Glen Davidson
Posts: 1100
Joined: May 2006
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Actually, I believe that most of us do bring up other pseudosciences to show how contemptible ID is.
But most of us don't bother fighting other pseudosciences, primarily because there is no concerted effort to introduce other pseudosciences into the schools.
There is another reason that I like to aim at ID, which is that it has tried more strenuously (or at least more successfully, in the PR campaign) to pose itself as science than any of the other pseudosciences with which I am familiar. As such, it is bizarre that scholastic notions of accident ("chance") and necessity ("regularity") are brought in by Dembski (showing that he knows ancient philosophy much better than he knows science), and these simply beg for refutation and ridicule.
That's just one example. Dembski's claims that we can identify a designer simply by eliminating "chance" and "regularity" is also nonsense logically, as he resorts to an eliminative "induction" that has no legitimacy whatsoever in science (we have to have evidence which connects to a designer having at least some of the characteristics of known designers, if we are to infer "design"). Then he complains that we are simply materialists who deny anything not material, as if we deny his claims because we are prejudiced against religion, rather than because of our prejudices against claims which have no basis in observable fact.
And if we demand actual processes of design of these "machines", he tells us that he has no obligation to match our pathetic level of detail. So while he's complaining about our supposed gaps in knowledge (some real, many not), he feels no obligation whatsoever to make up for the fact that he has explained nothing in biology at all.
ID happens to be the richest source of apologia for a complete lack of science in its purported "scientific program". It is thus where we may hone our abilities for fighting any other pseudoscience which might wish to claim to be science. The others are at present just too easy (from what I have seen), with little effort put into couching their criticisms and claims in post-modern claptrap and official-sounding pronouncements of what science is or should be.
ID is in its way very sophisticated, particularly in the sense of being sophistical. It is a full time job for teams of intellectuals and scientists to counter their many false statements and sophistical twistings of what constitutes evidence and what is a permissible conclusion from the given evidence. Judges, like Jones, can rule out the nonsense, but we have to answer it in many and varied ways.
If other pseudosciences present the same challenge to half-educated Americans, and to supplanting real science education with garbage, I believe and hope that most of us will be there, fighting the BS (which we sometimes do with the politically-powerful postmoderns in the universities--but mostly the post-modernists just make their priestly statements from on high, the which scientists and the more intelligent people promptly ignore. It seems to me that IDists probably make the most use of philosophical nonsense outside of the philosophy departments).
Right now the political power and the sophistical obfuscations of the ID "movement" make it the most important target for critical analysis. The other pseudosciences are mostly content to make converts the old-fashioned way, with a bit of glib nonsense and an invocation of Galileo, as if the latter would countenance their particular idiocy (he happened to be harsh with the pseudoscientists of his day, notably one who claimed to have a machine that could talk to another machine in a distant country, but which couldn't do so through the walls of separate rooms).
Mainly suckers fall for the regular pseudoscience, while some fairly educated people have been convinced by IDists (in the sense that they thought ID might have a legitimate hypothesis), before the IDists had been answered well and in full.
Glen D
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http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p....p
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of coincidence---ID philosophy
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