By ROGER EBERT - ROGER EBERT'S JOURNAL
Added: Sat, 05 Sep 2009 23:00:00 UTC

Thanks to scarecroe for the link.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/09/the_longest_thread_evolves.html

A week or so ago I began to receive feedback that posts weren't being displayed on my entry "Win Ben Stein's Mind," from Dec. 3, 2008. That was my attack on Stein's film "Expelled," which supported Creationism against the Theory of Evolution. I consulted the web gods at the Sun-Times. I was told...uh...ahem...perhaps the thread was growing a tad long, and was maxing out the software? After 2,640 posts and 239,093 words, perhaps this was the case.

Today I received a post from one of the stalwart debaters on that thread, Much Aloha Bill, advising: "Put this puppy to sleep. It's had a long run." A few days earlier, Randy Masters, the most stalwart defender of Intelligent Design, had written to advise that a couple of his posts hadn't gone through. And so perhaps Movable Type was gently informing me that enough was enough.

I was interested in the discussion right up to the end. Remember, I personally vet every post, and so even though I was rarely responding in the last few months, I was still monitoring. It seemed to me the Evolutionists had won, but then I announced that decision last February, in an entry titled, "Darwin Survives as the Fittest." After all, I have a horse in this race. I believe Darwin's theory is not only sound, but is perhaps the most useful theory in the history of science.

It must be said that Randy Masters debated heroically. He made no attempt to associate himself with the fundamentalists who had, higher in the thread, seriously argued that dinosaurs walked the earth with man and other such poppycock. Drawing from such I.D. defenders such as Michael J. Behe, William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells, he employed examples of organisms which, in his opinion, could not have evolved, but must have been Intelligently Designed. He was battered by the Darwinians but pulled himself up by the ropes and stepped back into the ring time and again.
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http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/09/the_longest_thread_evolves.html

TAGGED: COMMENTARY, EVOLUTION, MOVIES