The enduring futility of Intelligent Design creationism

It’s almost sad how pathetic the Discovery Institute has become. Every year they have a little roundup of their “accomplishments” of the year. This year, they got some guy named Brian Miller (sorry, I’ve lost track of the shifting roster of employees at the Fail Institute) to write up the grand summary. Let’s see if you notice what’s missing from this account.

So let’s review. In 2022, I participated in several conferences and private events in which I interacted with prominent scientists. Several acknowledged the strength of our arguments critiquing the current scientific orthodoxy and defending the evidence for design in life. At a recent conference, I spoke with one of the most recognized and admired evolutionary biologists. In a private conversation, he accepted that the arguments for design based on engineering analyses of living systems were substantive. And during a public lecture, he even tacitly conceded that the information central to life points to design. He stated that he wished to wait for future research to potentially explain the origin of biological information through natural processes. But his tone of voice suggested that he doubted whether such an explanation would ever materialize.

At another meeting, I sat on a panel with one of the leading evolutionary theorists. He stated that standard evolutionary analyses addressing nontrivial transformations typically are severely deficient in their mathematical cogency. He also thanked scholars in the ID network for addressing with rigor and nuance such questions as the rarity of functional protein sequences and the required timescales for generating coordinated mutations. At another conference, top-level biologists affirmed the strength of my arguments for the challenge of evolving new proteins that perform complex tasks. Many still wished to wait for natural explanations for the origin of novel protein structures, but they now much better appreciate the severity of the challenge.

I think he deserves a participation trophy! That’s all he did. He interacted with prominent scientists at conferences — all unnamed. He spoke to one of the most recognized and admired evolutionary biologists who tacitly conceded some ID talking points. They aren’t named, so we can’t assess the relevance of their discipline or their prominence. Then he was on a panel with a leading evolutionary theorist, again unnamed. Then he went to another conference with “TOP MEN” who affirmed ID … their names are a mystery.

Is it name-dropping if you fail to actually name any of them?

In addition to that hopelessly vague summary, they have an annual countdown of the top ten ID news stories. Shall I go through them all? No. Too boring. Too trivial. For instance, #6 is Megalodon, written by the most tediously pedantic nitwit in their stable, Günter Bechly. After a couple of paragraphs about the majestic size of Meg and it’s tremendous teeth, and noting that they are definitely entirely completely extinct, we get the dramatic exciting reason their contribution to intelligent design is being acknowledged here.

Sharks possess many remarkable biological features, of which some clearly point to intelligent design, such as their complex olfactory and electromagnetic sense organs. The latter are situated on and around their snouts and are called ampullae of Lorenzini (Bellono et al. 2017, Weiler 2017). The discovery of this electromagnetic sense by Adrianus Kalmjin is a fascinating story (Shiffman 2022). A recent study revealed further secrets, such as the fact that sharks only use these organs to find prey, while the related skates and rays also use them for electric communication (Weiler 2018). For more information on evidence for intelligent design in marine organisms like sharks and whales, I highly recommend the Illustra Media documentary Living Waters (Evolution News 2016).

That’s it! That’s all he’s got! Nothing new at all, some old news that sharks have a sophisticated sensory system, and none of the cited papers so much as mention Megalodon or discuss problems in evolutionary theory. I’m sure David Shiffman would be surprised to learn he’s being cited as a creationist authority.

So, for their great grand end of the year summary of the majestic progress of their agenda, all they have to show are vague assertions that the lurkers support them at conferences and that non-creationists have learned things that they can distort into some imaginary support for design theory. Mediocre.

Remember, they codified their plans back in 1998, in the Wedge document. Here’s what they were supposed to have done by 1993.

Five Year Goals

  • To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory.
  • To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.
  • To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda.

Those all flopped. What about their goals for 2018?

Twenty Year Goals

  • To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
  • To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its influence in the fine arts.
  • To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

2023 is time for their twenty five year goals, which they didn’t specify in the original document. Here, I’ll help them out:

Twenty Five Year Goals

  • To have a few anonymous scientists whisper tentative support off the record that they might support us.
  • To appropriate random discoveries by legitimate scientists as, in fact, intelligent design discoveries.
  • To employ an array of no-name wankers to write puff-pieces on our website.

Finally, mission accomplished!

