ID Makes the Cover of Time!

Intelligent Design (ID) has made it to the cover of Time magazine this week, and I’m delighted to say that the cover story is for the most part respecftul and fair. It’s certainly a far-cry from Time’s inaccurate and conspiracy-mongering tirade a few months ago. The cover story even gives a mostly correct definition of ID (adapted from the definition on Discovery Institute’s website). Time says that intelligent design is “the proposition that some aspects of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause or agent, as opposed to natural selection.” A number of ID scientists were interviewed for the article, and Time assigned at least a dozen reporters to work on the story. Still, there are some misleading Read More ›

Altered Reality: Newsweek Pundit Displays Own Ignorance in Column on ID

It’s been interesting to watch this past week as media pundits have weighed-in on the debate over intelligent design in the wake of President Bush’s pro-ID comments. Most of the pundits denouncing intelligent design have simply demonstrated how little they actually know about ID and what it proposes. A good example is Jonathan Alter’s snooty anti-ID column in this week’s Newsweek. Alter says a lot of ignorant and inaccurate things, but I will focus on just one:

Lehrer Newshour Features Debate Over Intelligent Design

Following up on President Bush’s remarks about teaching evolution earlier this week, The Lehrer Newshour tackled the subject of intelligent design this evening with a debate between CSC Fellow biochemist Dr. Michael Behe, and Case Western physicist Dr. Lawrence Krauss. The clear advantage of the Newshour over most news programs is that it can devote the time necessary to truly discuss an issue in-depth. This segment showed that it helps to have enough time to really get anywhere with the debate over evolution beyond the six second soundbites normally allowed. I think that Jeffrey Brown did a good job of moderating the discussion. Really the Newshour’s only mistake came early on when Brown reported that: This summer, the Kansas State Read More ›

A Rorschach Test for Our Times

Something called “intelligent design” is the “number one” discussed topic on the internet today (August 4, ’05), according to the web and blog watch group Technocrati.com. But what do people mean by the topic? Forget the old fashioned question — what do the scientists propounding ID mean by the term? This is the post-modern age. What do YOU want ID to mean? Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) invented the famous Rorschach test that long was used to see what different meanings people would project onto a series of abstract inkblots. I see a butterfly, you see a porter carrying water, the man down the hall sees a spy plane. Supposedly, it was a key to understanding personality. Intelligent design, I am afraid, Read More ›