Tuesday, September 20, 2005

An exercise for participants in the ID debate

This is a 1982 book defending evolution against ICR-style creationism. I read a lot of this literature back when I was in graduate school and this was the book on the evolutionist side that I thought didn't use bad arguments against creationism. He doesn't seem to imply that no non-naturalistic theory could be scientific, (Creationists of the last century did real science), but the ICR people escape problems by appealing to the mysterious nature of God, and creationism becomes pseudoscientific at that point. It also exposes misrepresentations of evolution by Morris, Gish, etc. It also gives a lot of good Darwinian theory, in language that we nonspecialists can understand.

Whether you think the case against ICR works or not, (I'm pretty convinced, myself) this provides the reader with a lot of pitfalls to avoid on both sides of the issue. What I like is that it isn't aimed at the ID issue at all, yet its arguments are clearly relevant to the ID debate.

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