Posted on by David

Not a fisk, but a lament, and maybe a bit of a rant…

It’s the little things: conflation (compounded with “straw man”), assuming the predicate, ad hominem (compounded by “poisoning the well”),  fallacy of composition,  and just plain getting the facts wrong…
 
…and all in one post!  That’s quite an achievement!  Of course, when I offered an opportunity for the post’s author to correct his facts, he avoided doing his homework and simply commented back that the statement I criticized was right.  Apparently without bothering to even check the pedigree his “facts”.
 
*sigh* Sad to see, really.
 
What am I talking about?  This post, where the author inaccurately conflates Intelligent Design with Creationism. 
 
[Just deleted a rather long post dealing with the issue of the poor argument in the post referenced above.  Unecessary. So, the bit of a rant, deleted.]
 
The Politburo Dictat contributor “Stephen” makes an assertion.  The “Comissar” backs the assertion up with one citation of a self-proclaimed Intelligent Design team.  All that is necessary to falsify the assertion that Creationism=Intelligent Design is one case in exception.
 
I offer: the  father of the Big Bang theory , Sir Fred Hoyle, confirmed agnostic. [I don’t know why I said that.  Stupid slip. Everyone knows Fred Hoyle coined the term “Big Bang” in one of his flip, over-the-top moments summing up some of his mathematical arguments detailing problems with the theory, while noting that the Steady State model he preferred addressed those issues. Famous story.  Silly of me. BTW, the problems he noted have only recently begun to be addressed by “Big Bang” proponents in modifications to the theory that are eerily… Hoyle-like.  heh]
 
Fred Hoyle was smart enough to seriously push the envelope of human knowledge—it’s why he was “Sir”-ed, you know—but he was often snarky enough to go a little too far in making provocative statements, as some of Intelligent Universe demonstrates.  At least he succeeded in provoking a lot of thought on the subject. Though not much by either creationists or the current crop of evolutionists, IMO. Still, Hoyle and many other thinking about the subject of intelligent design creationists?  In a pig’s eye. Indeed, Hoyle’s proposal of a panspermia hypothesis for the genesis of life on earth is as much anathema to creationists as his mathematical analysis of evolutionary theories is to evolutionists. See:
 
 
Admittedly, the various intelligent design discussions do seem to have greeater numbers of religious folk—not all from Judeo-Christian backgrounds, BTW—but their voice is no more respected in the discussions than that of scientists and philosophers. Of course, “greater numbers” of folks who have any religion except for post-modern accedie would be hard to come by in current evolutionary circles. (As would discussions of epistomology—a frequent topic as far as I can tell in intelligent design circles—which would fall flat on the ears of those who cannot, or will not, even see when they commit an error of conflation, eh?)
 
Ignorance is easy to remedy. But “…against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.”
 
 
Here’s an example of the kind of disingenuity among some creationists that’s as annoying as the dishonest polemic I lament above. From a Creationist site that I hesitated to link because it’s just so damned annoying *sigh*:
 
“In contrast, two of England’s leading evolutionary scientists, *Hoyle and *Wickramasinghe, working independently of each other, came to a different conclusion than *Bernal’s: The chance of life appearing spontaneously from non-life in the universe is effectively zero! (*Fred Hoyle and *C. Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space ). One of these researchers is an agnostic and the other a Buddhist, yet both decided from their analyses that the origin of life demands the existence of God to have created it.” [emphasis added]
 
Now, that’s a damed lie.  Not just an inaccuracy: a lie. Hoyle for one never said any such thing. And any “god” Wickramasinghe may have mentioned (although I can’t recall it or find authoritative references to a such statement) would certainly not have been the deity the author of the quoted paragraph was referring to.
 
Blech.  A pox on the creationists and the evolutionists.
 
 

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