I expect that most here have heard about the situation at Ball State University (in Muncie, Indiana), where a physics professor was apparently including some Intelligent Design in a science class. There was a public fuss. And, more recently, the president of Ball State wrote a letter to the faculty about the situation. It seems to have been a classy letter. She described the issue as one of academic integrity, rather than one of academic freedom as a few commentators had suggested. She apparently agreed that there were first amendment issues, as others suggested. But she saw academic integrity as the main issue. Incidentally, I also thought academic integrity was the issue.
The ID people don’t like what she wrote, because she was blunt about ID not being science. Over at UD, vjtorley has a post “An open letter to BSU President Jo-Ann Gora” where he raises some questions that he would like the Gora to answer. I’m giving my answers here, rather than in a comment at UD, because I think the issues warrant more discussion, and I’m sure others here will want to join in.
Defining ID
Vincent’s first question starts with “how do you define ID”. It specifically asks about fine tuning.
My answer: It is not up to Ball State to define ID. They are reacting to a movement which has been very noisy about what it advocates.
On fine tuning: It does not matter to me whether “fine tuning” is specifically designated as ID. The relevant issues are that:
- “fine tuning” is a religious apologetics argument, and
- it has no scientific content. If the apologetics were removed, it would be philosophy, not science and not philosophy of science.
He also brings up the question of whether the cosmos could be a giant computer simulation. But that, too, I see as philosophy and not science.
Bad science
Vjtorley’s second section opens with:
Would you agree that the discussion of a bad scientific theory – even one whose claims has been soundly refuted by scientific testing, such as aether theories in physics, the phlogiston theory in chemistry, and vitalism in biology – can be productive and genuinely illuminating, in a university science classroom?
To me, this seems a misdirection. ID has never shown any scientific value. By contrast, phlogiston led to a research program of measuring the mass of combustion products. It was the beginnings of modern chemistry, though that very research led to the downfall of phlogiston.
I would class the aether as an hypothesis, rather than a theory. It was a background assumption but played no direct role in research with the exception of the Michelson-Morley experiment. But it did provide a useful background for discussing apparent wave-like phenomena in light transmission. Perhaps it’s role is similar to that of origin-of-life questions in biology. The physics itself did not depend on anything about aether, just as biology does not depend on how life originated. As far as I can tell, ID does not offer anything comparable.
I don’t know much about the history of vitalism, so I won’t comment about that.
Fred Hoyle
The next section begins with:
If you answered “Yes” to question 2, as I expect you did, then I shall assume that for you, the decisive reason for keeping intelligent design out of the science classroom is that it is essentially religious in nature. As you wrote in your email: “Teaching religious ideas in a science course is clearly not appropriate.”
It then goes on to discuss Fred Hoyle’s ideas.
Honestly, Vincent, this is absurd. Nobody would have heard of Hoyle’s view of evolution, if he were not already famous for his astrophysics. An famous astronomer says something laughably dumb about biology, and you really think that’s worthy of time in a biology class?
Now I hope you can see where I’m heading with this line of inquiry. If the discussion of the flaws in intelligent design theory belongs in a university science classroom, it logically follows that discussion of the theory itself belongs in a university science classroom.
Sigh! Creationists and ID proponents are still confusing “theory” and “hypothesis”. ID was never a theory. At best, it is an hypothesis, and a rather bad one at that. Compare it to phlogiston, which was a genuine theory and did lead to useful empirical research. The research we see coming out of the ID community seems to be little more than a search for gaps in which to put your “god of the gaps.” You don’t even need an ID hypothesis for that kind of research.
Richard Smalley
The next section is about Richard Smalley. The whole section reads like apologetics. I am wondering why vjtorley thinks that an apologetics argument would persuade people that ID is not religion.
So my question to you is: if a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry thought that intelligent design belongs in the category of “science”, what makes you so sure that it belongs in the category of religion?
