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"Seldom does a storytelling talent come along as potent and fully mature as Mike Brotherton. His complex characters take you on a voyage that is both fiercely credible and astonishingly imaginative. This is Science Fiction."
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Are the IDiots Lying, or Stupid?
May 4th, 2009
“IDioit” is a term used to describe advocates of Intelligent Design (ID), and while it is derogatory, it’s hard to not use it when there is ample support for the label. For instance, columnist Melanie Phillips writes in Creating and Insult to Intelligence:
Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was “nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.”
But this is totally untrue…This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science.
OMG, WTF? I can’t abide outright falsehoods like this. If you get paid to communicate with people and write articles, well, you should do some basic fact checking, especially if your opinion is based on your supposed facts.
Unfortunately, I suspect the truth is closer to the Big Lie, where you just keep saying something false over and over until enough people believe it to give the idea traction. So, is Melanie just totally ignorant and writing out of her ass, or lying?
The truth is that Intelligent Design was invented to repackage Creationism, in an attempt to get a religious point of view into science class. You don’t have to believe me. You can believe the creators of Intelligent Design, the so-called wedge document that escaped their control, and their own statements. The wiki page link has a lot of details I don’t care to repeat here, but the evidence is clear. Moreover, in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a conservative Republican-appointed judge ruled that ID is essentially religious in nature. It certainly does not come out of science. Where are the articles in scientific journals showing the primary research? No where. They don’t exist.
So why would a newspaper publish a piece where the central tenet of the entire article is false? I don’t know, for sure. I just know that this Melanie Phillips person is lying or too stupid to check her facts. To tell the truth, I don’t know which. I am repeatedly shocked by what passes for journalism and commentary these days, where speaking from a political bias is taken as acceptable. When conservative pundits on CNN were caught when they thought the mic was off, saying that McCain’s choice of Palin as VP had just destroyed his chances, not a minute after saying positive things about it…it’s enough to make a person cynical.
So, what do you think? If not in general, at least about this article? Is she just totally ignorant of the facts and too stupid to check them, or lying out of her ass to help build a false public perception?
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May 4th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I actually suspect it’s a bit of both. I think she knows her position is indefensible, but she also is too stupid to get the real facts on her own.
It’s all pretty stupid, to be honest. There’s no way you can see ID as anything but a religious concept. It’s not even a theory, but it gets called one. It has yet to become a theory. At best, it’s a really bad hypothesis with no legitimate science attached to it. There’s a reason why evolution is where it is…cause it’s been studied for over a hundred years…almost 150, actually (or are we at 150 now? I’m not sure…).
May 4th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
No option for both?
(incidentally: tenet, not tenant)
May 4th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I think she’s saying the following:
Intelligent design isn’t the same thing as creationism. They’re both religious but ID is “based on science.” ID isn’t science, it’s a religious conclusion “based on science.” Basically you look at all the evidence & all the science & say “well despite the scientific conclusions I could draw from all this, I’ll go ahead & make a wild ass guess of a religious conclusion” An example might be:
1. My parents tell me that it’s a commandment of god to honor thy father & thy mother.
2. Then they tell me not to touch my fingertip to the oven burner while the oven is on.
3. experiment: I touch my fingertip to the oven burner while the oven is on.
4. Result: I experience great pain.
5. Scientific conclusion: If I don’t want to experience great pain I shouldn’t touch my fingertip to the oven burner while the oven is on.
6. Religious conclusion: If I don’t want to experience great pain I should follow the commandments of god & obey my mother & father. (It can also be concluded that if my parents told me to touch my fingertip to the oven burner while the oven is on then I wouldn’t be burned because I’d be obeying a commandment of god & honoring my parents by touching it.)
Both conclusions are based on the same scientific result. One is a scientific conclusion the other is a conclusion that is “based on science.”
May 4th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Yeah, both might be a fair option in some cases. And yes, here stupid=willfully ignorant.
May 4th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Some IDiots are stupid, some are lying, and others are merely ignorant. The Discovery Institute is lying. I think Melanie Phillips is ignorant, but with no desire to know; this is hard to distinguish from stupid.
Ms. Phillips is very obviously totally ignorant of the nature and practice of science—what counts as evidence, what is a theory, why methodological naturalism has allowed modern science to flourish. This is a consequence of the abysmal state of science education. Unfortunately, even scientists are often unaware of the parameters of their own profession. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a high-school level course in Science—not physics or chemistry or astronomy, but education in how science operates, how theories are validated, and what counts as evidence.
Here’s an example to illustrate scientific reasoning. Suppose an inventor wants you to invest $10M in his 95% accurate test for a disease that kills 100 people a year. Why should you kick him out without even listening to any further details? (You may now begin to understand the extent of scientific ignorance.)
May 5th, 2009 at 7:07 am
Playing devil’s advocate. Just because they disagree with you does not make them stupid nor a liar.
Perhaps, they don’t understand science that well. Perhaps they never will. But they have their opinions and they base them on things other than science.
In my personal opinion, neither evolutionary nor creationism should be be taught mandatory in schools. The reason why is that both topics are irrelevant from a human knowledge perspective.
We humans build upon each other’s knowledge. But there is nothing on which to build with this subject. Neither view point progresses our joint knowledge.
May 5th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Rob C says; “Perhaps [ID proponents] don’t understand science that well…. But they have their opinions and they base them on things other then science.”
Well and good. But why should these opinions be taught as science? Let’s follow your logic. I don’t know much about mathematics, but I believe for aesthetic reasons that 2+2=22. Should my opinion be taught in math class?
“In my personal opinion, neither evolutionary nor creationism should be taught in science should be taught mandatory [sic] in schools. The reason why is that both topics are irrelevant from a human knowledge perspective.”
Come again? A subject that generated 1,750 peer-reviewed research papers last year is irrelevant to knowledge? Last year a researcher overturned the prevailing theory about how out sensation of taste works, because the old theory could not have evolved that way. His discovery of an evolutionary pathway allowed him to come up with a whole new class of chemical “taste modulators” for foods. The entire field of drug resistance is inherently based upon evolutionary principles. Evolutionary principles showed Neil Shubin where to look for the Tittaalik fossil. Evolutionary principle (Vavilov’s Law) tells agronomists what locations to look for mew food crops, such as perennial varieties of wheat, rye, and maize. Last month a Science paper showed where and when sheep were first domesticated. The same evolutionary algorithm, by the way, led to the reconstruction of the original version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Evolution is certainly not “irrelevant” to human knowledge.
May 6th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Olorin, nice response. Rob, what are you, a redneck living in South Carolina?
May 6th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Wait a minute… This all presupposes that “Science” is fact. The true nature of the universe is so irreversibly immune to our understanding that anything/everything we talk about is religious in nature. “Science” included. To believe otherwise is an egocentric delusion. You are either lying to your self, ignorant or stupid.
May 6th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
I am guilty of all three infractions.
May 6th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Thank you for the admission, Bill. No-one thinks science is fact. Science is the arrangement of facts into theories, from which further facts may be deduced and tested.
May 11th, 2009 at 9:51 am
[...] got to be to remain this willfully ignorant. OK so recently I posted about a totally dumb column by someone named Melanie Phillips, wherein she complained about how Intelligent Design (the initials lead us to the apropos [...]
August 15th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
ID is obviously a desperate concession to the irrefutable revelations of science in the interest of remaining even remotely relevant in the modern day.