With the Discovery Institute, Who Needs Cable?

I don't have cable, so I miss out on such entertainment as the Discovery Channel. I do have internet access so I get a different kind of entertainment--the Discovery Institute. Their Center for Science and Culture operates a blog, which appears to mainly be used for complaining about media coverage of intelligent design "theory." One of their consistent complaints of late is that they are being unfairly and inaccurately lumped together with creationists. They know that it will be difficult for them to make any scientific or legal headway as long as they are associated with creationism.

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Now I can appreciate the challenge of trying to have others define your beliefs as you define them. I recognize that it must be frustrating to always be catagorized with a movement you are trying to distance yourself from. Recently one exasperated ID advocate challenged anybody to find a leading ID intellectual that did not accept the Big Bang or the age of the earth. The Panda's Thumb accepted the challenge, with humorous results. (Read the whole thing--including comments.)

The latest from the CSC is a complaint about how they were portrayed in a segment of PBS's The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. The post tries to draw a clear distinction between creationism and intelligent design.

The theory of intelligent design and creationism are different. Let me make this point very clear:

Creation Science is defined by the following six tenets, taken together:

-The universe, energy and life were created from nothing
-Mutations and [natural] selection cannot bring about the development of all living things from a single organism.
-The earth is young, in the range of 10,000 years or so.
-Humans and apes have different ancestries.
-Created kinds of plants and organisms can vary only within fixed limits.
-Earth's geology can be explained by catastrophic events, primarily a worldwide flood.

Intelligent design on the other hand, involves only two basic sceintific assumptions:

-Intelligent causes exist for origins of life.
-These cause[s] can be empirically detected.

First let's take the assumptions of ID. The first one is not very specific. Are we only talking about ID vs abiogenesis, or does the origin of any species fall under ID? The second assumption is really a hypothesis--one that is yet to be demonstrated convincingly. Now, I thought that the main way of detecting design was to find irreducibly complex systems. But earlier in the post there is talk of molecular machines. So is any and every enzyme without a clear precursor designed? After all, enzymes do some pretty specific chemical reactions.

Now what is interesting to me is that the tenets of creationism were not denied here. In fact, ID proponents hold to several of them. You don't have to search hard to find ID support for the second, fourth, and fifth creationist tenets. Not only are some of these tenets necessary assumptions for many of their arguments, but ID advocates often argue them explicitly.

They try hard to distance themselves from religious conservatives:

The story moves quickly to the typical stereotype of religion vs. science saying that is an issue mostly focused on religion and faith. To bolster that they have lots of high school students who express their doubts about Darwinism in overtly religious terms. The story leaves no doubt that evolution is under an attack led "mostly by religious conservatives." Interesting. David Berlinski would be surprised to hear that. So would Stanley Salthe. Or, Giuseppe Sermonti. Or any number of other non-religious scientists skeptical of the claims of Darwinism. Contrary to the Newshour's premise at the outset, doubting Darwinism is not solely a consequence of religious belief.

The interesting thing here is that the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism document is subject of the link. It is portrayed here as though the scientists on the list are non-religious. While some may be, many (probably most) certainly are religious. I once picked an actual biologist on the list, at random, and looked to see at what institution they were a professor. Answer: A Christian college.

Finally, the reason such superficial treatment of ID is given in the piece is: "because the issue for the media isn't about the science involved, it's about making this a culture war issue." Ooohhh, I see. So it's all about the science for the Discovery Institute. In that case, they may want to quit putting out books like Defeating Darwinism where the call to culture war is blatant and the attack on evolutionary theory is unabashedly about its conflict with Christianity.

With entertainment like this, why should I want cable?

Note: be sure to see update in comments.