Consider this comment by Larry Moran:
What [johnnyb] (and Meyer) are saying is that if the false Darwinian version of evolution is wrong then Intelligent Design Creationism is correct. You say this even though you know full well that there’s another possibility; namely, that the real, complete, version of evolutionary theory might be correct.
I responded
For someone who purports to have an understanding of ID solid enough to critique it, you display a remarkable inability to articulate its basic claims.
After this exchange I suddenly realized that we on the ID side have a huge advantage over the likes of Moran in at least one respect. We are not pushing the culturally dominant view, and for that reason we cannot afford to display the sort of intellectual laziness Moran indulged in here.
In other words, when we critique the culturally dominant view we cannot attack a straw man version of that view hoping no one will notice. We can’t, for example, erect a straw man such as “evolution boils down to a rabbit can give birth to a cow tomorrow”** and hope anyone will take us seriously. We are forced to actually study our opponents views, as Meyers has done (just take a look at the bibliographies of Darwin’s Doubt and Signature in the Cell). This forces ID proponents to be disciplined in their analysis. And that in turn forces them to make better and more forceful arguments.
Moran’s contributions to this debate — because they are lazy and silly and often amount to little more than “neener neener” — will be forgotten before long. Not so for Stephen Meyer.
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** I had a difficult time coming up with an example here. There is almost nothing so absurd that some defender of evolution has not pushed it at one time or another. The claims of evolutionists are difficult to parody — Poe’s Law in action.