October 29, 2007

Intelligent design: an unintelligent idea

Oh Ben, you poor, poor creature...

Stein appeared Monday on "The O'Reilly Factor" to trump the values of his upcoming movie, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," which argues that secular science has unfairly ousted discourse regarding intelligent design. Stein believes the theory deserves fair treatment in schools and in science.

What the movie, due in February, won't tell you is the truth regarding intelligent design. The "theory" is so embarrassingly poorly argued and devoid of scientific merit that even the Rev. George Coyne, director of the Vatican Observatory - not exactly a bastion of anti-theistic vitriol the last time I checked - has denounced it as an unscientific idea that simply "pretends to be" science.

...

Intelligent design simply asserts that structures like the human eye and bacterial flagellum couldn't possibly have formed by random chance, so an intelligent designer is needed. Such statements demonstrate flagrant ignorance of evolution, whose driving force, natural selection, is the exact opposite of random chance. Worse yet, they take the form "we can't explain it, so maybe God did it" - a logical error known as the "God-of-the-gaps" fallacy.

But don't take my word for it. Stein himself admitted on O'Reilly's show that the theory is merely an attempt to "fill in some of (the) gaps" left by evolutionary theory.


I will never be able to watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off in the same way again.

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