Percy writes:
In reality there's only one kind of science. It employs observations, experiment and the scientific method to develop an ever improving understanding of the natural universe. If ICR wants accreditation from Texas then they must begin teaching this kind of science.
Are you alleging that ICR does not do observation research, experiment and has no science methodology to develop an ever improving understand of the universe?
Why must creationist ID scholastically accredited scientists ...
No, the ICR does not have a science methodology and it actually works
against developing an improved understanding of the universe. Yet again, if you disagree and truly believe that they do have such a methodology, then please present a description of that methodology that demonstrates its validity. Yet again, if that methodology does exist, then it must have been described by the creationists themselves many times over the past decades that they've been churning out their materials. Especially considering that their avowed aim is education. I've certainly never encountered any such description of a working methodology and I'm quite certain nobody else has either.
Also, you are conflating ID "science" and "creation science". Even though ID has been incorporated into "creation science", they are actually not the same things and they have different histories.
"Creation science" was created at the end of the 1960's in the wake of
Epperson vs Arkansas (1968) and in response to the striking down of the "monkey laws" that had been in effect since the mid-20's. Now that the teaching of evolution could no longer be barred for religious reasons, creationists adopted the strategy of claiming that their teachings are scientific and so they want to bar evolution education for
scientific reasons. In reality, their teachings are religious. In preparing "public school" materials, they would simply take their existing blatantly religious books and make superficial cosmetic changes (eg, removing Bible verses, change "God" to "Creator", fail to identify who this "Creator" was supposed to be), such that the entire effort became known as "Hiding the Bible". Despite all their efforts to play "Hide the Bible", their materials are still blatantly religious, such that when Arkansas Act 590, 1980, (a sister law of the Louisiana law that was struck down in
Edwards v. Aguillard, 1987) mandated the teaching of "creation science" in the name of "balanced treatment", the teachers assigned to creating the curriculum could not find any suitable materials (except for a single
Reader's Digest article), finding the ICR "public school" materials too blatantly religious.
So where did all those materials come from? They weren't all created ex nihilo in 1968, even though a lot were produced in the late-60's/early-70's -- bibliographic searches through creationist claims that actually cite their own creationist sources often trace back to around 1972. But many of the leading creationists of that era had been working on their own claims for many years, even a decade or two. For example, Dr. Henry Morris and Whitcomb published their Flood Geology work,
The Genesis Flood, in 1961; it not only contained the basis for Flood Geology, but also Morris' earliest (to my knowledge) stab at his human population claim (AKA "The Bunny Blunder"). Nor did they create it all themselves, but rather they drew from the writings of prior creationists, such as George McCready Price (the true father of Flood Geology, having published his attacks on geology from 1906 to 1923). For that matter, attempts to find geological evidence of Noah's Flood date back to the Biblical Geologists of the early 19th Century, including one of the founders of modern geology, Adam Sedgwick, who had started out looking for the Flood but ended up realizing that the evidence indicated otherwise.
So there has been a long history of people trying to find scientific evidence supporting the Bible ... or rather supporting
their beliefs about the Bible. While we may rightfully suspect the honesty of some creationists in a number of cases, I prefer to think that all creationists started out with honest intentions. But the problem is that they start out "knowing" what they must find and what they must not find, or else "Scripture would have no meaning" (John Morris of the ICR stating why the earth can be no more than 10,000 years old) and that is not what they find. At that point, there are a number of things the seeker can do. Creationists do the wrong thing. They ignore and even deny the evidence. They start lying about the evidence both to themselves and to others. They create and promote deceptions such as "creation science".
That's what the ICR's "research" is. Ignoring the evidence, they misrepresent science and then use whatever means they can to discredit that misrepresentation. When the ICR was in California and ran into problems with accredidation in the late 1980's, the state sent a visitation committee to the ICR's graduate school on a fact-finding mission. It's been a long time since I've read their report, but one event still sticks in my mind. Their tour guide pointed out that the biochemistry class used the same textbook as leading universities, but guess what they were doing with it. As a class, the instructor had them all going through the book, page by page, and telling them which parts to cross out because "We don't believe that."
And there's a name for their "scientific discoveries", well an acronym actually: PRATTs. They're not doing science; they're trying to do science in.
ID is a slightly different beast. Instead of starting out trying to promote and defend a particular narrow interpretation of the Bible, its originators and proponents started out having other kinds of difficulties with evolution, mainly philosophical ones. For example, in an essay lawyer Phillip Johnson, one of ID's founders, explained his reason for opposing evolution: it doesn't leave anything for God to do. As a movement, the other main problem they have is their misunderstanding that science is based on philosophical materialism and so one of the movement's goals is change science so that it would also make use of supernaturalistic "explanations".
While most people didn't become aware of ID until 1987 when Edwards v. Aguillard had exposed "creation science's" game of "Hide the Bible" and creationists then immediately switched to the game of "Hide the Creationism" by embracing ID. Actually, ID goes back at least to 1981, which is when I saw Phillip Johnson on
Nova. He had recently written
Darwin on Trial which tried to present science as functioning like a court of law and so he wanted to apply courtroom rules of evidence to evolution. My reaction was, "What an idiot! Science is much more like a police investigation, following hunches and looking for clues and piecing it all together. It's only after the investigation has been completed that a complete case can be put together for the courtroom."
Both "sciences", ID and creation, have political and social agendas. Neither of them want to "develop an ever improving understand of the universe". Neither of them actually does science.
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