Ignorant, stupid or insane? (Or maybe wicked?)

Sorry, I never did get back to you on this, did I?A few reasons why I think creationists are not deliberate liars.(1) Evidently creationist propaganda fools some people. We can hardly believe in a conspiracy to deceive in which everyone is a liar and no-one is a dupe. So in that case, we have to ask --- if someone such as Kent Hovind can fool other people, is there any reason why he shouldn't have fooled himself? And the answer is that there's no reason in the world why this shouldn't be so --- as Richard Feynman said, you are the easiest person for you to fool.(2) A deliberate and cunning liar is economical with his lies. But this cannot be said of creationist mistakes. For example once a creationist (according to their custom) has made up a bogus theory of evolution, he could shoot it down by citing nothing but real facts; he'd never have to make anything up ever again. Alternatively, one could shoot down the actual theory of evolution using made-up facts. Or then again, having made up stuff proving that evolution didn't happen (e.g. no intermediate forms) it is not necessary to make up stuff that would prove that it couldn't happen (e.g. no beneficial mutations).(3) Indeed, creationists are often gratuitously wrong about subjects which have no real bearing on the subject, such as the Loch Ness Monster. There was a guy on these forums just a few days ago telling us that it wasn't gravity but the Earth's electromagnetic field that keeps us stuck to the Earth. Stuff like this persuades me that they are, as they appear to be, darn fools.(4) We certainly can't suppose a conspiracy to be wrong even amongst the upper echelons of creationism. For there is hardly a single subject on which they can agree. This can be seen most amusingly in their treatment of intermediate forms: every creationist will see the need to shoehorn such a form into classification of one or the other; but they clearly have no mechanism for deciding on which. They can't just get together and toss a coin to decide, because they don't know they're wrong --- they think they're valiant seekers after truth.(5) Most of them make no profit out of it. These surely must be dupes, even if the guys who are making a profit out of it are liars: few people go around lying without some sort of benefit to themselves. But this suggests the more economical hypothesis that the guys who are profiting from it have drunk their own Kool-Aid (see point 1).(6) With very few honorable exceptions, creationists exhibit just the right psychological characteristics necessary to make a man into a fool: they are lazy, credulous, slipshod, and self-conceited.---Now in this analysis I have confined myself merely to what one might call activist creationists --- the people who spend their time actively talking nonsense about science. There must be a much larger number who have just accepted what it says in Genesis because their pastor said so and have never bothered to read, let alone recite, any of the pseudoscientific gibberish with which we are so familiar.

"Dr" Hovind's other delusions bought him ten years in jail. Evidently he doesn't know any better.

Wouldn't that require them to be secret evolutionists? Or at least to have a much, much better grasp of what they're talking about than they let on?But then again we come back to my point (1): they can't all just be trolling, surely? And yet they all look the same from the outside: the same errors of fact, the same errors of reasoning, even the same daft rhetoric. In which case it is more economical to imagine that there is just one kind of creationist than that there are two fundamentally different kinds of creationist both of which look the same from the outside.

Non-existent? You are right so far as that goes: for the theory of evolution would operate in a universe in which fiat creation had taken place 6000 years ago just as it would in a universe of common descent.But the facts of evolution are not a deduction merely from the theory of evolution, but also from the evidence for evolution.