Another non-biologist says something stupid about biology. It should be obvious that this is not useful to discuss in a science class.
Viewpoint endorsement
The Ball State statement said that particular viewpoints should not be endorsed, even in humanities classes. Vjtorley begins his question with:
I’d now like you to consider the hypothetical case of a humanities or social science lecturer at your university who is asked a very direct, personal question by a student: “Do you believe in intelligent design?”
If a student asked me that in class, I would decline to answer and rule it off-topic. If he asked me informally out of class, perhaps I would answer. But, in my opinion, this sort of viewpoint endorsement does not belong in the classroom. I agree with president Gora that this is an issue of academic integrity.
Phlogiston, luminiferous aether and the vital force were all perfectly good scientific hypotheses.
Phlogiston wasn’t even wrong – it’s just that as a place-holder for what was “driven off” by burning, it turned out to be protean, and sometimes negative, so driving research into what it actually was.
The luminferous aether wasn’t exactly wrong either – just nobody thought that the medium would be anything as bizarre as a probability distribution.
And the vital force still eludes us, although it will probably turn out to be the trick that enables molecules bearing sequential information to be duplicated.
Or rather they were all more wrong that what we know now, and what we know now is more wrong than what my son will know.
Confession. I have an M.A. from Ball State in special education. When I was there the special ed department was strongly biased toward measurable results and empirical methodologies.
The essential dishonesty of some IDists never surprises me. So I am not surprised that Torley tries to turn Hedin’s problem (and the resulting letter from President Gora) into yet another round of but-how-can-you-prove-ID-is-not-science. That’s not what Hedin’s problem was – I won’t cover all the details which are available on Jerry Coyne’s website – but the short answer is that Hedin was teaching christian religion as a science class (fulfilling the BSU science requirement for their Honors program!) while not including regular science in the course. Here’s Hedin’s class reading list:
That’s not science; that’s christian evangelism for science credit.
IF Hedin’s class were not offered as fulfilling a science requirement, if Hedin’s department had reacted appropriately to the first complaint of excessive religious entanglement with a supposed science class, if Hedin’s class were renumbered/renamed as philosophy,or something like that – then no one would have objected and President Gora would never have gotten involved in this issue of academic integrity.
Torley stripping out the context of this problem is exactly as expected from the typical IDist who habitually strips the context from quotations about science and twists them into an ID issue.
Torley is without excuse.
As I understand it — and I really should understand it better, given my career choice! — “academic freedom” pertains first and foremost to one’s research, not to one’s teaching — or, more broadly, to one’s conduct in the classroom. The classroom is not the Socratic agora, the marketplace of ideas; it is a place where access to expertise is bought and sold. So there is no limitation of academic freedom in stipulating that certain issues don’t belong in the classroom.
And even in one’s research, academic freedom only means that, if one has tenure, one cannot be dismissed just because some entrenched religious, political or economic interests dislike one’s research. One still has to produce results, get grants, write books, go to conferences, and so on.
ID provides just one thing, a cut-and-dried answer that substitutes for thinking and for putting out the effort to find an answer.
Its potential is to stop science.
Glen Davidson
I disagree with Neil on a couple of points.
First, fine tuning arguments are not in general religious. On the contrary, they can be very useful tools within physics, and especially within cosmology. The presence of fine tuning indicates that something is going on that we don’t understand, and can be a pointer toward new physics. For example, the inflationary Big Bang model was largely motivated by an instance of fine tuning, the “flatness problem”. The size of the cosmological constant is a similar problem: in cosmology it is a free parameter, but in order to have anything resembling our universe, it has to be really, really small (relative to the scale expected from particle physics). This is a good indication that we don’t understand the all of the physics involved.
