Intelligent design and popular culture: Secular humanists lead the way in offering open debate

Steve Fuller, an agnostic sociologist who has chosen for his subject the debate between intelligent design and Darwinism has come under predictable attack from widely publicised Darwinoid trolls and has responded.

Kudos to New Humanist for having the good sense to actually ask for a response, instead of sitting, fat and contented, like a toad in a hole, spouting ... whatever a fat, contented toad spouts.

Given this evidence, I must perhaps revise my opinion of secular humanists. Maybe not all are useless tax-supported sludge, launching government-funded persecutions. Some may actually enjoy a serious exchange of ideas. Well, I like those sorts of revisions. Moving people into the category of "interesting" is always good.

Meanwhile, Steve Fuller has also written a play:

He expects the play to stir up Darwinists, even though its aim was not to "beat (the Darwinists) over the head" or argue that they had to believe in God. He said he was seeking to show that the evidence base Darwin had to work with had "really shifted a lot".

Writing a dramatic work had been an interesting experience, he said. "(It) requires a different kind of thinking from normal academic work. You have to lay the stuff out much more slowly than you would if you were writing a paper, where someone has the option of rereading."

Professor Fuller wrote the play, Lincoln and Darwin: Live for One Night Only!, as a "creative" replacement to the usual symposium he would be expected to give in his capacity as president of the sociological section of the BA festival.

He hopes to stage the work at next year's festival of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

It is hard to imagine that the American Association for the Advancement of Science will be as open as New Humanist. Too much public money, too many orgmen involved.

But, in my view, Fuller's troupe should go to the AAAS Festival nonetheless, perform the play on the outskirts, and use viral marketing to guarantee a bigger crowd for their show than for the boring establishment sludge.

That would perfectly mirror the intelligent design controversy in North America.

Then all we need is more useless pundettes who flunked Grade Six math freaking out over why anyone supposes that the universe shows evidence of design.

Pundette cannot get through her own day without sixteen image assistants/consultants, so that proves her point conclusively, right?

Yuh. Camera Two, dolly in to cleavage.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy: