ID Gets It's Stage: The Oxford Conference

In an interesting twist to the ID saga, The Ian Ramsey Center at the University of Oxford is having a conference on Intelligent Design called God, Nature and Design:
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. It looks like an interesting mix of papers, both critical and supportive of ID. It will be interesting to see how the There are a few items of note. Of the 21 papers submitted so far, six titles contain either "God", "divine", or "moral". I guess the pretense that ID is not about religion has gone down the memory hole to sit next to "cdesign proponentsists", and "creation science".

It will also be very interesting to see how the defenders of ID withstand a critical audience. ID proponents tend to avoid doing battle on any playing field they can't control, thus the censorious policies of so many of their blogs and conferences. However, it would be disappointing if William Dembski's claim that the "vanguard" of the ID movement, ie it's brightest lights, were not invited. That would be both an intellectual, and public relations, nightmare. However, given Dembski's tenuous relationship with reality, I will refrain from judgement at this time until I hear back from the conference organizers.

I find it also notable that the conference appears, based on the submission summaries, to be one of philosophy, not science. So regardless of the outcome, ID still appears to be a nonscientific movement.