Just What is Intelligent Design?

I’ve been following the reviews of the Ben Stein “Expelled” movie since it was first shown. Many of them properly criticize it for its many inherent cinematic flaws. Others angrily take it to task for its clear violations of sense or sensibility. There is also ExpelledExposed.com, the not-mentioning of which I get chided for every time I post about this movie.

Then there are some who applaud it for “speaking the truth” and “opening conversations”. On my second post about this movie, I asked people to send me links to any non-negative review coming from sources outside of the Discovery Institute (Answers in Genesis, EvolutionNews.org, etc). I suspect that there is now an effort afoot to produce as many positive reviews as there are negative ones, in order to keep things “fair and balanced” online.

After the initial spate of bad reviews by reputable critics, various Christian columnists have been lauding it for exposing the religious suppression of the “Scientific Theory of Intelligent Design” and especially the efforts of reviewers (and scientists, and “W” appointed conservative judges) to associate this “scientific theory” with the openly religious (and mostly equivalent) ideas of Creationism. Bad intellectuals, bad experts.

But, what is this Scientific Theory? Well, an idea has to have 3 elements to qualify as a scientific theory :

  1. Explain all currently and previously observed facts in the category of interest in terms of natural laws.
  2. Describe what facts, if discovered, would prove it false.
  3. Make predictions about
…
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This Just In: Hannah Montana May Have A Clitoris!

What are we to make of this latest flap over a teen icon revealing herself as a potentially sexual being?

I was only dimly aware of Hannah Montana till the Vanity Fair scandal (if scandal is the word). Now it seems I can’t get away from her, which is, of course, the goal of marketing—to make something inescapable for the general public. There are elements of the incident that require less froth and more examination. The accusations of “whose idea was it in the first place and how was Mylie Cyrus manipulated?” are loud and in many ways naive.

First off, Hannah Montana is a Disney product. I don’t think we’re yet quite comfortable with the idea of a person—even a fictional one—being a “product” like a box of soap or a car, but this is indeed what the character is. Designed, engineered, and road tested, Hannah Montana is a money-making machine for Disney and the various participants in the show and franchise.

Pause for a moment and consider: Disney.

It is difficult to imagine a marketing machine that is better at what it does. Which means the chances of something being done with one of its properties that it (a) doesn’t know about and (b) doesn’t approve are next to zero. Especially when you add to that:

Vanity Fair.

Big magazine, famous magazine, a magazine people in show business lust to get into. In the vernacular, Lot A Bank there.

So we’re talking about two major corporate entities, …

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America: #1 in Bibles. #37 in Infant Mortality

This Chris Kelly headline says it all: America: #1 in Bibles. #37 in Infant Mortality. Here's an excerpt from Kelly's Huffpo article: Europeans are feeling pretty smug lately, with their sturdy currency, "health care," and rising rates of life expectancy, but there's one area where we kick their ass: American…

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Risk information on the toxicity of commonly used chemicals bottled up by White House

What? The White House is endangering us by withholding information?

This is getting to be a familiar story, right? Here’s the typical plot: There’s something going on that poses a serious risk to Americans, and the White House decides to protect big corporations rather than protect the people at risk.

This time, the protected industry consists of chemical manufacturers. The victims are American citizens, many of them recalcitrant admirers of the Bush Administration. Here’s an excerpt of the article by the Associated Press:

The Bush administration is undermining the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to determine health dangers of toxic chemicals by letting non-scientists have a bigger – often secret – role, congressional investigators say in a report obtained by The Associated Press.

The administration’s decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program’s credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At issue is the EPA’s screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.

How many people are dying out there because they have been exposed to common chemicals of which most people don’t know of the dangers? How many of those people are children? Every time I hear of another person getting cancer (especially when I hear of a young child getting cancer), I wonder whether it’s because he or she has been exposed too …

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Louisiana Passes Bible Science Education Law

Yall might could be tiring of my babbling on about Bible study in science classes. But I shall continue. According to this article, Louisiana has, and Florida still may pass amendments to their education codes to give free reign to teachers who choose to use texts other than (and conflicting…

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