It matters

(Hat tip: Panda's Thumb.)

This post at Questionable Authority was prompted by an article at Tech Central Station.

The TCS article gives five reasons why (the author believes) ID/IOT will win:

1. ID will win because it's a religion-friendly, conservative-friendly, red-state kind of theory, and no one will lose money betting on the success of red-state theories in the next fifty to one hundred years.
2. ID will win because the pro-Darwin crowd is acting like a bunch of losers.
3. ID will win because it can be reconciled with any advance that takes place in biology, whereas Darwinism cannot yield even an inch of ground to ID.
4. ID will win because it can piggyback on the growth of information theory, which will attract the best minds in the world over the next fifty years.
5. ID will win because ID assumes that man will find design in life -- and, as the mind of man is hard-wired to detect design, man will likely find what he seeks.

And not one word about "it's right". Nor, even, in science-speak, "it explains reality better than the competitors do." His arguments boil down to one argument: "ID/IOT will win because so many people want it to be true." Nothing more, nothing less. Kern approaches the "debate" as a battle between faiths, religions, or even prevailing ideological fads. His arguments are valid if, and only if, it doesn't matter which idea is true (or more nearly true).

None of his five arguments address the reason ID/IOT will lose: It doesn't do nearly as good a job of explaining the world around us as evolutionary theory does.

Oh, and Questionable Authority has other things to say about the issue. Read his post, too.