Thoughts in a Haystack: Kidding Whom?

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Kidding Whom?

There is a very interesting article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times today (which can be found here now): "Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker". It describes a number of reasons to think that the "Intelligent Design Movement" may have passed its high water mark.

I wish the signs of the immanent demise of ID were clear but there is, nonetheless, a fascinating revelation in the piece:

The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

"They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

Here was a clear opportunity for the ID proponents to get support from an organization sympathetic to their aims for real scientific research to be done in "design theory" and to have a forum for their results that mainstream scientists, even those dirty "Darwinists", could neither rig against them nor ignore. And yet, when the opportunity came, they failed to respond.

If there was any doubt before about the lack of scientific merit in ID or as to the full knowledge by the major ID proponents of that vacuity, this ends anything but the pretense.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 2:29 PM