Intelligent Design & Common Ancestry

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"The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that ID is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism - it is intelligent design."
~ Michael Behe, Good News, January 2011

"I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it."
~ Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, 1996

"I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form?"
~ Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box, 1996

"[Eugenie] Scott refers to me as an intelligent design "creationist," even though I clearly write in my book "Darwin's Black Box" (which Scott cites) that I am not a creationist and have no reason to doubt common descent. In fact, my own views fit quite comfortably with the 40% of scientists that Scott acknowledges think 'evolution occurred, but was guided by God'."
~ Michael Behe, [Source]

"[Nick] Matzke at one point in his article refers to the "antievolutionary 'Intelligent Design' movement." Conjoining the term "antievolution" with the term "Intelligent Design" has become a useful rhetorical ploy by Darwinists for discrediting intelligent design but in fact is quite misleading. Michael Behe, the best known proponent of intelligent design, holds to universal common descent. He is as much an evolutionist as Matzke. Where they differ is on how evolution brought about biological complexity. For Matzke and the majority of biologists, the Darwinian mechanism is all that's required. For Behe, some form of intelligent guidance is additionally required."
~ William Dembski, [Source]

"From the design theorist’s perspective, the positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance. This is not to deny large-scale evolutionary changes, but it is to deny that the Darwinian mechanism can account for them. Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism."
~ William Dembski, [Source]

"I'm open to common ancestry ... I don't think I would go as far as Eugenie. I think there is still some question about that but I know there are some very strong lines of evidence for common ancestry ... So I'm open to that. That's not a problem for me if that's how it turns out."
~ William Dembski, [Source]

"I have no dog in this fight. If common descent were true and well supported scientifically, I could make my peace with it. My beef, and that of the ID community, is with non-teleological mechanisms like natural selection being invoked by Darwinists as designer substitutes."
~ William Dembski, [Source]

 "The central issue is not the relatedness of all organisms - what is commonly called 'common descent'. Indeed, intelligent design is perfectly compatible with common descent. Rather, the central issue is how biological complexity emerged and whether intelligence played a pivotal role in its emergence."
~ William Dembski, "The Great Debate", 2002

"I'd like to emphasize that the focus of my argument will not be descent with modification, with which I agree. Rather, the focus will be the mechanism of evolution. How did all this happen, by natural selection or intelligent design? My conclusion will not be that natural selection doesn't explain anything, rather the conclusion will be that natural selection doesn't explain everything."
~ Michael Behe, "The Great Debate", 2002

"According to evolutionist Francisco Ayala, Darwin’s greatest achievement was to show that the organized complexity of living things could be brought about without recourse to a designing intelligence. Given this view of Darwin’s achievement, what evolutionary biology has come to mean by “evolution” is an unintelligent or blind form of it. This was brought home to me two years ago at a debate in which I participated. I was invited, along with my colleague and friend Michael Behe, to debate Darwinists Kenneth Miller and Robert Pennock at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. The debate was initially titled “Blind Evolution or Intelligent Design?” Yet, when the debate actually took place on April 23, 2002, the program bulletin distributed at the event quietly dropped the word “blind” and titled the debate simply “Evolution or Intelligent Design?” The original title was more accurate. Intelligent design, the view for which Behe and I were arguing, is opposed to blind evolution, not to evolution simpliciter."
~ William Dembski, [Source]

"Intelligent design does not so much challenge whether evolution occurred, but how it occurred. In particular, it questions whether purposeless material processes - as opposed to intelligence - can create biological complexity and diversity."
~ William Dembski, [Source]

"There is a difference between observations of evolution,
and the cause of the changes that have been observed."

~ Stephen C. Meyer, [Source]

"We're not talking about gaps, we're talking about the
creative power of the mutation/selection mechanism."