I’m also a little more lenient in what I would consider appropriate in a science class. I have no problem with a class that looks at instances of apparent fine tuning also describing the kinds of solution that people propose — e.g. unknown physical principles, the multiverse, an infinite universe — and including among them the idea that “this is where physics stops working” (which is generally part of a larger conclusion, namely, “God did it”). The boundaries of science are uncertain, and I don’t see any problem with pointing out where things get murky. That has to be accompanied by noting that this is where questions leave the purview of the science classroom, however.
Of course, these quibbles have very little to do with the particular case here, which involved patently apologetic material under the guise of science.
Another post at UD: Ball State Takes Stand for Philosophical Naturalism as Science – Embarrassing Us Alums.
It starts with:
Well, no, Gora does not say anything of the kind as far as I can see. However, the ID proponents do seem to be seriously annoyed at what she did say.
Creationists seem to think of science or a scientific theory as simply a logically arguable explanation of things. This is evident in the comparison of ID to phlogiston or aether. The latter were relatively mainstream working theories, which despite being ultimately incorrect, nonetheless were useful in that they led to experimentation that actually advanced our scientific understanding. ID on the other hand, is not a working theory in that it has not led to any empirical progress. But even if it had the potential to lead to empirical progress in the future, we’d need to wait for those results before counting it as comparable to phlogiston or aether. IDists want status for their theory without their theory actually having done the work to deserve such status.
This is symptomatic, I think, of a fundamental disconnect in the way science is perceived by scientists vs. creationists. If you look at the various ID “theories”, such as CSI, irreducible complexity, cosmic fine tuning, or even something like Upright Biped’s semiotic argument, they all employ deductive-syllogistic reasoning. In fact most of them have literally been proffered in syllogistic form. But modern science doesn’t generally proceed this way. Research papers in the natural sciences don’t generally contain syllogisms. Science employs induction from observation instead.
I’ve thought for a while now that the ID movement was a form of new-age scholasticism due to it’s reliance on formal logic rather than experimentation. I think this is also related to why at UD they are so hung up on the rules of right reason and so forth. They are trying to construct reality by reasoning from (assumed) principles to facts about the world. While writing this post I googled “scholasticism intelligent design” to see if anyone else had already thought of this connection, and, quite ironically, if not also fittingly, I found a post at UD by vjtorley from earlier this year titled “Building a bridge between Scholastic philosophy and Intelligent Design”, in which he concludes that 13th/14th century scholastic thought “meshes well” with intelligent design!!!
I think there is a fundamental belief among the creationist/ID crowd that scholastic reasoning is equivalent to legitimate science. Which is why I think they may truly not get it when sciency folk criticize them for the lack of predictive power of their “theory”, for their inability to propose any cogent experiment, and for their complete lack of interest in investigating anything about the designer whose existence they’ve logically “proven”.
Will Gora will read a letter of over 2000 words from someone she has never heard of?
As anyone who has watched the tactics of the ID/creationist movement from its formal beginnings in 1970 knows, this is, and always has been, a sectarian culture war movement founded on word gaming and misrepresentations of science.
ID/creationist leaders have tried to ride on the backs of legitimate scientists ever since Henry Morris and Duane Gish – along with the rest of the crowd at the ICR – taunted scientists into campus debates.
The huffy pretentiousness over at UD does nothing to obliterate ID/creationist history. Not one of the regulars over at UD has any substantial knowledge of science, even at the high school level. All their arguments, however “sophisticated” they try to make them appear, are simply the ongoing political mud wrestling that has always been one of the primary hallmarks of ID/creationism.
Take a look at Andrew Fabich announcing his upcoming talk at AiG. He says,
When one considers all the research that has been done over the last century by thousands of researchers, many of whom have received Nobel Prizes for their work, the question that quite naturally arises is how did Fabich manage to repeat all those experiments?
Fabich is a typical example of the mindset of the youngest generation of ID/creationists who believe they are on the “cutting edge” of scientific research, when in fact they are simply steeped in ID/creationist socio/political doctrine.
ID/creationism’s only significant “evolution” is in its word gaming; it simply tries to become more “sophisticated” by trying to make its word gaming look more “philosophical.” This is what the UD site is all about.
