DaveScot at Uncommon Descent is now blaming judges for the lack of scientific research in intelligent design:
What’s standing in the way of ID is the judicial system and most of that is prejudicial i.e. the judge sits on the bench with a preconceived notion that ID is not science and the Darwinian fairy tale is as strong as the theory of gravity.
and in a later comment on the same thread
Can researchers get public funding for ID research so long as it’s legally considered a religion? Will any kids grow up to be ID researchers if they’ve been brainwashed in public school into thinking NDE is uncontested fact? Take all the time you need to arrive at the correct answer.
Poor ID scientists. If only they could get some money then we'd see some real research.
Then again maybe there is ID research going on and we just don't see it, since in the very next comment he writes
It needs to be pointed out that ID relies on exactly the same data that NDE is built upon.
Data is not owned by any particular theory.
Francis Crick wasn’t out to test ID theory but his discovery that DNA incorporates a digital code that is translated into instructions for a protein assembling machine (ribosome) is perhaps the most compelling bit of evidence in existence for intelligent design theory. It certainly is for me since my expertise partially lies in digital process controls used in factory automation.
All biology, paleontology, genetic, biochemical, and related reasearch is thus ID research because ID relies on evidence without regard to who found the evidence or what they were looking for when they discovered it.
I feel your pain in that if you do the research you feel entitled to keep it from being employed by contrary hypotheses but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. The evidence is available to everyone. Get used to it.
Wait, wait. How the heck does this work? On the one hand the judicial system is blocking ID research funding (how a judge gets involved in NSF or other funding agencies isn't made clear), but then again, every piece of research is ID research. The only way these two positions can be reconciled without calling DaveScot an idiot is to say that there is no research funding at all! Of course there is research being funded, so we're left with the obvious conclusion...
The fact is, there are several places that an ID proponent could apply for funding, including the Discovery Institute. And what's more, an ID proponent could even apply for funding from the NSF or other traditional sources as long as he had an actual research program to fund. Heck, they have even claimed a recent mainstream article as supporting intelligent design. How about carrying out more of that kind of research instead of sitting around carping about not being funded when you haven't even proposed a project to fund?
UPDATE: DaveScot now claims that the Discovery Institute doesn't have enough money to fund research, saying that the DI's budget of 1.2 million dollars "isn’t enough to keep even a single modest research lab equipped, staffed, and running for a year." I find that hard to believe, as well as not especially dispositive of the overall point.
For one, much of the research done by the NSF is carried out in academia, where the institution also pays to support the researcher(s), equip the lab, and provide incidental funding (in exchange, of course, for that most menial of tasks: teaching). We're not talking about starting a lab from whole cloth. How about getting one project funded, produce some results, and then go from there? Hey! That's science!
Further, the median research award by the NSF in the biological sciences in FY 2007 was \$148,000 (a year, for about three years) (see the BIO Performance Indicators spreadsheet at this page). That's the median. So let's assume that a proposal could be funded for about 2/3 of that, say \$100,000. Could the Discovery Institute afford to chip in \$100,000 a year for three years? I suspect so, especially when it pays its fellows on the order of \$50,000. Cut a couple of 'fellows' and you have yourself a research grant. Couldn't we find two of them willing to make the sacrifice in the name of science? (Elsberry has more to say about their budget.)
Or, even better, an ID 'researcher' could apply at any number of other private funding sources, including the Templeton Foundation. Heck, at Templeton they are already funding some projects "to stimulate and sponsor new research insights directly pertinent to the 'great debate' over purpose in the context of the emergence of increasing biological complexity, ranging from the biochemical level to the evolution of life and the emergence of society and culture."
And I still think the NSF would fund proposals if they were, you know, actually scientific.