I'm sure the ID side could be portrayed likewise.
But serious people see beyond that instantly. If one is unable to recognize propaganda, whether it's in support or opposition to their particular beliefs, they are fools, but exactly the target audience.
Should IDers be removed from the science faculty? No, if that's their private belief. But they may not teach it as science, because it is not science. It is philosophy or religion. It is not science, and must not be offered as such.
I'm not at all suggesting that it can't be mentioned or even taught as a course. But since it doesn't qualify as science, the schools would be wrong to teach it as such. If and when ID can actually offer testable evidence, that could change things.
Right now, it's a conclusion looking for reasons.
Apply to *Dawkins*, he'd be canned tomorrow. He pretends all his philosophy is science, it isn't, he teaches it from the highest scientific positions and everyone defers to him.
See the point?
The standard cannot be, no scientist may have philosophic views - it would be thought police, and the policers will not long be scientists and the politically correct views won't be their particular idiosyncratic idiocies.
Instead the standard has to be, anybody is free to think whatever they heck they want. Men cannot be expected to police their own opinions into separate categories, at the whim of hostile outsiders to violently disagree with them and wish to persecute them.
Instead, the hearers need to separate philosophic from scientific on evidence, and on seeing how all the pretend authorities reason with one another, what sort of evidence they offer, etc. Science is always pure invitation to truth, it cannot be made a coercive requirement. It can distinguish itself from other forms of reasoning, only to perceptive people who think for themselves and sift evidence critically. It cannot be distinguished by the specific positions taken, nor can it be institutionally policed off from other thoughts.
Institutional policing is policing and not science. The only forum in which real science can distinguish itself from other things, is the mind of someone intent on finding reliable truth, for himself.
So no, we can't lay down laws that Dawkins or Dennett may not philosophize, or may not pretend their philosophizing is science. Yes, you and I can see that much of it is not science but their philosophizing, and some of it isn't even that, it is pure wind and chutzpa. But they are free to emit wind at their leisure, and we are free to notice when they look like fools.
And the IDers too, are free to pursue careers as molecular biologists or doctors or astronomers or mathematicians, and they are free to philosophize, and they are free to confuse their philosophizing with what they think is science, and they are free to emit wind. And you and I and everyone else are free to notice when they look like fools.
DG says:”Should IDers be removed from the science faculty? No, if that’s their private belief. But they may not teach it as science, because it is not science. It is philosophy or religion. It is not science, and must not be offered as such.
I’m not at all suggesting that it can’t be mentioned or even taught as a course. But since it doesn’t qualify as science, the schools would be wrong to teach it as such. If and when ID can actually offer testable evidence, that could change things.”
Seems you have introduced a catch-22 here the likes of what the film has complained. “ID is obviously not science!”, you say. “Should not be taught in science classrooms”, you say. Yet you leave the prospect open to “testable evidence”. Pray tell how this testable evidence comes forward when the concept of ID itself is considered non-scientific?
You do see the irony here, do you not??
Max Tegmark writes a cosmology circular for Scientific American than might have been published in Metaphysical American instead, in which he stumps for 4 tiered and towering actual infinities, infinite spatial extent, receeding bubble inflation, many worlds QM in each, and a string landscape in which all possible rules of physics are realized somewhere. Not only does it not have testable implications, it literally posits that every conceivable observation is actual and occurs countable infinity times, and the only meaning it leaves to anything like "likelihood" is the (utterly unobservable) average spatial distance between those infinite sets. Shall we can him for pretending his philosophy is science? In a footnote he will say something like, if you don't mind wild ideas, go to my website and check out my bananas theory of everything. Should he be blackballed from all cosmology departments?
Another one devotes a few lectures to discussing the anthropic principle and places it has been advanced, in cosmological fine tuning arguments or as an ad hoc explanation of the observed matter to anti matter difference or whatever. Can? Blackball? Just discipline?
Enough. There are ideas that are franky philosophical and entirely speculative, that nevertheless arise in scientific contexts and rely on some degree of familiarity with existing science and the evidence for it, that attract the minds of scientists and interest them. This does not make them into scientific theories. They are frankly philosophic ideas, and they often have critical weaknesses that are not apparent to the scientific specialist, but would be to a trained academic philosopher.
We don't try to police them out of existence. We'd stunt minds if we did. They are generally harmless and sometimes quite fun, and sometimes they may suggest real advances to theorists etc. I don't see any outside, a priori or rational reason, that ID fascination should be treated any differently. I am not thinking about curricula issues or secondary public schools, just college and up academia and what the profs and grad students and practicing scientists (including other research institution types etc) do among and for themselves. I see no harm in it.
And I think men like Dawkins, or others earlier in the thread speaking of "barbarians at the gate" and the like, see harm in it, pretty much purely out of bigotry, or perhaps more accurately an intellectual snobbishness that looks down its nose at religion of any kind.
Men are free to think what they like, by nature. They will say what they think. It is foolish to fight it and try to stamp it out. Instead, offer truth freely, and entertain speculation indulgently.
One man's opinion...