I’ve been intending for a long time to formulate the following law of discourse about intelligent design. Earlier today, I was going to name it Saad’s Law in honor of the evolutionary psychology scholar turned pundit turned humorist Gad Saad.
According to this Law, you can say whatever ignorant nonsense in public that you want and expect to get away with it — as long as it’s about intelligent design.
“The Veracity of Gravity”
On Monday, Dr. Saad posted the following in reply to an interview with Michael Behe, the biochemist and proponent of intelligent design. I apologize for the vulgarity of the insults:
Utter rubbish shite. Innumerable evolutionists have already refuted this nonsense including @RichardDawkins among many others. There is not a single scientific phenomenon that has received as much evidence across countless disciplines as is the case with evolution. There is more evidence for the veracity of evolution than there is for f**king gravity, and these types of clowns continue to spew their garbage.
Besides being an atheist, Saad is a scholar who is supposed to know what he’s talking about if he ventures to say something about a subject adjacent to his own field. Yet this is completely uninformed and content-free. If he had any notion why Behe is wrong on the science, Saad could have shared that. As a cherry on top, he includes a vacuous appeal to authority — that of Richard Dawkins, whose recent non-debate debate with Stephen Meyer in the pages of The Telegraph indicated that Dawkins’s own familiarity with the arguments for ID is also lacking. They don’t make atheists the way they used to.
Saad’s Law in Action?
At first glance, this looked to me like an instance of Saad’s Law in action. But then I started scrolling through the responses provoked from Saad’s followers on X. Without spending my day reading them, I’ve so far found not one agreeing with Saad or coming to his defense. Many are thoughtful critiques of evolution, and a number of those advise Saad to familiarize himself with the works of Stephen Meyer and, of course, those of Michael Behe.
Saad’s followers are, as far as I can tell, uniformly disappointed by him. A typical example:
I would expect more from you, Gad than just making an assertion that a lot of people agree with you. Of course, that’s your identity so you’re going to defend it. Michael Behe is a very credible person and if you’re going to be honest, his theory [of] irreducible complexity is not easy to dismiss.
Gad Saad is someone who’s on the correct side of things on many subjects, and I’m told he’s a nice guy. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of his idea of sarcastic wit, which is to say the opposite of what you mean and assume that it will automatically be funny. One follower hoped for the best and offered that perhaps Saad’s post was intended as lame “satire.”
That’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that Saad’s Law, on the very day it was formalized, has already been disproved. Contrary to the Law named for him, Gad did not get away with mouthing off ignorantly about ID. Considered as a sign of the direction in which the culture is moving, that points to a welcome change.