Reading a recent blog entry titled The Nature Editorial: Either Intelligent Design is Science, or Senator Brownback Got it RIght from the Center for Science and Culture, a Discovery Institute program, I was struck by the weakness of rhetoric, lapses of logic, and what appears to be deliberate reframing of information in order to create a falsely constructed "either/or" presentation.

See if you can pick out the problems with this paragraph:

The editors assert that the emergence of the human mind without intelligent design is an ‘unassailable fact’. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this claim, aside from the problems with their interpretation of the scientific evidence itself, is the admission by the editors that the question of intelligent design in biology can be adjudicated by the scientific method. If the evidence for or against intelligent design can be evaluated scientifically— as the editors at Nature firmly assert that it can— then intelligent design is a real scientific inference, albeit, according to the Nature editors, a mistaken one. And if they are asserting that intelligent design is mistaken from a non-scientific standpoint, then the editors are advancing an atheistic theology, as Brownback pointed out.

Particularly note the logical twist/substitution that makes "intelligent design" into "a real scientific inference" when that is not necessarily what the editors of Nature said. In essence, this is a fancy word play intended to assert that ID is a legitimate, valid and scientific theory with evidence. I've yet to seen any evidence that this is true.

Labels: intelligent design, loons, science