Tuesday 29 March 2005

Scientific American Apologises

All that concentratin' on science an' facts an' stuff. It was wrong:
Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You had me scared for a minute then Paul! What a great article. It's nice to know there's still some scientists left in America: http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/login.aspx?ci=15376

Anonymous said...

You had me scared for a minute then Paul! What a great article. It's nice to know there's still some scientists left in America: http://www.gallup.com/poll/content/login.aspx?ci=15376

Paul said...

Hey Richard!

It's also good to know that some of them can handle irony.

I just hope the science-knowing, irony-having lot is a silent majority that's working to slowly seize power from a whole heap of crackpots....