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.

Letter to the Editor

The Record has printed another one of my letters to the editor. First, here is the other person's letter to which mine is a response.

The teaching of atheism

October 02, 2007

Despite Premier Dalton McGuinty claiming "evolution is a science," (Record, Sept. 7) he cannot demonstrate a single repeatable fact of evolution.

If evolution is true, it does not need a god to guide it. Evolution stands on its own as the cornerstone of atheism. And so our public schools cannot be neutral on the issue. If they teach evolution, by default, they teach atheism. God is a myth.

No wonder there is an outcry. Intelligent design needs to be taught to balance the scales. We may argue over God's name, nature and plan, but to make the teaching of creation unlawful establishes atheism as the state religion, represses freedom of speech, stifles intellectual thought and oppresses all other religions.

Yet McGuinty is against faith-based schools and calls evolution a science.

Dan Kraemer

And here follows my reply.

The evidence is there

October 10, 2007

In his Oct. 2 letter, The Teaching Of Atheism, Dan Kraemer shows he does not know very much about evolution.

First off, Kraemer is utterly wrong about there being no demonstrable facts of evolution. Indeed, transitional fossils such as archaeopteryx immediately spring to mind, and the London Underground mosquito is one of many observed examples of speciation. There are many more examples for those who would but look.

Second, evolution is not a cornerstone of atheism and it is dishonest to try and portray the two as equivalent. Many Christians, including myself, accept the theory of evolution as the best explanation which draws the facts together into a coherent, operating whole.

Third, intelligent design is anything but scientific theory. Leading ID proponent Dr. Michael Behe has conceded that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred." He also agreed that that definition of "theory" as he applied it to ID was so loose that astrology would also qualify.

Would Kraemer say teaching how two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom make up one water molecule is atheism? Chemistry never mentions God, either.

Cory Albrecht

Unfortunately, for The Record letters to the editor need to be under 250 words to stand a decent chance of actually being chosen for publication. There were so many other pieces of evidence I wanted to give. In my initial draft, each of the three sections were about twice the size, if not more.

The first section, to counter Kraemer's claim of no repeatable facts of evolution, had multiple examples of both transitional fossil sequences and observed events of speciation. In addition to Archaeopteryx, I had listed the well proto-horse fossils from Hyracotherium through Mesohippus and Merychippus and so on that lead up to modern day Equus, as well as those fossils in our own lineage — Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo habilis and so on. To go along with the London Underground moiquito I had also mentioned Hugo de Vries's discovery of a polyploid variant of the evening primrose which he found in his test subjects and that would not breed back to the diploid parent stock and the multiple instances of Drosophila speciation in laboratory settings. I had hoped to give an indication of just how much supporting evidence there is for the theory of evolution without having to get into complex subjects such as molecular biology and genomics.

In the third section I had originally mentioned the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and how in that court case Intelligent Design had utterly failed to show that it was a science and how organizations like the Discovery Institute use dishonest tactics like creating a strawman of evolution to tear down or even out and out lies about evolution. Alas, I had to settle for a few choice quotes from Dr. Michael Behe.