Technically that's so but it's hard to believe that this ruling won't serve to discourage activity in other venues. The ID folks will need to get a fresh angle if they can find one because the tack they took was shredded. I see visions of coffin nails.
There are plenty of legitimate tacks that those ID people who are genuinely concerned about ID and not using it as a subterfuge for Christianity can take.
First, evolution so far has no answer at all for how the first life forms came into existence. The whole concept behind evolution is that lifeforms evolve to survive. But minerals have no evolution -- carbon now is what carbon was millions of years ago. The first entity that turned from nonliving into living wasn't evolving, because as a nonliving entity it had no need or ability to reproduce or survive as an entity. Water was H2O in 300 million BC and it is H2O today. No evolution there. At some point there was no living matter. Then there was. That transition can't be explained by evolution. It CAN be explained by ID. Whether ID is or is not the answer to how the first life form came into existence I can't tell you. But it is a more plausible explanation, based on what we now know, than evolution is.
Second, it's a major stretch to try to use evolution to explain how consciousness first arose. One can technically claim that consciousness improved survivability, but that's arguing from the result you want. Where the first spark of consciousness came from is still a mystery that evolution, I believe, has no capacity to explain, and in fact hasn't even tried to explain.
Third, the ID question was around long before Christianity. Aristotle was writing about a prime mover long before the birth of Christ. And he wasn't talking in religious, but in philosophical terms. If the theory that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction is true, then where did the first action come from? Secular ID is simply asking the same still unanswered question that Aristotle was asking. It's a legitimate question, and evolution doesn't begin to answer it.
Darwin started with living, conscious creatures and went on from there. How we got to living, conscious creatures in the first place was never part of his theory. Evolution is a theory to explain how we got from point B to points C, D, etc. But it has nothing to say about how we got to point B in the first place. ID may not be the answer to that issue, but then again, it may. |
