Fish or cut bait
I guess it's "put up or shut up" time for Intelligent Design, and it's starting to look like it's going to be the latter.
The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research."They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.
"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.
Oh well. They got their hearing, but they never showed any results. But if they ever do (which I doubt) I'm sure they'll find a receptive audience.
To those who believe there is a scientific conspiracy to suppress data that's inconsistent with evolution, I can pretty much guarantee that's not the case. As a former research scientist myself, I can't even conceive of a researcher who would discover evidence that turns the scientific world on its head and then just sit on it. No, the scientist would publish his paper amidst a torrent of publicity, duly collect his Nobel, and then go on to a life of fortune and celebrity.
In short, ID's problem is not the bias of the scientific community. ID's problem is a lack of evidence.
Comments
Good riddance. Those who wish to teach "intelligent design" already have a forum for it: church.
Until and unless the government wants to force churches to teach evolution as an "alternative theory", they have no place forcing public schools to teach creationism.
Posted by: apotheosis | December 4, 2005 09:17 PM