Answering a Horrible Pro-ID Article
Anyone who has followed the evolution/creationism issue for any period of time is quite accustomed to seeing articles filled with the most basic factual errors, poor spelling and hackneyed arguments. But this article, written by someone named Brian Cherry in a webmag called the Washington Dispatch, may take the cake. It’s so badly written that for a moment, one suspects that it is a parody. Alas, it’s not. Mr. Cherry actually wrote it and, presumably, believes it. Unfortunately, he can’t even get the most basic facts right, let alone comprehend the larger issues he discusses. Let’s begin the fisking.
Who’s your daddy? It is exactly this sort of question that results in slapped faces and restraining orders if the query is made in a bar. When this question was posed to the State School Board of Ohio and framed in the context of human origins it sparked national debates and threats of lawsuits. The board was tasked with making the decision on whether or not students can be presented with an alternative to the theory of evolution. The alternative in question is the theory of intelligent design.
Mistake #1: There is no “theory of intelligent design”. At this point, ID is nothing more than a technical-sounding argument from ignorance. William Dembski, the leading ID advocate, defines an argument from ignorance as one that takes the form “Not X, therefore Y”. Yet even while denying, in rhetoric, that ID is based upon such an argument, he has created and developed a rather obvious one, the Explanatory Filter (EF). The EF is precisely this form of argument - “If not regularity and if not chance, therefore intelligent design”. This is not a theory in a scientific sense, and there is no actual explanatory model in place for ID. There is no model of how such design took place, by whom, or when. There is no actual positive research in favor of ID, there is only sniping at evolutionary theory as an explanation so that they can repeat the argument from ignorance seen above - if evolution doesn’t (yet) explain it, it must be ID. Sorry, this isn’t a theory.
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