PZ Myers takes down Orson Scott Card on the subject of intelligent design.

I read Card’s original article. He takes the tack of not exactly defending ID, but taking the piss out of ‘Darwininsts’ who try to quash it. Whoever they are. Both of them.

An understanding of good science is always enough to sweep away the overclaiming of those “scientists” who, as the religious fanatics they are, wish to impose their faith on everyone.

Geez, I really hate it when people claim that evolution is a religion! Or that science is somehow a religion that people exercise ‘faith’ in. I suppose this is the kind of thinking you can expect from religious folk — everything looks like a religion to them because it’s a salient concept for them. But religion differs from science and evolution in a few key respects.

Science v. religion A belief system is a body of doctrines, or statements about the way things are. Science is not a body of doctrines. It’s more like a system of tools (or methods) to try to distinguish true propositions from false ones. (I like Richard Feynman’s quote: Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.) So science and religion are really not describing the same kind of thing at all. (In another sense, science and religion are opposites because science is about accepting ideas that are well-supported, but religion is about accepting ideas that are unsupported. But that’s for another post.)

Evolution v. religion The main difference here is that evolution generates testable hypotheses that can be verified (and has been, over and over). Religion offers no testable hypotheses, and advances propositions that can never be verified.

The next person that tries this on me will get a stern but patient explanation.