Steve Fuller on the Dover Judgement

I promised to write a report on the Dover court case.... I am still working on it. Mean time Steve Fuller has been busy writing.

He wrote this piece in the Times Education Supplement: Schools for the Enlightenment or epiphany? and then sent me this article for the Blog:

If you follow US court cases over what can be taught in high schools, you will be treated to discourses of the sublime and the ridiculous in disturbingly equal measures. In this respect, the Kitzmiller case, the first to test the teaching of ID, is par for the course. The local school board was, by all accounts, fractious and its members not entirely forthcoming in their motives or actions. On those grounds alone, the presiding judge had good grounds for ruling against the defendants.

The larger and more interesting question was whether he would comment further on the fitness of ID for high school science classes. This was my reason for getting involved in the case, and the defence lawyers, to their credit, kept these two issues separate in the trial. As it turns out, Judge Jones devoted most of his decision to denouncing ID as a scientific project, while making some polite noises about its possible interest as ‘theology’ – not much of a consolation from a judge who admitted in a newspaper interview that his brush with religion consists in his wife dragging him to the local Lutheran Church on Sundays.

The judge’s reasoning could have been simply lifted from the plaintiffs’ playbook. The American Civil Liberties Union scored a total win, easily justifying their legal fees. However, the fact that Judge Jones, who is ostensibly intelligent and independent, would rule so categorically against intelligent design suggests that those interested in the fate of the US legal system need to initiate a far-reaching discussion about the relationship between religion and science in public life, in which I would include the classroom. This should not have been such a cut-and-dry case. A constitutional principle that originally aimed to prevent the establishment of a state-sponsored church is now being invoked to prevent the expression of views, regardless of merit, that happen to have religious origins and inspire religious support.

Regardless of Judge Jones’s appreciation or approval, virtually every major scientific world-view began with what contemporaries regarded as controversial political and religious assumptions. Galileo stands out in the Scientific Revolution because he spoke plainly and, not surprisingly, stood trial and suffered house arrest. Most others, not least Isaac Newton, concealed their motives. The project of rendering controversial political and religious assumptions ‘scientific’ involves enabling others not sharing those assumptions to find enough intrinsic merit in the positions themselves to accept or at least tolerate them. Newton was a genius because he could translate his theological insight into mathematical terms that commanded assent even from those who would not otherwise accept his theology. Of course, this scientific ‘sublimation’ of the original religious impulse typically invite new converts who take the position in radically new directions: How many people today think that they’re affirming Unitarianism when they work with Newtonian mechanics?

But sublimation is not possible without public exposure. In contrast to the 17th century, we claim to inhabit societies where people are mature enough to think for themselves. At the very least, this means that they possess ideas, not the other way round. No one seriously doubts that contemporary ID is historically connected to scientific creationism’s opposition to Darwinism. Unfortunately, the judge treated this point as a permanent strike against ID, as if to teach ID would be to unleash that entire history upon unsuspecting students. And who is being ‘supernatural’ here?!

Moreover, the US seems to have no trouble divorcing the origins from the import of scientific views when it comes to matters of race. The racist motives of biologists are not routinely investigated before deciding whether their work should be taught, despite their potential for subverting the grounds of universal civil rights. (But those so interested could ferret around recent discourse surrounding ‘genetic diversity’.) Darwin’s own magnum opus is fully titled: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, the connotations of which were happily embraced by Hunter’s Civic Biology, the high school text defended in the 1925 Scopes Trial. The ease with which the US legal system turns a blind eye to this matter reflects no more than that the nation was formally constituted with Black slaves but without an established church. The anchoring effect of a nation’s birth trauma should never be underestimated.

Let me stress that I am not calling for a witch-hunt for scientists’ racist motives, however more harmful they might be than their religious motives. Rather, I am calling for an amnesty on motives altogether. What was perhaps most disturbing about the judge’s decision was its reliance on the testimony of a professional conspiracy theorist, Barbara Forrest, who showed – quite correctly – the historical continuity between Christian fundamentalism and ID, including the Discovery Institute’s ‘Wedge Document’, a strategy for (re)turning the US to its Christian roots. When I was first shown this document during my deposition, my response was: ‘So what?’ That a particular scientific point-of-view is attached to – or even motivated by – a certain religious viewpoint backed by economic and cultural clout and dedicated to achieving specific political goals does not strike me as a problem in itself. The mere presence of a plan does not imply its success, as should now be clear from the many documents discovered in the 1950s alleging plots to turn the US into a puppet state of the Soviet Union. I mention this precedent because Forrest, a philosopher like myself, did her Ph.D. on Sidney Hook, a student of John Dewey who became just such an anti-Communist.

