DaveScot really is as foolish and dishonest as people say he is!

I've noticed Bill Dembski's sycophant-in-chief DaveScot has dropped by the AE blog to troll in our comments, as he has done in several others run by pro-evolution scientists. He has a reputation for wild distortions and pure risibility in his arguments (Ed Brayton's Dispatches from the Culture Wars is a fine compendium of DaveScottish follies, for those of you who can't bear to subject yourself to Uncommon Descent; just search for this name there and see what comes up), and I see he's fully on form here.

An example of how DaveScot behaves/argues: On Larry Moran's Sandwalk a few days ago, a commenter named Shalini opined that the new banner at Uncommon Descent was "ugly." DaveScot retorted with this charming remark:

What kind of name is Shalini? I keep looking for a red dot on your forehead.

That's a pretty clear bit of racist nastiness, if you ask me, and I called him on it. So how does DaveScot react to that? As follows:

A little checking up on Martin found him in my hometown and then the picture of the cable TV crew with all white people in it made his comment seem a tad hypocritical. I couldn't resist making the dig.

Making a public fool of himself is indeed something DaveScot rarely resists. Really, it takes a specially cultivated kind of stupid to think this way! I begin to understand just why Dave is so widely and enthusiastically ridiculed by everyone who isn't a pro-Dembski Uncommon Descent regular. Remember, people, if you're white, and you are not in the company of at least one racial minority at all times and in all circumstances, you are just as racist as someone who openly mocks the appearance of a non-white person.

DaveScot's further comments are a fusillade of disingenuousness and outright dishonesty. He claims to be agnostic, but then how to explain this post in which he exhorts his readers to pray for the people partaking in the Blasphemy Challenge, who are "giving up their immortal souls on a dare... I’m not rationally convinced we have immortal souls to give up but certainly the possibility exists... Please join me in a simple prayer for the young victims of this stunt."

Um, pray to whom about what, exactly, Dave, if you're an agnostic who isn't "rationally" convinced there are even such things as souls? Either you think these people are placing themselves at risk of divine wrath or you don't. As your post indicates you do, then your claims of nonbelief are as truth-challenged as most everything else you've said.

Dave then makes the usual persecution claims about ID.

If ID wasn't made into a strawman by anti-religionists more people might realize it fits fine with an atheist view like mine and even yours... Acknowledging the possibility that life and the universe doesn't just have the appearance of design but is actually designed is not anti-atheist.

The whine that ID is constantly misrepresented by the Evil Atheist Conspiracy has been dead and buried for so long it's nearly a fossil itself. Exactly how is ID made a strawman? As DaveScot goes on to say, ID has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, nosiree bob, no way, not at all. This is all just lies, lies, lies. ID doesn't specify a creator, you see. It merely points out that the universe and life on earth appear to be designed, and leaves the question of who/what the designing agent is open.

Never mind, of course, the very words of DaveScot's good friend Dembski himself (via Wikiquote):

"If we take seriously the word-flesh Christology of Chalcedon (i.e. the doctrine that Christ is fully human and fully divine) and view Christ as the telos toward which God is drawing the whole of creation, then any view of the sciences that leaves Christ out of the picture must be seen as fundamentally deficient."

"Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him." —both taken from Dembski's 1999 book Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology

Oh yes, let's also overlook the fact that the Kitzmiller trial demonstrated conclusively that ID is nothing more than warmed-over traditional Christian creationism, by contrasting earlier editions of the creationist "textbook" Of Pandas and People with later editions, and showing that the word "creationism" and its variants had simply been replaced with "intelligent design". (From The Panda's Thumb)

Creation means that various forms of life began abruptly through the agency of an intelligent Creator with their distinctive features already intact–fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc. (Pandas 1987, creationist version, FTE 4996-4997, pp. 2-14, 2-15)

Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact – fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc. (Pandas 1993, 2nd edition, published, pp. 99-100)

Finally, let's get back to that old fave rave, The Wedge Strategy, a document whose authenticity the Discovery Institute has fully fessed up to, and which lays the religious agenda of the intelligent design movement as bare as Jenna Jameson's ass.

But still you have guys like DaveScot, out trying to sell the idea that ID has no relationship to religion at all, either unaware or indifferent to the fact that the jig has long been up, and no one's buying what he's selling. So we're meant to swallow the idea that the intelligent designer of the universe isn't really God, just — to paraphrase the hilarious snark from Jon Stewart — some being with the skillset to design and create a universe. And anyone who says different is just an anti-religionist making up strawmen. Got it.

But you might want to fill Bill in before he writes another book. Talk it over with him next time you get together at his Nebraska beach house.