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Sunday, April 17, 2011

Speaking of Delusions ....

I post this for entertainment purposes only.

Denyse O'Leary had a contest. She asked her readers to "predict Darwin's doom."
What do you see as the timeline for Darwinism to be replaced by a more inclusive theory of evolution? If ever. And if not, why not?
Today she announced the winning IDiot, it's someone named "Bantay at 10" (What in the world were its parent thinking when it was born?)

Here's the best prize-winning answer the IDiots could come up with. (Yes, folks, they are serious.)
5 years –
Significant scientific discoveries will enhance a relatively new scientific paradigm we know today as “ID” – As additional discoveries buttress a design framework from which new scientific discoveries can be predicted, we will see more scientists and materialists distance themselves from Darwinism (like Marulis and Fodor).

10 Years –
Significant numbers of academicians from biologists to astronomers, philosophers to office secretaries, will be talking about a design framework for the future of their scientific fields in a professional setting, without fear of legal reprisals.

20 years –
Someone will win a landmark legal case that will have a result of ID being shown to be good science, not religion. Scientists who are on the anti-ID side will be expelled from their jobs, suffer public embarrassment for their fearmongering (Barbara?) and will be regretting that they didn’t break ranks while the going was good. Also in 10 years, a movie will be made about the Dover trial and there will be renewed controversy when the credits roll “ACLU Document”

40 Years –
More than 50% of the Big Academy will be non-materialists and agnostics, with atheism showing a steady decline from it’s already lowly numbers to an even lesser significance. The beginnings of post-Darwinist history revisionism will rear its ugly head, with surviving Darwinist hold-outs fighting amongst themselves over who claimed what fossil was a precursor to man (but strangely will forget that none of them were).

60 Years – Darwinism will be relegated to a small, obscure paragraph in science text books, probably as a footnote. All of today’s living fundamentalist Darwinists will be dead, their Machiavellianism and unscientific fearmongering and back-pats a thing of the past. Meanwhile, the exciting world of science will be renewed with advances in technology that will enable scientists to reverse engineer the parts in the cell itself, helping to elucidate secrets of its design previously unknown. On the global design front, advances in technology will reveal orders of magnitude greater levels of design in the universe.


15 comments :

Eamon Knight said...

All respect to office secretaries, but I didn't know they were "academicians" (even if they are the people who really run the place, whatever the department Dean thinks).

On the whole, this reads like a parody of the Wedge Document.

Georgi Marinov said...

The (quite tragically) ironic thing is that with the direction the world is going into, it is highly likely that 50 years from now there indeed won't be much actual research going on anywhere in the world...

One of the major reason for which will be the fact that the collective thinking of humanity has been dominated for so long by religion...

athel said...

I'm surprised that Canada's leading science journalist needed to ask this question. Didn't she answer it herself five years ago: "It’s almost not worth deciding what to do about Darwinism, because it is on the way out anyway"? OK, she didn't provide the detailed time line that Bantay at 10 does, but there seems a clear implication that by now we'd be seeing some signs of its disappearance.

athel said...

When I saw your illustration I thought it was a spoof book cover along the lines of what Crispian Jago likes to put in his blog. But I thought I'd check any and was amazed to see that it's a real book. To judge from the reviews (and the numbers of "helpful" and "not helpful" votes) at Amazon even the IDiots are not too keen on a book that addresses them so plainly in its title.

Vic said...

ID'ers are just obsessed with evolutionists getting dismissed from their jobs one day. It's their delusional utopia, their "kingdom of god". It seems like some sort of "pay back" for their perceived discrimination today, a feeling they only get because of their inability to comprehend state/church separation.

Anonymous said...

Glenn R. Morton
The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism

Lbbhecht said...

"As additional discoveries buttress a design framework from which new scientific discoveries can be predicted..."

Is he saying that an ID framework won't be able to predict things until it is 'buttressed'? That makes no sense. How can a theory which predicts nothing ever be 'buttressed' in the first place?

Joel said...

