Remember Disco's last "scientific conference" in Knoxville? This time, at SMU, things turned a bit ugly: dissenting voices were forcibly removed from the "conference" by police, and hate text messages were received that said, "shut the f*** up," and "shove that sign up your ass." From the article:
He [Lee Strobel] also decided to preach about how he believed the world's creator and designer was the "God of the Bible," as he said. That's interesting, seeing as how he said nothing of the God of the Jews, Muslims and other religions; apparently Christianity's God is the only one we have to believe in. And his entire speech dealt with differentiating atheists from Christians, where he seemed to use the word atheist as a synonym for "Darwinist" or "evolutionist."Check it out. Both hilarious and sad. I hope Dr. Moore is right and those jokers are being slowly bled dry as the foaming fundies jump ship financially for good ol' YEC.
At this point, we were fed up with the sheer lack of science being discussed. (Remember, ID theorists claim to support a science, not a religion.) So we held up our signs. They bore questions such as, "Why do we have wisdom teeth if they do not fit our jaws?" and "Why did it take 20 species of elephant to go extinct to get two species that survived?" and "Why do the ribosomes (protein synthesizing machinery) in our mitochondria match those of bacteria?" to name a few.
Well, after holding up these signs for a while, the men on stage noticed and decided to answer one of them. They chose the last one, regarding ribosomes. Immediately, the only person on stage with any knowledge of biology, Michael Behe, took up the question.
His answer was that ID theory does not allow for explanations regarding interspecies commonalities such as those implied in the question.
In short, his answer was that he couldn't explain it with ID theory.
But then he went on, describing how a Creator may have given humans similar ribosomes for no good reason. His logic was that when one sees a car with a radio, one can ask how that radio got there and there are many explanations.
One such explanation was provided by Behe, and it was so very realistic: He said the radio could've fallen from an apartment and landed in the car, suggesting that a Creator could have simply thrown ribosomes all over the place, and they just landed in humans by chance. Very likely, indeed.
But it's probably too much to hope for -- there are always suckers with religious fervor coupled to money, ready to throw it at anything that makes them feel more secure in their magical and wishful thinking.In fact, it was so friendly that as I was waiting in the auditorium lobby for the conference to start, I struck up a conversation with Todd Norquist, one of the Discovery Institute's employees in the Center for Science and Culture (the department that advocates for Intelligent Design). I asked him how many of these conferences were planned by the Discovery Institute, and he seemed hesitant, telling me that he didn't know if any more of them were going to be possible, since the costs were too high for the Institute to handle. He mentioned something about it costing $70,000, although I don't recall if that was the amount to produce the Dallas event alone, or if that was the current cost for the whole series thus far (the only previous event being in Knoxville). He complained that there had been virtually no money allocated for advertising, the sole contribution being $1000 paid to Scott Wilder for an "interview" of Stephen Meyer a week previously. He then told me (quite openly, also, which I thought was odd) that the financial situation of the Discovery Institute was grim, and that they were "bleeding money" and were "barely able to keep the lights on in Seattle."
I think it was at about this point that he may have realized that he probably shouldn't be advertising this, and so he abruptly asked me if I was a Christian. I shook my head no, and said, "not anymore, but I used to be." He nodded silently, and then quickly found somewhere else to be. But right after he left, I started chatting up another guy who claimed to be skeptical of "macroevolution," so I spend the next half hour or so explaining the molecular evidence.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Intelligent Design, Evolution, Creationism
