Wednesday, November 14, 2007

DI in the Whaaaaambulance

A long time ago,
In a blog post far far away...


I wrote a list of talking points for making a pro-ID/Creationist arguments.

The first point under the section about defining Intelligent Design read:
Remember to as vague as possible. Do not mention what ID actually says about common descent or age of the earth so that fundamentalists won't get offended and will continue giving you funding. Additionally, not adequately explaining yourself will give you the ability to dismiss critics later by insisting that they just don't understand Intelligent Design.
The list was based largely on a flopped presentation Dembski had given at KU but also drew from several years of watching other ID proponents presentations and observing their responses to criticism.

But it seems that the Discovery Institute is showing just how true it is in response to PBS's Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. Crowther claims that the show misrepresented ID. Yet this documentary wasn't their words. It was straight from the mouths of the ID proponents themselves!

- We had Buckingham and Bosnell being open and honest that they were Young Earth Creationists and they wanted it in the classroom in any way they thought it could fit in (and then perjuring themselves as to where the books had come from).
- We had Behe and Minnich define ID for us and be so utterly vague about it that Behe had to admit that astrology would be science.
- We had the DI's touted textbook, Of Pandas and People being caught in the act of giving the facelift to Creationism (and even leaving us transitional fossils to demonstrate it.
- We had the DI's own Wedge Document in which they clearly state their objective as "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies".
- We had repeated quotes from Phillip Johnson, the founder of your own movement, admitting that, "Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit, so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools."

These aren't our words here Disco boys. They're the words of people on your side.

In my last post, I wrote about how Behe and other ID proponents have failed to learn an important childhood lesson, namely, that if you act like a fool, you're going to get made fun of and you have no one to blame but yourself. Now, we catch them in their immaturity in yet another way: Adults know how to take responsibility for their own actions. Even Richard Thompson from the Thomas Moore Law Center admitted it was a "fair trial". But it seems that the Discovery Institute won't admit that they need to take responsibility for their actions and that they were beat in a fair fight. Instead, all we get is spin, spin, spin, rationalization, spin, spin.

Perhaps one day, creationists can all grow up.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thompson, the lead counsel in the Dover case, did not even SHOW UP for days at a time, leaving his second chair to bumble against nine lawyers and assistants on the other side.

He is a fool, and someone got to him.

Jon Voisey said...

Conspiracy theories are so cute.

Get over it. The lawyers for the Creationists in Dover are as inept as the Creationists themselves.