Intelligent design

Dispassionate he’s not. In his recent book on evolution and the “big questions,” David Stamos tried to show how evolution can answer all the big questions of existence, far better than ID, for sure. Intelligent design is not “genuine science” but instead “essentially mythological thinking masquerading in a lab coat. It is the attempt to take a way of thinking common to frightened and ignorant peoples living in pre-scientific societies [like, what, Africans ?], a way of thinking possibly rooted deeply in human nature, and to make it intellectually respectable.”

Stamos is a philosopher, but you wouldn’t know it from this passage. But then he later says that “many philosophers and scientists” think that religion does more harm that good, citing Bertrand Russell and Christopher Hitchens. Since Hitchens is no scientist, he must be a philosopher, and once we know that Stamos considers Hitchens a philosopher his own philosophical style makes much more sense.