Law Evolution Science and Junk Science

DI resorts to pounding the table

There's an old expression in law.

If you can't win on the law, pound the facts.  If you can't win on the facts, pound the law.  If both the facts and law are against you , pound the table."

The DI, having lost on both the facts and the law, now pounds the table by linking evolution to Nazis, a favorite DI stunt when they get caught with no facts.

I've actually exchanged emails with Casey Luskin on this issue. (scroll down)

He complained about uncivil behavior of scientists opposed to ID and claimed that ID proponents were above that.  I gently referred him to Phillip Johnson’s article from Touchstone Magazine July/August 2004:

Dr. Goebbels would have been impressed to see what propaganda can accomplish even in a democracy, where citizens are legally free to protest. If a cultural elite has sufficient control of the news media and the textbooks, it can marginalize disfavored opinions by confining them in categories that effectively label them as unworthy of serious consideration.

This discussion took place on the opposite page of an open oven door at Auschwitz.  Yeah, those Nazis really took to evolution, didn't they?

In fact they took to evolution so well, they engraved "Darwin mit uns” on their belt buckles.

see:

Oh,  that's God, not Darwin on the Belt Buckle?  “Never mind.”

Here's some more  photographs showing the Darwinian influence on the Nazis:

         

large Christian denomination myself.  Unfortunately the vast majority of Christian religious leaders did not unequivocally condemn the Nazi anti-Semitism. 

It's very plain that the Nazi holocaust was inspired and fueled by nearly 1900 years of Christian anti-Semitism, not by any serious implementation of evolution.

This is not to say that Christianity should be abolished.  I happen to belong to a

One notable exception to the general rule was a Christian who was not part of a mainstream Christian denomination, and I readily acknowledge individual Christians who did the right thing often at the sacrifice of their own lives.

Nevertheless, any attempt to minimize Christian anti-Semitism as the fundamental root of the holocaust is simply a form of holocaust denial.  Mr. Luskin should review the DI civility guidelines, again.  Start by putting a moratorium on the Nazi comparisons.  Visit Orac’s site for holocaust denial links.

Jonathan Witt denies common descent on behalf of Discovery Institute

Jonathan Witt establishes two things: (1)  He doesn’t know his history; and (2) Intelligent Design is creationism.

In his article at the DI, he discusses Percival Lowell’s contribution to science. 

Lowell, as you might recall, first observed canals on Mars.  What is significant about that is that his argument for the artificial nature of the canals is the quintessential intelligent design argument.

It is, in fact, a well-recognized Intelligent Design “false positive.”   What’s the big deal about false positives?  If your theory has both false negative and false positives when tested, it’s somewhat useless as a scientific theory because you can’t trust your results.

Dembski concedes that ID suffers from “false negatives”—there are objects that we independently know are intelligently designed, yet ID methodology cannot detect the design.  He argues however, ID does not suffer from false negatives ID never detects design when none is apparent.

The problem is that design has been detected in earthquakes, the passing of comets and a number of natural phenomena.  The the comon demoninator to these design false positives is that we didn’t know enough science a tthe time desing was suggested as a hypothesis.

For example, Percival Lowell calculated the odds of natural straight lines joining at the locations and angles observed by chance at less than 1 in 1.6 × 10²⁶⁰, proving that Mars must be inhabited.  This number is far above Dembski’s arbitrary “design” cutoff of 10^150.  Of course, the canals were intelligently created. 

It was Lowell’s own intelligence that saw design in indistinct natural features.

How does Intelligent Design deal with the almost certainty that we do not know enough about any particular natural phenomenon? 

Here’s Dembski:

“Now it can happen that we may not know enough to determine all the relevant chance hypotheses. Alternatively, we might think we know the relevant chance hypotheses, but later discover that we missed a crucial one. In the one case a design inference could not even get going; in the other, it would be mistaken. But these are the risks of empirical inquiry, which of its nature is fallible. Worse by far is to impose as an a priori requirement that all gaps in our knowledge must ultimately be filled by non-intelligent causes.”

So the story of Percival Lowell and the Martian canals perfectly demonstrates ID’s false positives and why it can never be sure that its “design inference” hasn’t been sabotaged by a simple lack of information in calculating the odds.

But Witt delivers an unintended bonus.  ID proponents are constantly claiming, incorrectly, the ID accepts common descent.  Here, Plantinga makes the same irresponsible, but oft repeated, claim.

Yet, here’s Witt on common descent:

“And Darwinists point to instances of non-controversial microevolution to defend the poorly supported view that all life evolved by random mutation and common descent from an original ancestor cell. Both Earth's relative smallness and microevolution are true, and both are insufficient to stem the growing tide of evidence against the larger models they are used to defend.

He doesn’t buy that “larger model,” common descent at all.  If you can’t accept common descent, then you are merely saying that God separately created the various “kinds” (however that word is defined) of animals.  If God created them about 10,000 years ago you are a young earth creationist.  If He created them much further in history, well, then you are an old earth creationist—but creationist you are.  Like the great taste/less filling debate about flavors, in the end, it’s still an argument about beer.

Mr. Plantagia, meet Mr. Witt, creationist and the public relations “voice” of ID.  He doesn’t buy common descent.

Just one question for you, Mr. Witt:  How do you take your creationism? Old earth or New Earth?

The same lack of knowledge regarding bacterial flagellae, for example, prevents any meaningful calcualtion of the odds that would demostrate "design" accordign to Dembski's own criteria.