The bottom line is the ID/creationism is not, and never has been, a science of any kind; Ball State’s president is absolutely correct on this point. I am surprised that some of the department heads at Ball State have lost sight of this obvious and well-documented historical fact. All they would have to do is link directly to the National Center for Science Education to get the complete socio/political and legal history of this movement.
Four guys are sitting at a bar. One is Fred Hoyle, world famous astronomer. The second man is Richard Smalley, 1996 Nobel Prize winner in chemisty. The third man is Fazale Rana, a biochemist. They’re talking about how the universe and biology show obvious signs of intelligent design.
The fourth man laughs and says “You guys may be smart in your fields, but what you’re talking about is outside of your area of expertise. You’re not biologists. What you’re saying is stupid”.
“Who are you, then, and what is your area of expertise?” Dr. Hoyle asks.
“Neil Rickert, Mathematician and computer scientist who dabbles in cognitive science.”
Nice one. What’s yours?
William,
If the universe and biology show obvious signs of intelligent design and this has been the case for a long time then why is it taking so long for the people who believe this to actually do something with that knowledge?
You know, build a better mousetrap or something! Anything really, other then write a book of course. Plenty of those.
Four guys are sitting at a bar. Fred Hoyle, world famous astronomer. The second man is Richard Smalley, 1996 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. The third man is Fazale Rana.
They turn to each other and say “So, the Universe, biology? Designed right?” “Yeah, seems so to me.” They all shrug and get another drink in. “Would a universe capable of supporting life as we know it not seem designed in some way even if it was not?” one mutters into their drink.
One of them turns to Neil Rickert, Mathematician and computer scientist who dabbles in cognitive science and says “I hear some really interesting things are going on in your field at the moment, could you give a few examples of the latest, peer reviewed and published research in your field? I’ve been looking at a blog called UD but I’m actually only interested in scientific evidence of which they seem to have none at all. ”
So, William, keep congratulating yourself on your belief in ID with the other ID believers. Keep writing posts at UD about the emptiness of the ID opponents arguments. Yet ultimately you’ll join the other couple of dozen ex-UD OP writers who all eventually realize that ID is sterile and just keeps repeating the same claims over and over again in new ways and never actually going anywhere.
Don’t believe me? Check the archives. Heard from Clive lately?
I would like to see William, or anyone else over at UD for that matter, come up with a justification for Hoyle’s “tornado-in-a-junkyard” argument against the origins of life and evolution.
But we all know that will never happen; don’t we, William? It would require at least a high school education in science on the part of UD people whose only pretense at scientific knowledge is to copy/paste, without comprehension, garbage truck loads of quote mined statements from real scientists.
That’s it, William; that is ID/creationism at its very core.
You mean, besides most of the science, and most of the scientific discoveries, of the past 400 years? A better question would be, when will the atheo-materialist nihilists do something with their “knowledge” beside trying to police scientific thought like fascists?
Mousetraps are “irreducibly complex;” just ask Behe.
In fact, far too complex for ID/creationists who, after something like 30 years now, still can’t even compute the CSI of anything.
Hoyle probably should have gotten the Nobel for his astrophysics. His grasp of biology, however, was genuinely embarrassing. No-one is going to give me a Nobel for anything. But I can see when someone is talking shite about a subject with which I am familiar.
Here is a simple concept that you won’t understand, William.
All working scientists submitting proposals for research have to submit their thoughts for peer review to various funding agencies. They have to show familiarity with the outstanding questions that need to be addressed. They have to show that they understand fundamental concepts in their areas of research. They have to lay out a budget and a time line for the research. And they have to specify the equipment they will need to buy or design and build as well as the number of people needed to conduct the research.
When these kinds of questions are asked of ID/creationists, the only responses we ever see are whining and melodramatic expressions of persecution complexes. You have obviously learned all of the histrionics of the ID/creationist community. But neither you nor any of your cohorts know any of the science; and nobody in the ID/creationist community knows how to do the research.
