Denyse O'Leary: IDiot for God

Update 13 August: Denyse O'Leary disses PTET (!!!1eleventyone!!!)



No-one embodies the intellectual, moral and spiritual vacuity of the "Intelligent Design" movement more than Denyse O'Leary.

The Canadian journalist's inability to process information contradicting her petty prejudices is legendary. A recent post at Uncommon Descent lays into what she terms Intelligent design and its enemies:

"Looking at the big picture over the past seven years (when I first started to take the intelligent design controversy seriously), one item stands out: The behaviour of the promoters of Darwinian evolution."

For O'Leary, the problem is not that ID has produced no research, no science, and no substance... It isn't the rejection of "ID Theory" by the scientific establishment and even conservative religious scientists, nor its catastrophic court defeat at Dover... It isn't even that ID has failed utterly in its own terms and goals as set out in the Wedge strategy and elsewhere... It is that people have been mean in pointing these things out.

Incredibly, after seven years of writing on the topic, O'Leary still seems clueless about what "science, "research" or "evidence" actually mean.

After a scattershot paranoic attack on her "enemies", O'Leary promotes her latest column in Mens News Daily ("ranked in the top 75 most popular right of centrer websites for 2007"). This supposed defense of abstinence education for teenage girls links to an item in the Washington Post, which referenced various studies showing such schemes were ineffective.

But O'Leary makes no attempt to address these studies or the issues they discuss. Instead, her readers are treated to a rambling discourse on O'Leary's relationship with her own father and then a list of her previous articles on unrelated topics.

How this challenges the studies reported on the ineffectiveness of abstinence education is not explained. But then to O'Leary and her target audience, explanations are unnecessary - their opinions trump any evidence. "Conservative" is right, "Darwinism" is wrong, and reality is irrelevant.

In another posting at Uncommon Descent O'Leary again links to another of her blogs, this time discussing The real reason why Darwinism is overwhelmingly confirmed - a tale for our times. Again O'Leary shows just how clueless seven years of taking the "controversy seriously" has left her: she still thinks that arguments about how evolution occurs are somehow magically evidence that it has not occurred... And that they are somehow miraculously evidence in favor of "Intelligent Design".

As a final irony, in yet another entry in yet another of her blogs, O'Leary reminds herself that the "Intelligent Design" ain't religion, no siree, lie is just a lot of hooey. Who would have known.

7 Questions Intelligent Design Can't Answer

A few days back, I wrote about the 7 Evidences For CDesign Proponentsism I just couldn't seem to refute. So why, you ask, haven't I become a True Believer[tm] and signed my blog over to Denyse O'Leary? Well, you know I just might... If only someone could help with these seven questions that "Intelligent Design" just can't seem to answer...

1. Why the censorship?

   For all their bluster about not being invited to all the best science parties, IDers are themselves staggeringly intolerant of debate. Sure, they squabble amongst themselves like a bunch of schoolgirls at the mall... But try asking them simple questions on their home ground, and you'll be shown the door faster than if you'd made a drunken pass at their mother.
   
   Here's one of my questions which Uncommon Descent thought too dangerous to print...

   "[Is] the “designer”... responsible for nature itself (in which case why should we be surprised that the universe works in wondrous ways) or is the designer only responsible for things which do not work in nature?"

   Ask yourself... Why would that question be controversial?
   
   

2. Why the deliberate ignorance?

   In the same thread at Uncommon Descent, "Unlettered and Ordinary" wrote:

   "Why do you think very skeptical atheists after studying the universes physics become theists? The same goes for some who study the OOL inquiry. No one twists their arm, they come to the conclution after studying the evidence that these things were designed."

   Here's my reply which was blocked:

   "Physicists are substantially less likely to believe in God than the general population. Biologists are even less likely."

   It seems that True Believer[tm]s don't like to be bothered with little things like "facts".
   
   

3. What do engineers know?

   Why on earth do IDers think engineers should know more about biology than biologists? CBEB picked up on this whacko comment at UD:

   "...how much does this guy know about biology? I would suspect that any “brilliant” electrical engineer would line up with us software developers to voice his incredulity."

