Just What is Intelligent Design?

I’ve been following the reviews of the Ben Stein “Expelled” movie since it was first shown. Many of them properly criticize it for its many inherent cinematic flaws. Others angrily take it to task for its clear violations of sense or sensibility. There is also ExpelledExposed.com, the not-mentioning of which I get chided for every time I post about this movie.

Then there are some who applaud it for “speaking the truth” and “opening conversations”. On my second post about this movie, I asked people to send me links to any non-negative review coming from sources outside of the Discovery Institute (Answers in Genesis, EvolutionNews.org, etc). I suspect that there is now an effort afoot to produce as many positive reviews as there are negative ones, in order to keep things “fair and balanced” online.

After the initial spate of bad reviews by reputable critics, various Christian columnists have been lauding it for exposing the religious suppression of the “Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design” and especially the efforts of reviewers (and scientists, and “W” appointed conservative judges) to associate this “scientific theory” with the openly religious (and mostly equivalent) ideas of Creationism. Bad intellectuals, bad experts.

But, what is this Scientific Theory? Well, an idea has to have 3 elements to qualify as a scientific theory :

  1. Explain all currently and previously observed facts in the category of interest in terms of natural laws.
  2. Describe what facts, if discovered, would prove it false.
  3. Make predictions about
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Read more about the article Who changed the Bible and why? Bart Ehrman’s startling answers
Who Changed the Bible's Narrative Ehrman's Findings

Who changed the Bible and why? Bart Ehrman’s startling answers

How often do we hear people “explaining” religious beliefs by stating “The Bible says so,” as if the Bible fell out of the sky, pre-translated to English by God Himself?  It’s not that simple, according to an impressive and clearly-written book that should be required reading for anyone who claims to know “what the Bible says.”

Bart Ehrman’s Exploration: Who Changed the Bible and Why?

The 2005 bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, was not written by a raving atheist.  Rather, it was written by a fellow who had a born-again experience in high school, then went on to attend the ultraconservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.  Bart Ehrman didn’t stop there, however.  He wanted to become an evangelical voice with credentials that would enable him to teach in secular settings.  It was for this reason that he continued his education at Wheaton and, eventually, Princeton, picking up the ability to read the New Testament in its original Greek in the process.

As a result of his disciplined study, Ehrman increasingly questioned the fundamentalist approach that the “Bible is the inerrant Word of God.  It contains no mistakes.”  Through his studies, Ehrman determined that the Bible was not free of mistakes:

We have only error ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals and different from them, evidently, in thousands of ways.

(Page 7).  At Princeton, Ehrman learned that mistakes had been made in the copying of the New Testament over the centuries.  Upon realizing this, …

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