This is amusing. Alister and Joanna Collicut McGrath have written a book called The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, and because it rips a well-known "Darwinist," the ID brigade is obligated to support it despite its members' trenchant and ongoing insistence that ID and God really have nothing to do with each other, except when they do, which is all the time, as long as no one says it out loud.
It's like a twisted invocation of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: God and the DI are bedfellows only when no one argues the point, as arguing neatly knocks God out of consideration until pro-science folks stop being accusatory. That is, the product of the uncertainly in God-talk and that in ID-talk cannot exceed a certain constant, although this constant's value is unknown.
Anyway, DI flackmaster Casey Luskin writes:
When my copy of Alister and Joanna Collicut McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine recently arrived, I was struck by its short length. I immediately wondered if it was short because Richard Dawkins himself provided scant substance in his The God Delusion to which to respond. According to the McGraths, my suspicions were correct.
Right; either that, or all of the evidence for the deity subscrbed to by Luskin and the McGraths could fit between two book covers fused together by Krazy Glue. Or, for that matter, between a couple of quarks belonging to the same atom.
Although Casey's straight-faced endorsement of this book is to be expected, it's still cause for a chuckle, from his admission that the book really has next to nothing to do with ID to his claim that it "covers an impressive array data from many fields." What is really a hoot, though, is this excerpt, where the McGraths are trying to build a case against Dawkins' assertion that a conscious designer of the cosmos would have to be hopelessly complex and is therefore highly improbable at best:
Perhaps we need to appreciate that there are many things that seem improbable--but improbability does not, and never has, entailed nonexistence.
Except, of course, when a creationist wants to rail against the statistical unlikelihood of evolution (typically using meaningless ad hoc numbers). In these cases improbablity always specifies impossibility.
And so the circus continues.
Comments
Actually, I think a variant of the original version where a product of standard deviations can't decrease beyond a certain value is more fitting:
delta(design)*delta(religion) ≥ b-bar/2, where b-bar = Beck's constant.
This means that when ID is observed the amount of religion in it is undefined, and when religion is looked at the amount of design in action is not decided.
Finally a use for Dembski's universal probability bound that has a chance of working, strengthening Dawkins claim of improbability to impossibility. Way to go, Dembski.
Posted by: Torbj�rn Larsson, OM | July 8, 2007 2:52 AM
Um, the HTML code got perverted by previewing. New try:
Actually, I think a variant of the original version where a product of standard deviations can't decrease beyond a certain value is more fitting:
delta(design)*delta(religion) ≥ b-bar/2, where b-bar = Beck's constant.
This means that when ID is observed the amount of religion in it is undefined, and when religion is looked at the amount of design in action is not decided.
Finally a use for Dembski's universal probability bound that has a chance of working, strengthening Dawkins claim of improbability to impossibility. Way to go, Dembski.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | July 8, 2007 2:54 AM
Torbjörn Larsson, OM:
I noticed that ScienceBlogs' preview function always does this to HTML entities like —. This is apparently some consequence of behaviors deeply embedded in MovableType. Consequently, I hit "back" in Firefox after previewing instead of posting from the preview screen.
It looks like it screws up Unicode too (compare the diacritics!).
Posted by: Blake Stacey, OM | July 8, 2007 11:31 AM
A few months ago, I proposed a new variant on Godwin's Law:
1. In any discussion of atheism (skepticism, etc.), the probability that someone will accuse a vocal non-theist of "atheist fundamentalism" increases to one.
2. The person who makes this accusation will be considered to have lost the argument.
McGrath and McGrath lose at the subtitle. Nothing to see here; move along now.
Posted by: Blake Stacey, OM | July 8, 2007 11:44 AM
Can someone remind me what the fundamentals are of atheism?
Posted by: pough | July 8, 2007 11:59 AM
"Atheist fundamentalist" is right up there with "Darwinist", "materialist", and "secular progressive" as terms that serve as an alert that the speaker is not much interested in rational discourse.
Posted by: Science Avenger | July 8, 2007 1:47 PM
Jason Rosenhouse fisked Alistair McGrath's anti-Dawkins screeding back in February, as part of his series reviewing the reviews of The God Delusion. Introduction:
Conclusion:
Posted by: Blake Stacey, OM | July 8, 2007 1:51 PM
In the meantime, the DI's Bruce Chapman is complaining about the NY Times' mention of computer simulations demonstrating how the eye could have evolved just as biologists have proposed. He's complaining that the NYT article doesn't specify what these simulations included and who carried them out, and asserts that the paper "should retract [the author's] claim or substantiate it."
This is funny for two reasons. One, our knowledge of the eye's evolution (which has occurred independently about 40 times in Earth's history) is not contingent on the presence or success of computer similations. We see organisms around us today with "transitional" eyes and such, for Chrissakes. And two, if the DI were forced to retract every unsustantiated claim and flat-out lie it has ever proferred, its Web site would consume no more than three bytes of disk space.
Posted by: Kevin Beck | July 8, 2007 4:17 PM
Thanks. I was aware of the comment box script (or perhaps even MT decoding) messing up some characters. It replaces the decoding into the comment box, but can't then interpret it correctly. So I usually do like you do when it is needed. Alas, it was late...
About the Unicode, I'm not really sure what is up with ScienceBlogs. Some blogs have Unicode, some seems to enforce Western (which messes up some diacritics) either straight up or when previewing/commenting, some seems to have one encoding in the name box and another in the comment box, and so on.
To further mess it up, of course the lazy list filler keeps both decodings when they have been submitted, so depending on what I choose from the lazy list and what the blog decodes, I can see 3 variants of my name posted. (The decodings of the decodings are noninjective, it seems.)
It is unfortunate that a site can't have a standardized scheme for all its blogs.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | July 8, 2007 5:25 PM
More "breathtaking inanity" from the ID crowd. Casey Luskin (who loves to call himself a scientist) has dedicated his life to convincing the world that his God created everything. Now that it has been decided in the laboratory, in proper journals AND in the courts we can only look at his efforts for what they truly are: pathetic.
Posted by: Wiseclam | July 9, 2007 10:42 AM