Oh not this 'what debate?' pretend stuff again.
Look, there is a whole industry around books on both sides, as well as court cases.
Arguments from inappropriate analogies are embarassing. I agree.
Daniel C. Dennett's essay The Hoax of Intelligent Design and How It Was Perpetrated in the book Intelligent Thought: Science Versus the Intelligent Design Movement pgs 39-41
The campaigners for intelligent design have become adept at feeding off the difficulty of this idea, by starting with a straightforward counterclaim and then retreating into the fog of technical confusion when their counterclaims are refuted. For instance, the philosopher William Dembski, one of the two most prominent ideologues of the ID movement, has attempted to argue that a particular sort of design product does require an intelligent designer, and that the designs found in nature include such products, but his various expressions of the argument to date, which depend on some rather abstruse mathematical formulations, have been show to be technically flawed. Few, if any, theoreticians give his project any hope of success, since the flaws they have uncovered are central to his thesis.
...
How can non-scientists assess their own judgement in this case? Not by trusting wishful thinking. If you can just see that Dembski must be onto something even thought you can't follow the mathematics, you are falling right into the trap. ... Perhaps, then, you should wait with bated breath on the sidelines while the experts duke it out in the scientific arena. This would be fine, except that Dembski has left the playing field and is appealing directly to the spectators, instead of contending with the scientists on their own terms.
In his trade books, magazine articles, and popular lectures, Dembski makes it appear that there is scientific controversy - but there isn't, as we can see by comparing his path with others. ... Instead, he and his cohorts use a ploy that works like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work, provoking an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence there is a "controversy" to teach.
Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. ... And here is the delicious part:You can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point amid all the difficult details. ... Clever! What looks to scientists - and is - a knockout objection by Dr. Schneider is portrayed to almost everyone else as ridiculous hairsplitting.
