Pardon the pun such as it is, but Erica Tennenhouse of Sciencebreathlessly “reports” that—hold your breath (pardon the pun)—a fish “holding its breath under water” has been spotted “for the first time.” Scientific illegiteracy has spread so wide that people will fall even for this. Sorry Felicia 🤷♀️, but all fish (except for whales, dolphins, and frogs) can breathe under water.
Examples are the bread of butter’s science.
I want you to literally thing about it, wherever in your brain makes you the most comfortable. How, pray you, might fish live in water if they can’t hold their breaththere? Have you ever tried to live in water? Take it from me, it ain’t easy!
Living in Water has been poorly received by critics
The day that we can hold our breath in water is the day we devolve back into the fish from whence we came forth.
“Monkey’s uncle” doesn’t even begin to describe what I’ll be.
First, I should say that I like Intelligent Design. It questions cherished assumptions held by arrogant scientists and other scholars. Furthermore, it strives very hard to be just like science, in order to undermineit. This is a noble goal, reminiscent of Obama’s biography, where he reminisced about being “behind enemy lines” in corporate America.
However, just because something falls under the category of muckraking, doesn’t mean that it is always good. There are many examples of bad muckraking. In fact, bad muckrakers like these give bad names to the rest of us. I can’t count the number of times people have assumed that I was one of these people, before even looking at my arguments! It’s quite frusrating. You have to be able to distinguish between good controversial figures, and bad ones. Legitimate commentators like nutritionist Kevin Trudeau, and complete quacks like Denise O’Leary. So without much further ado, I will just list a few of the difficulties I have with Intelligent Design.
Intelligent Design is not really Science
All Intelligent Design does is concede ground. Real science gains ground. Can anyone point to an example of Intelligent Design winning an argument? I sure can’t. Intelligent Design has also failed to acheive a paradigm shift. All people do in Intelligent Design is leave the movement. This has all the characteristics of a cult. But back to paradigm shifts, Hans Küng has taught us that scientific shifts occur best when left alone by religion. Who is Dembski to lecture Küng? And who is O’Leary to lecture Dembski? Ipso facto, who is O’Leary?
Intelligent Design fails to produce technology
It has long been obvious that the halmark of science is building neat things. What are some of these neat things? Escalators, pop machines, cures for diseases, spaceships, and lasers. Name one technological innovation produced by Intelligent Design. I bet you can’t name one. And all this for a movement with “intelligent design” in the middle of its very name.
Intelligent Design contradicts the law of entropy (aka the Law of Thermo Dynamics)
The arguments of intelligent design continually get more and more complex and absurd and overly wordy. But according to entropy, things get simpler (and, ergo, more appealing). How then does Intelligent Design survive? This is one of the lesser known objections to ID. Note that ID people often use Entropy against evolutionists! Can you believe it? More serious scientists have pointed out their flaws.
Those are just three things to think about. I would point out as well that not all critics of Evolution are silly. I myself have posted a simple conceptual objection to Modern Synthesis. But there are others. One might take a hint from David Berlinksi, a very well-respected mathematician who has posited interesting critiques. You can watch him below, and I leave you with this video.
Scientists have been pushing this one for about a century now. While Evolution is at points nearly too ridiculous to merit comment, I’ll humor you. And I really do mean humor. For this post I’ve decided to write on the lighter side, although at the core the idea is serious.
The entire foundation for evolution, according to Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins and Stephen Gould, is that creatures mutate into more and more advanced creatures, then get married and have new more advanced babies, with thumbs and wings and so on. Fair enough. But wait a minute, isn’t there something a little bit fishy about this?
Think back to middle school. None of the mutants could get girlfriends. If mutants cannot get girlfriends, then how can you expect them to get married? And if they can’t get married, then how can you expect them to ever have kids? Moreover, the mutants would never survive as the fittest in the first place, because all of the normal children, who are bullies, would beat them up. And in distant evolutionary times they would kill them, because as recently excavated cave paintings show us a la carte Marc Hauser, the more historic you get, the more barbaric you are. So just imagine what they did to mutants back then! So if you’re dead and you can’t get girlfriends, there is no way you’re going to pass on your mutant genes – even if they are selfish genes. And all this is a matter of a few years – nothing compared to geological time!
Sure, Middle School is not the Stone Age. But so what? The basic principles of life apply to all times and places.
Science and Math Defeated 