Inferior Design (American Prospect article on the ID movement)

[Starfury]

This is a good article on the development of the ID movement and its founders. It focuses on the religious connections and funding, but I would have liked to have seen a more explicit critique of ID itself.

Inferior Design

From our September issue: In late September, a contemporary Scopes trial gets under way in Pennsylvania. For the right, it’s been 39 years in the making.

By Chris Mooney
Web Exclusive: 08.10.05

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On September 26, an event that the national media will surely depict as a new Scopes trial is scheduled to begin. Hearings will commence in a First Amendment lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district over its decision to introduce “Intelligent Design,” or ID, into its biology curriculum. The analogy with the 1925 Tennessee “monkey trial” certainly has its merits. With a newly rejuvenated war against evolution now afoot in the United States, one being prosecuted by religious conservatives and their intellectual and political allies, it is virtually inevitable that the courts will once again serve as the ultimate arbiters of what biology teachers can and cannot present to their students in public schools.

The Dover case was filed on church-state grounds, and the Dover school-board member who drove the policy in question made his conservative Christian motivations clear in widely reported public statements (which he now disputes having made). And yet, curiously, members of the national ID movement insist that their attacks on evolution aren’t religiously motivated, but, rather, scientific in nature.

That movement’s home base is Seattle’s Discovery Institute, whose attempt to lead a specifically intellectual attack on evolution -- one centered at a think tank funded by wealthy extreme conservatives and abetted by sympathetic Republican politicians -- epitomizes how today’s political right has developed a powerful infrastructure for battling against scientific conclusions that anger core constituencies in industry and on the Christian right. Just as Charles Darwin himself cast light on the present by examining origins, in the history of the Discovery Institute, we encounter a narrative that cuts to the heart -- and exposes the intellectual sleight of hand -- of the modern right’s war on science.

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http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10084

[ixion]

1. that ID has gotten this far is dismaying

I'm amazed, given the amount of scientific data available, that there is even a discussion going on about this.

"Stimpy, your wealth of ignorance astounds me."

-- Ren, from 'Ren and Stimpy'

[PATRICK]

2. The visual aids must be fun

Unless they abandoned the Biblical model, it would be extraordinary to see the universe model as envisioned by ancient peoples. In the Hebrew case a massive domed terrarium with shutters to let in the rain from the waters of chaos outside, sun and moon and star hung from the dome like a planetarium effect. Do they make the seven days symbolic like all other uses of numerology in the Bible or idiotically literal beyond the intention of the unscientific writers and their pre-scientific culture?

The Bible was a great forerunner of the invention of terrariums and planetariums? No, it comes down 100% to the MEANING, the faith meaning in particular of life and its history. No evidence is that neat and demanding of belief without faith(as this "theory" implies) or they wouldn't have to frame it in legends and myth and symbols based on limited knowledge. In this case creationism is 100% religion. To deny this makes ID a serpent devouring its own tail(a very fit symbolic image in the circumstances) a deceiving "knowledge" to contain God in pathetic fantasies and fake truths, ludicrous "facts", cloaked as respecting science when it uses deception and anti-rationalism to insert its evident belief like a worm in an apple. In trying to trick material science truth seekers it destroys both faith and truth and deserves no place either in a public school or a religious one worthy of the name.

[cookiebird]

3. Just One Testable Hypothesis

please, please, that is generated through the ID perspective. Is that too much to ask for? so far, I've yet to read about any testable work that ID has generated. In LTTE in our local papers, the ID'ers whine about cabals of "darwinian" scientists, conspiracies of scientists suppressing evidence, scientists "afraid" of The Truth...ya'll know the drift. while i'm on a rant, why is this perspective widely identified as "intelligent design?" I wanna call it "Insipid Design" just for giggles...really, look at the stupid and inane genetic diseases the human species inherits on a fairly regular basis. :rant: