if creationism was scientific…

If Intelligent Design wants to be taken like a serious science, it needs to learn to follow the basics of the scientific method.

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Imagine giving a presentation to a group of people and being heckled by a couple of vocal critics who don't like what you're talking about. Everything you present is met with doubts and every single piece of evidence you use is criticized out of existence whether fairly or unfairly. Then, the hecklers take the presenter spot to pontificate on mysteries and when they present their evidence, they don't even bother to explain what it may be or how it came to exist, deferring to the supernatural and the spiritual to answer questions.

Not exactly what you'd call fair, is it? After all, you had to defend every other word out of your mouth and your hecklers just defer to the unknown to justify their opinions. The fact that they don't know and can't explain something is used as the evidence for their sweeping conclusion. If only you had it that easy during your presentation. But unfortunately for you, you played the part of a scientist in this analogy.

Every conclusion you made has to be backed up by fact and there's no shortage of angry creationists who want to take issue with your proof, fairly or not. Meanwhile, they get to waltz onstage, show some things they define as "complex," butcher all sorts of scientific theories to give them new meanings in strawman fallacies, then argue that their lack of knowledge is evidence of a deity.

If creationism was anything like science, its adherents would have to prove that there's such a thing as a supreme designer. Not by a book. Not by what they feel in their hearts. Not what their authority figures told them in their formative years. They would need to create experiments by which we could see a designer and obvserve him/her/it at work, doing actual designing.

They would also need to conclusively prove that there's only one designer since our universe is vast to say the least and it would make perfect sense that there could be many designers in specific regions of space, doing their individual design work. Finally, they would need to create explicit documentation that would allow anyone with the right equipment to replicate the experiments in question and subject them to peer review. Only then could we call creationism scientific.

With all the thousands of scientists that Casey Luskin claims support creationism… err, I mean "intelligent design" as a valid theory for how biology works, wouldn't at least one or two of them have raised the possibility that there's more than one designer or how to prove that there is a designer and identify how or what it is through scientific means? They are after all, scientists, right? Well, aren't they?

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# science // creationism / creationists / double standard / evolution


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