What's Wrong With ID?
Frank J
comment:
http://www.iscid.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=000152;p=3
probably sums it better than anything. My comments added for emphasis:
WD: You're asking me to play a game:
No, you're already playing a game. We're asking you to stop.
WD: "Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for
your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position."
We'll settle for less detail, since we've had a few years' head
start. Unless you count Paley, in which case you had the head start.
But we don't just need "causal mechanisms," we also need you to
tell us what those mechanisms explain. You know, the "what happened
and when" of biological history. Even YECs can do that part, so
we're confident that you can too.
WD: ID is not a mechanistic theory,...
It isn't a theory, period.
WD: ...and it's not ID's task to match your pathetic level of detail in
telling mechanistic stories.
ID can't match any level of detail, which is why you no longer demand
that it be taught in schools. So you just promote the phony "critical
analysis" of evolution, which insulates all the other attempts at
"theories", e.g. YEC, OEC, saltation, front loading, etc., from a
real critical analysis. Nice trick, I must admit.
WD: If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and
indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to
ape your method of connecting the dots.
Yes it does. You conveniently overlook the fact that when a designer is
detected in forensics and archaeology - using the "side
information" that those fields have that yours lacks - investigators
continue to "connect the dots" by determining what the designer
did, when and how. In contrast, the object of your game is to get your
critics to dwell on whether or not there is a designer. That saves you
from having to say what the designer did, when and how. And you don't
want to do that because you know that the answer is "it's still
evolution." Maybe not your "Darwinism" caricature, but still
evolution.
WD: True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be
fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is
discovering.
Then what exactly are the "fundamental discontinuities?" They must
not be biological because Michael Behe made it clear that there is
"biological continuity" (his phrase for common descent at the
Kansas Kangaroo Court), and you have not challenged him on it. So for
all your gyrations about "the" flagellum, barring any extraordinary
evidence to the contrary, the most reasonable explanation is still that
modern flagella originated "in vivo" not "in vitro." Likewise
humans are "modified monkeys," not "modified dirt." And the
process is still evolution.
But we understand. You can't say too much because you need YEC
political support. We know the game. Like astrology, which Behe likened
it to at Dover, ID continues to fool millions of people, but it fools
no biologists except the handful who already sold out to pseudoscience.
And since the sell-outs seem to know that it's a scam, we can't
necessarily say that it fools them either.
Ron O
About the most telling facts about the ID scam is that it was the ID
scam artists themselves that gave up on ID and went with the old
creationist obfuscation scam. They did this before they were forced to
admit that they had a replacement scam in Ohio and before the Dover
court case demonstrated that they had good reason to give up on the ID
scam. They have only been using ID as a dishonest smoke screen to make
their teach the controversy scam look legitimate for the past half
decade. This was demonstrated in Ohio when they gave the rubes the new
scam and the rubes found out that ID wasn't even part of the
controversy that the Discovery Institute wanted to teach. Anyone can
read the Ohio model lesson plan over at the Discovery Institute and try
and find the ID in it. What good was ID if they couldn't even mention
it in the replacement scam? They did try and sneak in ID/creationism
via web links to creationist web sites but the attempt was so bogusly
dishonest that they had to drop the web links from the final lesson
plan.
The ID scam artists knew all of this for years, but they kept scamming.
So the question is when did Dembski and the other fellows know about
the "change in direction" that supposedly happened in 1999 at the
Discovery Institute, and why didn't they tell anyone? The Discovery
Institute used to claim that ID was their business, but it looks like
business never was very good, even by their own pathetic standards.
Ron Okimoto
Frank J
ID is still their business. They simply promote the designer-free
language for schools, then insert all the designer language outside
class. And the media is their preferred outlet anyway. As you know,
these guys would not lose a minute of sleep if public schools just went
away. For some of them at least, I think that their main goal of
further dumbing down science education is to get rid of the public
school system; evolution is just 1 of 100 things they despise about it
(I too despise ~90). They can peddle their pseudoscience anywhere.