Drunken paranoid ramblings
Yesterday, Michael Behe admitted in court that the standard scientific definition of ‘theory’ was too narrow to include Intelligent Design. John Scalzi makes this awesome comment about this development:
The only value to this whole thing so far is that it got Behe to admit that in order to get ID to work, you have to cheat — you have to make words mean different things than what they mean. You know, the science community already has a word for the new, more lax definition of “theory” Behe wishes to promote: it’s called a hypothesis. Should Behe manage to get his way and change the definition of “theory,” what becomes of the word “hypothesis”? Is it demoted? Discarded? Given a nice gold watch for its years of service to the scientific community and then taken behind the barn to be plugged with a shotgun? And if is merely demoted, then what will become of the phrase “drunken paranoid ramblings?” That phrase has nowhere else to go.
And you read this entry because you thought I was writing my own drunken paranoid ramblings, didn’t you?