I have a lot of faith in the future of science and the United States. But both deserve better than what Judge Jones delivered in his verdict. The judge ignored a precedent set by McLean v. Arkansas (1982), the landmark case that banned creationism from high school science classes. The presiding judge, William Overton based his ruling on the expert testimony of the noted historian and philosopher of science, Michael Ruse. For the first time in a US court case, a definition of science was invoked that did not rely on whatever most scientists happen to think. To be sure, Ruse’s definition supported the scientific establishment but without making reference to it. At the time, Ruse was excoriated by his colleagues for lack of nuance, yet he succeeded in providing what philosophers value most: an independent standard for deciding validity. Francis Bacon’s invention of the ‘scientific method’ 400 years ago can be seen as a version of Ruse, but now acting as judge rather than witness. It was not a trivial achievement the first time round, nor was it when Ruse re-invented it. Unfortunately, this history was lost on Judge Jones, whose idea of neutrality required driving out religion from science simply because it challenged the received view of the scientific establishment.

Also, Steve will be speaking in January on ID at the following venues:
Thomas More Institute, London (Wednesday, 25 January). Contact person is Andrew Hegarty: andrew.hegarty@thomasmoreinstitute.org.uk
University of Bristol, Philosophy Department (Tuesday, 31 January). Contact person is Alexander Bird: alexander.bird@bristol.ac.uk

The Ribosome.

The Ribosome is perhaps the most complex machine at the centre of life. It is the place where proteins are assembled by putting together the 20 different amino acids in a specific order coded by information "photocopied" from the cell's "hard drives" - the DNA molecules.


Bruce Alberts is the President of the National Academy of Science in the US and organisation which thrown its weight behind the campaign to exclude consideration of Intelligent Design from Science.

In his huge textbook on Molecular and cellular biology he says this about the ribosome:

“The complexity of a process with so many interacting components has made many biologists despair of ever understanding the pathway by which protein synthesis evolved.”

He goes on to argue that RNA in the ribosome (the factory for assembling amino acids into long chains in the correct order using the code message copied from the DNA) provides a clue to its simple evolutionary precursors.

The important point is that Bruce Alberts here acknowledges a real and serious problem. He goes on to suggest some hope for Darwinists but it is a clutching at straws sort of hope.

Biologists have really serious problems with explaining complexity using chance and selection but they are determined to teach our children that no other more appropriate causes of complexity can be seriously considered.

The God of the Gaps Argument.

The argument goes like this:

Some Theists point to areas of biology that have not yet been explained in detail in terms of natural causes and say …the fact that we cannot explain this as a result of natural causes is evidence that God did it.

The GAP in our knowledge is evidence that we need another explanation.

ID is not simply a God of the gaps argument….and it is by no means clear to me that evidence that some gaps have been explained using natural causes is the same as proof that all gaps in our knowledge will be filled by natural causes.

If we dismiss the appearance of design in nature as merely an appearance and convince ourselves that it really can be explained as a natural chance phenomenon how do we know that we have not missed real intelligent design?

Evolution did not predict extraordinary complexity at the threshold of life and it struggles to adapt itself to explain it away.

Papering over the cracks and sweeping the problem out of the public gaze is not the best way to face up to the nature of nature.

The Darwinist Propaganda Carnival Continues…

The public relations exercise that is defending modern philosophical naturalism is seeking to use all the propaganda tricks in the book.

This years Science journal’s top ten discoveries seeks to underline an important propaganda point.

Evolution is an integral part of every single biology experiment.
Evolution underpins all our work to identify and treat genetic disease.
Evolution underpins all our work in countering infectious diseases.

Thus those who have grave misgivings about the creative power of chance genetic change being the cause of complex life forms and brilliant nanotechnology are portrayed as being anti-science and anti-medicine and seeking to turn the clock back to an age where mysterious spiritual forces were the causes of sneezing.

“They” want Astrology chapters inserted into physics textbooks.
“They” want Alchemy chapters in chemistry texts.
“They” want Unicorns, elves, hobgoblins and fairies in the biology textbooks.

These are tactics of slander, smearing and false accusation rather than a fair and balanced treatment of the arguments.

