Replies

Well if that is the issue then ID would not matter anyway, now would it.

Really, you evos and IDers overestimate the publics concern over this all of this.

What if the Pope cam out for ID? What would that do?

Besides, you make it sound like the Dem's tack on the stem cell issue has that much traction. Bush's position is pretty reasonable here, and most people seem to agree with it when they actually find out what it is.

On one have you seem to be saying that the public will side rationally with the eveo side because they "rational, logical positivists" and on the other you seem to be saying that they can be "bludgeoned" with rhetoric, and "tempted with eternal life" (a pretty silly formulation - and a demeaning estimation of the American people, BTW) You cannot have it both ways, it would seem to me.

Believe me, having high school kids in Kansas spend two weeks hearing about ID is not going to move us "back to the dark ages," or somehow "stop bioscience<" and you evos do not help your cause with this sort of hysterical "warnings."

Do you really think the voter believe that this will keep them "from eternal life?"

Do you really think that the voter is so stupid to buy all the outrageous claim coming out from the stem cell crowd, when it is pretty obvious that they are yet again rattling a cup? We have been through the "War on Cancer" and the "War on AIDS," but to little avail. This aspect of the Evo argument seems pretty childish from the outside looking in. As the teacher lobby has begun to be seen as just another interest group at the trough, so do scientist risk this perception the more they are seen as political actor.

Perhaps the Left will be successful here, but it will be a phyrric victory in the end. The self-ipmortant posturings of the Earth sciences crowd, the evo crowd, the gay is biological crowd. the diverity crowd, etc is wearing a little thin. When we have Harvard taking the wholly irrational view that the problem with a "manpower" shortage is some how solved by "empowering women scientist" is is profoundly hard to take the academy seriously when one hears their cries about "the sanctity of science."

I think that you are falling for the Left's notion that they are they "rational; and scientific" ones when they are in fact pretty full of gobbledygook themselves. In fact, ID seems pretty mild here compared to what the left has been up too for years.

As someone with no dog in this fight, I will tell you that the stridency and seemingly mortification of you evos becomes you little in the public square.

It just goes to show that it is not just the Left that has contempt for "the public."

In the end the American people will chose correctly given and honest means of doing so.

In my view, the position that you've taken is patently ridiculous. I am not referring to the political ramifications, which you ramble on at great length although I've said nothing about that, but rather your statement that the public doesn't care about the topic. The issue as it's been framed regards not ID in particular, but rather science overall and actual or perceived attacks on science including primarily those deriving from religion.

I've never seen anything either personally or in print to lead me to think that I overestimate the public's concern over science and religion. In fact, your statement strikes me as utterly absurd. I am hardly saying that "the public" sits around and obsesses constantly on the matter, but that people find both matters (and their intersection) of cardinal importance is not even remotely in doubt so far as I'm concerned.

As someone with no dog in this fight, I will tell you that the stridency and seemingly mortification of you evos becomes you little in the public square.

It strikes me as rather amusing that "someone with no dog in this fight" can carry on at such length, and with such stridency and seeming mortification regarding the matter, and yet still claim to have "no dog in this fight." Here's a tip, next time you wish to argue that you have no dog in a given fight try hiding the dog out of plain view....

If the Pope came out for ID then it would surely induce a debate parallel to the one that the President's statement has induced, and for much the same reasons. The questions at hand are central to the whole enterprise of human civilization, and normal people recognize them as such even if they don't sit around and obsess over them all day long. I'm not even sure what your motivation is to suggest otherwise, except perhaps that in my experience when someone dismisses an obviously important debate that even they themselves obviously find important, it's typically because they don't like the way it's going and can't think of a way to address the actual topic at hand.

But, I don't really know, maybe you actually believe what you're saying. I won't presume to fantasize a whole imaginary sequence like the one you've made up in the vapors of your own mind and attributed to me. My actual view on the political side of it is that it will only have an impact if the electorate concludes that religious interference will impede national progress, and I don't think we're anywhere close to that yet. Up to this point, the relevant debates are but one of several proxies for the overall culture war raging in this nation, and that would continue much the same regardless, since its fundamental underpinnings are other spheres of contention.