Science and media: Another journalist weighs in

In "The Secular Inquisition", Melanie Phillips writes (Spectator, May 4, 2009),

I am an agnostic if traditionally-minded Jew; not a scientist, not a philosopher, not a subscriber to any kind of -ology but a mere journalist who has always gone wherever the evidence has led and, trying not to make too many mistakes, has formed her conclusions and her opinions from that process.

I hold no particular brief for ID, but am intrigued by the ideas it raises and want it to be given a fair crack of the whip to see where the argument will lead. What I have also seen, however, is an attempt to shut down that argument by distorting and misrepresenting ID and defaming and intimidating its proponents.

Well, yes, of course. But if makes perfect sense to me, because I have been covering this controversy extensively for about seven years now.

I can explain it really simply: Darwinism - i.e., natural selection acting on random mutation is able to create intricate life forms - is the creation story of atheism. It is therefore an essential ingredient in a new secular establishment's idea of how to organize the world.

Two problems:

(1) It is obviously not true.

(2) The public doesn't believe it. (See (1) above.)

So what now for the secular establishment? Quick, easy, tax-funded fix: Launch a big public relations campaign against anyone who says Darwinism is not true - and spend a chunk of the education budget shilling for Darwin.

Admirably, in my view, Phillips comes to the defense of the much-maligned Michael Behe, author of Edge of Evolution, one of the few rational treatments I have ever seen of the issues around what Darwinian evolution can and can't do:

If there was an intellectual begetter of this movement, it was surely the biochemist Professor Michael Behe, whose book Darwin's Black Box in 1996 expounded the theory of irreducible complexity. He is not a Creationist. Other exponents such as Phillip Johnson explicitly renounce Creationism. As he explained in his book Wedge of Truth in 2000, he wanted to make use of the scientific and philosophical idea of ID to split science from the materialist fundamentalism that had driven it to make hubristic claims to knowledge which it could not reasonably support. Far from denying science, he wanted to restore it to what he believed to be the realm of reason and observable evidence – and thus make space once again for religion.

Darwin's Black Box is a good read too, by the way, and so is Wedge of Truth.

The main thing to see here is that Darwinists have nothing better to launch than persecutions because they do not have the goods.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Darwinism and intelligent design: Darwin's public relations squad

My friend, AngelWeb at Free Mark Steyn alerts me to this story by Melanie Phillips, "Creating an insult to intelligence" (29th April 2009):

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was

nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.

But this is totally untrue. Miller referred to a landmark US court case in 2005, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, which did indeed uphold the argument that Intelligent Design was a form of Creationism in its ruling that teaching Intelligent Design violated the constitutional ban against teaching religion in public schools. But the court was simply wrong, doubtless because it had heard muddled testimony from the likes of Prof Miller.

One thing I would contest with Phillips is that it was "muddled." It was a sophisticated attempt to keep a dying idea - Darwinism - alive, using the legal system.

If you can get a judge to say something is true, the fact that most reasonable persons do not believe it does not count for much.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

British journalist Melanie Phillips weighs in for the ID guys

A British journalist, Melanie Phillips, said to be in Prince Charles’s circle of friends, has come out swinging in defence of the ID guys. In the “The real nutters are the fanatics who despise religious belief” (Daily Mail), mid-column, she denounces the irrationality of the atheist lobby:

In suggesting that life sprang into existence without any kind of governing intelligence, they fly in the face of the evidence emerging from science that the hitherto unimaginable complexity of life forms, including the living cell, makes it scientifically impossible for life to have emerged without some kind of intelligent design.

Nevertheless, the Dawkins-ites are lionised as apostles of reason. Meanwhile, those scientists who are doing what scientists are supposed to do - follow where the evidence leads them - and who have concluded as a result that life was created by a guiding intelligence, are hysterically smeared by the Dawkins camp.

In a shocking campaign of intellectual thuggery, this camp has falsely accused such scientists of being religious fundamentalists who believe the world was created in six days - when they believe no such thing at all. Some of these scientists then find they are threatened in their posts or even forced out altogether.

Well, yes, Melanie, but the Darwinism the intellectual thugs espouse is the Enron of biology, and they’ll do whatever they must to avoid letting anyone balance the books.