   You have to wonder how these IDers would they like it if biologists came and told them how to fix cash registers and comment their Java code...
   
   

4. If it's not about religion, why the Bible stuff?

   Throw a rock at UD, and hit a Bible quote. One user, Lutepisc, quoted Isiah and Psalms in one post, and scolded me for asking him if "the God of Abraham" was the "Intelligent Designer" in the next:

   "Why not seek an answer to your question at a church, synagogue, or mosque? Why ask it on an ID blog? (Unless, of course, you’re basically here trolling…)"

   Remember - he had quoted the Bible to me...
   
   

5. What else has "materialistic ideology" subverted?

   Every page at Uncommon Descent trumpets:

   "Materialistic ideology has subverted the study of biological and cosmological origins so that the actual content of these sciences has become corrupted."

   WTF? Do these guys use non-materialistic ideologies when building bridges or making computer chips? Do they sacrifice goats to keep struts from falling, or have to bat invisible dancing pixies away from subroutines? Do they cast runes to find out legal precedents? If not, why on Earth do they think biologists should be troubled by such concerns?
   
   

6. Who designed the designer?

   Here's another question you can't ask at Uncommon Descent. Literally. Even ID supporters are not allowed to ask it. Why? Because the obvious answer ("It's Intelligent Designers all the way down") shows the whole ID-as-science enterprise to be completely, utterly, and irredeemably vacuous.
   
   

7. Where's the science?

   The Wedge Document was written in 1998. And yet ten years later, despite the delusional aspirations and beliefs of ID's supporters, even William Demski and Michael Behe admit that ID hasn't "yet" produced any science. One day soon Howard Ahmanson, Jr. is going to want to know what's happened to all his money. At least Dembski has one comfort... No-one thinks he's being spending it on clothes...

So there you have it. If any IDers would like to take a stab at answering any of these questions, please, you can comment here.

ID - The Hideous Truth

I haven't seen this picked up anywhere else, but Uncommon Descent recently mentioned interviews with William Dembski & Michael Behe by the Pro-ID Spanish website, Ciencia Alternativa, and carried at IDEAcenter.

Both interviews show how far removed the average ID supporter is from the reality of ID's Hideous (un)Truth.

In the first conversation, the interviewer gushes about all of the wondrous science ID has produced. Dembski has to point out that, err, there hasn't actually been any science resulting from his "ideas".

"CA: Dr. Dembski, ID has come a very long way since its inception; and ID proponents are making inroads in a vast array of scientific disciplines such as astronomy, biology, and chemistry. How has your own work in mathematics (namely, The Design Inference and No Free Lunch) helped or influenced the development of novel ways of doing science?

WD: It’s too early to tell what the impact of my ideas is on science. To be sure, there has been much talk about my work and many scientists are intrigued (though more are upset and want to destroy it), but so far only a few scientists see how to take these ideas and run with them."

When you've picked your jaw up from the floor following that little revelation, check out Michael Behe coming so far off the fence on Common Descent to give the average Uncommon Descenter a clutcher...

"ML: In The Edge, you make a defense for common descent (p.182) and later attribute it to a non-random process (p. 72). Considering the convergent evolution of the digestive enzyme of lemurs and cows, hemoglobin of human and mice, and in your own work resistance mutations that also arise independently (p77), why such a commitment to common descent? Isn’t genetic convergent evolution or even common design (considering your view of mutations) good alternative explanations to common descent?

MJB: I don’t think so. Although those other explanations may be true, I think that common descent, guided by an intelligent agent, is sufficient to explain the data. It has the great advantage of being easily compatible with apparent genetic “mistakes” shared by organisms, such as the pseudo-hemoglobin genes I wrote of in The Edge of Evolution."

Well, maybe I've got it all wrong? Maybe Dembski and Behe are just substantially more intellectually honest than the cdesign proponentsists I tend to come across.

What do you think?