Steve Verdon on ID

Came across this post by Verdon, who has also attempted to answer Dean Esmay on why ID should not be in public schools. His answer sounds much like mine, though I think his is more succinct:

Now, when we look at ID what evidence is there? Well? Having a hard time aren't you. You can't look at the bacterial flagellum. Dembski's filter is itself not evidence just as statistical procedures are themselves not evidence of anything in the physical world. How about the clotting cascades of blood coagulation. Nope, those are no longer good examples of complex specified information. Are there any experimental results that the ID assumptions have produced? Not that I know of.

So what is a scientist to make of all this lack of evidence for ID? A rational person who uses Bayes theorem would reject it as not having any explanatory power at all. Let me repeat that: A rational person who uses Bayes theorem would reject it as not having any explanatory power at all. Yet, according to Dean we are supposed to still give ID a chance.

So lets run down it again. ID hasn't produced anything in terms of experiments, predictions, or evidence. As a result of this, there is damn little in the way of peer reviewed publications (there is one review article with no evidence presented). Further, scientists, statisticians, mathematicians, and philosophers of science have looked at many of the concepts that ID have put forth and found many of them wanting. Dembski's filter has been found to be wanting (as well as Dembski's in ability to defend his filter in an honest manner, as well as Dembski's dishonesty in presenting the arguments in favor of his filter). Irreducible complexity has been shown to be a logical fallacy and when the crunch comes the goal posts always seem to keep moving. In short, ID has had its chance, but the proponents of ID have screwed the pooch. Instead of going into the laboratory and doing the hard work of designing experiments based off of the Intelligent Design premise; the proponents of ID have run to the ballot box, school boards, and the courts. They make their appeals directly to the public instead of their fellow scientists...

Until ID produces something that actually looks like science I see no reason to include it in even (advanced) college science courses, let alone high school courses. The entire ID movement is very much like a propaganda campaign. Keep repeating claims over and over until people start to believe them. For example, there is the claim that Darwinian theory is a theory in crisis, that it has got big problems (apparently Dean has bought this Big Lie). One example is the hoopla over the paper by Behe and Snoke (see here for both a take down of the paper and the claims that it is the "final nail in the coffin" for Darwinism). So Dean's insistence that we keep treating ID as being scientific, when it has produced nothing (and indeed one could argue that ID is actually anti-science), when it looks very much like a propaganda campaign, and wants to circumvent the scientific process altogether is beyond me. We don't put non-science (and especially anti-science) into science classrooms. One would think that this is obvious, but I guess not.

Well said.