:: Running from the Thought Police ::

Reality-Based Thoughts, Ruminations, and Unsolicited Opinions of a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ~~student~~ alumnus and employee.

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<< # St. Blog's Parish ? >>

:: Thursday, November 10, 2005 ::

Unmet Expectations

So I went to the "Creationism in Camouflage: The 'Intelligent Design' Deception" lecture I mentioned earlier. I knew that it was being presented by a bunch of Ayn Rand enthusiasts (whom I've heard real philosophers refer to as people who don't know what they're talking about), but I was hoping that what they'd do was outline and destroy Intelligent Design and then say something to the effect of "if you like stuff like this, join our club."

They didn't do that.

Instead, the lecturer, Dr. Keith Lockitch, started out with a history of creationism and it's morphological changes to become Intelligent Design (which wasn't bad at all), but then went on to say that the perfect way to combat Intelligent Design is to embrace Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism (which is where he lost me).

In making his particular arguement, Dr. Lockitch either succeded or failed, depending on what his objective was. If he was going to try to convince people to support Objectivism, then he may have won a single convert. Maybe. If he was trying to merely destroy Intelligent Design in the face of Evolution, then he failed, miserably. He even managed to tick me off numerous times, and I'm an ardent supporter of evolution.

How'd he fail? Well, consider the likely audience: even though we are a Big Ten, land grant research university, we're in the Bible Belt. There are a lot of fundamentalist groups around here that cling to ID and by arguing for evolution in order to advance his specific agenda, Dr. Lockitch got eaten up by both the creationists in the room and the people calling his "solution" bullshit. His agenda got in the way of his immediate point, and so he failed to at least rhetorically support Evolution over Intelligent Design.

Other than the fact that he's obviously read some of the crap that the Discovery Institute puts out, I could do a better job than this guy about arguing the illegitimacy of Intelligent Design as a scientific persuit.

:: The Squire 10:41 PM :: email this post :: ::
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