Thoughts in a Haystack

… But perhaps not the way the Discovery Institute might have wanted.

That is the impression I get from a report in the Southern Methodist University student paper, The Daily Campus. It is an account of the attendance by six students at the DI's canine and equus show, "Darwin vs. Design," at SMU recently and their protests of its dishonesty. The six were:

Francis Goldshmid: Junior, Biology B.S., Chemistry B.A.
Nicolas Sanchez: Junior, Biology B.S., Italian minor
Jani Brackett: Junior, Biology B.S., German B.A.
Desiree Brooks: Sophomore, Biology B.S., Chemistry B.A.
Ati Nayeb: Junior, Phsycology major, Biology and Chemistry minors
Mahmud Shurafa: Biology and Spanish double major

The tale is well worth reading in full, so I'll just give a bit from the end that I thought was particularly telling. The students passed out their own pamphlets that had quotes from the Wedge Document, including:

Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialistic worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

The telling part, given how often the DI keeps insisting that ID is all about the science, is:

… [S]omehow, one of our flyers made it to the front of the stage, where the journalist [Lee Strobel] asked the other men on stage about the quote regarding the institute's true purpose … being that it wants to replace modern science with "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."

To my shock, one of the men on stage said, "Yes that's true, and I don't see anything scandalous about that."

Nothing scandalous about trying to replace science with Christianity? Nothing scandalous about the fact that religion keeps being brought up during what is supposed to be a scientific conference? Clearly, the institute's dictionary must define the word "scandalous" differently from the dictionaries we own, because it sure appears to be pretty scandalous.

Those of us that have been at this for a while have long known that the Disco Boyz are indifferent to the scandalous … or to embarrassment, for that matter.