Oh, you're right there. There is tremendous misunderstanding on this issue.
I'm sorry, but when I see people saying that it's wrong to mention Christianity in a science class, I believe that's tantamount to denying God his due credit.
Why? What exactly do you think science is? Science can never be used to explain or understand that which is beyond the natural, so why try and make it?
I believe that God created everthing based on what the bible says, not some changing scientific theories. There is no scientific theory that is above being disproven, or at the very least, no scientific theory that is likely to never need to be changed as we better understand the evidence. Evolutionary theory will advance as we understand it more, as it already has. Similarly ID will change as a theory, as it already has, since irreducible complexity has now been disproven.
God should be given his due credit based on what He said He did, not on what we think explains evidence, especially since most people don't think that ID is true. Science, by it's very nature, has nothing to do with the explanation of the supernatural, so if you think we should give Him His due credit based on something which will never be able to comment on Him, then you are on shaky ground.
Here is a primary misunderstanding: you people think ID is some knee-jerk 'god of the gaps' theory. That simply isn't so. Moreover, it's virtually the equivalent of claiming that science and Christianity are mutually exclusive vis-a-vis one another.
ID has always appealed to 'God of the gaps' ideas. Would you seriously deny that ID has relied seriously in irreducible complexity, which has now been completely disproved?
Science is the study of the natural world, and cannot study God. ID makes claims that there are things which are not explained by natural phenomena, and thus invokes an 'intelligent designer' as the only possible cause. If that were correct, then not only would it not be something useful in science, but every scientific discovery, in a supposed area we could not explain without God, makes God's apparent role in nature smaller.
If it not a God of the gaps argument, which you are the first I have heard to say among many IDers, then it implies there are no Gaps which God needs to fill in our naturalistic (and therefore exmplainable through scientific processes) explanation of the current state of the world.
If the Christian viewpoint was presented as ID, then it simply would be a case of science (an exploration of the world through natural means) versus Christianity (an appeal to supernatural means). This is why I don't like ID, because Christianity is compatible with evolution as the method of origin of species. It is this idea that IDers don't like, as they are the only one's who see this clash between science and the bible.
This flies in the face of history. In point of fact, there's good reason to believe that we wouldn't even have science without the influence and patronage of the Christian Church. There were pleny of other civilizations that experienced a birth of science before its rise in Christian Europe (e.g. Greece, China, India, Islam), and yet in all of them science quickly proved still-born or else crystalised in relatively short order and eventually died.
You just made two contraditory statements:
1. "there's good reason to believe that we wouldn't even have science without the influence and patronage of the Christian Church"
2. "There were pleny of other civilizations that experienced a birth of science before its rise in Christian Europe"
Besides which, it is untrue to say that the Christian church's stance on many scientific issues has anything to do with ID. The church has indeed embraced science sometimes, but has also violently opposed it at other times. The church has been plentifully pro- and anti- science in it's time. This point you make is, however, irrelevant anyway.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "in all of them science quickly proved still-born or else crystalised in relatively short order and eventually died". No science has ever simply stopped, science is a process of continuous discovery. It cannot prove 'still-born', whatever that is supposed to mean, all science is is a tool by which we make falsifiable hypotheses about the world and then try to falsify them. It is not a
thing which can be still born, or can crystalize. Also, other civilizatons made scientific progress for longer than Christianity has even existed, the Egyptians and Chinese for example.
It's not merely coincidence that it was the Christian West that experienced the Carolingian Renaissance of the 9th-century (cut off only by the barbarian invasions of the Norsemen and Magyars), the Renaissance of the 12th-century (arrested by the advent of the bubonic plague), the Italian Renaissance of the 14th-century, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Why is it that it was only in the Christian West that astrology resulted in astromony? Why is it that it was only in the Christian West that alchemy led to chemistry? Again, I could on and on.
You could go on and on, and you woul go on and on being wrong. It is only recently that we have become more advanced as a civilization than Arabia or China. Have you read 1421? It is a book about the discovery of Chinese history, about the realization of how far ahead of us technologically the Chinese were than us in the west in 1421. It is only because we, the West, were determined on conquest that we have become the dominant force in the world. The chinese in these times had technology far above what we had at the time.
This is, however, like your last point, not only only partly true, but is also irrelevant.
Again, this shows the misunderstanding is on your side. Advocates of ID have no problem whatever with the concept of evolution. Of course things evolve. For myself, I didn't claim that it was the concept of evolution is the result of mere philosophical theory, but rather that it is 'Darwinian' evolution which constitutes a philosophical theory; that of naturalistic materialism.
And presumably by 'Darwinian evolution' you mean speciation? For which there is ample evidence?
It is not a philosophy, it is a scientific theory, and, in fact, the one that best explain the origin of species.
I'm sorry, ab1385, but your entire understanding of ID is horribly inaccurate. It is ID that looks at the world 'as it is' and hypothesizes design, because that's what the cosmos evidences. Even the militant atheist and Darwinian fundamentalist, Richard Dawkins, admits this much. At the very beginning of his book The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins writes:
"This book is written in the conviction that our own existence once presented the greatest of all mysteries, but that it is a mystery no longer because it is solved.... The problem is that of complex design. The computer on which I am writing these words has an information storage capacity of about 64 kilobytes (...). The computer was consciously designed and deliberately manufactured. The brain with which you are understanding my words is an array of some ten million kiloneurones. Many of these billions of nerve cells have each more than a thousand 'electric wires' connecting them to other neurones. Moreover, at the molecular genetic level, every single one of more than a trillion cells in the body contains about a thousand times as much precisely-coded digital information as my entire computer. The complexity of living organisms is matched by the elegant efficiency of their apparent design. If anyone doesn't agree that this amount of complex design cries out for explanation, I give up. No, on second thoughts I don't give up, because one of my aims in the book is to convey something of the sheer wonder of biological complexity to those whose eyes have not been opened to it" (emphases mine).
