Dinesh D’Souza, whose conservative political commentary I’m more familiar, has written an excellent article on the reasons behind the failure of Intelligent Design to become an accepted scientific alternative to Darwinism. As a Christian, D’Souza is sympathetic to the ID cause; at the same time, however, he also recognizes that its methodology is unsound and its target really should be the atheistic agenda of some atheistic Darwinists (e.g., Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris), not the fact of evolution and/or the theories of its mechanisms.Although D’Souza doesn’t use the term “folk science” to describe “atheism masquerading as science,” Howard J. Van Till does. And Van Till’s early work is the focus of my next post. For now, I’d like responses to this post to focus purely on D’Souza’s article.
UPDATE: HT to Steve Martin via Undeception’s Steve Douglas for finding atheist PZ Meyers’ critique of D’Souza’s claim that evolution is being taught in an atheistic manner. I applaud D’Souza’s on-the-money critique of ID, but I certainly don’t appreciate his over-exaggeration of the facts (if, in fact, he is exaggerating) in order to make his point. False claims in service of the truth certainly don’t help people act objectively.
Mike,
Heard this guy defend evolution on Michael Medved’s talk radio show where I believe there were some ID guests as well. From what I remember his arguments were as articulate as that presented in the article.
I’d be interested in what way current science textbooks are promoting atheistic evolution as he asserts. If so, it’s indeed troublesome. By focusing so much (useless) energy on debunking evolution we could be distracting ourselves from the real issues at stake in our educational system.
Dan
I’d be curious, too, to know how atheistic evolution is being promoted. I’d like to see quotations to this effect; otherwise, I might end up dismissing it as exaggeration or misperception.
Might have to do a Google search on this topic …
Well, it appears that D’Souza might be performing a bit of exaggeration when it comes to the teaching of evolution in an atheistic manner. I’ve “updated” the original post to provide the reader with some alternative sources of information.