Anti-ID Propaganda

Chuck Colson authored the linked article with the title, What Darwinism Can't Do, which begins with these two paragraphs:

The intelligent design (ID) movement has been accused of a lot of things over the years. Among the mildest of those accusations is that ID is just religion masquerading as science.

Anyone who could seriously think that, cannot be paying attention. Intelligent design, as defined by the Discovery Institute, teaches simply “that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected [random] process such as natural selection.” That’s it. It does not attempt to define or describe that cause. Most scientists who subscribe to intelligent design do believe in some form of evolution. And some of them are not even believers in the Bible—they are secularists. They simply believe that Darwinism does not have all the answers, especially about how life originated. (Darwin himself never pretended certainty on that.)

The religion masquerading as science charge sometimes arises from opportunism and other times from ignorance. The arguments used by IDists are based on scientific data related to biological organisms, their cells, cellular systems and biochemicals. The arguments arrayed against ID positions similarly reference the same things. When one examines actual ID position papers and critical reactions to them, one thing one does not find is exchanges over religious principles. That is telling. Although the religion card is played often, actual concepts advanced by IDists such as irreducible complexity, front loading, CSI and design arguments based on the coding nature of DNA, spark intense scientific debates rather than exchanges over religious issues.

The best forum for exchanges between IDists and their detractors is Telic Thoughts and it is also an internet site which features the comments of a number of scientists who believe in evolution and intelligent design but not necessarily in the Bible. Yet the worn out and discredited charges about religion persist. Propaganda machines have a momentum of their own.