Whether or not PZ Myers and Daniel Dennett were themselves guilty of this in their talks, the opinion piece by Leah Baird conflated generic creationism, so-called scientific creationism, the intelligent design movement, generic design and the Bible. Such a strategy makes it easy to present a straw man argument (i.e. just debunk one group's arguments and imply that it applies to all these groups).

 

Many advocates of these positions strongly object to being lumped with another group whose particular claims they reject.

 

Proving the scientific theory of evolution would not disprove design. Any attempt to disprove design is doomed to fail since one's failure to discern design does not mean that it does not exist.

 

Gordon Brown
Pullman resident