Intelligent design wants to claim the status of science. All real sciences have good science and bad science. Science is littered with the remnants of discarded theories, poorly done experiments, rejected arguments, mistakes, corrections. If a science is real, you can point to the ideas that it has rejected. In evolutionary biology, ideas such as group selection or hopeful monsters are rejected, at least in their original formulations. The mainstream is constantly challenged, and there is work that simply doesn't hold up. Lynn Marguilus challenged the establishment when she suggested mitochondria arose by endosymbiosis, but we accepted her ideas. She has also pushed symbiosis for organelles and in places in which the evidence just doesn't hold up, and we have rejected it.
So where are the theories that ID has thrown out? If the ID community is legitimate science, there must be some ideas that the community once accepted and no longer accept. There must be some studies that were poorly done (assuming they did studies). There must be some modifications that were made. There should be some examples of vigorous debate within the ID community about details, with each side marshaling evidence to support their case.
You won't find any of that. Remarkably, of all of the sciences, ID is the only one in which all of the major proponents got it 100% right the first time. As a community, they have even failed to reject a young earth. You will not find any criticism of ID by ID. You can recognize legitimate science as easily by what it has admitted is wrong and how it faces criticism as by what it gets right.
Mainstream science thrives on criticism. Unless there is criticism, it isn't science. Yet to ID, all criticism is bias or repression. They complain loudly when they are being criticized, failing to realize that it is the essence of the legitimacy they crave. If they actually changed their views or rejected an argument occasionally in response to criticism, we might take them seriously.
Not only is any criticism seen as discrimination, they claim it is religious discrimination. And they want to be taken seriously as science.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)

No comments:
Post a Comment