Sunday, June 26, 2011

William Dembski on Michele Bachmann

William Dembski has written a post for Uncommon Descent on the candidacy of Michele Bachman and what her take on science would be. He is typically nasty and insulting:
Back in 2005 George W. Bush supported ID in the same terms as Bachmann. But Bush also had as his science adviser “company man” John Marburger (the “company” being Darwinian naturalists). Like a lackey wiping drool from his master’s mouth, Marburger quickly let the press know that regardless of what his boss had said for public consumption, the fact was that ID wasn’t science and needed to be kept out of the schools.
So much for civil discourse. He continues:
So, far from commending Michele Bachmann for making some favorable remarks about ID (which plays to her natural constituency and can be read simply as a political move), I want to know who her science advisers will be, what concretely she would do as president to advance ID, and just how serious she is about taking on the bureaucrats and administrators (at the NSF? NIH?) who ensure that nothing but Darwinian materialist bilge gets funded. Is she willing to put her neck on the chopping block, and how could we know prior to the election?
Question: What would a grant proposal that promoted the testing of Intelligent Design look like? Yearly the NSF gets thousands of grant proposals that have concrete, hypothetical design constructs on an evolutionary process. There are no such design constructs for intelligent design. It all boils down to the same problem: just because you can show that my hypothesis is incorrect, it doesn't make yours correct.

Oh, and by the way, Dr. Dembski, how would you feel if we called ID bilge? (Here is an almost two hour talk by Ken Miller on why ID is not science.)



*Aside: Regarding the NSF, Dembski brought to light a problem involving pornography at the agency two years ago, a problem that was significantly overstated by the Washington Times (compare its story, where porn surfing was “pervasive” with that of Scientific American where seven cases among 1500 employees were found).

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