A Slate article chronicles how intelligent design advocates have come to identify with Galileo, the 17th-century scientist who was rebuffed by the Church for saying the Earth went around the sun. The analogy hinges on a recent statement by a Vatican official rejecting the claims of intelligent design, and the logic goes like this: If we have a new idea and the Roman Catholic Church disses it, then we are like Galileo, whose new idea the Church also dissed. Galileo’s theory turned out to be true. Ergo, ours may too.

The holes in this logic–for one, that Galileo represented scientific claims against religion ones and intelligent design the opposite–are so gaping as to make them admirable.