I’ve never visited Uncommon Descent. It is so funny to see these guys twist their faith into a scientific theory, fooling themselves and a few other people along the way. Here are their words:

Materialistic ideology has subverted the study of biological and cosmological origins so that the actual content of these sciences has become corrupted. The problem, therefore, is not merely that science is being used illegitimately to promote a materialistic worldview, but that this worldview is actively undermining scientific inquiry, leading to incorrect and unsupported conclusions about biological and cosmological origins. At the same time, intelligent design (ID) offers a promising scientific alternative to materialistic theories of biological and cosmological evolution — an alternative that is finding increasing theoretical and empirical support.

So science, an effort practiced by thousands of people around the world, from hundreds of countries, ethnicities and faiths are illegitimately using science to promote a materialistic viewpoint.

Have you ever heard anything that fucking dumb? According to these crackpots, 99.99% of biologists and cosmologists are subverting and corrupting the science of the loony 0.01% who can’t understand why we don’t think Scripture is an appropriate reference book for a scientific theory of the creation of the mother fucking universe.

These people constantly misconstrue the arguments of the rational scientific community in order to make proponents of intelligent design (ID) seem like persecuted, besieged warriors of truth.

Face it, Dembski, you fucking retard deluded bastard — your science does not cut the mustard. Your scientific and indeed mathematical arguments are constantly trounced by more capable scientists and mathematicians. The scientific record does not support and indeed cannot support your fucked up bizarre-o mashup of religion and science. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not an ideology. It’s a method, practiced by shit tons of people and its why we have the Internet, mobile phones, HD TV and MRI machines. These are the tangible result of science, real science, in practice. ID is a fantasy you have to justify your faith. As I’ve said before, I give your God a hell of a lot more credit than you.

I had the great pleasure to meet Ernan McMullin. He is the godfather of a friend of mine.

Educated at Maynooth College in Ireland, where he received an undergraduate degree in physics and a bachelor of divinity degree in theology, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest 1949. He went on to study theoretical physics on a fellowship at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Louvain in 1954. Joining the Notre Dame faculty as an assistant professor of philosophy that same year, he became a full professor in 1967 and was named to the John Cardinal O’Hara Chair in 1984.(ref).

My friend wanted to get us together because we are both interested in astronomy and science and he is a priest and I’m an atheist. We also both like to discuss and debate.

He gave me a pamphlet for a talk he had given in 2004 called “Evolution as a Christian Theme”. We also discussed this topic in person. He believe that the theory of evolution is completely consistent with Christian theology. I told him my line, that if intelligent design is true, the design is called evolution. He said, “Exactly right!”

In the “Evolution as a Christian Theme” pamphlet he concludes his argument rather concisely:

[T]hese proponents of what nowadays goes under the label of “Intelligent Design” implicitly assume the inadequacy of the original creation to bring about the Creator’s ends without further later causal supplementation on the Creator’s part…[T]hey appear to conflate the order of nature with the order of grace; they seek miraculous signs in nature of a kind that would seem appropriate, rather, to the order of grace.

Fucking brilliant. The ID folks look for God in nature without realizing that God is, apparently, smarter than them: he made nature purely natural. His intent was encoded, if you will, in his creation, from the moment of creation.

So the problem with the ID folks is that not only does their science suck, so does their theology! Their infantile misunderstanding of theology has led them to believe things that are completely absurd and they jump through incredible hoops to justify them.

I’m not a Christian. I don’t believe in the Creator the way Dr. McMullin does. But in terms of a theological argument, I haven’t heard a better one: science is never and could never be at odds with the will of the Creator.

That left wing radical group, The Gallup Poll, have released results with the headline “Majority of Republicans Doubt Theory of Evolution“.

The majority of Republicans in the United States do not believe the theory of evolution is true and do not believe that humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.

That’s right, folks, a majority of 1 of the 2 political parties in the USA put their fucked-up political/religious ideology in front of generally accepted scientific fact. They don’t argue with electromagnetism or gravity or thermodynamics. Science has apparently avoided blasphemy in these areas. But with evolution, and apparently evolution alone, science is wrong. Hundreds of years of peer-reviewed, scrupulous, detailed, exacting work by thousands of people is wrong because, you know, the Bible tells me so.

Thought experiment: a bunch of people are stranded for decades on a deserted island. The children of one of the families all die from an unfortunate genetic trait. That family passes on no breeding heirs and their gene pool on that island ends. That unfortunate genetic trait ends with them, yes? While it is still possible the trait exists in some of the other people, the fact is, the frailty of that trait causes those genes to be weeded out of the gene pool.

We see this in the world. Sickle cell anemia is correlated with an increased resistance to malaria. People without the sickle cell trait were more likely to die from malaria. The survivors were more likely to develop sickle cell anemia.

Survival of the fittest is obvious. Natural selection is obvious. I’m no expert on these matters, but I just don’t see what is so hard to understand about this.