Sadly they are needed to counter arguements made by creationists/intelligent design people. There have been major pushes (some successful and some decisions pending) in allowing the ID ideas taught in school. So we would need people to write articles like that to counter the BS taught in school.

What's really messed up is that science classes always emphasize the idea of scientific methodology. With ID being taught in school, you destroy all that work by saying that you use scientific methodology with everything except this since creationism will be taught in science classes. Blah