Nothing but politics and whining has come from the ID/creationist community since it formally began in 1970. Nothing, William; NOTHING. Explain that.
Wow, when you rip off the mask, you do it fast!
William,
That’s funny, because apparently ID is a scientific disagreement with the core claim of evolutionary theory that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion.
Very interesting that you can’t actually come up with anything relating to that core claim, but instead answer a different, unasked question.
And it seems to me that 400 years ago ID did not exist except as a purely religious idea, that there is a creator. Now, given that religion has existed for thousands of years what do you suppose changed in the last 400 to make all these “scientific discoveries” possible?
As it seems to me what changed was nothing to do with religion, or why did it take so long to happen? What was the trigger? Was a new discovery made in religion perhaps? No, I don’t think so. You seem ignorant of history.
Why 400 years ago? What is significant about that date?
The funny thing is that there are many ID journals, many ID papers, many ID conferences (Cornell?) and even many websites where ID supporters are free to make their case. Nobody is being suppressed, everyone is free to make their case. But for some reason, they don’t.
For example, you seem struck with your ability as a thinker and seem to think you are running circles round your debate opponents. So when are you going to publish your ideas formally instead of them becoming “yesterdays fish and chip wrappers” as they do at UD? If you arguments are so original and persuasive they deserve a wider audience. If, on the other hand, they are stale and unoriginal then the market will speak.
But as far suppression goes, what you don’t get is for everyone else to call what you are doing science just because you say it is, if it’s not. And that really burns huh? That’s all this is. You say it’s science. I say it’s not. I say publish or perish. You mutter.
Also, I suggest you look up what ‘fascists’ are before using that word again. It does not mean what you seem to think it means.
And even if it did mean what you think it means, take a look in the mirror. Who’s banning dissenting ideas? It’s not this site. It’s yours!.
I think it’s sweet really. All the posts he could have replied to, all the hanging points avoided, all the rebuttals gone unre-rebutted and he goes off on me instead.
Easy target much William? There’s much tougher then me around. You know, you’ve spoken to them!
I’m just following the evidence where it leads….
And all scientific discoveries in the past 4000 years (might as well go large) don’t forget about those!
That William thinks this misdirection is new is vastly amusing.
I also love the way he qualifies it with “most”.
besides most of the science, and most of the scientific discoveries
As if he were to say ‘all’ then of course you just need one example of an atheist scientist making a discovery to put a stop to that. But if it’s the case that it’s possible that you can indeed make a scientific discovery without thinking that the universe is designed then thinking that is not a necessary prior for making scientific discoveries and therefore the point is, well, pointless.
William, another thing that most of the people who made most of the scientific discoveries of the past 400 years had in common was that they had two eyes and one nose. Not all, mind. Just most.
lol. I R out-sophisticated already.
I guess we have no need for ID, since Murray tells us that most of the scientific discoveries of the past 400 years involve design.
There was a lot of whining about suppression of ID, but apparently that’s completely untrue.
Oh yeah, where’s the evidence for design? No, I don’t mean the junk that IDists claim is design, I mean something that shows rational planning, intelligence, something that actually stands out from the background of the lack of design so evident in life, or of the universe so generally hostile to life.
Glen Davidson
Shurely you mean nihilistic dark triad Alinskyite atheo-materialists, William.
But for the konspiracy, ID would be doing science with the best of them. Publishing great papers on the water canopy above the Earth, how the Cambrian explosion was three minutes thirty three seconds long, and how Adam tamed a T-Rex and taught it to mow the lawn.
.
Still awaiting an answer, William.
Ball State President Jo Ann Gora has given an address on this issue that is covered in The Star Press.
She notes:
Of course the people over a UD wouldn’t have a clue about that concept of academic integrity. Instead, they will zero in on the words “consensus of science scholars” as another of their maudlin complaints that there is a “defensive cabal of scientists who are out to protect their turf.”
