I have a new article up at The Panda’s Thumb, about intelligent design founder William Dembski and what his opinions regarding COVID-19 reveal about the ID movement. An excerpt:
His rather detached attitude to the question of the virus’s origin is curious given his self-proclaimed status as one of the world’s leading experts in detecting “design” in nature. It would seem if he really believed his own promotional material, he would be volunteering his services and expertise to help answer a question that has been at the forefront of the single gravest issue facing humanity at this moment: Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from? Surely Bill Dembski can delay his quest to become a cryptocurrency billionaire for just a few days while he helps save the human race, no? Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark do it all the time.
For some reason I forgot to include this in my last post, but I think it is sufficiently entertaining and revealing to warrant a post all to itself. Birger Sorensen (above left) is chairman of Bionor, a company trying to develop a vaccine for HIV. He has been involved in the development of several patented vaccines. Angus Dalgleish (above right) is an oncologist at Cancer Center London. His main research interests are the role of viruses in causing cancer and the development of vaccines against cancer. These two men do not believe SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19, arose naturally. Instead, they believe it was deliberately created by labs in China.
It is not surprising that, when a cataclysmic event like the current SARS-C0V-2 (COVID-19) pandemic occurs, crackpot ideas and conspiracy theories soon follow. Not long after the pandemic was declared claims began circulating that it was caused by 5G wireless signals or that it was a plot to install microchips into the global population. Ideas of such absurdity, persistent though they may be, can be summarily dismissed as the nonsense they are.
One particular claim, however, has not been so easily dismissed. While experts consider it most likely that the virus arose naturally in bats and was then passed on to humans thru another, as yet unidentified, animal host, there is an alternative scenario that continues to draw attention and support: That the virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan province where the pandemic first started. In some versions of the theory, the virus was the result of “gain of function” experiments that increased the lethality of the virus before its escape into the population. An early backer of this theory was Donald Trump, which was only to be expected given his penchant for unhinged conspiracy theories as well as his antipathy towards China. But the lab leak theory has continued to gain traction even among respectable and well-regarded media outlets and authorities. A number of scientists wrote a letter to Science demanding that this possibility be more strongly considered, and the Biden administration has ordered its intelligence agencies to investigate the possibility that the pandemic could have originated from a lab accident.
