Jeremy Shere writes:

The Creation Museum drew more than 300,000 visitors in its first year. It’s a state of the art facility with the latest technology. And it feeds a growing anti-intellectual, anti-scientific sentiment in the US. As a science writer, this alarms me. And it should alarm anyone who cares about science and ideas.

Paleontologist Peter Ward once engaged in a debate with Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. He assumed the debate was going to be about science and was quite prepared for it. However, it was not about science at all and he was quite blind-sided. The debate, I would argue, was also horribly slanted in favor of his interlocutor Stephen Meyer. Read the transcript here. I offer a couple of excerpts.

Ward: Steve here keeps talking about a theory of intelligent design. Again, the assertion of intelligent design. Intelligent design is not science, it is not testable by any scientific method. Why would you put something that is not science and not testable in a classroom? What scares me is that I have taught in middle schools, I have given lectures, I’ve seen these kids. You go ask them to – it sounds so reasonable, sure, let’s go teach the controversy, even our revered scholar George Bush said “teach the controversy,” it sounds reasonable, why not? And the reason why not is, let’s imagine we’re back before Kepler, before Copernicus, and we’re gonna teach intelligent design. We’re gonna say, hey look, those stars up in the sky, and those planets, well you can’t understand them because they’re too complex. The scariest thing to me about trying to teach intelligent design, it tells our kids that things can never be discovered, they’re just too complex. They’re too difficult to know, so don’t even try.

And later on…

Meyer: Can I make another point here, Dori? We have a list that we keep of scientists who dissent from Darwinism. It just crossed 450, including most recently, a signatory who is a member of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Many scientists question whether Darwinian evolution can produce these complex structures that I’ve been talking about.

Ward: But 7800 other scientists signed a document saying that’s crap. 7800 versus 400!

Meyer: I could’ve signed that document, no, it was a question of “is natural selection capable of producing complexity.” Most scientists don’t deal with this question of origins at all. They’re doing nuts-and-bolts science at the bench, they’re looking at how things work now, today. This is an historical theory, it isn’t going to hurt the students of America or our ability to recruit scientists if people are allowed to entertain the opposite of the Darwinian hypothesis. They say no design, we say, yes, design, that ain’t (sic) going to hurt generating new scientists and engineers, might help, because design is an engineering concept.

It is not a scientific concept. It is better suited in discussion of information theory or engineering primarily in a philosophical sense than in the science classroom. Why? It is clearly not science. It simply cannot meet the demand of empirical validity and repeatability that science requires. While we can hypothesize design from how we perceive reality, the hypothesis of an intelligent designer who created what we now perceive is an assertion that cannot be scientifically substantiated even while it can be philosophically asserted. How Ward does away with young earth creationism through the geological record and clear evidence of numerous mass extinctions in addition to the asteroid impact that likely obliterated the dinosaurs is a clear contradiction to the theory that a) the universe had a whole lot if intelligence behind its creation since it is so violent and unforgiving to life, and b) that the biblical record - even if we concede the Flood narrative as historically valid as written - is inaccurate at best as the historical-scientific document the Discovery Institute wants it to be.

Even if we say that the Flood apparently gives evidence of fossils, what of the other mass extinctions that occurred due to events such as increased carbon isotopes in the atmosphere due to volcanic activity? The Discovery Institute answer: ignore it - all of it. Or argue against carbon dating which we know works back to about 10,000 years for organic matter. Older ages in the geological record need to be determined with other radioactive tests that measure radioactive decay of other isotopes. You have to toss out radioactive decay in order to assert that the universe is somehow 6000 years old. Here is a little educational piece from clearly what must be an atheist network on dating for grade schoolers (not in the sense of courtship dating).

Here is another deception created by the infidel show Nova in a clear attempt of the Devil to pull our children away from God. Understand that the only way for the Discovery Institute and Ken Ham can make sense of their ideas is to basically ignore most scientific scholarship. In fact, they must essentially ignore the entire fields of geology, astronomy, particle physics, and biology. Foundational theories that have been repeatedly tested in each must be jettisoned outright because they do not agree with a very specific reading of the Bible.

Now is that science?

(HT: Jim West)