Some good news first: Dembski gave a talk in Kansas. Kansas! You’d think they’d love him there, but his audience was better informed than you might expect, from the example of their elected Board of Education officials.

Dembski, who may have been led to expect a warmer reception for his ideas—he was in Kansas, after all—seemed to grow testy as questioner after questioner expressed doubt about his assertion that evolution is a failed theory and that patterns in nature are best explained as a result of intelligence.

I know there is a solid body of intelligent, well-informed people in Kansas, and the escapades of the klutzes trying to railroad the state back into the Middle Ages are probably rousing quite a bit of antagonism. I also suspect the Discovery Institute schtick is getting old, and since Intelligent Design is a proven loser in the courtroom, its fans are looking for a new angle. The DI Fellows might want to think about revamping their CVs.

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The New York Times once again screws up by asking a religion writer to comment on evolution, and of course she casts it all in religious terms, opting in to Ruse’s terrible characterization of it as “evolutionism”. Fortunately, John Rennie has ripped into that claim satisfyingly.

Shulevitz and Ruse can go on about “evolutionism” if they like, but the kinds of claims they find troubling have nothing to do with what would be taught in public school science classes. Thus their arguments might be relevant as social context, but they have no bearing on any of the specific disputes involving whether or how evolution should be taught. Whether Shulevitz and Ruse would want this to be the case, their arguments help the creationists distract the public from the real issues.

Chris Mooney also has some good criticisms of the piece, although he and I do disagree on strategy (I think promoting secularism, of which atheism is a part, is a necessary component of any long term resolution of the creationism problem, and that is not the same as this mythical “evolutionism”.)

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There is this fellow, Krauze, who runs some forgettable Intelligent Design blog, who can be best described as polite, persistent, and utterly clueless. He’s been having a little back-and-forth with Jason Rosenhouse (who has a more patient temperament than I do, clearly), and Jason neatly polishes off Krauze’s claim that ID just needs more time to develop. It’s entertaining and thorough.

Alas, my daughter and I are big fans of Vonnegut’s writing, but he’s showing signs of losing it. He sounds terribly unhealthy on the radio, and his performance on the Daily Show a while back was depressing. This morning, Vonnegut was on NPR, and said scientists were defending evolution because of “tribalism”, and that “my body and your body are miracles of design”, and that “natural selection couldn’t possibly have produced such machines.” Please, please remind me to stop blogging when my mind deteriorates that far, OK?

To call the body a “miracle of design” is begging the question, while denying the possibility of evolution is the argument from incredulity. Neither is at all persuasive. I would like to know if Vonnegut thinks all those scientists who insist that the Earth is roughly spherical are also arguing for tribal dogma, or whether he suspects that they might actually be relying on this little thing called evidence…and why he thinks biologists fall in the former category and not the latter.

Out of respect for his past writing career, though, I will refrain from cutting him up with a razor here. There were some signs in his interview that he hasn’t drunk deep of the ID kool-ade, but overall it was a sadly muddled exercise in sloppy reasoning, spoken without the sharpness and clarity I’ve expected from Vonnegut.

Orson Scott Card has written a long essay defending Intelligent Design.

Oy, but it is depressing.

It’s a graceless hash, a cluttered and confusing mish-mash of poorly organized complaints about those darned wicked “Darwinists”. He lists 7 arguments. Then he repeats his list, expanding on them. Then he goes on and on, hectoring scientists about how they should behave. For a professional writer, it’s just plain bad writing—I’m struggling with how to address his arguments, but he’s written such a gluey mass of tangled ranty irrationality that it’s hard to get a handle on it. Ugly, ugly, ugly…and why do these guys all seem to think the way to defend the ideas of ID is to whine about the perfidy of all those scientists? Not once does he bring up any evidence for ID.

Card can’t discuss the evidence, because he doesn’t know or understand the evidence. That’s apparent when he begins by praising Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box, and regurgitates the argument from irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is not a problem for evolution, and Behe is a tired old fraud who hasn’t had a new idea in 15 years. That Card would be impressed with DBB says only that he doesn’t know much biology and that the depth of his thinking is remarkably shallow.

Oh, well. I’ll try the brute force approach and discuss each of Card’s arguments in turn. This will get long.

[Read more…]

This is fun—it’s a proposal for remaking Inherit the Wind with the Dover case as its centerpiece. It’s also a good overview of the events of the trial.

(via Red State Rabble)

That school in California that tried to teach a creationist “philosophy” course was chewed out by Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute. Luskin’s statement consisted of the usual folderol, but the outright fraud of several statements leapt out at me.

My name is Casey Luskin and I am an attorney representing the Discovery Institute. The Discovery Institute is a think tank based out of Seattle, Washington that represents a large number of scientists who do scientific research into intelligent design.

A “large number of scientists”? How many?

Scientists “who do scientific research into intelligent design”? Name them. Tell us exactly where they are doing their research and what specific questions they are trying to answer.

But if you do not cancel this course, and if you let this lawsuit go forward, you are going to lose and there will be a dangerous legal precedent set which could threaten the teaching of intelligent design on the national level. Such a decision would also threaten the scientific research of many scientists who support intelligent design.

See questions above. What scientists? What research?

I’m really fed up with this phony baloney the DI keeps pushing. There are darned few scientists backing Intelligent Design, and those few don’t do any research, nor can they tell anyone else what research could be done.

Because of the young earth creationist history of this course, this course is not legally defensible and it should be cancelled. Thank you.

Casey Luskin got his wish. The course has been cancelled. Not without a final irony, though:

Sharon Lemburg, a social studies teacher and soccer coach who was teaching “Philosophy of Design,” defended the course in a letter to the weekly Mountain Enterprise.

“I believe this is the class that the Lord wanted me to teach,” she wrote.