Monday, November 24, 2008

Your regular Denyseitude.


Doddering, self-referential Canadian ID wingnut Denyse O'Leary is all a-twitter over, well, whatever:

Atheist defends intelligent design - and I gather he's pretty good

Below are links to the Discovery Institute's five podcasts of University of Colorado (Boulder) professor of the philosophy of physics Bradley Monton - who is an atheist - on why the universe might show evidence of design. Monton teamed up with another skeptic of religion, mathematician David Berlinski, against materialist atheist Lawrence Krauss and British theistic evolutionist Denis Alexander, to defend the design of the universe as an intellectually worthy idea (not just some religious schtick).

And how did that turn out, Denyse? Oh, dear ...

I don't quite know what to make of Dr. Monton. He is a philosopher at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and an atheist. And yet, he seems to be the Discovery Institute's flavor of the month because he's pro-ID. Well... not actually. Just like Berlinski, at no point in the debate did he ever actually argue for intelligent design. In fact, he stated quite plainly that the current arguments used by ID advocates are awful and ineffective, and he was interested in trying to develop better arguments for them to use in the future. Idiotsayswhat??? Turns out the reason he's interested in doing this is because he doesn't like methodological naturalism, and he'd like to see supernatural explanations at least given a place at the table. I really don't see why this would be helpful or interesting, but then again, I'm not a low-level philosopher getting friendly with the Discovery Institute. The less said about Dr. Monton the better, quite frankly- I'm sure he's a nice fellow, but he had about as much relevance to the discussion as an expert in 17th century French poetry.

Degree of difficulty: Not worth talking about.

1 comment:

Ti-Guy said...

Turns out the reason he's interested in doing this is because he doesn't like methodological naturalism, and he'd like to see supernatural explanations at least given a place at the table.

Sure. At the table where one discusses fiction and myth. Not at the table where we're talking about science.