Darn it, some last points. This is the ABSOLUTELY FINAL clean-up on the

matter.

(1) ID is not just lousy science, but lousy religion. I dislike it at least

as much for religious as for scientific reasons. I dislike it, in fact, for

the same reasons, or at least the same KINDS of reasons, that I dislike the

“Left Behind” books & movies, and unbelievers telling me that natural

disasters like the recent tsunami “prove” the non-existence of God.

All that kind of thinking trivializes God. It belongs to the category of

thinking that A.N. Whitehead called “misplaced concreteness.” It shows a

dismal poverty of imagination — reducing the divine to science fiction (or

in the case of the “Left Behind” books, to a combination of sci-fi and spy

thriller). The ID-ers’ God is a sort of scientist himself, sticking his

finger in to make things work when natural laws — His laws! — can’t do the

job. Well, if that’s your God, I wish you joy of him. My God is much

vaster and stranger than that. Are we the children of God, or the children

of Wrath? I think about that a lot; but I am certain, at any rate, that we

are not the children of some celestial lab technician.

(2) Some readers have chid me for referring to ID as “flapdoodle.” This

was, they say, ill-mannered of me. Heaven forbid I should be thought

ill-mannered! Me! I therefore beg you to strike out the word “flapdoodle”

and replace it with one of the following, according to taste: balderdash,

baloney, blather, bunkum, bushwa, claptrap, gobbledygook, hocus-pocus,

hogwash, hokum, hooey, humbug, mumbo-jumbo, piffle, rigmarole, tripe,

twaddle.

(3) Some other readers (and perhaps some of the same readers — my eyes are

starting to glaze over) have chid me for refusing to explain my religious

beliefs in response to a polite inquiry. This chiding often came tagged

with contemptuous references to my previous remarks in this area, remarks I

have made about the feebleness of my faith, my aversion to theology, my

attachment to the merely (! — there’s an essay right there, if not a Ph.D.

thesis) esthetic aspects of worship — hymns and so on — and my general

lack of deep piety, or, to be frank, of much interest in religious topics.

Let me tell you, you have not savored the full meaning of the phrase “holier

than thou” until you have passed some religious comment on a well-attended

blog.

Well, on this one I think my chiders have a point. I shall make amends. I

shall write something about my beliefs; and if I don’t post it on NRO

(which, it seems to me, is not really the right place), I shall link to it

from The Corner. I don’t know when I’ll get round to it — I have never

tried anything like that before, and have no real idea how to go about it –

but it’s on my list. In the meantime, this will have to suffice.