Thursday, April 07, 2005

Regarding the "new" ID blog

I'm amazed that at least now the trackbacks seem to work.

But it's the same content. ;-)

I'll take one example:"Is ID Science? Three Things to Keep in Mind."

This subject is one of my pet peeves with these guys. Somebody like Dembski should know what is science and what is not science. Let me begin with the first sentence:

Laypersons new to the debate over intelligent design encounter many conflicting claims about whether it is science.


Scientists and engineers, however, know what science is, and ID is not science.

Next,Dembski's first point:

Can the majority of scientists be wrong about scientific matters? Yes they can....Intelligent design is at present a minority position within science. But it is a position held by reputable scientists.[6]


Regarding Dembski's list, I have previously commented that in fact, in Dembski's own purported specialty, Information Theory, there is not one peer-reviewed article in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory related to this subject, and for good reason. I don't know in details the credentials of the others, but this whole exercise is an attempt at an argument from authority.

In fact, it can also be true that the majority of scientists can be right about a given scientific matter.

Dembski's second point:

Just because an idea has religious, philosophical, or political implications does not make it unscientific. According to the late evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould, “Biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God…. Before Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us.”[7] Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins claims, “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”[8]


The fact that Dawkins used evolutionary biology to argue for his atheism does not mean that therefore ID's religious implications make ID true or false, although the the very existence of ID is due to folks trying to use their religion to marginalize science.

"ID" is metaphysics, not science, and I for one wish Dembski et al. would stop pretending it is anything but metaphysics.

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