On the Pseudo-Apologetics of Intelligent Design

I started reading Maurice Blondel's "Letter on Apologetics" (1896) yesterday while flying back to Norman from Washington, D.C. I could not help but think of the "Intelligent Design" school of apologetics as I came across this gem:

It does not matter that certain arguments seem demonstrative to certain untrained minds; we must resolutely refuse to employ them. It is a service which we owe to the truth to deprive it of all bogus supports and to show them for what they are. So much the worse for those who hanker after them. Those who have been satisfied by them will be saved from a certain philosophical presumption and may be reached instead by arguments of a very different kind which will not puff them up with empty learning. I hate the infatuation of people who are tough-minded with the tough-minded, who see too clearly to see properly, who are proud of their myopic certainty, who are foolishly indignant at the folly or intellectual perversity of unbelievers and who, with the bumptiousness of a faith which is bound up with reasons of a too human kind, have neither due respect for souls who are still seeking the light nor sense of the mysterious profundities of our destiny. It is undesirable that our apologists should be those who are most in need of conversion to the Christian spirit.

French Catholic thought would not remain more than a century ahead of Baptist thought if the fundamentalists who took over the SBC had not removed contemporary philosophers like Jeff Pool, Keith Putt and others from their teaching positions at Baptist seminaries. Pool and Putt are both students of the French Reformed Philosopher Paul Ricoeur who was strongly influenced by the apologetic method of Maurice Blondel.