Another loss for the Right Wing over Intelligent Design?

[ck4829]

I found this interesting and maybe even a little bit humorous, because I wonder how the right wingers will respond to this.

Even though it is a recent move and it is pretty small, some people are saying that "Intelligent Design" could mean multiple designers.

Here's one example:

"The last dozen years has seen a recrudescence of the Payleyist Argument from Design, the argument that because biological phenomena may appear to be designed, there must be an Intelligent Designer of those biological phenomena. A persistent focus of the Wedge-based Intelligent Design movement (headquartered at the Discovery Institute) over the last decade has been to attempt to persuade state legislatures and state and local boards of education to teach “alternatives” to the modern theory of biological evolution. The Discovery Institute has sent emissaries bearing that message to bodies ranging from the Darby, MT, local school board through the Ohio State Board of Education to the U.S. Congress.

Unfortunately, there are no scientific alternatives to evolutionary theory available to be taught. Mainstream Intelligent Design theory as it is represented in the published work of Phillip Johnson, William Dembski, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and their brethren is conspicuous by its absence. I can find no reasonably extended description of what mainstream Dembski/Behe/Johnson/Meyer ID “theory” actually is beyond the naked claim that “something must have designed this thing”, nor any description of what an ID “explanation” of some biological phenomenon would actually look like beyond the bare assertion that “this thing is/was designed”. There are no ID hypotheses to be tested against data and therefore no systematic or coherent ID research program.

Mainstream Intelligent Design is proving itself to be scientifically vacuous. While Dembski has his Explanatory Filter and Complex Specified Information and Specified Complexity, and Behe has his Irreducible Complexity, no actual research program utilizing those concepts has emerged from the mainstream Intelligent Design movement. Therefore a revolutionary change in the conception of ID is necessary to rouse it from its empirical and theoretical slumber and to provide appropriate material for school boards and legislatures who want an alternative to modern evolutionary theory to be taught in secondary schools. Multiple Designers Theory is that revolutionary change.

...

Multiple Designers Theory is far more developed than mainstream intelligent design theory."

http://www.pandasthumb.org/pt-archives/000509.html