We watched the Intelligent Design on Trial documentary, streamed from Nova’s web site yesterday. There’s one old kook that makes Michael Behe seem sane and logical in comparison, especially considering that the man has no science background; the man’s a professor of law.

Phillip Johnson is known as the father of intelligent design. The idea in its current form appeared in the 1980s, and Johnson adopted and developed it after Darwinian evolution came up short, in his view, in explaining how all organisms, including humans, came into being. Johnson taught law for over 30 years at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of the book Darwin on Trial, in which he argues that empirical evidence in support of Darwin’s theory is lacking.

The Nova website for the show has a bunch of extra information, including an interview with Johnson titled In Defense of Intelligent Design

Ignoring all the experimental evidence…

There are two hypotheses to consider scientifically. One is you need a creative intelligence to do all the creating that has been done in the history of life; the other is you don’t, because we can show that unintelligent, purposeless, natural processes are capable of doing and actually did do the whole job. Now, that is what is taught as fact in our textbooks. And to me it’s a hypothesis, which needs to be tested by evidence and experiment.

He compares evolutionary theory to crackpot ideas like alchemy, stating that he believes in the future evolutionary theory will move from being taught as science into being taught as a bit of trivia in a course on British intellectual history; a mere footnote. He believes that biology will move on to the “Real” science soon. Alchemists would have happily agreed with you about the not being able to turn lead into gold; they wanted to convince YOU that it was impossible so that THEY could be the first.

I see it as something like alchemy. It’s a precursor to real science. The alchemists must have squealed like crazy when people said you can’t really change lead into gold. But it was true that you can’t transform lead into gold by a chemical means. So when the alchemic ambitions were given up, then alchemy was able to change into the real science of chemistry. I see that happening as well. I think that biological science will change. It won’t vanish. It will just be based on reality and on genuine scientific testing. That’s what I see in the future. That’s the crisis.

On the common ancestor we share with the great apes and with Ray Comfort’s favorite fruit. Nutbars call it creator, scientists call it common ancestry, but I refer to it as Great Grandpappy Bananorilla.

Say we have almost 99 percent of our genes in common with chimpanzees. We also have at least 25 percent of our genes in common with bananas. There are these commonalities that exist throughout life. Do they point to a common evolutionary process or a common creator? That is the question for interpretation.

The genes are going to win when people ask me about that great degree of similarity between human genes and chimpanzee genes. I answer that genes must not be anywhere near as important as we have been led to believe.

Part of Johnson’s wedge theory involves squeezing in ‘under the radar’ and slowly making more room for yourself slowly, secretly. They want to move into your house while you’re away on vacation, and have all your things sold by the time you get back. They want to, under the cover of night, demolish your house and lay the foundation for that massive condo project, and you won’t be any the wiser until you return from Mexico to a massive condo project with a Starbucks in the lobby where your kitchen used to be.

The Dover case, unfortunately, was a train wreck waiting to happen. The problem was basically that we got too much publicity, and people pick that up.

They wanted to quietly win the Dover case and establish a legal precedent… They thought they drew an excellent judge in the case with a Conservative Bush appointee. Johnson taught law; you’d think he’d be in possession of a basic amount of logic and reason.

As for the judge and the opinion, the problem is that the judge didn’t just decide the local case in front of him. He decided that he wanted to become a national figure by deciding the whole question of evolution and creation for the country in one opinion. So he wrote an opinion as big and broad as a starry sky, saying that the notion of intelligence, that one of these two hypotheses, was not eligible for consideration because it was religion and hence by definition not science. So any attempt in that direction was unconstitutional. He is being rewarded for that opinion with all the accolades that the mandarins of science have at their disposal.

Mandarins of science? (A member of an elite group, especially a person having influence or high status in intellectual or cultural circles. — dictionary.com) He’s not far off from saying we faked the moon landing… He seems to believe that there’s a conspiracy of scientists that are keeping the Truth (and The Way and The Light, I’m sure) from being exposed.

I am in touch constantly with young scholars, including people in Ph.D. programs in biology, who see that there is something wrong with the Darwinian theory and would like to do something about it when they can. They like to talk with me because they don’t want to get involved in the traditional creationist movement. They see that as going too far away from the current scientific orthodoxy.

They also like him because he gives them Werther’s Originals and lets them sit in his lap.

I could go back to the question of the definition of science. That is perhaps more crucial than anything else. I have a view of science that is now disputed by secularist organizations and also by the most powerful organizations of science. I don’t think they speak for science. I think they speak for an ideology that is widely held among contemporary scientists. This is the ideology of naturalism. And that is basically a religious position: The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

He apparently doesn’t even talk to scientists. There is no assertion in science that there is nothing outside the known universe. There is what we know, and there is what we hypothesize, and there is what we don’t know. There is much that is unknown, but there is no scientific statement, law, theory, or ‘belief’ regarding the non-existence of something. There is no law that states that Unicorns don’t exist, nor a theory that states that Leprechauns don’t have gold at the ends of rainbows, and definitely nothing on the non-existence of an Intelligent Designer. There is, however, a veritable shitload of documentation to support of evolution.

Why? Well, Evolution started as a hypothesis, was tested and vetted by scientists in a logical, progressive manner, and after much work has been granted the title of Theory. It began as an idea, to which other ideas were added and tested, to yield what might be considered an Answer. ID starts with the Answer and looks for things that match, ignoring anything that doesn’t match.