Wheel out the persecution complex

I mentioned before that Ken Ham and Ray Comfort were going to flood London with Bible tracts for the upcoming coronation. The Panda’s Thumb also noted the silliness of this effort. Here’s the complete text of their comment.

Ken Ham and his fellow creationist grifters plan to disrupt King Charles’s Coronation by handing out religious tracts disguised as money.

This is hilarious. They are raising money to print and distribute 3 million counterfeit “1 Million Pound” notes that will display fundamentalist/creationist tracts on the reverse side. They are shamelessly raising money to do this. I wonder if the British Secret Service will also be amused.

That’s it! That’s all they said. It was enough to fuel Ray Comfort’s outrage, though. He thinks that’s a serious threat to call the police on them, so he’s made a video in which he intercuts clips of people getting handcuffed, of gangster firing machine guns, and then delivers a po-faced explanation of all the ways their Bible tracts differ from genuine UK pound notes. Yeah, Ray, we know. You’re more likely to get arrested for littering than for seriously trying to undermine the British economy with fake money. Your greater crime will be inducing eye-strain in all the people who will be rolling their eyes.

That doesn’t trigger their persecution complex, though…gotta inflate the concerns even more.

So ridiculous. They’re trying so hard to pretend the world sees them as fierce and dangerous, rather than a joke.

Speaking of jokes, if you bother to watch the video, it starts out with breathless outraged innocence, but One-Trick-Pony Ray can’t keep it up for long, and it abruptly switches to another of his man-in-the-street interviews where he confronts a stranger with the question and accusation, “Have you ever told a lie? Then you’re a liar and are going to hell.” It’s a good thing for Ray that the Bible doesn’t condemn people for being a repetitive bore, because he’d be damned for all time. I turn off any of his videos when he starts on that tired schtick, which means I can never sit through any of them.

Boo hoo, PragerU

Dennis Prager is unhappy that some of his fans don’t get to see their grown children on Christmas. Tragic.

There are probably hundreds of thousands of men and women who, because of political differences, maintain minimal or no contact with their parents and, even more cruelly, do not allow their parents to have any contact with their children—their parents’ grandchildren.
…
I know of this firsthand. Parent after parent calls my radio show, often close to tears, sometimes actually sobbing, pouring their heart out to me about being alone on holidays despite having children and grandchildren.

In virtually every case, the parent is conservative, and the child is on the Left. I assume there are cases of grown conservative children who won’t allow a liberal/Left parent to see his or her grandchildren—but I have never heard of a single such case. It is almost impossible to imagine a conservative adult depriving his or her parents of access to their grandchildren because the parent(s) voted for Joe Biden. Moreover, if there were such a person, every conservative I know would vociferously condemn this individual.

Awww. Don’t you realize that it is a religious imperative — it’s right there in the Ten Commandments — that you are required to honor your parents, without regard for whether they honor you or not? It’s an absolute rule. Your parents can be hateful bigots, they can have neglected or abused you, they can be preaching prejudiced ideas that do great harm to others, but you must place your children in their claws for Christmas. You have no choice in the matter, nor do your kids, because choice and consent are dirty words to the Pragers of the world. Shall we consider that maybe those sobbing grandparents are deprived of contact with their grandchildren because they are poisonous vipers who want to indoctrinate the kiddies with evil ideas? No, we shall not. The problem lies entirely with those damned liberal parents.

Prager gives three reasons why evil leftists are entirely at fault for making their parents cry.

Reason #1 is basically authoritarian absolutism. Thou shalt not question the orders of the preacher Lord!

The further left you go, the less likely you are to believe that you are accountable to an absolute moral code, let alone to a Giver of an absolute moral code. On the other hand, conservatives, certainly religious conservatives—people who believe in a God-given Ten Commandments—believe that they are obligated to honor their parents regardless of their political differences.

No, we Leftists do have moral values — we just don’t accept the unquestioned authority of a holy book, especially not when it’s a self-serving commandment that panders to the authority of old people, and especially not old people who have made questionable moral decisions. Shouldn’t a universal moral code be one that even people who do not follow a narrow religious sect can accept? “Honor your parents” doesn’t work as a blind precept, because some parents don’t deserve honor.

