And, indeed, about almost every subject the DI addresses. The books they’re publishing these days are profoundly dishonest – so much so that any reasonable review of their contents is taken by some as some sort of dogmatic anti-ID posture when it is in fact just a reasonable, even-handed take.
I have found it very interesting that nobody is really prepared to actually defend these books and their strange assertions most of the time, and that when they do venture to do so, the results are so utterly and completely disastrous. Whether it’s Stephen Meyer asserting that mammals appear abruptly in the fossil record with no evident precursors, or Douglas Axe claiming that the evolutionary consensus is that evolution has now completely stopped, or Wells and Dembski claiming that nothing but a “bone count” really underlies the explanation of the evolution of the mammalian jaw, there either is a complete silence in the defense camp or something comically atrocious, like one attempt here some time ago to claim that Axe was right, after all.
But the complete inability to offer even a decent excuse for all of this plain and flagrant dishonesty does not stop those people from tone-trolling. Yes, Meyer, Axe, Wells and Dembski are all liars, as the lack of any plausible defense admits. But how uncivil to point it out! How can anyone tell a decent lie, and be treated kindly while so doing, if people are going to call the teller a liar? And surely one who calls such a person a liar must be the crudest sort of atheistic, materialistic dogmatist.
The liars do contribute something to our culture, but not all contributions to culture are positive. They contribute something to conversation, but not all conversations are worthwhile. And they preserve certain ideas against the contrary flow of reason and evidence, but all ideas are not worthy of preservation. There is something odd in the mood that praises the retrograde, the awful, the dishonest and the incoherent against the reliable growth of genuine understanding. It is a kind of nostalgia for barbarity.