~ Stephen C. Meyer, [Source]

"I accept [the land mammal to whale] transition. I'm not arguing that, 'Where are the transitional forms?' [...] My question isn't, 'Where's the Ambulocetus?' or 'Where's the Pakicetus?' or 'Where's the Georgiacetus?', No. My question is, 'Where's the mechanism?!'"
~ Richard Sternberg, [Source]

"Intelligent design does not require organisms to emerge suddenly or to be specially created from scratch by the intervention of a designing intelligence. To be sure, intelligent design is compatible with the creationist idea of organisms being suddenly created from scratch. But it is also perfectly compatible with the evolutionist idea of new organisms arising from old by gradual accrual of change. What separates intelligent design from naturalistic evolution is not whether organisms evolved or the extent to which they evolved, but what was responsible for their evolution."
~ William Dembski, The Design Revolution, 2004

"Many assume that if common ancestry is true, then the only viable scientific position is Darwinian evolution—in which all organisms are descended from a common ancestor via random mutations and blind selection. Such an assumption is incorrect: Intelligent design is not necessarily incompatible with common ancestry. Even if all organisms on earth share a common ancestor, it does not follow that the primary mechanisms causing the differences between the species must be blind, unguided processes such as natural selection."
~ Casey Luskin & Logan Paul Gage, Intelligent Design 101, 2008

"Intelligent design includes a broad spectrum of beliefs. It includes those who accept common descent and support a form of intelligently guided evolution. It also includes those who believe that an intelligent agent designed life-forms separate from other species in something close to their present form. ID doesn't require special creation by any means, but special creationists do share with other intelligent design proponents the view that the complexity of life arose via intelligence, and not an unguided / random process like natural selection acting upon mutation."
~ Casey Luskin, [Source]

"Are we erecting a cardboard cutout of Darwinian evolution or is there a reason we use the term 'Neo-Darwinism'? There is. Evolution can mean many different things. I've written an essay called "The Meanings of Evolution". I've identified at least six different meanings. Many other people who write in the area would agree. But three key meanings. It can mean change over time. It can mean common ancestry or the idea of universal common ancestry - Darwin's tree of life, picture of the history of life. And it can also mean - it can refer to a mechanism. Specifically the idea that natural selection acting on various forms of mutations is sufficient to produce the form and function that we see around us and the appearance of design. Now when we use the term 'Neo-Darwinism', we do so because we want to be clear about what we're challenging and what we're not. The theory of intelligent design does not challenge the first two meanings of evolution - change over time or the idea of common ancestry. Though some of us are skeptical about universal common ancestry. But it does specifically challenge the idea that a purely undirected process - natural selection acting on random variations or other similarly materialistic mechanisms - can account for all the form that we see in the biological world. So we're not trying to erect a stereotype of the theory and knock it down. Just the opposite. We're trying to be clear and precise about what we are critiquing and what we're not."
~ Stephen C. Meyer, [Source]

"A centerpiece of "Judgment Day's" attack on ID is the fossil Tiktaalik, which allegedly shows fish evolving into amphibians. It's not clear why this would "refute" ID because ID is not incompatible with universal common ancestry."
~ Casey Luskin, [Source]

"Modern Darwinists point to evidence of common descent and erroneously assume it to be evidence of the power of random mutation."
~ Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution, 2007

"Although useful for determining possible lines of descent, which is an interesting question in its own right, comparing sequences cannot show how a complex biochemical system achieved its function."
~ Michael Behe, [Source]

"You're responding to us right out of your debating manual, as if you're dealing with some Young-Earth Creationist who just fell off the turnip truck! This is a serious challenge to your view, and it is not about gaps, it is about the adequacy of the mechanism, and you have not addressed that..."
~ Stephen C. Meyer, [Source]

