ImagesandWords writes:
quote:
If you are as familiar with the issue as you portray you must admit that there is enough intellectual dishonesty to go around.
No, I don't have to admit that at all. In fact, I expressly and flatly deny it. The overwhelming majority of intellectual dishonesty is coming from the creationist side of the table. Why? Because they routinely refuse to provide any evidence of their claims or methodology to back them up. There is a reason that you don't find any creationist articles in the journals. It isn't because of a Vast Conspiracy to Suppress the Truth (C). It's because they simply don't have the goods.
And while I agree on a certain level that using the courts to determine a science question borders on the absurd, there is something to be had by the process. That is, it allows us to do a meta-analysis of what the state of the science is. This is a common process in medical investigations where you take a look at the various independent studies, examine them for commonalities, and see if there is some sort of pattern to the results.
The Dover trial was very telling in this way. Behe, an actual molecular biologist who has been published, was shown to be less than honest when it comes to his claims. He insists that there is no data on certain subjects, no papers published, no studies, nothing.
Well, it turns out that the most insignificant search of the literature would have shown that to be wrong. When Behe was on the stand and made this claim, the opposing counsel started bringing out the papers Behe claimed didn't exist and put them on the witness stand in front of Behe. They ended up piling so high that Behe had to ask that they be removed because he was having a hard time seeing.
This is the sort of intellectual dishonesty that comes from the creationist camp. They are continually chanting the mantra of "Teach the controversy!" as if there were any controversy to teach. It isn't that science has all the answers to all the questions. It's that the questions we have concern the details of
how evolution took place, not
if. There is a difference between two mathematicians arguing over whether the six millionth decimal of pi is a 2 or not and them arguing over whether pi is an integer.
When you have one side of the question bringing forth mountains of evidence and the other side blithely insisting that none of it exists and providing no evidence of their own, how is a person who is not aware of the work of scientists and is not experienced enough in the workings of science to know how to find out what evidence exists supposed to make a decision?
This relates to my signature and the ridiculousness of the request coming from the creationist side of the table: That we are somehow supposed to entrust our intellectual rigor to seventh-graders. That if can't be understood by a junior high school student, then it clearly isn't legit science.
Science is hard. And there's a lot of it. It takes more effort than most people are willing to put into it in order to become proficient in just a single subject area. Why would anybody want us to lie about the state of the science?
Rrhain
Thank you for your submission to
Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.
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