Chapman and ID Research

Bruce Chapman at the Discovery Institute is deeply concerned about ID research projects:

I keep getting asked about the scientific research projects underway that relate to Darwinism and intelligent design. So why aren’t we talking more about them publicly? For several good reasons:

The most important is that the Darwinist establishment would like nothing better than to “out” research programs before they are finished. The idea is to shut down damaging evidence as early as possible. Strangle the infant in the crib. Demand answers now to questions still being explored.

I’m all for ID research. I would like nothing better than if all the ID advocates took to a lab or field research site and devoted themselves 24 hours a day to trying to find some positive evidence for the conjectures they prefer.

I don’t happen to think that today’s crop of ID advocates has any particular intellectual advantage over design apologists of the past two centuries, so I’m in no way worried about anything that they might get up to in a lab.

Also, if they were spending all their time frittering away at trying to come up with an experimental design for testing untestable conjectures, they wouldn’t have the time to be writing tomes for popular consumption, holding congressional briefings, writing senate resolutions, lobbying state boards of education, putting out letters to the editor, and all the rest of the political action that has filled up their schedules in the past.

But I think the way to see whether Chapman is right is simply to look at where ID advocates continue to choose to invest their time. If they are still running the political full-court press, then that is time that they are not spending in the lab.

The proof is in the pudding… which Chapman vows that we won’t see before it is time. Until then, I think that being skeptical about the existence or extent of “ID pudding” is quite reasonable.