Michael Medved, a Movie critic, outspoken lunatic conservative, and senior fellow at the discovery institute said everything we need to know about Intelligent Design, when he said:
The important thing about Intelligent Design is that it is not a theory - which is something I think they need to make more clear. Nor is Intelligent Design an explanation. Intelligent Design is a challenge. It’s a challenge to evolution. It does not replace evolution with something else.
Source: The Jerusalem Post, Aug 6th, 2008
There you have it.
Intelligent Design is NOT A THEORY; Therefore it has no business in biology class, since it's not even a theory.
Intelligent Design is not an explanation; Therefore it is not science, since the whole purpose of science is explaining how things work in the natural world.
Intelligent Design does not replace evolution with something else; therefore, it's place in a science class is superfluous and trivial at best.
Intelligent Design is a challenge to evolution; therefore, given the rest of what Medved has admitted, it is a largely UNSCIENTIFIC challenge, carrying no weight whatsoever in the scientific fields, and is strictly a sociopolitical challenge, if anything.
So do we need to waste any more time arguing the subject of Intelligent Design, and whether or not it belongs in science classes?
5 comments:
This is not really new. The Discovery Institute has mostly given up on their "no, it's definitely positively maybe possibly absolutely not religious, honest" scheme. The DI's disastrous defeat in Dover demonstrated that nobody really believed it anyway.
Personally, I can't wait for the Disco 'Tuters to fall back on that classic argument:
"Well, you can't prove that there isn't an intangible superbeing that made the bacterial flagellum and the human eye and the guinea worm and Harlequin-type ichthyosis, so your answer is just as miserably inadequate as ours, ain't it? SO THERE!"
I think I'm going to hunt for more self-incriminating stuff like this from the disco's fellows. During the Dover trial, Michael Behe, another Disco fellow, came up with a definition of "science" that he had to admit would allow for astrology. I've read other zingers from other Disco people, that essentially admit that they're not scientific and so on. If enough of their own people proclaim that ID is not science, then well, it's pretty much an admission that their crap doesn't belong in science classes, end of discussion.
I don't know if that would be a productive use of time; for every foot-shot quote from Behe, Medved, et aliae, I'm sure a creationist will be able to respond with a dozen quote-mined statements that superficially appear to be damaging to the theory of evolution.
Ultimately it's irrelevant. Intelligent design fails as science because it has no evidentiary support and makes no testable predictions, not because of what people say about it or the character of its supporters.
I say again, because of this, Melvid is my new hero.
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