Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Modus Operandi
I've been gone on vacation for a little more than a week, so naturally there's a lot of catching up on the wackiness of the religious right, particularly its intelligent design outpost.
Back on July 19, William Dembski wrote a post on Uncommon Descent charging that remarks at the most recent Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in London, in which Richard Dawkins accused Lewis Wolpert of being a creationist and Wolpert responded that sometimes he wished he were a creationist, were deleted from the online audio.
Dembski, with his keen eye for Darwinist duplicity, chortled that "If it's been edited out, it didn't happen?!" (Someone really needs to study the unseemly attraction of intelligent design theorists to exclamation points.)
Well, of course the remarks weren't edited out, as Dembski has now been forced to confess. They're there in the recording. It's just that Dembski, as he so often does, relied on an unnamed "friend who attended the meeting" and he's "been having difficulty downloading the file in question."
It's simply amazing how many times Dembski's false charges turn out, upon investigation, to be based on some anonymous informant. The volumes of evidence for evolution are never enough for Dembski, it seems, but his army of unnamed informants, no matter how often wrong, are taken at face value with no effort to made to check the facts.
This, of course, is the intelligent design modus operandi in a nutshell.
Of course, lying cheek by jowl at Uncommon Descent with Dembski's confession that he didn't bother to check before making his latest false charge are these headlines: "Myths about science and religion: A little research saves a lot of apology" and "Environmental Journalists: Prosecutor, Judge & Jury?"
Back on July 19, William Dembski wrote a post on Uncommon Descent charging that remarks at the most recent Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in London, in which Richard Dawkins accused Lewis Wolpert of being a creationist and Wolpert responded that sometimes he wished he were a creationist, were deleted from the online audio.
Dembski, with his keen eye for Darwinist duplicity, chortled that "If it's been edited out, it didn't happen?!" (Someone really needs to study the unseemly attraction of intelligent design theorists to exclamation points.)
Well, of course the remarks weren't edited out, as Dembski has now been forced to confess. They're there in the recording. It's just that Dembski, as he so often does, relied on an unnamed "friend who attended the meeting" and he's "been having difficulty downloading the file in question."
It's simply amazing how many times Dembski's false charges turn out, upon investigation, to be based on some anonymous informant. The volumes of evidence for evolution are never enough for Dembski, it seems, but his army of unnamed informants, no matter how often wrong, are taken at face value with no effort to made to check the facts.
This, of course, is the intelligent design modus operandi in a nutshell.
Of course, lying cheek by jowl at Uncommon Descent with Dembski's confession that he didn't bother to check before making his latest false charge are these headlines: "Myths about science and religion: A little research saves a lot of apology" and "Environmental Journalists: Prosecutor, Judge & Jury?"
