Intelligent Design
jlynch | May 18, 2006Ed linked to a set of 45 "SIgns you might be an ID supporter" and this caught my eye:
35. You resent the implication that ID assumes the Designer has to be supernatural. After all, He could have been a space alien, right?
34. You believe that the laws of Nature, the fundamental constants of physics, and the configuration of the solar system with respect to the rest of the cosmos, all show signs of having been intelligently designed to make it possible for us to exist and to study Nature.
33. You believe both of the above simultaneously, though you can't quite explain how a space alien could…
stcynic | May 18, 2006With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, a link to an amusing post full of "You might be an ID supporter" jokes. Some are fairly amusing. A couple of my favorites:
18. You consistently refer to mainstream scientists as "Darwinists," which you use as though it meant "bigoted, atheistic, materialistic and dogmatic adherents of a religious movement attempting to trick people into becoming atheists too."
17. You consistently refer to evolution as though mutation and natural selection were the only mechanisms available for the development of natural diversity.
Read the rest for yourself.
stcynic | May 17, 2006The DI loves to put out lists of scientists who "dissent from Darwinism". Because such lists make no actual arguments, they are pure appeals to authority. That authority is often misplaced, of course, since a large percentage of those on the list have no more training in the relevant fields (fields where evolutionary theory is involved) than a non-scientist would have. According to the NSF, there are 543,580 scientists in the US (that doesn't include engineers). Which means that even if we grant them all of the engineers and all of the scientists with no training at all in evolutionary…
stcynic | May 16, 2006Rich Hughes sent along a diagram of Dembski's explanatory filter. It won't fit on my screen, but PZ Myers redid it and posted it to his blog as well. It's hysterical. Click here.
stcynic | May 13, 2006Pim Van Meurs has an excellent post at the Panda's Thumb that looks at Dembski's design inference and why it is really nothing more than a "god of the gaps" argument, contrary to the common claims of ID proponents that there is a positive way to detect design:
Okay, let's start with how ID tries to infer design, namely by using the Design Inference. In order for something to be designed, it needs to be 'specified' and sufficiently 'complex'. So what is really meant by these terms? Specification basically means that there exists an independent description of the event or system, and as Dembski…
stcynic | April 27, 2006To those who claim that we've never seen one species turn into another, I give you the Oklahoma University IDEA Club. It used to be known as the Creation Science Society. In fact, their webpage initially said:
Welcome to the University of Oklahoma IDEA Club website! We are no longer the Creation Science Society. Our new name is Intelligent Design & Evolution Awareness Club. That's IDEA Club for short!
Voila, a perfect example of sympatric speciation that happened right before our eyes. The actual speciation event took place sometime between August 18, 2003 and October 5, 2003. Here is…
stcynic | April 26, 2006There is an interesting exchange going on in the comments after my post on ID and Creationism. I want to move part of that conversation up to the top so it doesn't get lost. In particular, I want to focus on an argument made by Jeremy Pierce, author of the Parableman blog. I want to focus on that argument because I think it cuts to the heart of several important questions involving ID and evolution. First, I want to establish what Jeremy is arguing by quoting him. In essence, he is arguing that ID is synonymous with theistic evolution. I first began to detect that this might be his position…
stcynic | April 25, 2006I want to call everyone's attention to an earlier essay that goes through ID arguments and traces them to creationist beginnings, written by Jason Rosenhouse. I had not seen this one before writing my post on the subject, but it makes some of the same points and adds several that I did not bring up.
stcynic | April 25, 2006Over at Dembski's Home for Wayward Sycophants, crandaddy has made a rather curious claim that provides an excellent pretext for analyzing further the links between ID and creationism while simultaneously providing a case study in the ability of ID advocates to ignore evidence that they wish didn't exist. He is responding to the praise of Barbara Forrest from Pat Hayes and myself, and this is his argument:
Now, here's what I don't understand. Forrest has a PhD in philosophy from Tulane, yet the best ID=Creationism arguments she seems to be able to put forth are either red herrings (The…
jlynch | April 22, 2006The philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi came up in a recent conversation I had with some colleagues, so I though I'd repost the following from last December ...
In 1999, Dembski established the Michael Polanyi Center - an ID institute - at Baylor University. As this article notes, Dembski appropriated Polanyi's name, contrary to the wishes of his literary executor and son, Nobel Laureate John Polanyi, in an attempt to associate Polanyi with a cause he clearly would not have shared. Richard Gelwick, the articles author, should know. He is the author of The Way of Discovery: an…
jlynch | April 21, 2006One of the highlights of the Dover trial was the takedown of Michael Behe that occurred on Day 12, where Behe testified that "the scientific literature has no detailed testable answers on how the immune system could have arisen by random mutation and natural selection" only to be shown such literature by plaintiffs' lead counsel Eric Rothschild.
