You Can't Debate A Fanatic

Which is exactly why the atheist Darwinists (whoops, repeated myself I'm afraid) aren't willing to debate Intelligent Design:

A majority of biologists reject ID. But a minority of scientists, who are no fools, suggests that it is Darwinism that fails to explain the complexity of organisms. I don’t intend to wade into the details of the debate, but rather to ask how a layman like me, or Derbyshire, can hope to venture a responsible opinion. The question is not merely theoretical. The teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools is being challenged before local and state school boards across the country.

Some say that, for non-experts, the smartest thing would be to accede to the viewpoint of the majority of scientists. But wait. The point I want to draw out here is that Darwinism, in particular evolutionary psychology, itself undercuts the claim that ID may be safely dismissed.

Charles Darwin’s insight holds that people are simply animals and that, like all animals, we got to be the way we are because our ancestors beat out the evolutionary competition and survived to pass on their genes. Evolutionary psychology extends this idea. There are some behaviors that increase the chances that a given person will be able to pass on his genetic information. One, for instance, might be murder, often committed against rivals who give the appearance of seeking to diminish the odds of our raising viable offspring that will carry our DNA. A classic illustration is the crime of passion, where the angry husband shoots the sexual rival who has been having an affair with his wife.

From this perspective, a main evolutionary-psychological impulse that drives males in particular is the drive to fight off rivals. For rivals threaten to reduce our access to reproductive assets — namely, women — by lowering our status in a social hierarchy. In certain neighborhoods, all it takes is a disrespectful look or word, a “diss,” especially in front of women, to get a man killed.

In evolutionary psychology, as in common sense, it is apparent that males highly value whatever source of status or prestige they have managed to secure. We value status so much that some are willing to kill over it. Others are willing at least to wound, if only with words.

One prominent evolutionary psychologist, Harvard’s Steven Pinker, has written frankly about rivalry in academia, and the use of cutting rhetoric in the defense of established ideas: “Their champions are not always averse to helping the ideas along with tactics of verbal dominance, among them intimidation (‘Clearly…’), threat (‘It would be unscientific to…’), authority (‘As Popper showed…’), insult (‘This work lacks the necessary rigor for…’), and belittling (‘Few people today seriously believe that…’).”

I bring this up because Intelligent Design aggressively challenges the status of many professionals currently laboring in secular academia. And because one of the hallmarks of the defense of Darwinism is precisely the kind of rhetorical displays of intimidation, threat, authority, and insult that Pinker describes.

For instance in a section on the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled “Q&A on Evolution and Intelligent Design,” you will find numerous statements as if lifted almost verbatim from Pinker’s examples — ridiculing ID as “non-scientific,” an idea whose “advocates have yet to contribute in a scientifically rigorous manner,” who “may use the language of science, but [who] do not use its methodology.”

When you consider that ID theoreticians have published their findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals, in formidable academic presses such as those of Cambridge University and the University of Chicago, such denunciations start to sound like a worried defense of status more than a disinterested search for truth.

If the Darwinian establishment is vexed, that’s understandable. A century and a half ago, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species with its materialistic implications signaled the overturning of Western society’s traditional matrix for the granting of status: namely religion. From Darwin forward, intellectual prestige was bestowed not by religious institutions but by secular ones, the universities.

It has remained so until today. Now, with many parents and school-board members signaling their impatience with the answers given by secular academia to ultimate questions — like, where did we humans come from — the secular hierarchy would be foolish not to be concerned. It would be perfectly in keeping with their own Darwinist views — about how men especially will fight to defend their source of status — to expect secularists to struggle violently against any challenge that may be raised against Darwinism, no matter where the truth of the matter may actually lie. Being the animals that we are, we are programmed through our genes to do just that.

One argument the Darwinists put forth is that ID is not a true theory as it isn't possible to disprove it. The implication is that one can disprove the Theory of Evolution.

How do we disprove macroevolution, the notion that all species derived from a single common ancestor?

When the lack of transitional fossils in the fossil record is pointed out, Darwinists claim that that's to be expected--the fossil record is bound to be woefully incomplete.

Sounds like "Darwin of the Gaps" to me.

If you point out the sheer improbability of life, especially intelligent life arising, or if you point out that we're nowhere near understanding the spontaneous generation of life from the primordial soup, or that the notion that life on Earth was carried by comets is simply a cosmic dodge, Darwinists hold firm to the notion that Nature somehow made this happen, random chance.

Sounds like blind faith to me.

The fact is, we know next to nothing about our ancient past. All of the ingenious methods we've employed to infer knowledge about our past is flawed to significant degrees. If you think we're a technologically advanced people who know most of what is useful to know about ourselves and our universe, you might just want to pick up a copy of the execrable "Scientific American" (do it at the library or the dentist's office---don't pay for this rag) and peruse the feature on articles in the magazine from decades past. Much of what we were dead certain we knew then we've come to realize since was bunk.

And so it is with favored theories today.

I sometimes hear Darwinists argue that ID must somehow refute thousands of papers published in peer-reviewed journals over the last couple hundred years.

Fair enough.

By that standard, the Darwinists have a long way to go in refuting the far vaster published material concerning God's relationship with the world and man, documents scrutinized by billions stretching back several thousand years.

How silly people who prize their rationality can be.