Scott Adams has a little piece on his blog about Intelligent Design. Here are a couple of bits that I found objectionable.
First of all, you’d be hard pressed to find a useful debate about Darwinism and Intelligent Design, of the sort that you could use to form your own opinion. I can’t find one, and I’ve looked. What you have instead is each side misrepresenting the other’s position and then making a good argument for why the misrepresentation is wrong.
I almost hate to say this, but this indicates to me that you’re not looking hard enough. There are plenty of resources that paint the picture pretty clearly, many of which I have linked to. But here’s another one just in case.
It seems that the goal of most IDers and other people pushing junk science to promote their own agendas (there’s no global warming, the jury’s still out), is to muddy the waters enough that people without a good grasp on science won’t be able to figure out what’s going on. Looks like that has worked out well in Adams’ case.
The core of ID is discrediting what they believe are weak points in evolutionary theory, while promoting a position that cannot be tested or disproved.
When it comes right down to it, Scott like most of us has little credible education or expertise from which to draw reasonable conclusions. But given a clear explanation of how scientific theory works, it’s quite clear that ID doesn’t qualify as theory, or even a hypothesis. It is instead a presupposition, largely unsupported by evidence, used as a platform to attack evolutionary theory in support of a religious agenda.
The idea of an enlightened public discourse on the subject is pretty laughable. I refer you once again to this article. 20% of americans don’t know the earth revolves around the sun. Our education system is a joke. Most americans are making decisions about things they know little to nothing about. The ID debate is a further effort to undermine education and reduce public decision making to battles of character and emotion.
The Problem: here :There’s a mountain of evidence for evolution. Here: Organic materials break down quickly and need very specific circumstances to be preserved. here: Evolution has had a very long time to work on the body, just because you can’t do better is not an indication of intelligent design. here: Yep, and science has challenged it’s own assumptions when confronted with proof to the contrary. Science has gotten more accurate along with our ability to gather information. There is every indication it will continue to do so. No one is saying science is infallible.