Comments on: Discovery Institute official denies central tenet of intelligent design

By: Spiv

Spiv — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 16:10:05 +0000

You make a good point. Either way I guess it feels like classic political finger pointing instead of real issues, so I’m not big on it.

Then again, as you pointed out, they’re a political engine, not a scientific one, so maybe dealing with their clumsiness on this level is useful. “god” knows we’ve been trying to deal with it on a scientific level for some time.

By: Scott Elyard

Scott Elyard — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:39:58 +0000

Egnor is “fragile”? His past performance belies that greatly, so are you sure you didn’t mean “stubborn and resentful”?

I don’t think this is indicative of any real understanding on Egnor’s part. If it were, it would not be allowed past the DI censors (remember, the DI is a thinktank–i.e., a political, not scientific organization).

This is a blunder, but not the sort of blunder that will lead them to wisdom.

By: Spiv

Spiv — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:14:15 +0000

Hate to say it, but unimpressed. I think it isn’t directly against their “irreducible complexity” argument. Don’t get me wrong, the argument is fluff, and this sort of thinking will hopefully lead them to the eventual conclusions the science world has come to, but in the mean time it’s a small, semantic picking that I’d expect from the fundies, like us using the word “design” in any way during an explanation about evolutionary results.

These guys are fragile too, let’s not scare them off of the very kind of subtleties that we have been hoping they would lean into all this time.