Look, you know that I hold you in the highest esteem of all creationists except perhaps wumpini.But let's look at your own behavior, shall we? Ignorant?OK, let's talk about the post-anal gut thing again.We were discussing embryology, and you brought up the post-anal gut as something that evolution couldn't explain.(1) With a little research on the internet, I showed you how the post-anal gut fitted perfectly with evolutionary biology. You could have done that yourself, but you didn't.(2) You admitted that you got your ideas about the post-anal gut and evolution from a creationist propagandist website. You could have looked at the actual facts revealed by scientists. But you didn't.(3) As our discussion progressed, you revealed that you didn't even know what the post-anal gut is. You asked me to explain it and I drew you a diagram. And that, I think, is the most damning thing of all. You were reciting an argument that you'd found on the internet about the post-anal gut --- without spending a few minutes of your time even finding out what the post-anal gut is. That was something that you needed an evolutionist to explain to you. Ignorant? You needed me to tell you what we were talking about. When it was you who brought the subject up. Insane?Insanity is actually a legal term with no medical basis. A person is "insane" when they are so mentally disturbed that they can't be held legally responsible for their actions. So in that sense, you're not insane.Nonetheless, you might be a little bit crazy, in the informal sense. I mean no personal offense here, I'm just calling it how I see it.You see, every time you come with some creationist argument --- a creationist argument of your own choosing --- it turns out to be bogus. Every time you've pitched me a creationist curveball, I've swung my big bat of facts and hit it out of the park. Sodium deposition; the post-anal gut; the anatomy of Archaeopteryx; what Kimura said --- well, haven't you always been wrong?And yet you still go on believing that you're fundamentally right, even though you turn out to be wrong about everything in particular.This does seem a bit crazy to me. The facts show that I am right in every detail, that you are wrong in every detail, and yet you still think that it is you who sees the "big picture".Someone once said: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". (This quote is often attributed to Einstein, but until someone cites the source, I don't believe that he said it.) But you can see how it applies to you, I hope. You go on reciting stuff that some creationist website has said, and you're proved wrong every time.So yes, you're a little bit crazy.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, that would fall under "ignorant" or "stupid", depending on the circumstances.And there's nothing morally wrong with it. It's a shame for them, of course, that they're missing out on some cool stuff, but then maybe they find different things cool. If they spent the time I spent studying science doing something that they find more rewarding, then that's fine by me.Where it starts to go horribly wrong, of course, is when they start trying to communicate their ignorance, misconceptions and confusion to others, or offer aid and support to those who do. I think that this is somewhat immoral. If someone's going to teach their opinions to others, they have an ethical duty to try to speak the truth; if they are going to support someone else teaching some opinion, they have a duty to try to find out if he's speaking the truth.If they just want to have unexamined opinions of their own, that's fine. But it sure helps.

His God evidently has very small fingers.

No. This is because teaching religion (as opposed to teaching about religion) in schools is against the First Amendment; and because evolution is a fact. Yes. See above. Does this concept of "fairness" include teaching that the Earth is flat alongside teaching that it is round? Teaching Holocaust denial alongside history? Teaching denial that germs cause disease alongside the germ theory of disease? Or does this concept of "fairness" only apply to the bad ideas that you like? So I guess you'll be campaigning to have Muslim imams come and teach at your local Sunday school? The kids need options. Either that or you're engaged in hypocritical special pleading.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, you can. You can teach them creationism all you like. You can even (as I understand it, stop me if I'm wrong) have them sit out science classes in which evolution is taught, thus depriving them of the "options to explore" which were so important to you back in post #56. But I don't see how you get to rewrite the curriculum for everyone because it conflicts with your religious beliefs any more than a geocentrist or a flat-Earther does.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Once again, I should like to ask whether you just wish this principle to apply to you, or whether it should also cover the people who think:* That Bush was behind 9/11
* That income tax is illegal
* That the Earth is flat
* That statute law only applies to corporations
* That black people and white people are different species
* ... and so on ad nauseam.But even if we just make this a special privilege for creationists, we're having to throw away so much more than evolution. Information about the speed of light or what the theory of thermodynamics is will contradict the pet mistakes of certain creationists, and so might lead to controversy around the dinner table.If we only taught children science that conflicted with no creationist argument, we'd be down to electricity. And even then, it is possible to derive the speed of light from Maxwell's laws ...Who knows, indeed, what statements are safe? One chap on these forums tried to base his creationist argument on the claim that the Great Pyramid was built by a completely different civilization than the one that built all the others. That was in his top six creationist arguments. It seems that we can't teach kids about Cheops, lest we run the risk of teaching his kids about Cheops.Another guy based his argument on the proposition that "all earth's creatures have 2 eyes". Now we can't teach kids that spiders have eight eyes, because if his kids get to hear it, it might lead to friction around the dinner table.When almost anything can be the subject of a mistake by someone, what is safe to teach children? Can we at least teach them spelling? No, we can't --- because a really devout King James Onlyist will tell you that, for example, "cloak" should be spelt "cloke", like God spelled it. To say that "cloke" is wrong is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. What's going to happen when he finds out that his children are spelling "cloak" the Devil's way?And yet it is, in the end, desirable that children be educated. Which means, I'm afraid, that we can't allow people like you, no matter how sincerely motivated, to play dog-in-the-manger.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

