Melanie Phillips Kicks Little Green Footballs

Melanie Phillips does a great job here of putting Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs in his place:

What [Intelligent Design proponents] don’t accept is that random, blind-chance evolution accounts for the origin of all species and the origin of life, the universe and everything. ID proponents say the idea that science can account for everything – the doctrine known variously as materialism or scientism – flies in the face of reason and evidence and seeks to commandeer the space previously reserved for the unknowable, or religion, which can sit very comfortably alongside science, as it does for so many.

Those who have imbibed evangelical atheistic materialism with their mothers’ milk, however, find it impossible to get their heads round this. Shouting from the rooftops that ID is not science but camouflaged religion, they react so viscerally precisely because ID does come out of science and talks its language.

. . . .

While materialist fundamentalists can deal with religious believers by scoffing they are in a separate domain altogether from the real ie scientific world, the suggestion that science might itself arrive at the conclusion that there are limits to what it can understand is a heresy that directly threatens the materialist fundamentalist closed thought-system -- and therefore must be stamped out.

. . . .

Dogma is certainly what is on the other side of ID in this fight – a materialist dogma which, posing as the standard-bearer of reason against obscurantism, actually embodies irrationality and a kind of intellectual fascism. It is a secular inquisition – as the reaction to my post makes all too plain. (Bold is mine.)

Johnson makes the same logical mistake Judge Jones did:

1. Young Earth Creationism questions Darwinism.
2. Intelligent Design questions Darwinism.
3. Therefore, ID is the same thing as YEC.

The very obvious and overwhelming differences are lost on them. This apparently intentional refusal to acknowledge differences gets very close to bigotry, as I discuss here.