brainwagon

Dear Lord, it actually gets worse.

Like most of the stuff on ID The Future, this one lies right out of the gate:

It is no secret that evolution is, at bottom, an idea driven by metaphysical concerns.

In a sense, he’s right. It’s not a secret, it’s an outright lie. Evolution is an idea driven by the desire to explain the diversity of biological organisms and their adaptation to their environments. It continues on….

Even people unfamiliar with the details of evolutionary thinking have a sense that it goes well beyond mere scientific inquiry.

Even those people huh? I think you meant especially those people.

It’s hard to find anything in this useless pile which actually is true. In no particular order,

• The teaching and promotion of evolution is nowhere mandated by law.
• Hume didn’t argue that the existence of evil refutes design (unless of course you actually are willing to admit that ID is just code for religion).
• Darwin didn’t argue that homologies revealed a lack of design. He argued that they were more easily and reasonably described as inherited variations which proved to be advantageous.
• Darwin’s religious beliefs are complicated and like most people, underwent some metamorphosis over his life. To say that his religious beliefs didn’t allow for a design is an absurd simplification if not an outright fabrication.
• Ken Miller’s example of elephants was designed to demonstrate something: that Intelligent Design doesn’t explain the evidence of changes that we see in Indian elephants. Hunter doesn’t even understand the point, and claims that Miller is prejudiced against a conclusion of design. The problem is: there IS NO EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT DESIGN. Indeed, looking at the conclusions we’d have to draw from the fossil evidence, the DESIGN HYPOTHESIS IS ABSURD.
• The case in Dover was decided by a decidedly conservative judge who evaluated the own admission of Michael Behe that if we accepted his own definition of science, that astrology would be a science. The fact that the school board clearly had no secular purpose in mind when they initiated their policy. That many of those people proceeded to lie in court. And the textbook Of Pandas and People that they recommended was simply a standard creationist work with the words design substituted for creation.

The fact that this stuff is taken seriously by anyone really makes me think we are all living behind the looking glass.

[tags]Intelligent Design,Pseudoscience,Rants and Raves[/tags]