A parent who endorses the politics of hatred, as Republicans do, should legitimately be disowned. You want to say that gays should be killed, brown people deported, atheists (and anyone who follows a different sect than yours) is evil? Then no, you don’t get to play with my kids. Perfectly fair.

Reason #2 is a strange one, and a good reason to avoid people like Prager: it’s because atheists do not have a conscience and are evil, and that’s why they make Grandma cry.

The Left proves the utter inadequacy of the conscience. To cite the present example, the adult children who deprive their conservative parents of contact with the parents’ grandchildren have a perfectly clear conscience. All those secular people—including secular conservatives—who argue that God is unnecessary because it is enough for people to answer to their conscience are spectacularly naïve. The consciences of most people who do evil are blissfully untroubled.

They don’t even care that they are making their parents unhappy! To the contrary, if I’d had to cut off my parents’ access to my kids, I’d have felt terrible about it, and would have suffered pangs of guilt (fortunately, that was never a problem in my family, and I wish my kids could have spent more time with their grandparents). The reason someone may sever communication with a parent is precisely because they have a conscience and a set of moral values that find the ideas of an older generation repugnant.

Reason #3 is even stranger and more absurd. It’s college. Conservatives really have a hate-on for education.

You almost have to be a college graduate to shun your parents and deprive them of their grandchildren because of political differences. If you had asked most of these college graduates before they enrolled in college who, because of political differences, won’t see their parents for Christmas if they could imagine never talking to their parents because of political differences, most of them would probably have deemed the question absurd. After four years of college indoctrination—essentially consisting of hatred of nonleftists—the question is no longer absurd.

No, what happens is that kids escape their parents’ control, and learn that Mommy & Daddy’s moral and religious code isn’t the only one out there — they learn to think for themselves and discover that there is a world of ideas that aren’t as blinkered and narrow and oppressive. They might just wake up to the fact that the gay-bashing and transphobia and racism and greed they were brought up with are bad ideas. They may even still love their parents, but just regret how they treat others, and not want their own children to have that kind of bias instilled in them.

It’s not that the more liberal offspring are the problem. It’s the nasty opinionated hidebound kinds of people who would call in to cry on the shoulders of a conservative wretch like Dennis Prager who are terrible role models for anyone’s kids.

Brings back childhood memories of going to church at Christmas

It was exactly like this.

I never go to church anymore, not even at Xmas. Instead, this year I’ve replaced it with the roars of a murderous freight train circling around and around my house all through the night, letting me know it would kill me if I stepped out into the blizzard. It’s still out there. There’s a weird haze outside my window caused by all the shards of ice whipping through the air.

It’s all preferable to church, though.

Do you want $100,000? (Or is it $200,000?)

I have been contacted by a loon who is offering big money to anyone who can disprove his mathematical argument that god exists. I’m not interested — it’s incredibly stupid — but hey, if you want to waste your time playing a rigged game, help yourself.

One hundred thousand dollars, $200,000.00, cold hard cash for disproving this theory by these rules.

The Jews have been doing Gematria for thousands of years. There are 20 verses in the Holy Bible telling us that God put this Gematria in the Bible. Dr. Ivan Panin bagan in 1890 to create 43,000 pages of Gematria and went around the country challenging any atheist to disprove ANY of these 43,000 pages of proof that God wrote the Holy Bible. Not one Yot or Tittle of Dr. Ivan Panins 43,000 pages of proof has been disproven in the past 130 years.

‘The Theory of Biblical Patterns’ shows the significance of God’s prime digits, ‘3’ for trinity, ‘7’ for divine perfection and God’s prime pairs, 3 and 7 side by side, ’37’, and ’73’ and ’23’ the number of chromosomes in human DNA. All probabilities are shown. The first 28 are from Dr. Ivan Panin 130 years ago and have never been disproven. A half a dozen others are from various sources such as Dr. Chuck Missler. The remainder God gave me directly.

It’s numerology. It’s utterly absurd. Here’s one of his 100 proofs.

So the number of words in Genesis 1:1 is evenly divisible by 7. Big whoop. What am I supposed to disprove? That a multiple of 7 is not divisible by 7? Or that this mathematically trivial fact is not evidence of god? I suspect he has the former as his trump card, that no one will disprove a truism, so he’ll never have to cough up his cash.

Don’t blame America! We’re not ruining the coronation!

