Over the years, I’ve learned a few things that may usefully be imparted to bright and budding ID theorists. The lesson I’m about to impart is one I adverted to in my paper “Dealing with the Backlash against Intelligent Design” on my designinference.com website.
To illustrate the lesson, let me give an example from my graduate days in mathematics. At the end of the first year in grad school at the University of Chicago, the math students take oral exams. Depending on whom you get to examine you, this can be a stressful experience. One way to relieve the stress, when asked to prove a theorem on the blackboard, is to introduce a small inaccuracy, one that takes a bit to unravel but is easily rectifiable. The inaccuracy, depending on the professor who is examining you, will consume considerable time and energy. Yes, you will have to endure some berating. But when it’s gone on long enough, you rectify the error. By then the clock has run out and you’ve passed the exam.
Fast forward to my blog entry yesterday titled “What’s Your Favorite Dawkins Quote.” There I gave as my favorite Dawkins quote “Even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory, we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.†I stated the quote this way on purpose, leaving off a little parenthetical in that sentence that doesn’t at all change its significance. I was waiting how long it would take for kneejerk Darwinists to jump on it. See for yourself at The Panda’s Thumb: “Dembski quote mining Dawkins.”
Now, you may be thinking that I’m just making this all up after the fact. Let me assure you that I’m not. Unlike the evolutionary process with which they are so enamoured, kneejerk Darwinists are supremely predictable. In the future, when I do something like this, I will provide prior confirmation with a date-time stamp elsewhere on the Internet.
By the way, in case you’re wondering what is the point of this exercise, it is to highlight that Dawkins regards evolution as an axiom that does not require empirical confirmation (note that he has made this point in other places and not just in the above quote). What’s gratifying is to see the kneejerk Darwinists at The Panda’s Thumb falling all over themselves trying to justify Dawkins’s ludicrous claim.
That was the point of the exercise. In the best Marxist fashion, Darwinism is collapsing of its own internal contradictions. What you are seeing at The Panda’s Thumb is a sign of things to come.
[P.S.: Squeamish readers of this blog may worry that I’m cynically manipulating the Darwinists. Quite the contrary. I’m doing this for the Darwinists’s benefit, giving them the reality therapy they need to exit the land of the lotus eaters and return to Ithaca. Alternatively, I’m giving them an experience in Socratic elenchus. Frankly, I doubt Socrates would have had much patience with the sophists at The Panda’s Thumb.]