Okay Gene, let's go through it.
First, you are right that not every contributor to science, especially since the Enlightenment (which was not science) began to infect the minds of some in the scientific community. In the context I wrote, I was objecting to those who reject anything from those who speak contrary to their worldview with the rebuttal that it is not science, whereas accept uncritically anti-creation non-science coming from scientists such as Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins.
You seem to be missing the point. ID is in itself not addressing the god-antigod issue but is addressing a limitation or weakness or fault in the neo-Darwinian evolution (NDE) theory about
how life could develop incrementally. Gould might have been one of the first to recognize that incremental development not only does not work, the fossil record of the Cambrian explosion contradicts it. Yet Gould had no solution to the problem posed by ID about NDE. Can you stick to that? If you can, then you are addressing what the ID movement (by whatever name) is addressing.
Did Einstein do actual research? He did no "actual research" as experimental science, yet he is hailed as a great physicist. As for publishing, the prominent IDers have already addressed this and most of them have book-length publications. The issue they raise is controversial because those controlling the channels of mainstream scientific publication themselves have a bias on this issue and consider, as you do, that there is nothing of value that ID can contribute to the discussion. That is not a scientific but a worldview decision, a demonstration of confirmation bias that did not exist among scientists before the mid-19th century.
Gatekeepers of scientific publications are not merely scientists; they are humans who hold worldviews and this biases their gatekeeping. It is equivalent to the medieval Schoolmen rejecting the heliocentric theory because it clashed with their worldview. You show your own bias by using derogatory language like "Meyer and his ilk". The gatekeepers share your attitude.
All you are saying is that evolutionary biology is an active field of study. Great; I am glad that it is because the flaws in NDE need to be addressed, yet few of the mainstream participants are addressing the quite valid questions that the IDers have raised.
And it is not only those who might be identified under the ID label. Have you looked at what the Santa Fe Institute has been doing? They too are raising the same kind of questions that the IDers have been raising, from a computational-complexity standpoint. That is what
Meyer, Gelenter, and Berlinski also were discussing.
Instead of telling us how unscientific these people are, why don't you instead address the
scientific problems they have raised? Or are you of the mind-set that anything coming from someone with an ID label is
ipso facto not scientific? That is a
philosophy of science judgement and not a
scientific judgement.
You are sounding like it!
Do Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer "suggest a way of thinking"?
More specifically, the Genesis account is the target because it is the context for creation issues in the West. (Few people in this debate know anything about what Hinduism or the ancient Sumerians or Chinese, or the Mayas said about creation.) The Genesis account, despite what has been read into it, does not give the scope of the creation in that it does not tell us the scope of the
shamayim ("heavens"). Genesis 1:1 can equally be read as referring to the skies (
shamayim) and the land (eretz). By
shamayim it does not necessarily (or probably) mean the modern cosmological model of what we call the universe. So to be more focused, for both myself and the IDers - all of them that I know except one or two who do not believe the genesis account - any reference to "creationism" means to the Genesis (or biblical) account of creation.
This is like arguing that because there are competing theories in scientific fields, that "science" ought to get its story straight first! And you also appear to not recognize the antithetic relationship between the biblical worldview and Mystery Babylon, the source of the extant pagan religions of your two examples. That is a significant failure to distinguish!
ID did not even exist as an identifiable movement back when Judge Overton gave his benchmark ruling against young-earth creationism (YEC) being taught in state-school biology.
What can partially confuse the understanding of the ID movement is the
political component of Establishment science. Is there any political diminution of pure science? Where does most of the money come from nowadays to support scientific research? From government? Do you really believe government is objective in funding research grants, with "no strings attached"?
IDers are aware of this because the
scientific issues they raise are ignored by mainstream
Science. (By
Science I mean politically-infested activity that is called science, whether it is or not.) I do not hear ID-bashers addressing this because to do so would not support their position!
Of course you are. The medieval Schoolmen made the same kind of assertions about Galileo's contention.
It has taken 40 years or more (or maybe more like 140 years) for evolutionary biologists to realize this, and to also realize that incremental NDE is a failed theory - at least the developmental hypothesis of it. I am glad to see the flurry of activity needed to address it. What ID brings to it is in raising the larger questions about evolutionary mechanisms that are quite relevant to the current state of evolutionary biology (EB) if for no other reason than that most EBists do not know much of anything about control theory and how it applies to structural organic development. It is beginning to diffuse in but so far, only slightly. All the ruckus about "AI" will probably hasten it.
The history beginning with Miller of the major efforts to address this question are generally recognized among EBists to have failed. That is, nobody has a scientific explanation for how life arose. (Do you? Publish it and win the Nobel Prize!) One might appear in the future, but it is not in the present state of knowledge.
You are making the ID case, that both mutation and selection are not random. IDers would agree. So would I.
Agreed, starting historically with Gould.
Okay, wise guy. The video link I gave above has three people (plus host) discussing the mathematical challenges to NDE (Gelernter and Berlinski from the MIT AI Lab in the past) as was also discussed in an MIT symposium led by Murray Eden in the 20th century. It is known that there are serious mathematical problems with NDE (whether you think MIT is a sufficiently scientific institution or not). Maybe they can be solved. They will not be by being ignored.
One of the prominent IDers, Bill Dembski, has multiple doctorates, one in math, and his doctoral thesis was about probability theory as it applies to these same kinds of NDE problems. He has written a book,
Intelligent Design, where he analyzes the problem about
irreducible complexity in graduate-school detail from a probabliistic standpoint. Have you read anything Demski has written? You might start there before drawing any hasty conclusions.
Of course one can expect new ideas, but this is an expression of hope, not fact. If and when a credible theory arises, it will probably have implications that a 19th century Enlightenment worldview will find objectionable, and that is the worldview that has infiltrated science in the last two centuries and is why there is an ongoing, never-ending "creation-evolution" controversy.
Again, you fail to understand ID. Have you ever talked to any of the leading ID proponents such as Steve Meyer, Bill Dembski, Mike Behe, Paul Nelson, ...? I have talked with all of them, sometimes into the early morning hours of a conference. You should recognize that when you write "that does not mean in any way the door to a Intelligent Designer is opened up" that this is not a scientific statement and cannot be supported by scientific methods. What if humanity were the result of a bioengineering project? Could that be detected scientifically? It is history, not science, that would give that answer. The scope of ID thinking is wider than your thinking and considers how we might detect such possibilities with our present scientific or mathematical methods. You might not want to consider such questions as falling within the limitations of the methods of science, yet if you've learned any philosophy of science, you would know that they overlap. There is no rigidly defined demarcation of
science.
You should run for Congress.