#2792: Kirk Durston

According to the Discovery Institute, who tends to publish his rants, Kirk Durston is a “scientist, philosopher, and clergyman”. Most importantly, Durston is a proponent of intelligent design creationism, and like most proponents of intelligent design, he focuses his efforts on criticizing the theory of evolution or theories of the origin of life or the universe that don’t invoke supernatural forces because he makes the fundamental mistake of confusing (hypothetical) evidence against the theory of evolution with evidence for intelligent design. Not that his criticisms have much merit either. A favorite trick is, predictably, to misleadingly portray real scientific claims and debates.

Much of his writing concerns the alleged “corruption of science”, for instance the fact that scientists sometimes entertain theories that are hard to test (like the multiverse): modern science is, according to Durston, plagued by “ ‘fantasy science,’ where science fiction is often confused with science”; instead, scientists should, as Durston sees it, accept the role of God. He does not try to apply the testability criterion to that one. On other occasions he does claim that intelligent design is “testable and verifiable” because it predicts “functional information” but is predictably stingy about details (like what the hypothesis actually is, what the predicted observation – “functional information” – actually is, and how and why the unspecified hypothesis predicts the particular and specific functional information it supposedly predicts).

 

Diagnosis: Yes, they are still chugging along, even though the intelligent design movement stopped having much impact on anything a while ago, with people like Durston appealing to the same PRATTs intelligent creationists were appealing to twenty years ago. Boring.