Friday, February 02, 2007

 

Trekkies

The Uncommon Descent blog recently linked to a post by Roddy Bullock that asks:

Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches outer space for confirming material evidence?

Answer: A scientist.

Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches inner space for confirming material evidence?

Answer: A religious nut.

That DaveScot finds this profound says more about the vacuous nature of intelligent design than anything critics of intelligent design could ever write about it.

By "inner space" Bullock and DaveScot undoubtedly meant to convey the micro-world of the cell and its genetic material. As with so much else, they seem blissfully unaware of the other ways that particular construction might be interpreted.

Like the characters in a Christopher Guest mockumentary who never consider the multiple meanings of "A Mighty Wind," our over-earnest friend DaveScot offers up the ID theorist's search of "inner space."

RSR can't get it out of his head that they really mean to boldly go where no man has gone before -- the vacuum of deep inner space between DaveScot's ears.

The difference between those scientists who hypothesize extraterrestrial life and those who posit the role of an intelligent designer in the creation of life is not, as DaveScot and Roddy Bullock would have it, that one searches with a radio telescope and the other an electron microscope.

Rather, the difference lies in the claims made for each.

To date, as scientists involved in the search for extraterrestrial life readily admit, there is no hard evidence of life anywhere in the universe but earth. The hypothesis that life exists elsewhere, while supported by statistical analysis, remains just that, an hypothesis.

ID "theorists" on the other hand, while conducting no actual search for evidence outside that fabled "inner space" make wildly exaggerated claims -- claims that are contradicted by scientists actually engaged in the study of the cell and the genetic code.

Research in intelligent design isn't conducted by peering into a microscope. It's conducted by exploring that "inner space," usually by theorists who stare fixedly at the inside of their own eyelids.

It is there, in the safe confines of the cerebrum, that the DaveScots of this world can vanquish the Klingon Empire Darwinists without ever looking into a microscope, reading Origin of the Species, or leaving the basement.

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