Need I say more?

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

"They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

The article also claims that even evangelical colleges are getting disillusioned.

[Via (admitted conservative) John Derbyshire]

Blogger John Farrell has a suggestion for Dr. Behe.

[Monday morning update]

More thoughts on the sterility of Intelligent Design as science:

If we continue with Behe’s analogy, we might expect that the decades before 1965 would have seen big-bang proponents scolding their critics for ideological blindness, of having narrow, limited and inadequate concepts of science. Popular books would have appeared announcing the big-bang theory as a new paradigm, and efforts would have been made to get it into high school astronomy textbooks.

However, none of these things happened. In the decades before the big-bang theory achieved its widespread acceptance in the scientific community its proponents were not campaigning for public acceptance of the theory. They were developing the scientific foundations of theory, and many of them were quite tentative about their endorsements of the theory, awaiting confirmation...

...Unfortunately, the proponents of ID aren’t operating this way. Instead of doing science, they are writing popular books and op-eds. As a result, ID remains theoretically in the same scientific place it was when Phillip Johnson wrote Darwin on Trial — little more than a roster of evolutionary theory’s weakest links.

ID always seemed like the idea of the worlds on the back of a giant turtle -- but whats the turtle on?

If the universe and all the stuff, creatures, etc in it are to complex to have just existed or developed naturally; and God is the even more infinate answer to the universes creation; who/what was the even more powerfull thing needed to create God?

ID belongs in the area of theology, not science. Even there it is on slppery ground -- in numerous areas of the Bible we are told that belief comes from faith -- If we could prove the idea of ID then faith would not be needed.

The whole point that seems to be missed by it's detractors is that ID is an attempt to deal with a theological question in a scientific way. Of course, that could be a failed attempt but I think the jury is still out (well, they may be tying their shoelaces!)

People that believe in the existance of God do not depend on science to prove that existance. They rely on their hearts and the cloud of witnesses recorded in a number of books. Written testimony is often supported by new archiological evidence (which has often put many scoffer's to shame, if they had any.)

But I do suspect that much of the support for ID is politically motivated by people that don't have much of an understanding of science.

None of the above addresses the heart of the issue however, which is, could the complexity observed be accounted for by the proposed mechanisms in the time allotted. I think people are a little too quick to answer that question. Which is to say they don't give it the deep consideration that it deserves (present company excepted of course ;)

The whole point that seems to be missed by it's detractors is that ID is an attempt to deal with a theological question in a scientific way.

No, it's an (failed) attempt to deal with science in a theological way.

None of the above addresses the heart of the issue however, which is, could the complexity observed be accounted for by the proposed mechanisms in the time allotted. I think people are a little too quick to answer that question. Which is to say they don't give it the deep consideration that it deserves (present company excepted of course ;)

I'd say "yes". We're talking extraordinarily long timeframes and huge numbers of generations in which to evolve changes. The ID people have yet to explain why they think life is more complex than could be accounted for given the timeframe and generations involved. In fact, I'd say there's a good argument for too much complexity to be "designed".

An example of this is the complex web of biological processes. Surely, any competent designer could have come up with a more efficient and simpler way to transfer energy and materials around a cell.

Another example is the short lifespan of a human being and the way aging manifests. Anything capable of "designing" a human, should be able to do a better job.

I think people also don't understand the power of randomness, particularly randomness harnessed to selection. I think there's some ego defense going on here -- how can something so maximally mindless do things that we can't do ourselves?

I've seen this also in the software testing world. Random input testing has been rather cavalierly dismissed as the worst kind of testing, but on any sufficiently complicated piece of software it will find bugs that rationally designed tests would have had little chance of finding.

"No, it's an (failed) attempt to deal with science in a theological way."

It can certainly be seen that way and of course, much of ID in the news has been political theatre.

However, while I agree that the central tenants of ID should be put through the peer review process it remains to be seen whether it will be or not; the article you reference doesn't seem to be the last nail in the coffin (although it could be the first.)

You may remember, I agree with you that science is what should be taught in science classrooms. The thing is, much of what is taught in classrooms regarding evolution was known to be wrong at the time of teaching it those many decades ago when I was a lad. I couldn't speak to whether the same goes on today, but I'd be willing to place a wager.

It sure seems to me that America succeeds in spite to the education we give our children.