Limbaugh on ID

The Discovery Institute keeps insisting that Intelligent Design/Intelligent Origin Theory is not religion. Rush Limbaugh, and at least one of his callers, seem not to have gotten the memo.

On the other hand, I do think this: I think that the people -- and I know why they're doing it, but I still think that it's a little bit disingenuous. Let's make no mistake. The people pushing intelligent design believe in the biblical version of creation. Intelligent design is a way, I think, to sneak it into the curriculum and make it less offensive to the liberals because it ostensibly does not involve religious overtones, that there is just some intelligent being far greater than anything any of us can even imagine that's responsible for all this, and of course I don't have any doubt of that. But I think that they're sort of pussyfooting around when they call it intelligent design.

That's pretty much what everyone except the proponents say. They're in the position of the mainstream media denying its liberal bias. Maybe they think these denials actually work; maybe they don't care, as long as they maintain plausible deniability.

WND has an article setting forth Jonathan Witt's response to Limbaugh's statement:

Jonathan Witt, Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, the nation's leading intelligent design think tank, says Limbaugh's suggestion that design theorists appear disingenious when drawing a sharp distinction between creationism and intelligent design is mistaken.

"Since newspapers routinely mangle our position on this matter, it's little wonder," he said today.

"Traditional creationism begins with the Bible and moves from there to science," says Witt. "Intelligent design begins and ends with science."

The thing is, critics of ID/IOT, and even many supporters including Rush Limbaugh, know what The Designer isn't. It isn't anything that implements its design using any of the natural laws we know about. Over the course of any number of books and articles, the supporters of ID/IOT have declared that The Designer has to be more complex than what it designs, more intelligent than what it designs, and is not bound by the laws of physics.

That doesn't leave any room for anything but a supernatural cause, and honest people know that.