Darwinist Richard Dawkins' speech at Kansas Univ.

A Lawrence Journal-World news report on Richard Dawkins' recent speech at KU said,

“I know you here are in the front-line trench against powerful forces of darkness,” Dawkins told a more-than-full audience at Kansas University’s Lied Center Monday night. “I salute the science teachers of Kansas. Fight the good fight.”

The good fight, Dawkins said, was one in favor of the science of evolution rather than the “rotten logic” of intelligent design and creationism, he said.

Wow -- "powerful forces of darkness." And the Darwinists condemn the fundies for pushing those Darwin-to-Hitler theories!

And "rotten logic" of intelligent design and creationism? There is "good" logic and "bad" logic, that sort of thing, but "rotten" logic? Dawkins is really getting desperate.

BTW, the LJW report falsely identifies Dawkins as a physicist -- he is an evolutionary biologist.

“I.D. is granted immunity from the rigorous standards of science,” he said.

Wrong. ID, unlike Darwinism, makes no claims beyond what can be demonstrated by science.

Those gaps in theories are what scientists fill with research, with their lives’ work. It’s also what creationists and intelligent design proponents fill with a divine being.

“If you don’t understand something, forget it,” Dawkins said. “Just say God did it. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away.”

ID and other scientific criticisms of evolution theory actually spur scientific research by forcing scientists to confront weaknesses in the theory. For example, research to determine possible evolutionary pathways for irreducibly complex systems is really ID research or ID-inspired research. Suppression of scientific criticism of evolution theory is anti-science and anti-intellectual.

The Red State Rabble reported,

Early on in his talk, Dawkins cited British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle as saying that the probability of producing life from evolutionary processes was about same as finding that a fully operational Boeing 747 jumbo jet had been assembled by a tornado passing through a junkyard.

Turning that argument back on itself, Dawkins observed that any designer must be at least as complex as the objects designed.

"God," Dawkins said to loud applause, "is the ultimate 747."

An atheist saying, "god is the ultimate 747"? That is strange.

One blogger reported that infamous KU Prof. Paul Mirecki was in attendance. Mirecki wrote on a semi-public Internet forum that his new course describing ID and creationism as "mythologies" would be a "nice slap in the big fat face of the fundies." Mirecki's misadventures are described in several articles in the "Evolution in Kansas" series of Lawrence Journal-World.

Dawkins' speech at KU is also discussed here, here, and here.