The coronation of King Charles will take place in May. Some grifters see the teeming crowds going to the event as an opportunity, and are planning to attend. Now I have zero interest in royal shenanigans, but I think it’s fine if the people of England have a big party, and I certainly wouldn’t dream of disrupting it, so I don’t want us Americans to get the blame for a particular stupid bunch of party-crashers.

Ken Ham (Australian) and Ray Comfort (New Zealand) are teaming up to print these One Million Pound fake banknotes — they’ve printed 3 million of them — for evangelists to hand out at the coronation.

This is a tired old Ray Comfort schtick. The notes are worth nothing, less than nothing since they’re garbage, and are tedious old gospel tracts. For years, you’ve been able to buy these worthless tracts from Living Waters — here’s an American version.

Servers will be able to tell you that some Christians love to leave these as tips at their restaurant table. You can imagine how galling that would be.

Now these obnoxious twits are going to London with a gigantic pile of tracts to scatter. They are practically salivating at the opportunity — in this video, they are first excited about the size of the crowds at Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, and then cut to scenes from Elizabeth’s coronation. It’s a religious ceremony! It’s in a church! There are jewels and gold and pageantry!

Ray and Ken imagine that their cheap-ass cheesy old-timey tent-revival act will blend right in, and they’ll be welcomed by the crowds attending an Anglican ceremony, and that they’ll get hordes of converts by passing out pieces of paper with inane conservative Christian apologetics printed on them.

I think that at best what they’ll get is some deeply annoyed people offended by this foreign intrusion on their reverently observed historical tradition, and at worst they’re going to meet some hooligans who will make a strong response to their efforts. It could get ugly. I don’t think they’ll get to meet any royalty, but maybe a truncheon or Piers Morgan.

Hey, if anyone should get one of these, send it to me!

Mawwiage!

Ken Ham is irate about another thing: kids today are cohabiting! They aren’t sufficiently dedicated to marriage!

We certainly do live in a very secularized culture. The once-Christianized veneer (the Judeo-Christian ethic based on biblical morality) has worn off, and secularism and moral relativism have taken its place. And study after study just continues to confirm how secular this nation really has become. For example, according to a new study, nearly 80%—almost 8 in 10—of US teenagers (15–19 years old) “expect to cohabit before marriage.”

What’s wrong with that? Be happy together, I say. Who are you, Ken Ham, to tell others how to live their lives? I know, you’ve got your holy book, but that book doesn’t seem to be a very good guide to living well. He can claim some experience with marriage, at least.

Mally and I will celebrate 50 years of marriage this December. I am so thankful for a wife who has been one with me in the ministry God called us to. Without her, the ministry of AiG would not be where it is today or even exist. I can honestly say we love each other more than ever. And what is the core factor for a stable marriage? Having a third “partner”: the Lord Jesus Christ.

I know ol’ Ken doesn’t understand elementary logic, but I can say that Having a third “partner”: the Lord Jesus Christ isn’t actually a core factor in a stable marriage. I’ve been happily married and in a strong relationship for 42 years now, and so far, Jesus has not horned in even once. We’d be horrified and kick him out if he tried to crawl into bed with us, the creep.

This is not to suggest that being married for a long time confers some special virtue on a couple. People can grow apart. One partner can be an intolerable jerk. There are many reasons why a marriage might break up, and it’s better to separate than to live in miserable company. Also, I should note that there are marriages that Kenny boy disapproves of, such as same-sex marriages, that bring joy to people’s lives and can last a long time, and some of them also have Jesus in the relationship, and some don’t. Some even have Allah dancing with them in their imagination! It’s all good. You really don’t need a third partner…although, uh-oh, some marriages actually do involve three or more actual physical flesh-and-blood people.

Logic isn’t going to persuade him, I’m afraid. How about revelation? When I was reading his hateful post, a song popped up on my playlist, as if by a miracle. It sounds relevant.

This is how it works
You’re young until you’re not
You love until you don’t
You try until you can’t
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dyin’ breath

No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
Then try to love the things you took

And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else’s heart
Pumpin’ someone else’s blood

And walking arm in arm
You hope it don’t get harmed
But even if it does
You’ll just do it all again, and…

Jesus told me that you should listen to it, Ken Ham, and take it to heart.