Are the bulk of ID and Wedge arguments little more than the Chewbacca Defense?

Are the vast bulk of ID arguments and ID wedge strategies little more than the Chewbacca Defense? At first look, the above might seem absurd. The idea of a Chewbacca Defense is easy to dismiss due to its source. Still, animated shows like South Park and the Simpsons excel at social commentary.Chewbacca Defense is a satirized account of Johnnie Cochran’s defense during O.J. Simpson murder trial.One writer has defined the Chewbacca Defense as "D" is for Diabolical | HuffPost Latest News>"someone asserts his claim by saying something so patently nonsensical that the listener's brain shuts down completely” I disagree with this description, though I grant it may be an sometime secondary effect of the defense. The Chewbacca Defense, I think, is better defined as an intentional obfuscation of an argument to create confusion for the purpose of allowing those viewing the argument to be able to rationalize away any legitimacy of the argument. In short, manufacture confusion so that one can point to and exploit the manufactured confusion and claim that the manufactured confusion amounts to reasonable doubt.A couple of more recent ID arguments which constitute Chewbacca Defenses:

The ”Wedge Strategy’ and ”Teaching the Controversy’ are Chewbacca Defenses because instead of focusing on the actual scientific arguments in favor of the Theory of Evolution, the Chewbacca Defense instead seeks to create and exploit manufactured confusion for the purpose of reframing the question away from any scientific validity.I have to ask, “Is it not fair to start pointing out that these wedge strategies are little more than lawyer and political tricks and it is not potentially beneficial to call it the Chewbacca Defense rather than or at least in conjunction with the less accessible ”fallacies’?” After all the average person understands lawyer and political tricks far more then they understand logical fallacies.Edited by Trae, : Refinded the OP.

Is that more what you were looking for?

Agreed.I think the Expelled movie is more of the same. I guess my question to you would be, “If the IDers are refining their attacks are the methods of science proponents well-suited to this particular challenge?”

True. I don’t think the science establishment is particularly helpful. We and they can claim that certain terms have specific meanings, such as theory, but I regularly see those same terms stretched to be near meaningless by scientists themselves. It certainly isn’t hard to find a nova documentary which has some person implying a ”theory’ is something one can just come up with. Discovery Channel and History channel’s screening process seems even worse. I’m not sure what they wouldn’t present as science.Perhaps the better solution is not to try to talk two different languages while spending so much effort trying to translate the entire discussion into science. Perhaps as much of the discussion as possible should be in populist terms.Whenever we take the discussion away from what science knows into hair splitting terminology and logical arguments we simply setup a possible Chewbacca defense. Which is a better counter to the Chewbacca defense, “Science never knows anything for certain” or “The Theory of Evolution is as certain as pretty much anything else in science” in terms of explaining what is meant by scientific certainty?

quote:

---

What I would try to do, then, is try to explain to the lay person that 100% certainty is impossible to achieve, period.

---

I would suggest that concept of 100% certainty muddies a layman’s explanation. It shifts the discussion away from what is known to what is unknown. Yes it is valid in certain situations, but in others it is simply diversionary.