Limbaugh on the Dover Ruling

This is certainly interesting. Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the Dover ruling. No one will be surprised that he thought it was a bad ruling, but he said something very interesting in his discussion of it. The Worldnutdaily reports:

Limbaugh continued, "On the other hand, I do think this: I think that the people - and I know why they're doing it, but I still think that it's a little bit disingenuous. Let's make no mistake. The people pushing intelligent design believe in the biblical version of creation. Intelligent design is a way, I think, to sneak it into the curriculum and make it less offensive to the liberals because it ostensibly does not involve religious overtones, that there is just some intelligent being far greater than anything any of us can even imagine that's responsible for all this, and of course I don't have any doubt of that. But I think that they're sort of pussyfooting around when they call it intelligent design.

"Call it what it is. You believe God created the world, and you think that it's warranted that this kind of theory for the explanation for all that is be taught."

I don't think the folks pushing ID are necessarily pushing the "biblical version of creation", at least not all of them and not all in a literal sense. Among ID advocates, there is disagreement on this that ranges from the young earth creationism of Paul Nelson and Nancy Pearsey to the theistic evolutionism of Michael Behe. Behe, at least, does not appear to favor any particular form of creationism. But there is no doubt that ID is little more than a vague form of creationism - creationism with all of the specific testable statements taken out. Naturally, though, the DI's spin doctors are busy trying to fight this reality:

"Traditional creationism begins with the Bible and moves from there to science," says Witt. "Intelligent design begins and ends with science."...

"It has larger metaphysical implications," says Witt, "but so does Darwinism. The theory of intelligent design is a methodology for detecting design, and scholars from a variety of backgrounds employ it - Christian, Jew, Hindu, even a former atheist like Antony Flew, who still rejects the God of the Bible."

First of all, they have been flogging Antony Flew for far too long. And while it's true that Flew initially did indicate that he was having doubts about his atheism because he didn't think there was any reasonable scientific explanation for the origin of life, it's also true that he retracted that statement after discussions with scientists who actually know that field of research well. He said:

My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species ... [In fact] the only reason which I have for beginning to think of believing in a First Cause god is the impossibility of providing a naturalistic account of the origin of the first reproducing organisms.

A few weeks later, after being educated on the subject, he retracted that claim in a letter to Richard Carrier:

I now realize that I have made a fool of myself by believing that there were no presentable theories of the development of inanimate matter up to the first living creature capable of reproduction.

The claim that Flew accepts ID is vastly overblown and false. It's time they stopped spreading that rumor around. More importantly, notice how Witt has to skip right over all of the key testimony in the trial, particularly about the book Of Pandas and People, a book written by DI fellows and a book that used the very same definition of "creation" and "creation science" that it used for "intelligent design". So while Witt wants to pretend that ID is nothing like creationism, his fellow DI fellows have written a book that uses those terms interchangably. I don't think that ol' dog is gonna hunt, Mr. Witt.