The Smug Baldy Speaks

In the good old days, the blind led the blind, and even so, snake-oil salesmen were relatively easy to spot. Now the snake-oil is well marketed by cool-looking websites like Overwhelming Evidence, where kids are encouraged to, “communicate their views on intelligent design and evolution”.

Indeed, OE puts the power in student’s hands”

We believe that today’s students are smarter than for which [sic] they are given credit and that rather than being told what to believe, they have the ability to explore the range of possibilities and figure out what to believe on their own.

Presumably, from all this exploring the range of possibilities and communication of student’s views, some sort of truth will emerge, much as Shakespeare’s works were expected to emerge from having a bunch of monkeys typing on computers. Much like the flawed infinite monkey theory, what you get on Overwhelming Evidence looks a lot like something excreted from a monkey.

Case in point, is this post on Respectful Insolence, about a looney OE post about the Steorn Infinite Energy Machine. Hmm … infinite energy, from nowhere. If that sounds familiar, it should, because the idea of infinite energy has been around forever. Recently, we had a huckster here in Alabama touting his own perpetual energy car. That a ID blogger would fall for an infinite energy scam, claiming that it not only shows that current understanding of thermodynamics is completely wrong, but that it somehow supports the religious “theory” of intelligent design, is enough for Orac at Respectful Insolence to conclude:

However, the stuff posted there is so out there, so idiotic, that I’m still not entirely sure that OE isn’t a huge hoax put on by “materialists” in order to mock ID creationists!

Now, there’s a conspiracy worth theorizing about.