The Incompetence of Intelligent Design

Casey Luskin, a well known supporter of Intelligent Design has a blog post up at Evolution Views & News complaining about an op-ed piece by Richard Dawkins in the L.A. Times where, according to Luskin, Dawkins misrepresents Intelligent Design.

The part that Luskin seems to take offense at is this paragraph in Dawkins's editorial:

Intelligent design “theorists” (a misnomer, for they have no theory) often use the alien scenario to distance themselves from old-style creationists: “For all we know, the designer might be an alien from outer space.” This attempt to fend off accusations of unconstitutionally importing religion into science classes is lame and disingenuous. All the leading intelligent design spokesmen are devout, and, when talking to the faithful, they drop the science-fiction fig leaf and expose themselves as the fundamentalist creationists they truly are.

In addition to the disingenousness that Dawkins mentions there is also the implied dishonesty of ID supporters because the aliens gambit has been a common ploy used to “prove” that ID is not religious and thus should be taught in science classes.

Luskin tries valiantly to refute this accusation of dishonesty by throwing out a bunch of quotes from Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe and William Dembski showing that the Designer most definitely is the Christian God, all to try and prove that ID is not so dishonest as to use something as absurd as space aliens.

Luskin googled for the phrase “For all we know, the designer might be an alien from outer space” (taken from Dawkin's op-ed) in order to see if any ID supporters were actually using that aliens argument and he says that the only result Google returned was for that very same Dawkins op-ed. Any person who has ever used an Internet search engine knows that if you search for a phrase, especially one that specific, you're not going to get much more than the original web page from whence it came rather than any supporting information about the topic they were interested in finding more about.

Luskin would have been better off googling for “aliens intelligent design” if he really wanted to see how often aliens are given as the designer behind ID. That search gave me almost 2 million hits. In addition to a lack of googling skills Luskin also seems to lack long-term memory skills in that he couldn't remember one of his own articles where he says:

An extensive look at the actual writings and arguments of those in the ID research community reveals that intelligent design is not an appeal to the supernatural, nor is it trying to "prove" the existence of God. The consensus of ID proponents is intelligent design theory does not allow one to identify the designer as natural or supernatural, because to do so would go beyond the limits of scientific inquiry.

In that article, not only does Luskin try his hardest to disassociate ID from Creationism but he also quotes Behe twice saying that the designer might very well be space aliens.

In the end, however, Luskin's incompetence at googling properly and his inability remember what he himself has written in the past only ends up highlighting the basic dishonesty of the Intelligent Design movement. For years they've been trying to get ID into high school science curricula in the United States, but as shown in the Dover trial the textbook they were pushing was just a rebranded creationist textbook. In his rant, Luskin does nothing but show that ID is, truly, nothing but Creationism in drag.