David Icke on Richard Dawkins

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David Icke is well known for criticising religion - Christianity especially - but I've always wondered what his opinion of Richard Dawkins is. Well, in his new book he writes:
[The Illuminati] know how reality works and they want to make sure that their target population never does. Religion was their major vehicle for this through the ages and then 'science' came forward to play its crucial role in suppressing the truth. The party line in the 'science' establishment is that the world is solid and physical and there is no 'afterlife'. Anything to do with the so-called 'paranormal' is condemned or ridiculed by the programmed, often malevolent, 'experts' wheeled out to debunk views, experiences and research that demolish the manufactured myopia that is mainstream 'science'. Ironically, most of what is accepted as scientific 'fact' turns out to be simply assumption and not fact at all. This includes, indeed especially so, Charles Darwin's 'natural selection' or 'survival of the fittest'. As João Magueijo, the Portuguese cosmologist and Professor in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London, said: ' ... most science is just a theory and is not motivated by existing observations crying out for an explanation.' He also rightly observed: 'It seems to me that contradicting textbook wisdom is only heresy for those who have learnt it from the text book.'

It is quite a sight to see 'experts', like Professor Richard Dawkins at Oxford University, trying to discredit anything that doesn't fit with their concrete belief-system. He condemns religion while being an evangelist for his own - the religion of this-world-is-all-there-is. Dawkins ridicules the 'God religions', but doesn't realise that he is a leading voice of the 'no-God religion'. He is the High Priest and Chief Zealot of the religion called 'Scientism' and he is desperate to debunk anything that could question his intellectual pre-eminence. Dawkins targets with religious zeal those who challenge the omnipotence of mainstream science. I have seen him close up during a debate at the Oxford Union, and also on his television programmes, attempting to debunk alternative healing and the 'paranormal'. I see fear in his eyes for some reason and almost a sense of panic and desperation. The thought that he could be wrong seems to terrify him, but surely he must know by now that he has been talking bollocks for decades. If he doesn't, given the evidence available, it's a real head-shaker. Where has he been? It is the legions of mind-made, song-sheet scientists like Dawkins that man the barricades whenever the party line is under threat. They are gatekeepers who seek to impose their own ignorance upon the masses. A few of them, and certainly those who run the institutions, know what they’re doing, but most have just been programmed by the system to program others.

[..]

The university system, elite or otherwise, is ever more irrelevant, ever more in retreat from the cutting edge. There is a revolution of perception going on and the isolated intellect simply can't see it, nor can it see how ignorant the religion of intellectualism really is. How is mainstream science ever going to understand reality when it is populated by 'scientists' filtering everything through a left-brain that can only perceive sequence, time and apartness? It never is and it was never meant to. The idea is to keep people from the truth about reality and the human condition by keeping that knowledge from science. It is the head/heart scientists who are at the cutting edge, not the regular bunch personified by people like Professor Richard Dawkins. He's the Darwinism groupie at Oxford University who targets his nose-in-the-air bile and ridicule at anyone who has another view of reality beyond the edges of his postage stamp. He condemns religion and yet he is the high-priest of his own - Scientism, the belief that only mainstream science has the truth and anything else is blasphemy. I once appeared with him at the Oxford Union years ago. It was like debating with concrete on legs. He didn't like me; I can't think why. The whole Darwinist nonsense, which takes the creator out of Creation, was carefully calculated to indoctrinate a mass perception of life with no purpose, one in which we are mere accidents of 'evolution' and life's a bitch and then you die. It still dominates the collective mind of what is bravely called 'science'.

As with medicine, law and education, so the closed-world of mainstream science is structured to repel all boarders who threaten to breach the dam that passes for its perception. One method is to attack alternative approaches to healing and condemn them as ' crackpot' or 'dangerous', but what could be more crackpot and dangerous to human health than chemotherapy? The science establishment presses for new laws to 'protect' people from alternatives while pursuing policies and technologies that are potentially lethal to both people and planet. Scientists who buck the establishment and seek knowledge through an open mind find their funding and job opportunities disappear. Talk to some of those scientists who have challenged the orthodoxy of global warming, for a start. It is the carrot and stick again and it is used across the entire system to keep dissenters in line and truth in the closet.