Creationists often pretend that getting criticism that points out their ideas are completely invalid is a validation. It's enough that they can get a scientist into a debate; even if they are hopelessly outclassed, babble and lie and treat a scientific debate as if it were a tent revival, they will afterwards strut and preen and pretend that their participation alone makes them a legitimate member of the scientific community. Dawkins made this point in his essay, "Why I won't debate creationists",
Sometime in the 1980s when I was on a visit to the United States, a television station wanted to stage a debate between me and a prominent creationist called, I think, Duane P Gish. I telephoned Stephen Gould for advice. He was friendly and decisive: "Don't do it." The point is not, he said, whether or not you would "win" the debate. Winning is not what the creationists realistically aspire to. For them, it is sufficient that the debate happens at all. They need the publicity. We don't. To the gullible public that is their natural constituency, it is enough that their man is seen sharing a platform with a real scientist. "There must be something in creationism, or Dr. So-and-So would not have agreed to debate it on equal terms." Inevitably, when you turn down the invitation, you will be accused of cowardice or of inability to defend your own beliefs. But that is better than supplying the creationists with what they crave: the oxygen of respectability in the world of real science.
Well, now Francis Beckwith has now fallen squarely into that good ol' creationist tradition of crowing triumph where there is none.
Contine reading "What's that whining noise?" (on Pharyngula)
6 Comments
Frank Schmidt · 30 March 2004
I used to think the creationist-propagandists were merely misguided until I met one. Now I conclude (in the absence of strong evidence to the contrary) that they are deliberate frauds.
Loren Petrich · 30 March 2004
Consider the case of Andrew Snelling, who gives new meaning to the term two-faced. He's both a professional geologist, old earth and all, and a young-earth Flood Geologist(!)
Or consider the case of Jonathan Wells, who claimed in Icons of Evolution that he became skeptical of evolution in graduate school, but who also claimed to his fellow Moonies that he entered graduate school in order to destroy Darwinism from within. His church is known for disguising its identity with numerous front groups -- and for having a doctrine of "heavenly deception". So could Jonathan Wells be doing some of that?
Jim Harrison · 30 March 2004
Scientists have a hard time dealing with Creationists because they aren't used to taking into account the likelihood of fraud. Nature isn't trying to fool anybody. Hence the helplessness of the innocents when suddenly confronted with the miracle of unscrupulousness.
I knew a computer science grad student at Carnegie-Mellon who devised a brilliant poker playing program that could beat all comers. It took the local profs a very long time to realize that the machine systematically cheated.
RBH · 30 March 2004
It's the same with investigations of parapsychology. There are scientists who have made complete fools of themselves in that field. One of the saddest examples was a quite distinguished British physicist, whose name I have completely blocked, who was taken for a ride a couple of decades ago by children who could purportedly bend metal slips enclosed in glass tubes. Of course, when they thought they were unobserved the children were surreptitiously opening the tubes, bending the metal by main force, reinserting the bent metal in the tubes, and then triumphantly presenting them to the "investigator." As I recall, equally surreptitious observation of the children by some dour doubting Thomas caught them at it.
I'm going to have to hunt that up again. It may be instructive.
RBH
Dave · 31 March 2004
"Although the intelligent design movement (IDM) is small, certain recent events seem to signal its growing importance, though the verdict is still out: the controversy over the Harvard Law Review book note of my monograph, the creation (pardon the pun) of a blog by a group of serious scientists who disagree with ID, the publication of Creationism's Trojan Horse (Oxford University Press, 2004), God, the Devil, and Darwin: A Critique of Intelligent Design Theory (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Why Intelligent Design Fails (Rutgers University Press, 2004) (three books critical of ID) as well as the publication of the book edited by two ID advocates (which includes opposing views as well), Darwin, Design, and Public Education (Michigan State University Press, 2003) and the forthcoming book edited by Michael Ruse (ID opponent) and William A. Dembski (ID proponent), Debating Design: From DNA to Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 2004)."
Although the number of criminals in the United States is still small, certain recent events seem to signal its importance: The growing number of prisons, increased attention to criminals from state and federal governments and increased length of sentences.
Steve Reuland · 31 March 2004