Your Hot Cup of Rant

By now most of you have presumably heard or read about the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, or if you haven’t, you will. The BASIC gist of the film is that it’s a film advocating Intelligent Design (the belief, in essence, that we come from an intelligent designer, what a surprise) over Evolution (the belief that we evolved to be the way we are). This is the sort of argument that is particularly problematic, because in most respects, the sides in this argument come down to

- rational scientists who use logic and evidence

versus

- ID proponents armed with belief and faith

so there cannot possibly be a winner. Logic cannot defeat faith because faith is belief in something, and if someone believes something strongly enough, that belief will allow their mind to override the most convincing of arguments because “I believe differently”. Faith cannot defeat logic because even the most religiously interested scientific mind has facts and tests and examples that make them accurate, and no amount of faith and belief can defeat their cold hard numbers.

Which is why movies like this come around.

Now, I have no specific interest in seeing Expelled, largely because if I’m going to waste my money, I’d prefer it not go to a lying prat with ulterior motives who lies on celluloid (which is why I don’t go to Michael Moore films, either), and frankly, between the litany of dissections of the fallacies others more interested than me have dissected and the blatant lies the creators have told just to make certain their film actually had a “bad guy” so to say, I don’t think I need to spend nine dollars to find out that the film is a smear job intended to present the theory that “a wizard God an ‘intelligent designer’ did it” is a better theory than “we all evolved from share a common ancestor with monkeys”.

I mean, what the fuck is the tailbone for, if we’re all designed? We don’t use it for very much of anything.

But let us step away from the “faith versus proof” argument for a moment.  Let us step away from “taking sides” and being non-objective for a moment.

Evolution has, regardless of arguments to the contrary,  more or less made a reasonable case for itself; the archyopterix (and before some mouth-breathing twit who only believes what he reads in badly-written forum arguments comes here and says “TEH ARKYPOTRIX WZ FAKE DOOD!”, not even your own supporters argue that point anymore (scroll down, it’s there), so let it go), The Moth Experiment (also proven true), one hundred and fifty years of research and evidence and findings and pieces of data that, while they do not 100% prove irrefutably and beyond all doubt that Evolution is the absolute be-all-and-end-all of how we are the way we are, certainly do provide a sufficiently convincing argument to that effect.

The ID side has had, what, twenty, thirty, forty-odd years to formulate proof and facts and evidence and such, yes?

So where is it?

Seriously. Where is it? If there is ANY actual legitimate proof that ID is real, why is no one bringing it out, showing it off to the doubters and saying “Here, now do you see?”

Because this is where the problem comes in, and why everyone is having a problem on both sides with this situation: Evolution supporters are not in the position where they have to defeat Intelligent Design, NOT because ID has no “proof”, but because that is not how science works. Proponents of ID have spent many years attempting to tear down Evolution experiments (some successfully, others not), but that does not prove the validity of Intelligent Design as a theory.

Tearing down a co-worker does not instantly make you Employee of the Month if you’ve done nothing but sit at your terminal playing Minesweeper. Finding the flaws in a house does not immediately mean you can sell someone your property if you’ve not built the house on it yet. Even IF Evolution were to be utterly disproved and discredited tomorrow, guess what? There is still no actual proof that Intelligent Design is anything but religious dogma, so the space that Evolution occupies would be filled with a provable theory and ID would still be rejected as HAVING NO BASIS IN SCIENTIFIC FACT.

So do all of us a favor, and when I say “all of us”, I mean EVERYONE ON EARTH. Either admit that ID is “Creation Sciences” as applied by the Wizard of Oz “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” method, or find a piece of proof. Just one. Not a theory, not a “hypothesis”, not a potential avenue of discovery. Perform an experiment, record the results, perform it a few more times, check the results, hand the experiment off to someone else and have THEM record the results, then present it as your irrefutable proof.

If you can actually DO that, then maybe people will stop snickering behind your back.

Largely because they’ll be so amazed at the flying pigs, presumably, but we can hope.

The world needs an enema.