Thoughts in a Haystack

Steve Matheson is continuing his campaign against the Discovery Institute and its minions. Not only has he called out Uncommon Dissonance Dissent Descent, he has established an "integrity dipstick":

There is a slight variation on the term that is also applicable.
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Stephen Matheson is a Christian. He also teaches at a Christian institution, Calvin College. But, mostly, he is a scientist ... specifically, a biologist.

He has been doing a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell:

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapters 4 and 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapters 9 and 10

Recently, Matheson has been distracted by real life (you know, real science and real education) and has yet to complete his review of Meyer's bloated screed, though I will continue to follow for new installments and will be posting them all in some convenient place.

Of course, the Discoveryoids are particularly discomforted by Matheson, who they have a hard time categorizing as a "Darwinist" ... by which they mean a philosophical materialist ... and, therefore, his criticism cannot be as easily deflected by ad hominem.

Matheson and another actual scientist, Arthur Hunt, decided to beard the lyin' lion on its own favorite turf, Biola (Bible Institute Of Los Angeles) University. As Matheson pointed out, that promptly resulted in his being "quotemined and utterly misconstrued" by the Disco 'Tute's spin machine. Matheson has been exposing that dishonesty here:

Bread and circus: Signature in the Cell at Biola (Part I)

Bread and circus: Signature in the Cell at Biola (Part II)

Bread and circus: Signature in the Cell at Biola (Part III)

Most recently, Richard Sternberg, the king of pseudo-martyrdom, has been making such a fool of himself over something that Matheson wrote that Larry Moran has, in a perhaps slightly surprising alliance, taken to whacking Sternberg over his lack of knowledge of biology and arithmetic. Now Matheson who, unlike Larry, tends to be generous (perhaps to a fault) in assessing the motives of those who disagree with him, has apparently had enough.

After responding to Sternberg with no little ... and literary ... sarcasm, Matheson stated that "it will be useful to send a clear message to the Discovery Institute as an organization, now that I've seen its mode of response to me since Meyer and I met."

And then he hoisted the Jolly Roger.

For those of you that don't already have Quintessence of Dust in your newsreaders, I strongly urge you to add it.

This could be fun!
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Josh Rosenau points to a post at the Ministry of Misinformation by Jay Richards that, once again, belies the claim that ID has nothing to do with religion. Of course, Richards is still waiving around the fig leaf that ID doesn't claim that the "Designer" is God but there is an interesting amount of slip peeping out of Richard's skirts:

Anyone who is aquatinted with Wilkins' epistemological hat or even Meyer's mealy-mouthed invocation of extraterrestrial "Designer(s)" knows that it is "divine causality" that ID evokes and even Richards can't keep the story straight.

Reading this, however, it occurs to me that there is a good explanation of why ID is not science.

As we all know, a central argument in ID is that DNA is like computer software or a code and, since the only examples of software or code that we are aware of are created by an intelligent agent -- humans -- it is "reasonable" to infer that DNA is also designed by an intelligent agent. IDers, however, as Richards notes, refuse to engage in "specifying how the design is implemented, or by whom." Indeed, they (not so strangely) refuse to address "religious questions about the identity or metaphysical nature of the designer."

Let's look at another example: we know that radio signals can be created by intelligent agents like humans. If we then listen and discover radio signals coming from outside the Earth and we refuse to consider who or what might have caused those signals or how they were created, we'd might argue that the "best explanation" was to infer that all the radio signals were the result of intelligent agents. Of course, we have good explanations of other sources of radio signals -- just as we have good explanations of adaptation and the "apparent design" of life -- but if you insist on squeezing your eyes tight shut and burying your fingers knuckle deep in your ears and refuse to even consider the source of those extraterrestrial radio signals, it's easy enough to "conclude" they are intelligently designed.

That would be just as "scientific" as ID is.

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Update: Stephen Matheson of Quintessence of Dust describes Meyer making this very "argument."
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