Whatever gets you through the day.

It's been a while since I made fun of the folks over on Uncommon Descent, the blog of Wild Bill Dembski. This isn't because I've stopped paying attention to them so much as that, since the Kitzmiller et al. vs Dover Area School District et al. ruling, they just haven't had a lot to work with. Things haven't changed- they still don't have much to work with- but nonetheless I saw something on there yesterday that is simply priceless. I refer, of course, to a post written by Wild Bill himself that is meant to buoy the flagging spirits of Intelligent Design* activists everywhere:



For those who are too lazy to read the image directly:

The lesson is this: The myth of invincibility is just that — a myth. Also bear in mind that Darwinism’s record isn’t nearly as good as the New England Patriots’ going into Super Bowl XLII.

Reading this made me laugh really, really hard and then continue laughing at unpredictable intervals for the rest of the day. There are two reasons for this. The first is just the sheer absurdity of it. If you have to look to the result of a football game to reassure yourself, and others, that your "research program"** will someday achieve success then you have absolutely nothing left on your side but sheer tenacity. I mean, what the hell? Are there lawyers out there who say, "I didn't think I could possibly get my client off but, hell, the 1980 U.S. hockey team totally beat the Soviets so maybe I can win after all!" It's an utter non sequitur.

The second thing that amuses me, however, is that it implicitly puts intelligent design in the same game with modern biology. You know- evolutionary theory is cast as the New Englad Patriots who will be defeated by Intelligent Design's New York Giants*** in the big game. This is hillarious to me: that an army of highly-educated researchers laboring for more than a hundred years are somehow matched by a handful of cranks with what amounts to a legal SWAT team. The much more accurate analogy would be an NFL game between modern biology, represented by the New England Patriots, and Intelligent Design, represented by a shuffleboard club from the local senior's center. The only way to make the analogy even better would be if the shuffleboarders had a team of lawyers who constantly filed injunctions against tackling.

Say what you want about the intelligent design folks**** but you can't say they're not creative.*****



* What my father-in-law refers to as "Ecclesiastical Design."

** Keeping in mind, of course, that intelligent design has a research program in much the same sense as I have a starship.

*** If I don't have the correct teams please keep in mind that I don't care. I do not watch sports and don't really want to.

**** And I say a lot- almost all negative, too.

***** A little too creative, really.