The Dawkins/Dennett boogeyman

Why would a pro-science op-ed give credence to the words of William Dembski?

William Dembski (one of the leading lights of the US intelligent-design lobby) put it like this in an email to Dawkins: “I know that you personally don’t believe in God, but I want to thank you for being such a wonderful foil for theism and for intelligent design more generally. In fact, I regularly tell my colleagues that you and your work are one of God’s greatest gifts to the intelligent-design movement. So please, keep at it!”

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Last call

The Koufax voting closes at midnight tonight, so this is your last chance: click through the links below and vote. Or, you can just copy and paste the list below and mail it to wampum @ nic-naa.net, with the subject “Koufax”.

(Voting is now closed.)

And really, it’s encouraged to make an informed vote for the best candidate here, so I will not be at all chagrined if you vote for some other worthy blog. If I lose, though, the orgy* is cancelled and you might as well tear up your invitation.

*And you ought to see the other attendees…va-va-va-voom.

Let us pray

Here’s another bunch who don’t understand science: an article on research on prayer. You know, the creationists are always complaining that all those scientists out there (waves hand vaguely towards the nearest university) are biased and reject supernatural phenomena out of hand, and that their weird metaphysical research program can’t get any funding. Can we just face the fact that there are plenty of crackpot scientists and sloppy bureaucrats in the world, and that lots of nonsense gets funded and studied?

(More below the fold)

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Nelson’s game

Sometimes, I feel very sorry for Paul Nelson. He’s one of the few creationists who actually tries to engage his critics, and I think there’s a very good reason for that: when creationists try to emerge from the hothouse environment of their “think-tanks” and institutions of ignorance, when they stand before audiences that weren’t bussed in from the local fundamentalist church, they tend to get bopped hard. There is a good reason for that, of course —it’s because they say such remarkably silly things. The exceptional thing about Nelson is that he keeps on saying such silly things.

And he’s done it again, in an article full of misconceptions and half-truths about how science works. It’s a sincere attempt to express his beliefs, I will grant him that, but dang if it isn’t astoundingly wrong from top to bottom. Jason Rosenhouse has already flensed it once, so I’m left with little but a few bones to crack, but hey, that’s fun, too.

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