Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
The tiny biochemist I drew in my notebook totally disagrees with the actual biochemist I heard speaking. I draw brilliant, brilliant biochemists.Normally when I accuse creationists of creating a strawman, I'm speaking quite metaphorically. Here, he even has blueprints for the scarecrow. It's surprising, though, that it took Paul over a month to write this, and didn't even construct an actual artificial being to stand in for him. Could he have been delayed in his construction efforts by work on his incredibly imminent monograph in Evolutionary Monographs?
Bonus good fun:
Several years ago, a prominent origin of life researcher complained to me in private correspondence that 'you ID guys won't be satisfied until we put a spark through elemental gases, and a cell crawls out of the reaction vessel.'One could reply by noting that it is totally unreasonable. One could even note that, if one did actually set up a reaction chamber and produce a cell at some point within a biologically reasonable few hundred million years, the "ID guys" would respond that the reaction chamber itself was created by humans, and is thus actually evidence of intelligent design. Foiled again by IDolators' consistent failure to understand why experiments matter!But this is not an unreasonable demand that ID theorists make of the abiogenesis research community.
But the part I really want to focus on is Paul Nelson's reference to "ID theorists." Nelson, after all, famously commented that "Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem." He has defended this comment at length, and I don't find it an interesting enough defense to reply in any detail. Nor need I in this context. If there's no theory of ID, then there are no ID theorists. If indeed all "[they]’ve got [is] a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions," then there are "ID intuitors," or "ID notionists."
And since those intuitions and notions have been discredited, we're really talking about "discredited ID intuitors" and "discredited ID notionists." Leaving only the rather unexciting task of deciding which is which.
Comments
To be fair, they are conspiracy theorists....
Posted by: James F | March 16, 2009 4:04 PM
Don't look now but Paul Nelson is drawing a bead on you from his comment-proof, discussion-proof creationist bunker.
Over at our favorite website, Creationist Lies and Dogma, aka EN&V, Paul is engaging in another imaginary conversation. Where does that guy get his mushrooms??
Posted by: Doc Bill | March 18, 2009 2:07 PM