Thus scientists have crossed over the line between the pursuit of truth to the defence of a worldview. The odd thing is that they do not seem to realise what they are doing. Most of them simply have no concept that there is such a thing as a “worldview” they are so immersed in their own view of the world that they don’t really believe that there can be anything else other than naturalism without it deserving to be in a padded clinic.

Scientists (especially biologists trained to think in exclusively evolutionist fashion) are poorly placed to draw the distinctions between belief based upon evidence and belief based upon worldview.

Evolution provides poor resources for explaining the huge problems of the origins of life and the origins of huge amounts of complex machinery which makes our best efforts at technology look very clumsy indeed. To pretend that we have demonstrated that unintelligent causes provide a full explanation for all this is dishonest.

Ken Miller Vs Bill Dembski on the BBC

Bill Dembski provides what he was going to say after Ken Miller used up all the time available on the BBC interview a week ago here. Ken Miller's main point was that ID is bad because it is a "negative argument." I blogged about this complaint here.

Exposure

Even if ID does nothing else it has performed a useful function in exposing the necessity of the fact of evolution for authoritative secularism. ID exposes the relationship between Darwinism and materialism more clearly than ever before.
Darwinism claims to come as a neutral, apolitical, nonreligious, scientific fact but it is, in fact, the trump card of dogmatic atheism and the backbone of modern secularism.

Is not Darwinism an integral part of a political and ideological system? Are socialists generally Darwinists? Are atheists universally Darwinists?

ID has rattled some cages in a very disturbing manner. The extraordinary venom with which it is attacked should alert us to the significance of its arguments.

David Klinghoffer pulled together some striking quotes here which illustrate what I mean:

Daniel C. Dennett. In his highly regarded Darwin's Dangerous Idea, he tells why it might be necessary to confine conservative Christians in zoos. It's because Bible-believing Baptists, in particular, may tolerate "the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world." In other words, they may doubt Darwin. This cannot stand! "Safety demands that religion be put in cages," explains Dennett, "when absolutely necessary....The message is clear: those who will not accommodate, who will not temper, who insist on keeping only the purest and wildest strains of their heritage alive, we will be obliged, reluctantly, to cage or disarm, and we will do our best to disable the memes they fight for."

In an essay, "Is Science a Religion?", Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins is frank enough. Perhaps the leading figure on the Darwin side, he forthrightly states that "faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate." He equates God with an "imaginary friend" and baptism with child abuse.

There is Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, of the University of Texas, who defended Darwinism before the Texas State Board of Education in 2003. In accepting an award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation,Weinberg didn't hide his own feelings about how science must deliver the fatal blow to religious faith: "I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I'm all for that! One of the things that in fact has driven me in my life, is the feeling that this is one of the great social functions of science — to free people from superstition." When Weinberg's idea of science triumphs, then "this progression of priests and ministers and rabbis and ulamas and imams and bonzes and bodhisattvas will come to an end, [and] we'll see no more of them. I hope that this is something to which science can contribute and if it is, then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make."
There is University of Minnesota biologist P. Z. Myers, a prominent combatant in the Darwin wars being fought in an archipelago of websites. He links his own site (recently plugged in the prestigious journal Nature) to a "humorous" web film depicting Jesus' flagellation and crucifixion, a speeded-up version of Mel Gibson's Passion, to the accompaniment of the Benny Hill theme music "Yakety Sax," complete with cartoonish sound effects. "Never let it be said that I lack a sense of reverence or an appreciation of Christian mythology," commented this teacher at a state university. In another blog posting, Myers daydreamed about having a time machine that would allow him to go back and eliminate the Biblical patriarch Abraham. Some might argue for using the machine to assassinate other notorious figures of history, but not Myers: "I wouldn't do anything as trivial as using it to take out Hitler."
Then there is the Darwinist chairman of the religious studies department at the University of Kansas, Paul Mirecki. He emerged from obscurity recently when his startlingly crude anti-Christian writings came to light. Mirecki's bright idea had been to teach a course about "mythologies," including intelligent design. Things got interesting when it came out that he followed up his announcement by crowing in an e-mail to a list-serve: "The fundies [Christian fundamentalists] want [ID] taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category 'mythology.'"
Mirecki had previously posted a list-serve message responding to somebody's joke about Pope John Paul II being "a corpse in a funny hat wearing a dress." Mirecki wrote back, "I love it! I refer to him as J2P2 (John Paul II), like the Star Wars robot R2D2."
Administration officials at KU confirmed that the e-mails had come from Mirecki, who also wrote: "I had my first Catholic 'holy communion' when I was a kid in Chicago, and when I took the bread-wafer the first time, it stuck to the roof of my mouth, and as I was secretly trying to pry it off with my tongue as I was walking back to my pew with white clothes and with my hands folded, all I could think was that it was Jesus' skin, and I started to puke, but I sucked it in and drank my own puke. That's a big part of the Catholic experience."

