THE DISCOVERY INSTITUTE IS ALL ATWITTER over a French game show. The audience was polled on which heavenly body orbits the earth, the sun or the moon. To the misfortune of the contestant, the majority of the audience was pre-Copernican.

I’m not sure what problem this poses for DI, because the question can only be resolved by empirical methods eschewed by the Discoverers. I have been assured by proponents of Intelligent Design that all frames of reference are equivalent, and the earth could well be the center of the universe. Science is a reading imposed by white Anglo -Saxon males, and just the other day I learned that, “Science and higher math (beyond simple arithmetic) are the same in China, Pakistan, Iran, Brazil, Canada and the United States, precisely because they were spread by Western style institutions”.

Here’s an idea for a game show. Ben Stein, flush with the proceeds from his latest movie, goes back into television, hosting an all star science gladiatorial brawl along the lines of Battlebots, but without the Plexiglas. We’ll call the show, Eat Ben Stein’s Lunch.

Much noise has been made on the subject of debates. Folks of the Design persuasion seem to think Evilutionists will not debate them in public. A few did in Oklahoma the other day, ganging up on Bill Dembski, who was armed only with his flagellum.

Now that’s entertainment. No rules. No moderators. No time limits. Plenty of whiteboards. To the pain.

What we need is a weekly one on one confrontation: two guys or gals, locked in a room together, armed to the teeth with dry markers and erasers.

Ben could captain a team and select his champions from among the vast universe of lawyers, English majors and moon units plotting the overthrow of empiricism, materialism, methodological naturalism and evolution.

In the other corner, Richard Dawkins could choose his champions from a cross section of atheistic, homosexual loving, Marxist, God hating denizens of mainstream science. Both captains would know the topic of the match before choosing their champions.

There is really nothing more entertaining than a knock-down drag-out fight, and nothing seems to capture the public’s imagination like Satan vs. No-Kin-To-Monkeys.

I’m thinking about some big prize money. Ben will be swimming in money from the box office of his new movie. Let’s see him ante up some real incentive money, say the price of a presidential candidate’s haircut. Each team starts with half the prize, and forfeits a chunk to the other side for each inexcusable intellectual offence. When the losses exceed Ben’s ante, the contestants can cover with their own funds.

Let’s say $100 fine for each instance quote mining, $200 for each instance of argumentum ad baculum, $400 for invoking the cosmological argument, $800 for arguing from consequences, and $2000 for failure to convert units to metric. The contest ends when one of the contestants is broke. Winner takes the pot.

Anyone claiming that ID makes no reference to God while simultaneously attacking atheistic materialism will forfeit the match.

The transcripts should prove entertaining.

As might the transcripts of Bill’s shootout at the OK Corral.