Typical Evasion
Back in the stone age, when I was a student, there was this thing
called Usenet, which had a newsgroup called talk.origins, where
creationists and evolution proponents argued.
I saw a pattern emerge: the evolution side had a number of people who
produced data to back up their claims, like experimental results,
pictures of fossils, and so forth. The creationism side, on the other
hand, seemed to have a surfeit of people providing excuses why the
evolutionists were wrong, and why creationism couldn’t be tested the
way the evolutionists said.
For all the IDists’
protests
that ID isn’t just Creationism 2.0, it seems they haven’t changed
their MO all that much.
Case in point:
PZ
forwarded a video
that challenged creationists to come up with a gene that doesn’t have
evolutionary precursors.
The
response
at UD is entirely dismissive:
So, has Myers indeed stumbled upon a true significant challenge for ID? Or, has he simply stumbled, as he so often does, over his own misconceptions and metaphysics? I vote for the latter.
There are a lot more words in that post, but they all boil down to:
no, ID can’t be tested that way. No, we’re not going to tell you how
to test ID, and we sure as hell aren’t going to perform any
experiments of our own. But you should still take us seriously because we say so.
More and more I am starting to think that arguing sensibly with IDists is similar to climbing a sand dune, and every so often the IDists decide that the sand dune we’re trying to climb is the wrong one.
Don’t forget “And if you don’t accept our views or dare to ask us to back them up, then you’re closed-minded.”