A long rant over at Telic Thoughts...

... about the origins of Intelligent Design Creationism.

The reason I write about it is that a single paragraph caught my eye:

As I have argued before, design is a concept/explanation that has been around since the Greek philosophers. An astonishing example of such thinking comes from Marcus Cicero (106-43 BC). Cicero would write something that sounds oddly familiar:

Can I but wonder here that anyone can persuade himself that certain solid and individual bodies should be moved by their natural forces and gravitation in such a manner that a world so beautiful adorned should be made by fortuitous concourse. He who believes this possible may as well believe, that if a great quantity of the one and twenty letters, composed of gold or any other matter, were thrown upon the ground, they would fall into such order as legibly to form the ‘Annals of Ennius’. I doubt whether fortune could make a single verse of them.

The remarkable thing about this is not that Cicero subscribed to natural theology. The remarkable thing is that this quote is advanced in support of Intelligent Design Creationism.

For one thing, one would think that with the advent of the theories of Gravity and Classical Mechanics, such a quote would become a liability to Intelligent Design Creationism, proving as it does the vacuity of the full-blown intellectual surrender strategy that is creationism.

For another, it clearly shows the links between Intelligent Design Creationism and bad, old-fasioned fundamentalism. The very links proponents of Intelligent Design Creationism strive so fervently to hide...