hell’s handmaiden

I wonder if the ECLJ is at all related to the American Center for Law and Justice which put out a frantic warning not long ago that, to paraphrase, “Religion is under assault. Christianity is under attack. The nation is collapsing. The Lib’rals are guttin our values, stomping on our Bible-based Constitution, educating our children, putting condoms on our men and shoes on our women.” Oh… hey, looks like they are related. The PDF of the ECLJ’s document is hosted at the ACLJ’s website.

The document itself looks like the usual creationist ‘teach the controversy‘ claptrap wrapped in the rhetoric of free speech and free expression.

What are the creationists up to these days?

Well, Casey Luskin is blaming cancer on Darwinism. Really, he’s claiming that the “failure to recognize function for introns” resulted in delays in the discovery of the causes of colon cancer. The “failure to recognize function for introns” is, of course, all the fault of the neo-Darwinian paradigm.

Luskin’s argument is yet another incarnation of the somewhat silly, but very popular among creationists, argument that “scientists have been wrong before so they must be wrong now about… um… stuff we don’t like.” David Heddle made the same spurious point sometime back when talking about Carl Sagan. Jonathan Witt made the point as concerns Percival Lowell. I myself have asked, “Stupid scientists! Why can’t they see the truth?”

With friends like these you don’t people like me telling the world that ID is a front for religion.

Christian thinkmag wars over intelligent design?: I have cause for hope, the tiny knot of genuinely orthodox Christians who hope to rescue Darwinism as it actually is for Christ have no influence whatever.

Post-Darwinist: Christian thinkmag wars over intelligent design?: I have cause for hope

Brilliant, Denyse. She goes on to demonstrate how strongly ideology trumps substance.

Right then. The book was allegedly written to Southern Baptist “pastors”, and therein lies its primary usefulness. It is likely to prove an excellent crap detector: Any pastor who takes Wilson seriously should be defrocked.

Denyse O’Leary is on a rant about ‘Darwinian’ medicine, arguing that, well, it doesn’t really matter what the source of the problem is anyway, running through rather flippant treatments of alcoholism and obesity in the process.

…it hardly matters when they appeared or who - besides immediate ancestors and sibs, and people who live nearby - has them.

Consider, for example, an illness for which there is apparently a genetic predisposition: alcoholism. Fundamentally, the patient has decisions to make (Will I drink or not? Will I get drunk or not?) What if Alley Oop had the same problem? What if he didn’t?

Denyse O’Leary, “Toronto-based journalist, grandmother, Roman Catholic Christian”, and I add, “comedian, pinball wizard, rising ID star, big fish in Dembski’s very dirty pool” has raised another non-issue. Specifically, she asks:

Would genome mapper Francis Crick be permitted to suggest that intelligent aliens seeded the universe today?

Would Crick be allowed to suggest such a thing?

Well, of course he would. He could suggest anything he wants. He could suggest it then; he could suggest it now.