I mean literally say whatever you want. There’s a strange ethical tenet in the media that holds that when it comes to ID, you can assert anything that seems expedient, or like it kind of ought to be true given what everyone else in your crowd says — however far that may be from factual.
It’s as if there were a special license issued to ID critics, “The bearer of this certificate is entitled to publicize any untruth about intelligent design that he pleases, and is guaranteed not to be challenged on it.” Other than by Discovery Institute.
Yesterday our colleague Sarah Chaffee caught one fellow in a major falsehood. Lee McIntyre’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is histrionically headlined “The Attack on Truth,” referring to Darwin skeptics, climate heretics, and other villains. In the article he repeats the familiar line about how we “advocat[e] that ‘intelligent-design theory’ be taught in the public schools as balance for the ‘holes’ in evolutionary theory.”
No. In fact we’ve always opposed mandating ID in public schools, and strongly caution teachers against trying to freelance on the subject. We say this in public and private. Unambiguously. Over and over. Why? One good reason is that scholarship on ID would not be advanced — quite the contrary — by political controversies about teaching it in public schools.
On the other hand, that thoughtful adults, responsible journalists, and scientists in relevant fields should read up on it and consider the arguments, without fear of censure — yes, that we do support, but it’s a very different matter.
The irony is too much. According to his bio, McIntyre is the author of a new book by the title Respecting Truth. He’s an expert on truth. He literally wrote the book on it. Yet here is, a “research fellow” at a big university (Boston U.), appearing in a respected publication for academics, who attacks us in these absurd terms, even going so far as to link us with “big tobacco” of all things, a novel slander I hadn’t heard before, and the man can’t be bothered to do the elementary work of consulting our science education policy, which as Miss Chaffee points out is emphatic, crystal clear, and readily available via the Internet.
On the bright side, doubting that the blind Darwinian mechanism satisfactorily explains the evolution of life used to get us compared to Holocaust deniers. Big tobacco is a step up from that. Is, perhaps, the community of Darwin enforcers getting more civil?
The complacent sloppiness of these guys is still a pebble in my shoe. Apart from science education, has Lee McIntyre taken the time to inform himself on what the evolution debate is about, what arguments and evidence we bring to bear? There’s no indication of that in the article. If he hasn’t checked up on something as basic and easy as where we stand on teaching ID in schools, it seems doubtful that he’s researched the deeper matter of what ID advocates say about evidence for design in biology and cosmology.
My goodness. We’re “postmodernist,” says McIntyre, “academically suspect,” with “almost nothing” by way of evidence?
He hasn’t looked into the subject he’s writing about, yet has the chutzpah to say we’re the ones who “disrespect truth.” His book according to the subtitle is about “Willful Ignorance in the Internet Age” — a worthy subject — but as Sarah Chaffee notes, he’s the one spreading his own ignorance online, willfully it seems.