Dembski babbles on in his own little world, unaware of how ridiculous his strange contortions look. He has a paper out that compares Evolution as Alchemy, attempting to argue that the incompletely described history of life on earth means that evolution is as phony as an antiquated mystical philosophy about chemistry. In his usual turgid style, Dembski struggles to tell us what his gripe with alchemy and evolution is.

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Some Pennsylvania private schools have a new advertising campaign:

The billboard ads say “Intelligence … by Design” and show a Bible Baptist teacher and students.

The Harrisburg Christian radio ad features the voice of science teacher Stephanie Morris. She describes weaknesses in the theory of evolution and says, “The foundation of my biology course is a personal God and creator.”

Harrisburg Christian has 302 students and costs up to $6,600 per year. Bible Baptist, with 475 students, costs up to $4,400 a year.

That’s 777 students getting a sub-standard education in the sciences, and $4,083,200 getting flushed down a rathole. It’s an odd situation, where the wealthy yank their kids out of the public schools and put them in an expensive pit of ignorance by choice, and at the same time fight to underfund the public education they’ve abandoned and turn the schools the poor and middle class rely on into holding pens. We all lose.

I must immediately urge the Social Affairs Unit to consider confining their essays to social matters, or affairs, or units, because dang, when they start chattering about science, it’s like watching monkeys do philosopy—they really aren’t suited to it, and it all boils down to a comic-opera poop-frolic no matter what.

The latest effort is by one Myles Harris…the same Myles Harris who invented bogus criticisms of evolution a while back. Now he’s written a little misbegotten parable about a medieval kingdom where a strange artifact is dug up: a “box made of an unknown, shiny metal” with “an arrangement of what look like keys,” and inside, “a network of tiny green boards covered in gold, copper and silver wires.” He’s trying too hard to be clever; just say a laptop computer and be done with it. After all, he’s willing to plainly call the truth-quashing villains of his story “evolutionists”—this is a primitive kingdom with a ‘priesthood’ of evolutionists, apparently.

The box, evolutionists say, is obviously a product of chance. The common people should not, just because it is so complex, be misled into thinking it is anything else than a sophisticated natural object. If they do they will be falling for the “watch heresy”. Many years ago a noted theologian suggested that if you came across a pocket watch in a forest you would be correct in thinking it was designed by an intelligent hand. This was proved to be quite wrong because many natural objects are far more complicated than a pocket watch, and they arose by chance. Because this object was a million times more complicated did not mean it was designed. Evolution was perfectly capable of creating objects even more complicated than the metal box.

It’s embarrassingly bad, full of obvious logical flaws. If a machine-like artifact, even one whose principles of operation were sophisticated beyond our comprehension, were dug up, “evolutionists” wouldn’t be arguing that the rules of the biological world applied to it unless it exhibited properties resembling those of life. Harris is reduced to inventing characters with views stupid enough that he is capable of coping with them (which means they have to be awfully dim), such as this idea that evolution is about complicated things arising by chance.

Harris himself sent me the link to it. I guess he likes attention, even if it is of the sort we give to circus monkeys. Weird little people over there at SAU…