The Zone Call

Captain W.E John’s fictional hero “Biggles” forces an unarmed Pfalz pilot to land and captures him. The man later gives information whilst drunk to Air Intelligence, that leads them to organise a raid on a new German Airfield. Biggles isn't so easily fooled and finds a torn part of a secret order in the German's plane. Biggles then searches in the opposite direction to the information given.
As he flies aimlessly around he notices that the anti-aircraft fire becomes much more intense the closer he flies to a particular piece of woodland.
He decides to fly low over the wood and finds the German Army massing soldiers in it. He then uses a helpful R.E. 8 pilot and observer to send out a "zone call". This is a concentrated fire by all British artillery in the area on one spot (and costs in the region of £10,000 a minute in shells!). The wood is pounded and the German troops are forced to withdraw so this foils the potential German attack.

ID seems to me rather like flying near the wood. There must be something very important about ID- because of the nature of the opposition to it.
It exposes the heart and soul of materialist assumptions and exposes the materialist faith as one religious position amongst many rather than the one truth amongst many fairy stories.
The Dover judgement (I will write a report on this when things have calmed down a little) is another piece of evidence calling for a Zone call concentrating on the materialist love affair with Darwin.

Negative Arguments and the haka

+ OR -

Now…am I getting the right idea?

1. A negative argument is one which seeks to establish an alternative explanation by presenting evidence that the current explanation has a poor fit with reality. A negative argument is therefore an attempt at falsification of an explanation.

A negative argument is therefore a fundamental part of scientific endeavour and there is no shame in presenting a negative argument(s) A negative argument is not by definition a bad shoddy little bit of science that you drop secretly somewhere and do not want your name associated with.

A negative argument is often a different way of presenting a positive argument.
Your explanation has a bad fit with reality…but hey! My explanation really works nicely here!


2. A positive argument will therefore be one which seeks to establish an alternative explanation by presenting evidence that the alternative explanation has a better fit with reality.

3. Where we can limit rigorously a discrete number of possible explanations and then knock down until only one is left this is perfectly reasonable proof that the remaining option is true (providing the discrete number of options are really all the options available)

I remember from O-level physics the excitement of the experiment showing that the current bun model of the atom was wrong. (Rutherford found it pretty exciting too: “It was quite the most incredible thing that ever happened to me in my life” he is reported to have danced a haka!) Was that in one sense a negative argument….throw away the currant buns… and in another positive… we need a new idea…aha how about a small tiny nucleus plus electrons scattered around.

Sudden integrated increases in biological Information.

We know that there must be sudden integrated increases in information from the nature of the systems that we have discovered operate within a cell.

All life as we know it operates in membrane bound units. This means that the first membrane bound cell had to occur at a specific moment when the membrane sealed on a blob of protoplasm. For this object to be really alive it needed

(a) All the information to code for the apparatus to replicate its own information
(b) All the information to gain sufficient energy to power replication of the information and the doubling of the structural molecules is needed.
(c) All the information to produce the machinery to double all the structural materials of that first living cell.

It is impossible to have this happening without a sudden increase in integrated information.


The origin of a new protein system from scratch.

If we imagine a tree of ancestry for all proteins then there is a limit to the degree with which new protein can be thought of as deriving from other proteins. A large number of proteins must be present to make the simplest living organism but there are large numbers of families of proteins which are additional to those which would have been derived from those necessary for the origin of life.

My understanding is that it is this clustering of interdependent information which is at the heart of Behe’s argument in Darwin’s Black Box and which is the insight which is at the heart of the biological ID debate.

Dembski's Book- The Design Inference.

Was it supposed to be serious mathematics/science or just a scheme to make money for the CUP?

Did the editors of the series simply include the Dembski volume as a cynical ploy to make money out of brain dead fundamentalists... or was there serious content that serious mathematicians, logicians and scientists thought was worth serious consideration by academics...

I genuinely want to know the answer to this question.

Maybe I should just sit down and send this question to them by email and ask.

