Wow. As reported at the Panda’s Thumb, the DI is puffing up and getting pissy about a misattribution of a quote to one of their own. How dare we ‘Darwinists’ promote such blatant falsehoods!

Today there is another urban myth building up a head of steam, and being helped along by Darwinists, about Discovery Fellow Paul Nelson. Gaurdian reporter Karen Armstrong reports: ‘Great shakings and darkness are descending on Planet Earth,’ says the ID philosopher Paul Nelson, ‘but they will be overshadowed by even more amazing displays of God’s power and light.’ And yet this is pure rubbish because Nelson never said anything like this, and it turns out that Armstrong never even interviewed him. Nelson points this out in his letter to the Guardian demanding a correction.

Unfortunately for their sense of false outrage, the fact of the matter is that that wicked ‘Darwinist’, Nick Matzke, is the one who actually caught and reported the bogus quote, and called for its retraction. Matzke noted that it didn’t sound like anything Nelson would say out loud, and traced the quote back to a source that doesn’t seem to have any connection to Nelson.

Ooops. That’s what they call ‘helping along an urban myth’ over at the DI?

Note to self: if Rob Crowther is found bleeding in the street, just walk away. He seems to be one of those guys who’ll sue you if you try to give him first aid.

It feels good to see the IDist crackpots beaten back a little bit in their bid to control the Kansas school board, and I think it is necessary to keep up the pressure and prevent them from getting a better grip on public school education. However, Paul Nelson actually has a point with his little parable. It’s not the point he thinks he’s making, but it’s important to keep in mind anyway, and I’m going to dash some cold water on any sense of triumphalism on the pro-science side.

[Read more…]

It wasn’t a clean sweep that threw all the rascals out, but the Kansas school board election did return a little more balance and helped out the pro-science side. Thoughts from Kansas summarizes the results:

The Board is back in moderate hands no matter what. The night is, on balance, a victory. It’d be nice to further marginalize the extremists by winning the remaining races in November, but we’ve got a majority that will implement the science standards recommended by the scientists, educators and parents of the science standards committee. The Board can focus on bigger issues. They can dig into ways to address the special challenges of rural districts, and to find solutions to the problems faced by the students in poorer urban districts. Real challenges, not fake controversy. Helping kids, not fighting culture wars.

Best of all, it looks like Connie Morris has lost her seat on the board. That’s good news right there.

Kansans, remember to get out and vote today—a low turnout is expected for the primary election for the Kansas school board, and you really want to dump Connie Morris, right?

Connie Morris, a conservative Republican running for re-election, said the board had merely authorized scientifically valid criticism of evolution. Ms. Morris, a retired teacher and author, said she did not believe in evolution.

“It’s a nice bedtime story,” she said. “Science doesn’t back it up.”

Evolution is the only story backed up by science. You don’t really want a school board run by ninnies who don’t know that, do you?

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Oh, yeah…there are other races besides the school board.

Catch ’em quick before they get deleted. In a post on Dembski’s blog that is discussing their Kansas ad campaign to falsely portray the IDist’s efforts as solely about teaching good science, there are a couple of interesting comments. Keep in mind that the Discovery Institute has declared that they aren’t trying to sneak intelligent design into the classroom, they just want an “honest” discussion of the weaknesses in evolutionary theory.

Here’s the first revealing comment, which plainly states that the goal of the Kansas science standards is to teach ID:

My hope is that ID will be taught properly in Kansas. Having been born and raised there I would love to claim to be from the first state to teach ID. There is a lot of movement among science high school teachers to never teach ID, even if it becomes a law because “we don’t know how to teach philosophy.”

It would be nice to see them learn. I worked in a school and grew tired of hearing them speak of how it’s wrong to point out the weaknesses in Darwin’s theory because, “even if it is weak, it’s still the best theory out there.” (Shades of Dawkins anyone?)

Comment by Joel Borofsky — July 30, 2006 @ 10:08 am

Bleh. How dishonest can you get? What informed teacher of biology would say of Darwin’s theory, “even if it is weak…”? It isn’t weak at all.

After being asked about this comment, take a look at his response, which digs an even deeper hole.

It really is ID in disguise. The entire purpose behind all of this is to shift it into schools…at least that is the hope/fear among some science teachers in the area. The problem is, if you are not going to be dogmatic in Darwinism that means you inevitably have to point out a fault or at least an alternative to Darwinism. So far, the only plausible theory is ID.

If one is to challenge Darwin, then one must use ID. To challenge Darwin is to challenge natural selection/spontaneous first cause…which is what the Kansas board is attempting to do. When you do that, you have to invoke the idea of ID.

Comment by Joel Borofsky — July 30, 2006 @ 9:04 pm

You may be saying, “So what? Blogs aren’t accountable for the random ravings of their flibbertigibbet commenters.” (I certainly don’t feel that way about mine.) There’s one important additional piece of information you need, though.

Joel Borofsky is Dembski’s research assistant and co-moderator of the site.

(hat tip to Richard Hughes.)

John Rennie deconstructs an IDist’s own definition of Intelligent Design. Here’s that definition:

ID is the claim that there exist patterns in nature that are best explained by intelligent agency. ID doesn’t claim to be a default explanation. It is claimed to be a legitimate hypothesis, supported by a large body of evidence, that deserves consideration without being rejected on principle because of a preconceived metaphysical bias.

Sentence by sentence, that definition is untenable. Read Rennie for the big picture, but I just want to focus on that last clause: the “preconceived metaphysical bias.” That’s a common creationist code phrase that you’ll hear a lot in this debate, and it can be translated as “scientists reject supernatural explanations.” That IDists claim to have a “best” explanation or that they actually have evidence in support of their beliefs becomes completely irrelevant when they cap their definition with the idea that you shouldn’t need rational, logical, tested explanations or any kind of empirical, natural evidence—the first part of the definition is a tacit admission of the need to meet the standards of our “metaphysical bias,” science, and that last bit is a rejection of science!

I think they need to cultivate a little more honesty and consistency, and lay out in detail what their metaphysical bias might be. Mine is that the processes of the natural world are sufficient to explain physical reality, and that what we require to understand the natural world are natural explanations. I’d like to see a summary of their biases and a list of the supernatural evidence that IDists want to use to support their contentions.

Some days, you just want to give up the arguing and go rest your head on the desk for a while. No matter how dumb you think the opposition is, they’ll always manage to say something dumber than you can imagine.

Forgive me, but I find it hard to take Casey Luskin seriously. He’s a mouthpiece for the Discovery Institute who always reminds me of a voluble squirrel: he chatters away frenetically, but the brain behind his words is tiny and ill-prepared to cope with any substance. I always feel this urge to throw some peanuts at his feet to distract him. Anyway, his latest frenetic missive is a collection of angry chitterings, protesting that ID isn’t about the supernatural at all (it’s just about undermining naturalism…hasn’t he read Philip Johnson yet?), and no, they aren’t trying to sow doubt and confusion by mangling the science standards in Kansas. Meanwhile, John Rennie is more like a sleek, swift Doberman who gives the squirrel a quick shake, a chomp, and the nuisance vanishes with a squeak. For now. Anticipate Luskin’s further shrill whining to continue from within the belly of the beast.

Hey, and if you want to hear more about the distortions of science in the Kansas standards revisions, Jack Krebs has been barnstorming the state, and there’s lots of material to expose the Discovery Institute fraudulent campaign there.