15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense

[Michael]

Earlier we had a post on Intelligent Design (ID) and when I came across this Scientific American article I noticed it was answering many of the questions posted by ID fan-boys So I thought I’d post the link here for those who would like a little more information on the topic: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. As a few people thought that I was asking for a higher-than-normal standard when I asked for peer-reviewed publications in favor of ID I was pleasantly surprised to see that this was one area that the author also hit upon:

No evidence suggests that evolution is losing adherents. Pick up any issue of a peer-reviewed biological journal, and you will find articles that support and extend evolutionary studies or that embrace evolution as a fundamental concept.

Conversely, serious scientific publications disputing evolution are all but nonexistent. In the mid-1990s George W. Gilchrist of the University of Washington surveyed thousands of journals in the primary literature, seeking articles on intelligent design or creation science. Among those hundreds of thousands of scientific reports, he found none. In the past two years, surveys done independently by Barbara Forrest of Southeastern Louisiana University and Lawrence M. Krauss of Case Western Reserve University have been similarly fruitless.

I think this is a good argument for why ID should not be taught in public school as a science (of course there is no reason why ID couldn’t be discussed in the proper forum such as religious thinking and such). However ID has no scientific merit;

For instance, when and how did a designing intelligence intervene in life's history? By creating the first DNA? The first cell? The first human? Was every species designed, or just a few early ones? Proponents of intelligent-design theory frequently decline to be pinned down on these points. They do not even make real attempts to reconcile their disparate ideas about intelligent design. Instead they pursue argument by exclusion--that is, they belittle evolutionary explanations as far-fetched or incomplete and then imply that only design-based alternatives remain. Logically, this is misleading: even if one naturalistic explanation is flawed, it does not mean that all are. Moreover, it does not make one intelligent-design theory more reasonable than another. Listeners are essentially left to fill in the blanks for themselves, and some will undoubtedly do so by substituting their religious beliefs for scientific ideas.