Am I supposed to look at the list of advisory editors and say "bunch of total jokers"?

Here they are:

Brian Skyrms
Ernest W Adams
Ken Binmore
Jeremy Butterfield
Persi Diaconis
William Harper
John Harsanyi
Richard Jeffrey
Wolfgang Spohn
Patrick Suppes
Amos Tversky
Sandy Zabell

If you do a google search on each you do not immediately think.... erm... this is a wind up!

Classification of ID

It seems to me that there are two sorts of ID type arguments.

(a) Cosmological ID - "Someone monkeyed around with the physics" This someone it seems to me has to be God or at least a god of some kind. To be able to control the laws of physics must be a property of deity I think.

(b) Biological ID - Life is an exhibition of design (or apparent design)

For this area there are two divisions:

(i) The origin of life itself. Where did the first living organism(s) on the planet come from? How did they/it arise?

(ii) The origin of additional biological complexity to produce the stunning variety of living organisms we can see around us.

I am interested in Cosmological ID but I do not intend to focus on it in this blog. By training and natural inclination I am much more concerned about the biological ID arguments.

Dembski and Dilbert

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) feels a little of the same way that I do:

"Let me say very clearly here that I’m not denying the EXISTENCE of slam-dunk credible evidence for evolution. What I’m denying is the existence of credible PEOPLE to inform me of this evidence. "

I tried to read the Design Inference. I can cope with some of it but I have a sort of brain that does not cope very well with pages of equations. I have a brother in law who dreams in equations....but so far he has not had time to tell me what it all means. My choice at the moment is to trust Elsberry and Shallit or to trust Dembski. This is a thoroughly unsatisfactory state of affairs. The fact that The Design Inference was published by Cambridge University Press means that at least some people somewhere think it ought to be taken seriously.

Who are they? Where are they? Don't they realise that what they did was important?

The Panda's Thumb response of resorting to "believe Shallit and Elseberry or you are an idiot" and "Dembski is a wicked liar" is entirely unsatisfactory. What I need is a good collection of well qualified statisticians and probablity theory people - well respected in their fields to tell me that Cambridge University Press made a mistake here and some rubbish got through the filter.

I need someone who can communicate properly without resorting to pages of equations but someone who is respected by both sides to tell me what it all means.

Surely it should not be too difficult to get together a group of people and produce a report on the logic and probability arguments in this controversy.

If Dembski is totally and utterly wrong can I have some credible witnesses to tell me so please....

Evidence for ID

Some of the commenters have been challenging ID because it has not produced a "knock out experimental result" If ID had produced a knock out experimental result proving ID then it would be published through the peer review system and we could all stop arguing and re-arrange our thinking appropriately.

If there are no knock out experimental results then ID cannot be science.

This is an unwarranted narrowing of the meaning of the word "science" and would have excluded Darwin's book the origin of Species from science. He had no knock down experiments. What he was proposing was a whole new way of thinking about the evidence that was already there.

His theory made sense of a lot of evidence which did not fit with a simple static - it was designed exactly as we see it - model for origins in biology.

Proposing new ways of thinking about the evidence in front of us is real science. The new way of thinking about the evidence may be right or wrong or in-between but we decide by carefully comparing one explanation with another.

Chance, necessity and a combination of both provide poor resources for the generation of complex integrated information. Intelligent design provides a much more resonable explanation for this kind of phenomenon.

Our ordinary and natural response to complex integrated information is to infer design. This is acknowledged even by Richard Dawkins and others who are convinced that it is a mistaken view. However since our natural and normal response is to infer design the default position has to be that the design is real until it can be shown that this inference is mistaken.

The evidence of molecular biology has provided a real challenge to the molecules to man by chance idea. There are conjunctions of objects in molecular biology which are difficult to account for in terms of chance and necessity or a combination of both. Until a clear explanation of how this can happen it is therefore reasonable and right to believe and teach that the design is real.

ID...Nuggers and nutters following wicked liars.

In C. S. Lewis' children’s novel the Silver chair the great climax of the story comes in the underworld where Eustace and Jill have ended up in their quest to rescue Prince Rilian with the inimitable Marshwiggle “Puddleglum” (what a character!) They are struggling with the soothing deceptions of the witch who is crooning…. There is no Narnia… There is no Narnia….There is no sun... There are no fields…

Puddleglum’s answer is a masterpiece:

"One word, Ma'am" he said coming back from the fire; limping because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things - trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play-world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.

