Intelligent Design
Believe it or not I received a request to update my blog (okay NK here it is). Besides being pretty damn busy I think I've been suffering writer's block - and isn't that a surprise for someone who talks too much most of the time?
So reading Baketown today I saw a link to this little gem. I've seen it before and laughed my ass off. It even has a Wikipedia article. But let's be serious about this whole Intelligent Design debate.
First off - the proponents of IT are being patently dishonest right up front. They claim they just want to have an open discussion of possible origins of life and the universe. They don't. They very much have an agenda that is strictly right-wing-fundamentalist-christian. This is nothing more than Creation Science with a new name. Now IT is trying a more subtle approach then CS did (who says they don't learn sometimes), but neither deserves to be called or treated as science.
True science tries to find evidence to help prove a theory - or disprove it and that is a very important point. Science will also modify theory to conform to evidence. IT does not and cannot do that. They have a belief that must be proven and nothing else will do.
A favorite tactic of the IT crowd is to claim that evolutionary theory is unproven and can't explain life either. What that does to prove their ideas is of course nothing. Evolution is a fact we can see all the time, just check out dog breeds or plant hybridization (yes those are human manipulations not natural selection but it works the same and there are plenty of cases of observed natural selection). ET also does not try to explain the origin of life or the universe, just how it may have evolved, the actual beginnings are not known. Even my favorite, panspermia
doesn't really try to suggest where life started but maybe just how it got here.
Oddly none of this denies people a view that life was created by a God. Nothing about evolution says there is no God. But faith and spiritual beliefs are not science. The IT crowd seems threatened by facts, insecure in their own beliefs. Dubba panders to them as usual and we watch a new dark age come as learning take a backseat to superstition.
So reading Baketown today I saw a link to this little gem. I've seen it before and laughed my ass off. It even has a Wikipedia article. But let's be serious about this whole Intelligent Design debate.
First off - the proponents of IT are being patently dishonest right up front. They claim they just want to have an open discussion of possible origins of life and the universe. They don't. They very much have an agenda that is strictly right-wing-fundamentalist-christian. This is nothing more than Creation Science with a new name. Now IT is trying a more subtle approach then CS did (who says they don't learn sometimes), but neither deserves to be called or treated as science.
True science tries to find evidence to help prove a theory - or disprove it and that is a very important point. Science will also modify theory to conform to evidence. IT does not and cannot do that. They have a belief that must be proven and nothing else will do.
A favorite tactic of the IT crowd is to claim that evolutionary theory is unproven and can't explain life either. What that does to prove their ideas is of course nothing. Evolution is a fact we can see all the time, just check out dog breeds or plant hybridization (yes those are human manipulations not natural selection but it works the same and there are plenty of cases of observed natural selection). ET also does not try to explain the origin of life or the universe, just how it may have evolved, the actual beginnings are not known. Even my favorite, panspermia
doesn't really try to suggest where life started but maybe just how it got here.
Oddly none of this denies people a view that life was created by a God. Nothing about evolution says there is no God. But faith and spiritual beliefs are not science. The IT crowd seems threatened by facts, insecure in their own beliefs. Dubba panders to them as usual and we watch a new dark age come as learning take a backseat to superstition.
posted by Prof Frink at 9/28/2005 07:34:00 PM
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