Saletan on Intelligent Design, May 11, 2005: What Matters in Kansas – The evolution of Creationism.

Saletan on Intelligent Design, February 13, 2002: Unintelligible Redesign – This is the way creationism ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

I don’t understand at all how Saletan can say that Intelligent Design has “evolved” in any way. The arguments they’re peddling in Kansas are exactly the same arguments they were peddling in Ohio. Pluralism, what he calls a more evolved monster (or “creationism’s more advanced Homo erectus phase”) in 2005, is exactly what the supporters of ID were promoting in Ohio, in 2002 — “According to ID proponents, the committee in charge of Ohio’s science curriculum is too ‘homogenous’ and lacks ‘diversity.’ It marginalizes alternative ‘points of view’ to which students should be ‘exposed.'” We even see the same actors: John Calvert was at Kansas and Ohio.

In 2002, Saletan informs us that ID is “non-living, non-breathing proof that religion has surrendered its war against science.” That is hardly the cry to arms he advises in 2005, for scientists to go on the offensive in disproving ID. But why should evolutionists take ID seriously now if there has been no change since 2002?

However, that’s not the real question. The real question is why have Saletan’s views changed on ID. How come “it’s too bad [scientists and liberals] go around sneering, as censors of science often have, that the new theory is too radical, offensive, or embarrassing to be taken seriously,” when in 2002, he criticized these same people for being “hysterical” in their response to ID, for taking it too seriously, in essence?

The two titles of his articles sum it up perfectly. How could Creationism be evolving now if it ended in a whimper in 2002?