One would almost think they were the necrotic mainstream media. From Douglas Axe at ENST, on BioLogos’s Dennis Venema’s critique of his book Undeniable at what sounds like an attempted thugging:
First, considering the critical view I take not just of Darwinism but also of the academic echo chamber that, with iron-lung-like artificiality, allows this otherwise dead theory to persist, it should be clear that I wrote primarily for people outside the echo chamber. The exclusion of anyone who fits that description from providing even one of the reviews of my book therefore raises questions about the true intent of the exercise. Second, although I was offered the advantage of having the last word, my response was restricted to about a third the total length of the four critiques (though I did get this adjusted upward a bit). And third, I only realized after my response was submitted that it would be published a full month after the first of the critiques became public.
I hereby unstack the deck.
My official symposium response, to be published March 5, doesn’t give much space to my first critic, Dennis Venema. This is mostly because, not knowing the order in which the critiques would be published, I had already dealt with the problems that Venema’s piece shares with the others — his complete lack of engagement with the actual argument of Undeniable, his misconstrual of this as an argument from intuition, and his accompanying charge of anti-intellectualism. The second reason I chose not to spend many words on Venema is that he relied heavily on technical criticisms, whereas the whole point of Undeniable is to give people a better option than trying to follow the technical toing and frying. …
In the end, then, Venema’s technical complaints come to nothing. In his position, I would probably be inclined to respond with more technical complaints. He is, of course, free to do so, but he would do himself a favor to hit pause and consider whether there really may be a clear logical reason that the natural causes he wants to credit with inventing life can’t actually deserve that credit. More.
Venema need not do that. In an era when science is going post-modern, there is no truth to be pursued, only social power to be won or lost. The post-modern naturalist war can be against fact itself (and often is), as in this case.
ID theorists tend to be modernists. The biggest single mistake that they make is thinking that fact matters to their post-modernist opponents as much as it does to them. The post-modernist opponents would not be nearly so popular if that were true.
See also: What becomes of science when the evidence does not matter? People who need to evade the fact of fine-tuning of our universe for life should find even the wildest improbabilities of Darwinism a snap.
Can science survive long in a post-modern world? It’s not clear.
and
Jordan Peterson — Do the Stitches Hold?