From Newsgroup: talk.origins

https://evolutionnews.org/2025/08/jay-richards-on-an-icon-of-intelligent-design-and-20-years-of-a-bifurcating-culture/

Apparently Jay Richards claims that the perfect solar eclipse due to the moon's size and orbital position as an icon of the ID scam. This claim
seems to be utter nonsense, and the perfect solar eclipse likely isn't
any sane type of support for the ID scam. It is part of the ID perp's
fine tuning stupidity (#2 of the Top Six), but it actually is just
support for the accidental evolution of our solar system. The fine
tuning would have had to have been done in such a way that another
planet with just the right mass hit the earth at just the right angle to
eject enough debris into orbit so that the moon would form around 20,000
miles from earth. This collision would have added just enough mass to
the earth so that enough energy would be transferred to the moon so that
over billions of years the moons orbital velocity would increase and the distance between the earth and the moon would increase to what it is
today so that the moon would be just the right distance from the earth
to just occlude all of the sun during a total eclipse. This would mean
that our solar system has been evolving over billions of years under
natural laws, and is not the subject of any instantaneous creation.

Earth's rotation has slowed over billions of years so that our current
day length is 24 hours, and the moon has gotten further and further away
from the earth.

Some god may have planned it all to occur the way that it did, but that
god isn't the god described in the Bible. The sun and moon were not
created the day after plants were created on this earth, and the moon
was created so that it would take billions of years to achieve it's
current orbit.

Jay Richards was the first program director for the ID scam, and after
the Wedge document was exposed he was honest enough to admit that the
Wedge was the program that he was directing, and he pointed to the ID
perp's mission statment to support that admission.

https://web.archive.org/web/19980114111554/http:/discovery.org/crsc/aboutcrsc.html

The ID perp's mission statement was pretty much repeated in the Wedge document.

At least the ID perps posted the Icon article as a religious topic under
their Faith and Science header. Probably only a YEC IDiot would
consider the current distance to the moon to be an Icon of the ID scam.
You'd have to likely believe that the sun and moon were created on the
4th day in order to think that the orbit was finely tuned to produce a
total eclipse by just covering the sun without much extra to spare. The article claims that the evidence for Richard's 2004 book, Privileged
Planet, has grown over the last two decades. The sad thing is that it
was just published to keep using ID as bait (the bait and switch ID scam started in 2002), and the bait and switch has continued to go down on
hapless creationist rubes to this day. The evidence never grew strong
enough to end the bait and switch scam that the ID perps have been
running for over 23 years. They sell the rubes the bogus ID science,
and then only give them an obfuscation and denial switch scam that they
tell the rubes has nothing to do with ID nor creationism.

As a side note I got pictures of the last total eclipse that passed
through Arkansas and you could make out a possible solar flare on the
photo that I took with my camera. You could see the solar flare more
clearly on the projection from the monocular that I had set up. I
didn't have a telescope just a spotting scope. During totality you
could look directly through the spotting scope and could clearly see the
solar flares.

Ron Okimoto

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