Extremely Lame

Not even neo-conservatives have their head so far up their tuckuses as the religious right. And of those, even the abstinence only fools aren’t as bad as the mock creationists known as the Intelligent Design movement.

Intelligent Design as a philosophical concept is not what I have a problem with. I have a problem with the inherent dishonesty of the I.D. movement trying to get it taught in science classes. There’s a problem with this. It ain’t science. There are no tests you could do to prove or disprove the hypothesis of a higher power creating life as we know it. It’s philosophical wankery, and there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s just not science. By that rationale, I’d consider the outer reaches of science, such as string theory and branes and higher dimensions to be similarly not science. In this case, it’s not just philosophical wankery, but mathematical wankery as well. Then again, Stephen Hawking isn’t trying to get these things taught in high school instead of other things that are genuinely science.

The entire point of Intelligent Design is arguing that abiogenesis (The origin of life) was brought about by an intelligent being far more powerful than we humans. It’s not even the point to say that that intelligence that created humanity is God. It could be aliens as far as the theory is concerned. See: Raëlians.

The theory of evolution doesn’t even address this question of how life started. Evolution addresses that species change over millennia through the process of natural selection. Setting up Intelligent Design as somehow at odds with evolution is ridiculous.

Thus we come to Ben Stein’s vehicle Expelled. I really need to watch this myself. It’s downright unfathomable that anyone, especially a Jew, would Godwin himself by standing in a concentration camp and say that Darwin’s theory of evolution brought about the Third Reich. What kind of madness would it be if we allowed any other crackpot theory to be taught as science? What about teaching that the earth is flat? What about astrology? What about the theory that babies are delivered by storks?

Sadly, I was kind of pissed at the Huffington Post getting some of their facts wrong when they decided to go all ad hominem against Stein. He wasn’t on a game show on MTV where he regularly lost trivia challenges to contestants. The show Win Ben Stein’ s Money was on Comedy Central, and it was a rare thing for him to get beat.