LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

I found Evolution and God...Again on the "Dispatches from the Culture Wars" blog. It's long, but well worth your time.

An excerpt:

With prominent conservatives like George Will and Charles Krauthammer speaking out strongly in favor of evolutionary theory and against ID lately, you knew there would be a reaction from some of their ideological brethren. George Neumayr, executive editor of The American Spectator, offers this commentary in an attempt to argue that evolution and atheism are one and the same. He begins by trying to poison the well with a false charge of disingenuousness:

Only a small percentage of the American people support the evolutionary claim that life arose through purely material causes. Consequently, many Darwinists, recognizing that they need to win new converts lest they completely lose control over the debate, now loudly argue that Darwin's theory harmonizes with religion. As Brown professor Kenneth Miller put it in the New York Times recently, Darwin's theory isn't "anti-God." But this PR strategy of emphasizing the compatibility of Darwinism and religion is running into a problem: Darwinism's most celebrated experts -- that is, the scientists who understand the theory most purely and deeply -- admit that it is an intrinsically atheistic theory.

Notice how he automatically assumes that Ken Miller argues that evolution is not anti-God purely because of "PR strategy"? This is an example of what I call the preemptive accusation - if you accuse your opponents of doing the very thing that you yourself are doing, it puts them on the defensive and distracts attention from your own behavior. He has not a shred of evidence that Miller is not entirely sincere, nor does he attempt to produce any. I don't know Miller personally, but we have many mutual friends. To a person, all would testify to his integrity and sincerity. Indeed, even the most deeply convinced IDer would not stoop so low as to claim that he is not entirely sincere both in his advocacy of evolution and his deeply held Christian faith.

On the other hand, there is solid evidence that tying evolution to atheism is an integral part of the PR strategy of the intelligent design movement. The Wedge document, for example, is full of arguments conflating evolution and atheism. It's also important to note that it is the ID movement's main thinktank, the Discovery Institute, who has hired a PR firm to help shape their arguments, not Ken Miller or evolutionary scientists.

Reading this article will give you insight about how the ID people spin things and twist them. It's a fascinating read.