Weird world of ID

Uncommon Descent is (unintentionally) the funniest blog on the planet. It exists to promote the farcical notion that ‘Intelligent Design’ (ID) is a real scientific enterprise, as opposed to what it really is: a weaselly euphemism for ‘creationism’.

Uncommon Descent has a long and disgraceful history of banning anyone who raises a dissenting voice, all chronicled at Uncommonly Dense: The BlogCzar Years (and this despite repeatedly whining about ID allegedly being censored by the scientific community). Chief among those doing the banning was one DaveScot, who seemed to enjoy nothing more than kicking off anyone who disagreed with him. Any posts made by the banned person also disappeared at the same time, rendering some threads utterly mysterious, as the remaining posts referred to the missing ones. And if a thread became too embarrassing for DaveScot (such as in cases where he was shown to be wrong or contradicting himself), he would remove it completely, without telling anyone.

In an ironic turn, DaveScot himself has now been banned from Uncommon Descent. His crime? Pointing out that Christians have a long history of racism in a thread that was supposed to be about how ‘Darwinism’ naturally leads to racism. (Here is not  the place to explain why the latter claim is nonsense.)

Cue much laughter from Uncommon Descent’s many observers. ID is a silly idea, refuted in every conceivable way, but its supporters cling to their delusion that evolutionary biology (which they always call ‘Darwinism’) is in crisis and about to collapse so as to reveal that the whole Universe was designed. In public, ID claims not to have any opinion about the identity of the designer, but its followers can’t hide their belief that it’s the Christian god that they’re talking about.

All this would matter very little if they kept their crackpot ideas to themselves. But no: they want to introduce their nonsense to school science classes under the guise of ‘academic freedom’. Apparently, science teachers should be obliged to teach children things that are demonstrably wrong – as if it’s not hard enough getting genuine science into kids’ heads. So laughing at them is a good response (they need to be ridiculed), but we should never lose sight of the fact that ID is an attack on science cloaked in weasel words.

And, of course, it’s another example of how religion poisons the world at every turn.