Note how rapidly the whining and word gaming have expanded over at UD. And we still see no ideas for funded, peer reviewed research; only publications in their own “scientific” apologetics journals and propaganda screeds cranked out for the general public.
President Gora is quite obviously aware of ID/creationism’s history and goes on to say,
ID/creationists don’t accept separation of church and state. This is another Right Wing stealth war on secular society that appears to be ready to burst into flames.
Hobbes,
Yes, exactly. The typical UD contributor, at any rate, has a fairly shaky grasp of the distinction between an argument and an explanation. They tend to prefer arguments, and get very excited when they manage to produce a valid one.
They also tend to not fully understand the role of abduction (= inference to the best explanation) in scientific explanation — typically they will present intelligent design as an inference to the best explanation, and then stop there — whereas the process of scientific reasoning requires that the posits (inferences) have testable consequences.
As Peirce put it — and I think he was way ahead of his time on this one (and on so much else) — theory-construction requires abduction and deduction and induction. We posit something that, if it existed, would explain our observations; we then deduce some set of phenomena that would be observable if the posit existed; and then we induce, from our actual observations, whether or not the observations confirm our posit.
The ID folks are willing to commit themselves to the posit, and sometimes do a little a priori probability calculation (which is prone to the GIGO problem — garbage in, garbage out), and drive themselves into ecstatic frenzies over how incoherent “materialism” is, but the hard work of doing the actual science is somehow beyond them.
William J. Murray,
As is typical of the ID supporter, Murray fails to grasp the distinction between the motives for doing science and the content of the scientific theories produced.
Its a bad reflection on “higher education” to the people when anything indicating the Christian God or any God is banned outright as a option for origins.
Such a great tradition of belief and intellectual belief in the God of genesis or generally the world and poof some pres says its not true.
As follows.
If one censors a opinion in science class on options for origins then either one is saying that option is not true OR its not the purpose of science class to seek the truth on origins.
Thats logic isn’t it.
ID and YEC absolutely clearly use the same methods for figuring out origins or criticizing conclusions about origins as their opponents do.
Saying some prof doesn’t know what he’s doing in teaching conclusions is silly.
He was hired over other people. Why keep him around.
NO its just censorship from the left wing or a establishment wanting control over teachings.
Truly this President doesn’t deserve a position in places where advancement of science is the purpose. its just fighting religion.
The publicity is probably worth more to creationism then teaching a few hundred kids .
Truth can always get the win when dealing with authority repression.
Just where did you get the idea that ID/creationists ever do any research? From 1970, when the ICR was officially founded, up until this very day, ID/creationists have contributed absolutely nothing to our knowledge of our universe. Instead they skulk around in their plush offices and crank out propaganda for their ignorant followers.
In that time, many real scientists have accomplished far more and discovered far more than you can possibly know; and a number have received Nobel Prizes for their work.
But you can’t name one ID/creationist that has ever submitted a research proposal and did work that opened up new areas of investigation for others to follow.
Yes indeed; science has gradually pushed back the darkness of authoritarian sectarian rule over the human mind. We no longer burn people at the stake for heresy; and we no longer accept the assertions of self-proclaimed prophets who pass themselves off as spokesmen for deities.
Kantian,
Is your lofty sophistry now reduced to making disparaging claims about what goes on in my mind?
As I pointed out, the atheistic nihilists have recently been doing just that – attempting to control scientific thought via fascistic tactics.
No one cares what goes on in your head. We comment on what you demonstrate in your written posts.
Could you elaborate on that, William? Because if you are talking about peer-review, then, no.
Can people remember the rules please? I may have to do a clean up later.
Well, you asserted that, and a whole lot of other things for which you fail to provide evidence.
Sort of a pattern with creationists….
