The funniest thing about this new interview of Bill Dembski is not that it’s conducted by Sean McDowell, who has a “Ph.D. in Apologetics and Worldview Studies from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary” and is the son of the well-known evangelist Josh McDowell.
It’s not that McDowell doesn’t ask him a single probing question.
It’s not that Dembski reveals he has a new book on intelligent design coming out, co-authored with the illustrious Robert J. Marks II; the table of contents can be found here.
It’s not that Dembski still doesn’t understand that the source of information in biology is well-understood biological processes such as mutations, recombination, gene duplication, and gene transfer.
No, the single funniest thing is that Dembski points to his nearly-dead, on-its-last-legs vanity journal Bio-Complexity as one of the ID movement’s greatest scientific successes.
As I’ve pointed out before, Bio-Complexity is a great example of the utter intellectual vacuity of intelligent design. Despite having an editorial board of 31 people, in 2014 the journal managed to publish exactly 1 research article and a total of 4 papers. In 2015 they published a total of 2 papers. In 2016 so far they’ve published exactly 1 paper. (At that rate, in 2017 they’ll publish half a paper.)
Wow! That is a research record to be very proud of! It really shows that intelligent design is fruitful, and inspiring top-quality research from scientists all over the world! The only downside is all the hard editorial work that needs to be done by those 31 members of the editorial board. Why, if they didn’t have to spend all their time reviewing papers, they might be publishing some intelligent design research of their own. Truly, it’s a scientific success.
They give PhDs for apologetics?! Wow. That’s not even as hard a curriculum as “history of basket-weaving” or “macrame and public policy”
Since apologetics is basically dissembling effectively for Jesus, what he has is a Ph. D. in lying.
I kinda suspect archaeologists have worked hard and thought intensively on the history of basket-weaving – and would welcome a positive contribution on that subject.
I wonder how difficult it would be to publish a fake paper, something like the Sokal affair or Who’s Afraid of Peer Review? Presumably rather easily since it seems safe to assume what has been published is “fake”, albeit in the different sense of pretending to be science. The postulated fake paper should be “fake” by their own standards, the point being to see if they actually do any review or are just happy to actually have a submission. And also, perhaps of necessity, if author(s) who are not known IDiots and have no connections to the editorial board could be published.
(Actually, that kind-of sounds like two papers, a “real” ID-ish one (regurgitate some standard bullshite?) to test the authorship question, and a fake / gibberish / error-full one to test the reviewing.)
Actually it would be pretty difficult. ID is a small club and any paper from a new player would get a lot of scrutiny.
“That’s not even as hard a curriculum as “history of basket-weaving” or “macrame and public policy””
There is ample evidence that both basket weaving and macrame both exist. Apologetics however lacks *any* supporting evidence for its central themes.
And after 2017, we’ll have to wait infinitely long for the completion of publishing that last paper.