanks.
“At Evolution News [the Discoveroids’ creationist blog], where I’m privileged to serve as editor, our contributors don’t write much about theology …”
This is because they know even less about theology than they do about science and philosophy. Of course ID is not apologetics; it is not a reasoned argument in support of anything. It is just anti-evolution. And ID is not searching for anything – you don’t search for something you already know you have.
And yet “At Evolution News [the Discoveroids’ creationist blog]” they feel the need to have Faith and Science News, when they already have Science News. And Intelligent Design News that is supposed to be science.
SC’s red-faced font: “However, the scientific results [ID] returns are crucial to any convincing, objective account of man as a creature of God.
OK, I’ve thought and thought, and I’m drawing a complete blank. What scientific results would those be?
An intelligent being that could poof the universe into existence, and poof all of the creatures on earth into existence, can make those creatures anyway it wants to. There is absolutely no way to prove that the “designer” did it by instant poofing or a slower mutation-by-mutation process which would be indistinguishable from evolution. Once an all powerful being is postulated, it becomes impossible to sort out what it did or did not do.
Furthermore, if, as Kling believes, God created life with “guidance and purpose”, he did so over billions of years. (As far as I know, the Discoveroids are not young earth creationists.) It takes a powerful will to deceive oneself to believe that a God who created an entire universe in an instant, took billions of years and numerous extinctions to sort our how to create us.
It seems like the DI is becoming more openly religious, but their theology needs a lot of work.
@Ed:
It takes a powerful will to deceive oneself to believe that a God who created an entire universe in an instant, took billions of years and numerous extinctions to sort our how to create us.
That’s why they have their abridged dating system in their bible of 6000 years and floods and arks and all the other nonsense therein.
I’m still holding on to my skepticism of Klinghoffer’s ID “theory”. All those fluorescent tinted humanoids that I saw in the massive stacks of SciFi comic books absorbed during my childhood can’t just be simply dismissed as the result of some fancy-pant’s think-tank imagination. Here’s to more scientific research investigation of Silicon Based Interstellar Humanoids!
took billions of years and numerous extinctions
It takes YEC to deny that!
Actually, even YECs (almost all of them who write and preach, at least) accept the reality of numerous extinctions. The (nonavian) dinosaurs are gone, the trilobites are gone, the saber-toothed tigers, mammoths and moas.Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” was completed ten years before “Origins”.
I suspect that what is really upsetting to the creationists is just one little corner of evolution, the idea that the human body has its place in nature as a relative to the chimps and other apes. Particularly because it is so obviously true.
From the perspective of a Christian, the role of God (and Jesus and the Holy Smurf) is inexplicable unless he/no, not she,/they are the Intelligent Designer(s).
If they are not, the question is of course why the Intelligent Designer (blessed be he/sh[e]/it) thought it useful to create them.
Isn’t Klinkleclapper an orthodox jew or something? Then what does he care about Christmas?
“no intelligent being, “behind” a randomly driven material process that bears no evidence or indication of guidance or purpose.”
Remarkable. Quantummechanical processes are even more probabilistic and bear no evidence or indication of guidance or purpose. How come Klinkleclapper and co never rant against those? Yeah, rhetorical question.
@mnbo
Classical Mendelian genetics is based on probabilities.
How come we don’t hear rants against probabilities in our genetic makeup?
Mark Germano offers a concise precis of Klinghoffer’s spiel:
Bingo. That’s the DI’s bedrock foundation, as explicitly laid out in their Wedgie Document.
And they have a point. Why, just look at the number of people who are injured or even killed because, when they inadvertantly fall from a height, insist on believing in gravity! The fools!
Why does Klinkletinkle always forget the great ID theorist William “Dr. Dr.” Dembski, one of the pillars if not the Great Pill Himself of the entire ID movement?
The good Doctor wrote a definition of ID:
Dembski isn’t just some turnip wot fell off a truck, Klankerwanker, he’s the principal ID theorist of all time who wrote these books:
The Design Inference, 1998
Intelligent Design, 1999
The Design Revolution, 2004
Understanding Intelligent Design, 2008
Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information, 2014
If you can plow your way through that serious load of dreck and still come away with the notion that “ID is science” then you have a severe reading comprehension problem!
It appears that the “notion” that ID is all about the supernatural comes not from Evilutionists, but from the very ID theorists themselves. Well, duh!
If there is such a thing as an official definition of ID, it would be
certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection
I retrieved this from Wikipedia, which copied it from three ID sites.
Let’s not leave this thread without a couple of shameful plugs for some friends of mine. A couple of books that make great stocking stuffers, Disco Tooters excluded:
Barbara Forrest’s “Intelligent Design, Creationism’s Trojan Horse,” lays out the entire history of the ID movement. A great read.
Jerry Coyne’s “Faith versus Fact,” is his reply to critics (theologians) who claimed that Coyne “got it wrong” because he didn’t read enough “sophisticated” theology. Well, Coyne spent a couple of dreadful years doing that and concluded that there’s no difference between crummy theology, so-called sophisticated theology and your drunk uncle’s opinion. Although, to be sure, drunk uncle is a lot more fun to hang out with. It’s a great read, too, but thorough and scholarly – not exactly a ripping yarn – and Coyne drops the mic on the notion of faith being “another way of knowing.” Spoiler alert: No, it’s not.
Bonus book: Lauri Lebo’s “The Devil in Dover,” is a first-hand chronicle of the events that led to Kitzmiller and the trial itself. Lebo, a journalist raised in the community, knew the events and people involved first hand. A ripping yarn, too!
“Certain features” is my favorite ID meaningless phrase. It’s also a great name for a rock album.
Ah, DocBill, I googled that quote and found this:
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI001_1.html
Though I have been familiar with TalkOrigins for several years now thus far this one has escaped me thus far.
mnbo, and all this time I thought the reason the Tooters held all their events at churches was poor event planning!
intelligent as an adjective can mean: “able to vary its state or action in response to varying situations, varying requirements, and past experience”
A definition showing that intelligent doesn’t require intelligence.
Klinghoffer (in red print):
“However, the scientific results it returns are crucial to any convincing, objective account of man as a creature of God.”
I’m late to this discussion, and haven’t read all the comments, so my apologies if this has already been pointed out, but —
Klingie, your idea of the Scientific Method is bass-ackwards. You’re stating your conclusion before doing ANY scientific research.
@retiredsciguy
And the “conclusion” is purely negative, that there is something wrong with evolutionary biology. It doesn’t offer an alternative, only says that there is an alternative. Just one simple, obvious question: How is it that the human body is most similar to the bodies of chimps and other apes, given all of the other outcomes that there might have been?
man as a creature of God
All things are creatures of God. In particular, each individual human, each one of us. To speak of “man”, meaning that abstraction, “mankind”, rather than individuals, is suggestive of Universalism, rather than the personal relationship of one with one’s Creator (Sustainer and Redeemer).
The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built.
Really? We’re talking bedrock here? I don’t even know what that means, to suppose that a finite, fallible creature would somehow resemble an infinitely powerful god. Does this mean god has genitals and an anus? What on earth for? So forget that. Perhaps this is in reference to god’s reasoning being shared by man but how does that work for a creature mired in the trivialities of everyday existence and a mortal body? No, this is silly bronze age reasoning that doesn’t translate well in an age of scientific enlightenment. Time to move on people.
human beings are created …
This is different from the creationist concern about mankind being related to other creatures.
The distinction is a matter of the fallacies of composition and division.
Creationists don’t worry about the sciences of reproduction raising doubts about the individual’s relationship with one’s creator.