Glen Davidson
Heh! Umm, technically William, you didn’t point anything out. You declared that ID has been the standard of science and scientific discoveries over the last 400 years, but oddly you provided naught in the way of any example or substantiation for said claim. You equally insisted that “atheo-materialist nihilists” are policing scientific thought like fascists, without…yet again…any kind of example or substantiation. So much for your claim of pointing anything out…
Do let us know when you get around to…you know…actually providing something besides your opinions.
The first rule of The Skeptical Zone . . .
Peer review – for mainstream science – is basically a cadre of self-serving pseudo-intellectual thugs. Sort of like a modern day inquisition, but this time with a new secularist recipe.
Ah yes, the censorship claim. Tell us, William, how many online ID journals have been started and abandoned in the last ten years.
How much does it cost to publish an earth-shattering paper online? Or start a website? There are existing ID websites, but so far they publish nothing but rubbish. Why is that William?
Is there a conspiracy among ID advocates to undermine their own cause?
Yet when I ask people who make this claim for examples of papers that were rejected on the basis that they “support ID” none can be found.
Perhaps you can give an example William? Or was Steinberg being moved from one room to another sufficient evidence for you for the global cabal conspiracy?
Yes, it would be truly enlightening to see a list of ID papers submitted for peer review and rejected.
Interesting. Since I’ve done lots of peer review of mainstream science, I must be a self-serving pseudo-intellectual thug. Kinda makes me warm and tingly all over.
Peer review is what keeps Sewellage out of mainstream publication. Perhaps William could cite an ID paper that actually merits publication.
OMagain,
I’d like to see the ID grant proposals that have been submitted and rejected. IIRC when the Templeton foundation announced a call for proposals not a single alleged ID research team/facility/individaul bothered to submit anything at all.
How about it, WJM, can you cite any ID research proposals that have been submitted and rejected for any reason whatsoever?
Now wait a minute, my grant proposal to buy a million dollar magic wand (yes, from my company–it’s worth it!) to wave over colonies of bacteria lacking flagella to see if flagella would poof into existence was rejected flat-out.
Will the persecution never end?
Glen Davidson
So I take it that you think anyone, especially ID/creationists, can just ask for public money from scientific funding agencies and get it just for the asking?
You think that there should be no vetting of knowledge and capability to do the research?
You think you can just take the money and do whatever you like; sort of like the Discovery Institute getting money from Howard Ahmanson?
You think that sectarian opinions count as scientific theories? You think that sectarian opinions pushed onto others are not subject to questioning and the need for evidence?
Thugs, eh? I think you are projecting your own inner demons.
What do you call people who use every socio/political tactic at their disposal to force their sectarian dogmas onto other people’s kids? And why do you believe that these dogmas are not subject to questioning and demands for evidence and data?
I think we know the answers to these questions, William. You and your cohorts go after perceived weakness and naiveté on the part of laypersons and the general public; but you are absolutely terrified of real, working scientists.
I would suggest to you that it is the ID/creationists who have the well-documented history of thuggery and bullying; and this was all started in 1970 by the likes of Henry Morris, and especially Duane Gish, who liked to show up unannounced in high school biology classrooms and bully the teachers. Gish was proud of his tactics and portrayed himself as a bulldog. Gish was a bully, pure and simple. Other ID/creationists loved his tactics.
ID/creationists hate scientists just as much as thugs and criminals hate the cops and the FBI.
Heh heh. That’s all of science, is it? Or just the bit that conflicts with what you have chosen to believe?
And none of the characteristics of an actual inquisition.
It would be a trivial matter for a moneyed sponsor – there are more than a few with religious sympathies – to gather up these orphan papers and publish them in your very own ID journal. If it has merit, people could hardly ignore it forever.
I think we (IDists) trust “laypersons” and “the general public” to make up their own minds if they have all the information available; I think the ones that are “terrified” are those that work the hardest to have the ideas of others censored and policed, and threaten and bully any venue that might lend credibility to those other views.