I hate intelligent design theorists (sic)

Yeah. They're theorists alright. Public relations theorists. Rhetorical theorists. And the more I see some of the slimy, stinky, watery shit that trickles (and sometimes explosively erupts) from their mouths and pens, the more I think that they are aware they are lying.

For a while, and still during my more generous moments, I thought that Dembski, Witt, Meyer et al. were just stupid. But after reading some recent stuff on the Discovery Institute's blog I'm afraid they're just being dishonest. They're manipulating people that are either too stupid to understand or too busy to look into the real issues.

Here's a couple things I found that were disturbing:

(1) This is hilarious. Jonathon Witt, being the genius that he is, mistakes an online blog carnival with the peer reviewed scientific literature! What a dumbass! There are all sorts of carnivals out there. There's a carnival of knitting, a carnival of the badger, all sorts of crazy things. A carnival is simply a collection of blog posts that ANYBODY can make. There's no review process you big douche bag. It's just some dude or dude-ette sitting at their computer collecting links from around the interweb. Just because the person holding the carnival is apparently a biologist doesn't really have anything to do with it.

What are you, a moron?


(2) Meyer's report about Pennock's testimony at Dover. Pennock apparently argued (I wouldn't put it past Meyer to misrepresent Pennock's claims though)

"...that if a theory has significant metaphysical or religious implications, it cannot be a scientific theory and must be categorized as religion. But there is no reason to assume this. For example, many scientists believe that the Big Bang theory, with its affirmation that the universe had a temporal beginning, has positive implications for a theistic worldview."

Here Meyer is confusing an explicit argument (ID) for certain "metaphysical" consequences with an implicit (science) at best argument for certain "metaphysical" consequences. Here "metaphysical" apparently means "divine" or of "another world", not its typical usage in philosophy. But we'll stick with it. Pennock's problem with ID is that its core doctrine (its only doctrine) is that through the "scientific method" we can infer that their is some "metaphysical" entity, eventhough the ID folks will deny the identity of the designer, it's pretty widely accepted that ultimately you're going to end up with a designer that violates the laws of nature etc. and is divine or at least not another biological entity. Anyway, ID explicitly makes an argument for certain metaphysical conclusions.

Science, on the other hand, does not make any such arguments. While one can argue that the big bang "has implications" for a theistic worldview, there is nothing in any cosmology textbook that says: "one consequence of our theory is that there is a god". Similarly, while it has been argued that Darwinism leads to Nazi-ism, Eugenics etc., there isn't one biology textbook that claims: "one of the necessary consequences of this theory is eugenics".

Now while I happen to believe that scientific theories can serve as good reasons to believe in a certain set of metaphysical commitments, there is nothing in those theories that require that particular set or really any set at all. One can always fall back on the skeptical argument: we can't really know if we're brains in vats or not, or that we're just pawn's in an evil demon's chess game, therefore what we think about the world could be completely false and therefore our theories would be very poor reasons to hold any particular set of metaphysical commitments.

In fact, it is certainly a fact about the world that different scientists, who believe that certain theories are good theories, hold very different sets of metaphysical commitments. That reveals something about the nature of religious belief: for most people, and I think rightly so, religous beliefs don't have anything to do with science or evidence or rational thinking at all. Why people are religious is a pretty difficult question, but obviously it doesn't have anything to do with rational thinking. And that's fine. Clearly one will always be able to accomodate one's beliefes about the world with their religious beliefs because religions are purpose-built to allow for that.

Anyway, the bottom line is that Pennock is right: ID has certain necessary metaphysical implications while science does not.