Egnor drops the ID charade

Egnor's public tempter tantrum is absolutely hilarious. (ERV has a funny summary about it) It's fun to watch the whole ID movement self-destruct - failing to gain a foothold in either science or the classroom, it has devolved into nothing more substantial than petty, whinny tirades against those evil "Darwinists".

Egnor's rant is no exception, foaming at the mouth about scientists' refusal to hold a conference at a state whose legislature passed an "academic freedom" bill to introduce "supplemental material" into classrooms and encourage teaching "the scientific strengths and weaknesses of existing scientific theories" such as evolution and global warming. Sound familiar? It's the old Teach-the-Controversy tactic (ironically, when creation science was taught in Louisiana, the creationists considered that academic freedom as well). Creationists aren't especially good at coming up with new ideas, only disguising their outright attacks on science education, and even then they're fairly inept - the motivation for singling out evolution for "critical" analysis is obvious and the rank and file membership is notorious for being unable to keep the "Intelligent Designer" anonymous.

So imagine my surprise when Egnor dropped the charade of religion-neutral ID and threatened to unleash the fury of the creationist hordes, stopping just short of threatening, "our arrows will blot out the sun". Not the ID hordes or the academic freedom hordes. Nope. The creationist hordes. The big C-word.

But you misunderstand the people for whom you clearly have such disdain. Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human beings and they don’t accept a strictly Darwinian explanation for life.

There are a lot of big organizations out there who don’t exactly like you. The National Association of Evangelicals represents 40,000,000 people and represents 40,000 churches.

He goes on and on about how "God-fearing Americans" despise the attacks on their faith and are fed up with darwinism/atheism. The stupidity is cringe-worthy, but the honesty is refreshing.

Finally, we see the true face of Intelligent Design, Christian creationists who not only deny evolution, but are also enraged at the mere mention of Charles Darwin and evolution in schools. They are determined to inject their religious views into the classroom and blot out the theory of evolution in a misguided crusade to safeguard their faith. They don't have a scientific leg to stand on, but they're not interested in science, they're interested only in cultural dominion. If it involves censoring actual science and teaching children factually wrong information, then so be it. And if it involves lying to the press and the public about their motivations, then so be it. But there's one place where they're always honest about what they believe - church.