Ok, "design" but what else?

Looks as if the Intelligent Debate is getting a lot more... um... tedious. This paper by Stephen C. Meyer, posted last month on the Discovery Institute website, is a position statement about the scientific status of Intelligent Design. But, once again, instead of setting forth a problem solving agenda or defining the movement further in terms of of what ID "can" do, the paper attempts to bash the idea of "science" into a mash of confusion. Apparently, since no plausible case has ever been made that ID is science, ID-ists are bent on redifining "science" to fit their multiplicitous agenda. Time and time again, the only thing ID-ists prove they can do is wheedle on about being against something.

The failure of the movement to do anything but be against something is only half the problem -- the other half of the problem, of course, being that ID doesn't measure anything, make any predictions, or solve anything. But what's most frightening about this paper is that, since ID-ists are not out wasting time observing anything or collecting data, they have all the time in the world to refine their bluster and pontifications. The result is a very nuanced, sophistocated set of deconstructions that most evolutionary biologists would be hard pressed to counter -- partly because tautology and circular reasoning are hard to refute, and partly because evolutionary biologists have a bigger job than sitting around merely opposing things.

The time for dignified silence against ID is over. Scientists and philosophers of science should and must now engage this movement head on. The Discovery Institute has so perfected the use of babbly sci-jargon that, to an indifferent and ignorant audience, their hornswoggling silver-tongued blather might start to pass as actually having meaning.