Nick Matzke was instrumental in putting together the literature that Rothschild used, and he and a number of denizens of the Panda's Thumb (Andrea Bottaro and Matt Inlay) have a paper in the current edition of Nature Immunology highlighting Behe's…
stcynic | April 21, 2006I just posted the following comment on Chen's blog:
I've been an ID watcher for a long time and I've seen a lot of funny things get said. But I have to say, this performance may take the cake. It's at least on the level with Dembski's nonsense last fall where he claimed that our side pulled Shallit's testimony because it was an "embarrassment", then was shown that in fact his side had tried frantically to keep Shallit off the stand, and then deleted the posts where he had made the accusations in the first place, saying that it was all just a bit of "street theater". Chen posts a comment…
stcynic | April 21, 2006The whole Samuel Chen thing reminded me of this brilliant satire of ID arguments that was compiled by Steve Reuland. The project was a collaborative effort of a bunch of folks, most of them associated with the Panda's Thumb now. I'm not going to include all of the footnotes, which show actual quotes from ID advocates to support each of these satirical takes on their arguments. To see those, follow the link above. This is reprinted with permission.
IDists...
On Intelligent Design...
ID is whatever we say it is, and we don't agree.
Greater and greater numbers of scientists are joining the ID…
stcynic | April 21, 2006A couple years I wrote an essay called Intelligent Design as Roman Mythology, in which I noted that the most appropriate symbol of the ID movement was that of Janus, the Roman god of gates that is generally portrayed as having two faces. Here is a bust of Janus that can be found in the Vatican museum:
By this time, of course, ID advocates are so accustomed to presenting different faces to different audiences that it has become old hat. The central deceit at the core of their PR campaign is the one that says that their motivations aren't religious and that ID is nothing more than a "…
stcynic | April 21, 2006This keeps getting funnier. In this comment on his own blog, he says the following about the Wedge Document:
Cody, you are quoting from various parts of the "wedge document" and so forth. These are documents that we, including DI, do not necessarily agree with. Meaning, we have seen certain errors with intelligent design in the past and with promoting it and have worked to change those errors so we can stay honest. Honesty, something evolutionists have none of.
How do you top that punchline? While claiming that "evolutionists" have no honesty, he says with a straight face that the DI doesn't…
stcynic | April 20, 2006Samuel Chen is a Baylor undergrad poli sci major who posted the DI's objections to being called a "conservative Christian think tank" on his blog. As the conversation there in the comments has developed, it's become fairly amusing to watch. Someone from here posted a quote from Barbara Forrest that cited the Wedge Document, as I did, to support the argument that the DI is, in fact, a conservative Christian thinktank. First, the quote from Barbara:
Launched by Phillip E. Johnson's book Darwin on Trial (1991), the intelligent-design movement crystallized in 1996 as the Center for the Renewal of…
stcynic | April 20, 2006Yesterday, the Baylor student newspaper printed an article that referred to the Discovery Institute as a "conservative Christian think tank". The DI, as you can imagine, didn't like that description one bit because, frankly, they've spent so many years selling the silly notion that they're not a conservative Christian think tank and it's just annoying when all that propaganda doesn't pay dividends. They fired off a letter and the Baylor paper caved in immediately and pulled the article and made a "correction". The letter said, in part:
The article "Baylor not immune to scholarly feud over…
stcynic | April 20, 2006The Kirk Cameron video isn't the funniest thing I've seen on the web lately. This is. It's DaveScot's rendering of Martin Niemoller's famous poem "First they came...", written in response to the horrors of Hitler's Third Reich. He begins by citing a poll that says 48% think that people who have strong religious beliefs are discriminated against in this country. After 3 years of "war on Christmas" and "war on Christians" propaganda, wholly devoid of actual evidence of course, no one should be surprised at such numbers. But here's the kicker. His take on Niemoller's poem:
When they came for the…
stcynic | April 19, 2006It's gotta be in the running. Here's William Dembski commenting on Allen MacNeill's upcoming course on ID at Cornell University:
Dembski, a former professor at Southern Seminary in Louisville, doubts the course will accurately portray intelligent design. "Given that I regard myself as a fair-minded person -- and given that I understand the professor of the class has called me a bald-faced liar -- I would guess that [it's] probably not going to be a fair treatment," Dembski offers. "But who knows?"
And of course, Dembski would be the authority on honest and fair treatment, wouldn't he? After…
stcynic | April 18, 2006Those folks at Worldview Weekend have given us a perfect example of why ID advocates are so successful at winning over followers - because so many of those followers are A) ignorant and B) uninterested in what is actually true. As long as some unnamed scientist who says he's defending God says something that counters something said by those big bad atheist scientists, whatever they say is true - even when it's clearly not. Sean McDowell's pathetic attempt to explain away Tiktaalik roseae proves my point. Don't worry, he says, this isn't a threat to either ID or young earth creationism:
For…