Anti-Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

Let's be upfront about what we stand for

This short post on Uncommon Descent contains the first reference I have seen on UD to the words “anti-evolutionist”. The inference is that UD is being identified as an anti-evolutionist web site rather than just an Intelligent Design web site. As I have maintained on this blog before, in popular parlance “Intelligent Design” now evokes anti-evolutionist connotations: This practice is misleading given that Christian evolutionist John Polkinghorne claims to be a Intelligent Design Creationist. If UD is primarily an anti-evolutionist site and secondarily an Intelligent Design site, then to date UD have done little to make this clear. I haven’t yet seen many posts on UD acknowledging that if evolution is to work it must be resourced by highly improbable preconditions thus flagging up Dembki’s ID detection  criterion and making it an ID candidate. If UD really stood by ID first and foremost they would be able to make peace with evolutionists like John Polkinghorne; but no, the agenda of UD is now cast in stone and probably too mixed up with right wing politics and Young Earth Creationism to make this possible. I would love to be proved wrong on this score.

Anyway, if from now on UD starts identifying itself as an “anti-evolutionist” web site we will know where they stand. But somehow I don’t think this will happen because they will want to continue to portray themselves as representative of the exclusive and one and only authentic ID community and therefore have an interest in making out  ID to be necessarily anti-evolution. They will therefore continue to misrepresent evolution as a necessarily informationless process that pretends to be able to create information.