In some ways the conviction that intelligent design is right is like this… at the moment (for me anyway)…it is too beautiful and alive to be wrong. Truth is alive and envigorating. Falsehood is deathly and suffocating.

For anti-IDers we are somewhere on a scale of “just plain delusional nuggers to certified nutters” as Jeffahn put it elegantly… with a few (Like Behe and Dembski) who are just plain old fashioned wicked liars. We’re just babies making up a game. Delusional nuggers and certified nutters following wicked liars!

In the story the “underworlders” were intent on going deeper and deeper underground they were not interested in even going to have a look at the little hole being enlarged to look into a very real Narnia.

Puddleglum knew his world was the real one and the story ends with an escape from the gloomy underworld into the shockingly dazzling brightness of a real Narnia!

Which world will turn out to be the real one?
I am going with Puddleglum….

Tony Blair an ID supporter?

On the occasion that the above right honourable gentleman may next be found here would he mind leaving a comment about the above subject... I just happened to read in the New York Times (you have to log in) that he was an ID fan:

"President George W. Bush, a vocal Christian, has stated he believes that intelligent design should be taught in classrooms alongside evolution, as has British Prime Minister Tony Blair."
The report was from Reuters but I certainly was not aware of whether you were keen or not... I might even consider giving you space to do a guest post!

Vote for High Priest of the Temple of the Enlightenment.

In his last address as President of the Royal Society Lord May mentioned the values of the Enlightenment:

What are these values? They are tolerance of diversity, respect for individual liberty of conscience.....

He then proceded to attack ID, Christianity and especially the last book of the bible as the cause of Islamic terrorism! There are clear limits to his tolerance then. Clearly a prime candidate for the High Priest at the Temple of Enlightenment Tolerance. Perhaps this is why he has retired from the Royal Society.

Dr William Dembski has a new candidate for the leader in the new Darwinist culture of contempt.

Other notable examples of candidates for the position of High Priest:

Dr. Richard Dawkins Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Scientific Enlightenment and Tolerance:

"It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that) "

[He later explains that what he particularly dislikes about creationists is their intolerance.]

Paul Z. Myers:
"Please don’t try to tell me that you object to the tone of our complaints. Our only problem is that we aren’t martial enough, or vigorous enough, or loud enough, or angry enough. The only appropriate responses should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing and humiliation of some teachers, many schoolboard members, and vast numbers of sleazy far-right politicians."

And:

"Don't tell me to be dispassionate or less unreasonable about it all because 65% of the American population think creationism should be taught alongside evolution, or that Americans are just responding to common notions of "fairness". That just tells me that we scientists have not been expressing our outrage enough. And yes, we should be outraged that the president of our country panders to theocrats, faith-healers, and snake-oil artists; sitting back and quietly explaining that Bush may be a decent man who is mistaken, while the preachers are stridently condemning all us evilutionists to hell, is a (deleted word) ineffective tactic that has gotten us to this point.
I say, (deleted word) the polite words and careful rhetoric. It's time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots. If you don't care enough for the truth to fight for it, then get out of the way. "

Paul Mirecki, designer of the world's shortest course on Intelligent design and other mythologies at Kansas University (It is one of those course that finishes before it begins!) :

“The fundies want it all taught in a science class, but this will be a nice slap in their big fat face by teaching it as a religious studies class under the category ‘mythology,’"

ID is popular amongst traditional Christians

Contrary to the view which Darwinists are seeking to portray (the theory of intelligent design reflects the views only of extreme fundamentalists in the US) an increasing number of traditional and well established Christian denominations are expressing their support for Intelligent Design.

In the UK many conservative Christian denominations look to the reformed publishing charity "The Banner of Truth" to express an orthodox stance doctrinally. They have recently put an article on their website from the very traditional Free Presbyterian Church magazine expressing a very positive attitude to intelligent design theory.

Positive articles have also been written in the Evangelical Times and the Grace Magazine.

Recently the usually extremely cautious Roman Catholic approach to evolution has hardened to clear opposition for chance only teaching and a positive approach to Intelligent Design.

To have the Pope and the Free Presbyterian Church agree about something controversial must be a first!

Clearly it is not just theological illiterates who find the chance and necessity view of life and death unsatisfactory. It seems that your attitude to ID is influenced strongly by your prior commitments to particular worldviews. Materialists find it alarming and threatening. Theists of a more traditional and conservative type find it exciting and thrilling.