Thursday, August 30, 2007

Why don't IDist or Creationists post in peer reviewed journals?

The following links provide in detail why Intelligent Design and Creationist theories are not found in mainstream science journals:

1. Correspondence w/ Science Journals (Behe)
2. Why isn't intelligent design found published in peer-reviewed science journals?
3. Do Creationists Publish in Notable Refereed Journals?
4. Why Don’t Creationists Publish in Leading Science Journals?

There are several journals promoting peer reviewed Creationist research, but mainstream scientists involved in this debate deem these journals psuedoscience, ignore them, and continue to make claims that Creationists "don't do science". Creationist theories stand little chance of breaking into mainstream journals because they've been deemed "Christian apologetics", though creation science can be discussed without any reference to religion.

I find it disheartening to think that we may neglect to consider important insights about our universe merely because we are bound to the scientific gatekeeper that refuses to consider anything that may coorespond to a particular religious belief system...even if what is being discussed and considered is based on scientific research.

Below you will find a few of those journals that support creation science:

The Creation Research Society Quarterly
Journal of Creation
Institute for Creation Research

Dr. Walt Brown has also provides several theories in regard to creation science that can be found in his book, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood. Brown also provides a website where his entire book can be viewed on line.

I've been asked several times why scientists who support Intelligent Design don't publish in ID journals. Personally, I wonder what the point would be in doing so? The scientists who ask this question are the same ones who have claimed that creationists MUST publish in mainstream journals if they want to be taken seriously. If ID research is not published in “mainstream” journals, the scientific establishment will merely deem it pseudoscience just as it has done with creation science.

Intelligent Design is *not* religion, hence the inference *should* be published in mainstream scientific journals. Just recently, a lab had been established at Baylor University where it appeared that Intelligent Design would be given consideration in the research that was being applied. Professor Robert Marks headed the "Evolutionary Informatics" lab and had begun collaboration with William Dembski on several papers. Though, as we have seen happen in the past, censorship of this endeavour took root, and the plug was quickly pulled. Par for the course...

I've also received comments similar to the following:

Bottom line: ID must make a positive, undeniable scientific advancement.”

It already has. It has demonstrated that materialistic processes cannot account for all that we observe in nature, and that design is overwhelmingly evident in the universe and living systems. This is perhaps the most significant scientific advancement of the last half-century, *if* science is defined as the search for truth.

If you don't believe this statement to be accurate, consider the research papers that have been published in recent years trying to falsify the inference.

A quote I've kept in my files, and that I find much more elegant than my writing style is found below (unfortunately, I neglected to document the source):

The theory of intelligent design promises to reinvigorate a field of science grown stale from a lack of viable solutions to dead-end problems. The intellectual competition created by the discovery of design will bring sharper analysis to the professional scientific literature and will require that assertions be backed by hard data. The theory will spark experimental approaches and new hypotheses that would otherwise be untried. A rigorous theory of intelligent design will be a useful tool for the advancement of science in an area that has been moribund for decades.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great work.