Mike hits one out of the park:
It took me a while to realize that the 'professional creationists' were not intellectually honest either. I am not referring to those who follow them, or those who are simply not very [knowledgeable] about evolution. .... Everyone can be misinformed, ignorant, or simply have not thought things through correctly. What I will not tolerate is willful ignorance. Creationist leaders and spokesmen are willfully ignorant. How many times do they have to be told what scientists mean by a theory? How many
times will they misstate the basics of evolutionary theory, such as claiming that natural selection is a tautology? The list goes on and on. These creationists have heard the evidence-based rebuttals of their false arguments many times.And these rebuttals did not take. They never take. Creationist speakers continue to repeat these falsehoods even though they have heard the explanations over and over again, to the point where they could probably make the arguments themselves, were they so inclined. And they present themselves as an embattled minority, struggling for the truth. They are quite simply on the wrong side of the evidence, evidence gathered from disparate fields, such as biochemistry, genetics, geology, and physics.
- Log in to post comments
I tried reasoning with one these types, sorry to say that the froend is a former friend . Absolutely no proof can get in, almost exactly the sama as dealing with a Rush Limbaugh fan. Toal waste, and I will try no more.
I posted this to the talk.origins newsgroup on January 28, 1994:
"My approach to rationality accomodates the historians' contentions that many of those who were on the 'wrong side' were epistemically virtuous in at least some respects. Is it too ecumenical?
[...]
"The label 'irrational' is most tempting when behavior that appears to indicate the pursuit of nonepistemic ends is accompanied by professions of devotion to the ideal of cognitive progress. Sometimes people's decision making exhibits deviations from progress-promoting processes that are hard to explain except by supposing that the cognitive goals they explicitly honor are not those that motivate their decisions. The hallmarks of such cases are varieties of inflexibility, blindness or deafness. Thus when scientists continue to defend their assertions by rehearsing the same arguments, even when they have been presented with
criticisms and counterarguments that their contemporaries take extremely seriously, when they neither reply to nor even acknowledge such counterarguments, it seems that we must either credit them with insights that are denied to the multitude or else suppose that the conclusions they maintain are too valuable to be risked by engaging in any kind of dialogue.
"Consider, in this light, the case of 'creation scientists.' Ever since this group of critics of Darwinian evolutionary biology achieved prominence, champions of orthodoxy have wanted to label them as 'pseudoscientists.' The apsychologistic character of twentieth-century philosophy of science influences the formulation of the charge. If creation scientists are pseudo*scientists* that
must be because they defend a pseudo*science*, a doctrine that can be distinguished from genuine science by its logical characteristics. Philosophers shift uneasily at this, because one of the great morals of the demise of logical positivism was the difficulty--or, to put it bluntly, apparent impossibility--of articulating a criterion for distinguishing genuine science (Quine 1951, Hempel 1951). Moreover, a sober look at the history of paleontology will reveal that the creationists effectively espouse what was once scientific consensus, not a scientific consensus that was overthrown by Darwin in 1859 but one that began to erode in the early years of the nineteenth century.
"The apsychologistic point of view has matters exactly backward. There is nothing intrinsically unscientific about the doctrines--no reason to castigate Thomas Burnet, or others who held them, as pseudoscientists. The primary division is a psychological one between *scientists* and *pseudo-scientists*. The behavior of creation scientists indicates a kind of inflexibility, deafness, or blindness. They make an objection to some facet of evolutionary biology. Darwin's defenders respond by suggesting that the objection is misformulated, that it does not attack what Darwinists claim, that it rests on false assumptions, or that it is logically fallacious. How do creation scientists reply? Typically, *by reiterating the argument*. Anyone who has followed exchanges in this controversy or has read the transcripts of a series of debates sees that there is no adaptation to any of the principal criticisms. One important example among many is the creationist use of the second law of thermodynamics. For nearly twenty years, the major exponents of creation science have been declaring that the second law of thermodynamics is incompatible with the evolution of life. Creationists have been in the presence of people who have given lengthy critiques of their objection and there is substantial evidence that their eyes have wandered over some of the pages on which such critiques have been printed. How has their thinking adapted to these critiques? Apparently not at all, for they make no replies to them and continue to present their ideas in exactly the same ways."
--- Philip Kitcher, _The Advancement of Science_, 1993, Oxford University Press, pp. 195-196.