The other day I congratulated Tom Gilson, proprietor of the Thinking Christian blog, for summarizing in a paragraph the gist of Stephen Meyer’s case in his debate with Lawrence Krauss. Gilson also said:

Krauss, eager to do battle with a straw man…, insisted that [“God of the gaps”] was what ID was about, and ridiculed Meyer (and all of ID) for it. Krauss made the same kind of mistake repeatedly. For example, after Meyer made the point — absolutely uncontroversial among mainstream biologists — that some of evolution’s processes must be random, Krauss ridiculed him for claiming that everything in evolution is random. It’s an easy claim to ridicule, except that (as he underscored in a later blog post) Meyer doesn’t believe the claim and never said it.

Gilson’s main point was that Darwinists predictably go after straw-man versions of ID — “God of the gaps,” aka “Goddidit,” etc. I would add that another, related habit they have is to avoid grappling directly with ID’s main theorists.

With that in mind, here’s a post by atheist biologist PZ Myers. It’s snide as always, and that’s fine. It’s his schtick. There is the expected accompanying image macro, this one with a picture of Mike Myers/Dr. Evil with a humorous caption. Dr. Myers comments on my post thanking Mr. Gilson for his thumbnail sketch of what Dr. Meyer said about, among other things, the massive challenge of protein evolution that relies on unguided natural processes alone. In his article, Gilson refers to a post by Meyer sharply taking issue on that with Richard Dawkins, who took issue with Dr. Meyer on the same question (“Dawkins’s Dilemma: Misrepresent the Mechanism…or Face the Math“).

Now guess. Besides characterizing ID in the usual cartoon terms (“magic man done it”), do you think Myers chose to grapple with Tom Gilson…or with Stephen Meyer himself? Of course! He’s goes after Mr. Gilson’s formulation. Myers totally bypasses Steve Meyer’s highly germane response to Dawkins. He also ignores Paul Nelson’s response to Dawkins, and a further response from geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig.

Why would this be? Instead of arguing with these figures in the world of ID science and scholarship, he argues with Tom Gilson‘s paragraph. I could understand, if it were a choice between fighting with a book-length treatment of an ID argument, or with an article or blog post, then there are only so many hours in a day. You could justify responding to the article over the book. But these are all relatively short, digestible articles we’re talking about. And from Gilson’s article, Meyer’s reply to Dawkins was one click away.

It’s always the habit of ID’s top scholars, given the choice, to argue directly with the leading scientific advocates of the competing theory. It’s the preference of Darwin’s partisans to avoid doing the same.

You understand, I mean no disrespect at all to Tom Gilson. Far from it — I admire his thoughtful writing. But let me try to imagine Stephen Meyer evading a chance to engage with Dawkins or Krauss and instead taking to the Internet to try to wrestle to the ground a paragraph in a post by a hypothetical blogger, the Thinking Atheist. Trying hard, but sorry…I can’t do it.

Image credit: © James Steidl / Dollar Photo Club.