After conceding this much, Dawkins then goes on to spend the next 300-plus pages trying to explain away why all that obvious design is only 'apparent', and that, in actuality, all that complexity came about by sheer accident; through completely unguided, purposeless forces.
So tell me, who isn't looking at the world 'as it is' here? Has it not occurred to Dawkins and his ilk that perhaps all that 'apparent' complex design is in fact apparent because it really is designed? sheesh!
I would still very much contend that you are not looking at the world 'as it is' here, until you can provide some evidence that gives the hypothesis of design has any evidence for it.
So far I have come across these so called 'evidences'
1. The irreducible complexity argument.
Now completely falsified, which is why, presumably, you do not allude to it.
2. The 'ability of evoltution to add genetic "information"', undefined as that is generally left.
Proved false by the fact that we have bacteria which have evolved proteins to digest nylon, a manmade structure only in existence since the last century. This is information, however you look at it.
3. The fact that the world 'looks designed'.
Looking designed presumes, of course, that we, exactly as we are, is what evolution was aiming at. We could have come out completely different and still looked designed to ourselves, because we would still look at ourselves as the aimed for conclusion of a designer. That we 'look desiged' appeals to an idea that complexity cannot arise naturally, but as point 2 above, among many other examples, shows that we can develop further complexity.
Besides, 'looking designed' has nothing to do with whether or not it is. Have you never looked at a cloud, or a knot in wood, or a pattern in some dust, and thought 'that look just like...'? ID is essentially doing an advanced form of this. Does this look designed?
It is simply a graphically demonstrated function of mathematics, a fractal. There is nothing designed about it.
Although I'm loath to call into question anyone's spiritual status, I can say with some degree of confidence that Kenneth Miller is a Christian-of-convenience only. By that I mean, you'll rarely find him at church on a Sunday except when the media needs film footage of him at one so they can say, "See! Even their fellow Christians don't agree with these silly IDers and their creationist foolishness."
I corresponded with Dr. Miller personally for a short while after I saw him as a guest on "The Colbert Report" one night. On it he repeated the same mistake several of you are guilty of when he equated ID with 'Creation Science', strongly implying that ID advocates were little more than bucktoothed hillbillies, obstinate in their ignorance as they insist that God created the universe in six literal 24 hour days. I e-mailed him at Brown University where he teaches expressing my objection that he had deliberately misrepresented what ID actually posits and that he really should have known better. His response was essentially that he just didn't have time to properly explain what ID really is. I then wrote back asking him why, if he seriously didn't have sufficient time to accurately represent the ID position, he chose to spend the time he did have to misrepresent the ID position. He failed to answer me.
I would very much like to see that resonse, verbatim, because I very much doubt that He said He misrepresented the ID viewpoint - after all his main points are always to show why the points brought up at the ID trial are false, and why an impartial conservative judge judged that on the basis of the logical arguments presented, ID was unscientific and false.
You also just said, essentially, I am loathe to judge anyone's faith. Oh, except Dr. Miller. Him, I don't think, is a real christian.
Didn't I already say that? As a matter of fact, I did. In the very post you quoted to which this is your response.
Here it is again:
Those who advocate for ID don't claim that the current evidence PROVES there's a creator (much less that that creator is the God of the Holy Bible). As I already said, it's an 'inference to the best explanation'--as in, an inference to a better explanation than that provided by Darwinian evolution with its presuppositions of philosophical naturalism.
I admit I did change the last word here, though. Philosophical 'naturalism' describes it better than 'materialism'.
Here we go again, ID is the best explanation for the evidence. What genetic or fossilized evidence do you think is better explained by ID than speciation? Philosophy has nothing to do with this science, the science is an explanation of the evidence, that is all.
The only arguments I have heard are the three listed above, which are all equally invalid. These are the evidences I attribute to ID as they are the one's brought forward at the trial of ID by the so called 'experts', the main proponents of ID.
In large part I agree with you, Elspeth, but I would want to make one correction. It's certainly true that the creation account of Genesis 1-2 is not meant to be understood as history (that is, a chronological list of events as they took place in time), nor is it intended to be understood as science (definitely not, since they didn't have science), but neither should it be interpreted as allegory. Instead, it should be read as theology. (Maybe this is what you meant to begin with, anyway.)
And on this, at least, I agree.
I think the onus is really on you to explain what evidence you feel is better explained by ID than by speciation. I use the word speciation (as the origin of species), rather than the term evolution, as that is the specific issue we are really disagreeing on here. IF you want I can talk about why I think that evolution explain the origins of species better than ID, about the fall of irreducible complexity, etc. How about the fact that we have 1 fewer pair of chromosomes than all of our ape ancestors, but how we do have 1 pair that is almost identical to the only two chromosomes that apes have that we don't, only fused together. How do you explain that as being best explained by ID?
It IS a long video, but it much easier to watch this than trawl through pages of text, the guy is quite an eloquent speaker. I just personally found it very useful, and so I thought that other people should watch it if they wanted to find out about ID. He does talk quite a bit about the politics of ID and how the idea came about for about 20 minutes before discussing much of the science, but the politics and basis of ID is very interesting. 
