sawyl | Dissent over Dissent Over Descent (Reply)

It seems as though everyone's favourite social epistemologist is back with what the Guardian says is an, "...amazingly bad new book..." about intelligent design. But perhaps I'm being unfair and quoting the review out of context? Sadly not:

Fuller happily adopts ID's rhetorical tactics: speaking of biologists' "faith"; forgetting to mention (or merely being ignorant of) the wealth of evidence for evolution in modern biology that wasn't available to Darwin himself; and even muttering about the "vicissitudes" of fossil-dating, thus generously holding the door open for young-Earth creationists, too. The book is an epoch-hopping parade of straw men, incompetent reasoning and outright gibberish, as when evolution is argued to share with astrology a commitment to "action at a distance", except that the distance is in time rather than space. It's intellectual quackery like this that gives philosophy of science a bad name.

I guess this is what happens when you embrace relativism quite so absolutely: you start to believe your own crap...