Zatera Ul

Dr. Sanity has a good post on postmodernism, science, and politics. I’m just picking a couple bits about intelligent design out of context here:

One thing you can say about the religious right is that their desire to teach “intelligent design” (a theory I do not think has sufficient evidence to be included in children’s science textbooks) basically represents a rather desperate desire to have their religious views respected in a system that has deliberately and with malice aforethought been excluding them for years. even as other “religions” views are substituted.

Most of the Christians that I know who are into intelligent design stuff aren’t anti-science, rather they are very interested in integrating the Christian view of the universe with the scientific view. Which atheist scientists have neither encouraged nor facilitated; the only God they might allow is one who sits in the corner and does nothing, after setting off the Big Bang.

Another quote:

I happen to think that intelligent design is a “crackpot idea” for various reasons, but I don’t see the harm of pursuing it to its scientific conclusion. Let anyone who wants to, come up with a way of testing it or studying it. Have institutes that support research on it. If there is any merit in the theory, it will come out. After all, there are some pretty bizarre theories out there in astrophysics that don’t have much evidence and have not discovered adequate ways to be tested–but I really hate that anyone’s ideas to be banned from discussion and refutation.

Scientists keep claiming that intelligent design isn’t, and can never be, “real science”, yet few of them complain about cosmologists who formulate wildly untestable theories about things like what there was before the Big Bang, and other universes that might be part of a multiverse with our own universe. (MFH and I listened to a podcast once with a couple of cosmologists discussing the multiverse. I kept yelling, “Yes, and how do you test that?!” back at them.)