Saturday, April 26, 2008

Ten ways Darwinists help Intelligent Design

An excellent rundown of how ID critics mishandled the campaign against ID and the recent movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." I'm telling ya', their lack of fitness for survival becomes more evident every day.

Part I
Part II
Part III

4 comments:

Kevin McKague said...

First of all, ID fails because many of its proponents are trying to prove an unprovable hypothesis. This fact alone makes it very, very unscientific.

Secondly, nothing in evolution even attempts to explain the very beginnings of species, merely how they adapt over time. Having said that, there is nothing incompatable with evolution religion, and the fact that many who teach evolution will profess a faith in God is proof of this.

What is most objectionable about tactics used by those in the ID movement is not that they believe that God created the universe, it is the fact that for some strange reason, they feel that they need to knock evolution to promote religion. They will confuse people about the nature of science and accuse the scientific community in order to do it. When somebody makes claims that evolution that requires a boatload of faith in the imaginary, they are not doing the ID movement any favors, they are showing a lack of understanding about the scientific method, and the scientific community.

Consider that much of what we now consider to be fact about our ecosystem, and even our medicines, would be unknowable if we had not first understood evolution. How’s that throat infection, Mr. ID guy? Whatever you do, don’t take an anti-biotic, we wouldn’t have them if not for Mr. Darwin’s evolution. Having trouble with your garden since the Weed-be-gone spray stopped killing weeds? Surely the weeds aren’t simply adapting to the spray. Maybe the garden simply wasn’t “intelligently designed” by its gardener.

If you want to suggest that God created the universe, by all means, go ahead. Just leave the science to the scientists.

Then again, maybe I’m being hasty.

After all, isn’t gravity just a “theory”, just like evolution. There are just too many things about gravity that can’t be proven by science, so lets throw that out too.

I now believe in “Intelligent Grappling”, that angels are actually responsible for holding us to the earth. If “Big Science” refuses to give IG equal time in science classes, well, that’s just proof of a wide-ranging conspiracy among the scientific community to support the unsupportable idea of gravity.

Maybe I should make a movie!

Anonymous said...

I've got a question: can we please stop using the term "Darwinism"? Very few biologists call themselves "Darwinists" these days, and they use that to distinguish themselves from more recent evolutionary theories, not from the ID controversy.

The term is too loaded and ambiguous to be useful, and can easily be misleading.

How about "mainstream scientists" where it applies, "scientific materialists" where it applies, "atheistic scientists" and so on.

Anonymous said...

Thank goodness the "Evangelical Outpost" is putting those pesky scientists straight!

Anonymous said...

Hi Martin,

I would submit that ID needs all the help it can get, even the imagined items Joe Carter gives us.

Consider, as a couple of examples, that the intellectual leader of the movement, WIlliam Dembski, is of the opinion that females are evolutionary dead-ends. Or that another leader, Granville Sewall, has an understanding of thermodynamics that leads to the assertion that oil and water cannot spontaneously separate into two perfectly-ordered phases. With leaders like this spouting truly ludicrous things in their most studied scholarly works, it's no surprise that ID is laughed out of the room.

Unfortunately for ID, nothing on Joe's list rescues the concept or the movement from the scientific circular file. There's nothing to do but laugh at a movement that thinks that zero (the amount of positive evidence gained through the process of hypothesize, test using controlled and repeatable experiments, and revise) is greater than many thousands or millions (which is the number, conservatively speaking, of pieces of positive experimental evidence that supports the theory that all life shares a common ancestry, and that the variety of life comes about via natural selection acting on randomly-occurring variation).