Psychoanalysis of ID Proponents

ID advocates can't accept the inability of science to deal with supernatural hypotheses, and they see this limitation as a sacrilegious denial of God's work and presence. Desperately in need of affirmation, they invent "theistic science" in which the design of the Creator is manifest. Perhaps because their religious faith is rather weak, they need to bolster their beliefs every way they can--including hijacking science to save souls and prove the existence of God.

- Adrian Melott, Professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. [1]

Although not all proponents of IDC are biblical fundamentalists, for each some scientific finding will eventually be considered threatening to their religious beliefs.

- Joel Cracraft, President of the American Institute of Biological Sciences [2]

So why is biological complexity singled out for intelligent design? One reason: vanity over human origins. Once past the rhetoric, the crux of the matter for intelligent design proponents is retaining humans as nature's breed apart, the center of life on Earth, the special product of a scriptural creator.

- Leonard Krishtalka, Director of the Kansas University Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center. [3]

Judging by the review Phillip Johnson (author of Darwin on Trial) belongs to a plentiful group of people who can't abide the untidiness of evolution- the messiness, the chanciness, the endless blind alleys, the indifference and the mind-boggling multiplicity which we can see as the story of life on earth. The opposition to evolution and to natural selection as its mechanism is to some extent a question of personality. People who seek or need order and purpose find natural selection quite horrible and understandably so.

- Clare Stevens, scientific reviewer of Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box. [4]

ID seems more comforting: "It plays to our own egos," says Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, who argues that the self-renewing, self-correcting process of evolution is more in line with Christian teachings. "Many people would prefer to think they are the direct products of a benign, beneficent creator."

- Ken Miller, Professor of Biology, University of Colorado [5]

Like all scientific creationists, Behe keeps quiet about the identity of the Great Designer, but the author's professed Roman Catholicism offers one clue.

- Jerry Coyne, Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago [6]

I wanted to comment on the June 22-24 conference I attended at Concordia University, entitled "Intelligent Design and its Critics," because I think it sheds additional light on the motives and psychology of these new creationists….. For my money, however, the action is not in the arguments of ID, all of which have been thoroughly refuted by myself and others (especially by Kenneth Miller in his superb book Finding Darwin's God), but in the psychology of ID. What is really going on here is old-time religion dressed up in new fangled jargon…. What ignites my ire about these people more than anything else is there disingenuousness about their religious motivations. In Why People Believe Weird Things I compared these evolution deniers to Holocaust deniers, pointing out how they use the same style of argumentation and commit the same fallacies of logic in their parallel attempts to distort the historical record for political, ideological, or religious purposes.

- Michael Shermer, a columnist for Scientific American [7]

1. http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-55/iss-6/p48a.html

2. http://www.aibs.org/bioscience%2Deditorials/editorial%5F2004%5F01.html

2. 3. http://ljworld.com/section/oped/story/185247

4. http://www.btinternet.com/~clare.stevens/behenot.htm

5. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/archive/020729/20020729022139_brief.php

6. In GOD IN THE DETAILS: THE BIOCHEMICAL CHALLENGE TO EVOLUTION. JERRY A. COYNE REVIEWS DR. MICHAEL BEHE'S NEW BOOK DARWIN'S BLACK BOX.

7. http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/shermer_design.html