Ah, it's so cuuuuuuuuuuuuuute when denialists project their own behaviour and plans onto that of scientists.

Bjørn Østman said...

Great! I am actually planning (!) to live long enough that I get to experience all this. Will be a blast.

qetzal said...

I thought ID wasn't religious, and didn't require a supernatural designer? Isn't that what all the cool ID kids claim? So why is Bantay predicting a decline in materialism as part of "Darwin's doom?"

Someone's straying from the script again.

Anonymous said...

Ms O'Leary also said in her post:

"I give Darwinism 25 years. I would have given it 50 years, but cut that in half due to the impact of the Internet."

Well, so far on the Internet in terms of content we have Uncommon Descent (with articles mostly by Ms O'Leary, who is clearly not a scientist), Biologic, The Discovery Institute, Cornelius Hunt's web site and a few others. If Uncommon Descent is anything to go by where each article only receives a couple of hundreds of views, this hardly seems like the Internet revolution Ms O'Leary seems to be expecting.

Perhaps I'm missing the ID revolution and the new paradigm that's about to take over Darwinism. Maybe if Ms O'Leary is reading this she can point me in the right direction? I read Uncommon Descent, but it mostly seems to be anti-evolution or anti-atheist articles and very little about the "replacement" theory she talks about...

Corneel said...

It is interesting to read that this:

20 years –
Someone will win a landmark legal case that will have a result of ID being shown to be good science, not religion.


is followed by this:

40 Years –
More than 50% of the Big Academy will be non-materialists and agnostics, with atheism showing a steady decline...


ID is not religion, but it does purge out atheistic scientists. Isn't that odd?

Benoît Leblanc said...

5 years –
As more and more people get their information from non peer-reviewed and special interest websites and social networks, public understanding of basic concepts like natural selection, the germ theory of disease and the carbon cycle go down dramatically while new-age relativism, pseudo-science and religion-tinted views become more and more accepted.

10 Years –
Significant numbers of academicians from biologists to astronomers, philosophers to office secretaries, finding that it's far less work and far more rewarding (in terms of money and popular recognition) to spout nonsense than do actual science, indulge in the creation of many lines of new "nonconformist" research, including the role angels play in our lives, the immeasurable but extremely important effect of Atlantis crystals on health, and the relation between old age and the color of one's aura. Political pressure forces some Federal money to be channeled into these new fields.

20 years –
Iridology, hompeopathic medicine and therapeutic hand are now part of the curiculum of every university, and attendance is on the rise.

40 Years –
More than 50% of the Big Academy is now non-materialistic and agnostic, with atheism showing a steady decline from its already low numbers to an even lesser significance. Medical treatment is now partly determined by the use of a ouija board, by that of th I-Ching and by astrology. Vaccination is at an all-time low since the mid XXth century. The death toll from infectious disease and from cancer begins to rise. The upside is that thanks to the money saved after scrapping federal research institutions such as the NIH, NASA and NSF, there are plenty of funds to build new federally-sanctionned churches.

100 Years – Darwinism is relegated to a small, obscure paragraph in science text books, probably as a footnote. Everybody accepts that divinely-inspired sacred texts are the only way to grasp reality as it is, and that there is anyway no objective reality. Although it is true that humans once lived to be a thousand, that was in Biblical times: misinformation to the effect that people lived to be 80 or 100 years old in the early XXIst century are obvious fabrication, as even the most skilled faith healer is hard pressed to get the average person to live past 50.

Unknown said...

10 years-Europe and Asia take the lead in science and technology, as superstition and anti-rationalism become increasingly accepted in the US, along with widespread government-assisted homeschooling.

20 years- The economic boom in Europe and Asia swamps the recession-plagued economy of the US. Massive epidemics in the US decimate the population, and US life expectancy falls well below the world average, because of the advances of non-traditional medicine.

50 years- The US population, envious of the rapid advances and good health of the rest of the world, elects a hard-headed atheist scientist as president.

lou said...

He is immediately impeached by Congress for not saying "So help me God" during his swearing-in.