Mad rantings about politics, evolution, and microbiology. Comment policy: say what you want, but back it up with an email address. I don't like anonymous trolls.
...then they wouldn't have to keep secrets. The remarkable thing about ID creationists (and young earthers too) is that they can't be honest. Because ID creationism has no predictive power (except for the parts where 'standard' evolutionary theory is operative), they are forced to fall back on slogans such as "teach the controversy." Granted, most don't care about science at all, but, instead, want to use ID as a battering ram to further a social and theological agenda. Amanda summarizes this very nicely:
...it's not unusual to hear a story about creationists keeping a shroud of secrecy around their activities and internal communications, because they know full well that if they don't work by subterfuge, they will fail because everyone will know how crazy they are....I'm completely unsurprised that they're afraid to expose it [the movie Expelled] to critics, and would point out that this privileging of the truth of what they really think to true believers is endemic to wingnutty... The anti-choice movement really has two tiers of knowledge: The understanding shared internally that all contraception, premarital sex, and sex education is wrong and the way they portray themselves to outsiders as people who are just very interested in babies.
The greatest con theopolitical conservatives ever pulled was getting their religious views defined as the cultural 'default setting' when, in fact, most people aren't fundamentalist Christians. And the way they did that was by lying.
Gratuitous self-promotion: Speaking of creationism, I'm giving a talk tomorrow at the Boston Skeptics meeting about how to go on the offensive against creationism.
Email this entry to a friend
View the Technorati Link Cosmos for this entry
Comments
But how is Dr. Mike going to "frame" his discussion. Going on the offensive? That might mean being beastly towards creationists and the framing trio of Nisbet, Mooney, and Kirshenbaum might consequently tell Dr. Mike to shut up, just like they tell Dawkins and Myers to shut up.
Posted by: SLC | March 24, 2008 1:30 PM
Speaking of secrets, what has come out of the secret Discovery Institute Laboratory for Secret Research? Wasn't something supposed to be published by now?
Posted by: mark | March 24, 2008 1:38 PM
What does one need to do to "care about science"? I believe that I care about science and yet I'm sure we disagree about the origin of the universe. Is my belief in God prima facie evidence that I don't care about science? I hope not.
OC
www.offensivechristians.com
Posted by: Offensive Christian | March 24, 2008 5:03 PM
OC asked
That's the corner you're defined into by the ID creationist movement, friend. As Bill Dembski says, "As far as design theorists are concerned, theistic evolution is an oxymoron, something like "purposeful purposelessness" " and "Design theorists are no friends of theistic evolution."Posted by: RBH | March 24, 2008 5:09 PM
RBH,
Bill and I have never talked. I'll click in the link above and check it/him out. I'm not a theistic evolutionist (not that Bill thinks that would help) and I'm not a Darwinist, neo or otherwise, so that makes me anti-science? That just doesn't seem fair - I mean science is so big! It seems that there must be a fit for me under some school of science.
I'm earnest in my questions so I hope you don't mind the discussion.
Thanks,
OC
www.offensivechristians.com
Posted by: Offensive Christian | March 24, 2008 9:53 PM
Concern troll alert. Science ain't no mall ("it's so big" - gotta be some flavor to appeal to my existing prejudices). Sorry.
Posted by: jimmybignuts | March 25, 2008 11:59 AM
i'll tell ya, until such time that every first grader knows that the sodium in the salt on their table and the sodium in their body came from exploding stars, we have failed to educate.
Posted by: genesgalore | March 25, 2008 10:11 PM