First, the walls of the Grand Canyon are overwhelmingly sedimentary rock --- limestone, sandstone, and shale. These are not hard rocks.Now, let's have a think about the amount of water involved. Before it was dammed, the flow of the Colorado was 623m/s (the overprecise figure is because of a conversion from imperial to metric). As not all of its tributaries have joined it by the time it gets to the Grand Canyon, let's call that 500m/s at that point.According to geologists, the Colorado has been flowing in its present course for 17 million years. Which is 6 billion days. Which is 144 billion hours. which is 8.6 trillion minutes. Which is half a quadrillion seconds. Which is 250 quadrillion cubic meters of water flowing though it, or to put it another way, about a fifth as much water as there is in all the seas and oceans.Whereas forty days and forty nights is about how much rainfall they get in Sydney, Australia, every year.Of course, this is all very approximate back-of-a-used-envelope stuff, but if you want some idea of the scale, you now have it.Besides this, the erosional forms cut by the Colorado clearly were cut by a river, How else were meanders like this produced except by the meandering river that meanders through it? And they claim that a local flood in the Middle East occurred which they suggest was the origin of myths of a global flood for which they do not claim that there is the slightest shred of evidence.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

How much time have you spent looking for this "smoking gun" and what would it look like if you found it? But it would not be at all logical to reject all religion on the basis of understanding such things as biology and geology. In the first place, if people want to argue you out of being a Christian, rather than a creationist, you won't find them saying: "The Grand Canyon was formed by the action of the Colorado River, therefore there is no God". They'll be banging on about the Problem of Evil.In the second place, you complain that being a Christian is "hard". But by tying Christianity to counterfactual statements about science you yourself are doing your darndest to make it well-nigh impossible. That may not be your intention, but it's your effect. I can take seriously the proposition that Jesus died for my sins --- but if you want to make it "Jesus died for my sins and the Grand Canyon was not formed by the erosive action of the river which actually flows through it" then this is something that I cannot take seriously. I know too much. Well, I hope no-one will call you "**** for brains". But there might be a case to be made out for "ignorant".Consider that when you were asked for evidence for creationism --- when you could have come up with any argument you pleased --- you chose this: ... and then it got even worse. I repeat, you could have picked any argument you chose. And yet you picked one in a field where a couple of minutes with google would have given you the expertise to know that you were wrong. You decided to base your argument on a subject to which you have evidently never devoted two minutes' research or five minutes' thought. Is this not ignorance? Is this not conscious ignorance?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But this is not a conclusion that I came to merely by observing that creationists disagree with me. It's a conclusion that I came to by studying their arguments and trying to take them seriously. Like dwise1, I wasn't prepared to just brush off creationism, I looked into it deeply, to see what they had to say.And what I found was a pile of nonsense piled on error. I remember telling a friend of mine (who had studied biology at university) about some of the more popular arguments I'd seen, and after we'd finished laughing she said: "No, but let's take their case seriously, you've spent enough time laughing at their stupid weak fringe arguments of dumb uneducated creationists, now give me the strong mainstream arguments of educated intelligent creationists".Me: "I just did."My point is that maybe it's not "arrogance" that leads me to dismiss creationist arguments. Maybe they are, in fact, 99% "ignorant, stupid or insane", as the thread title puts it.How long does it take you to dismiss the proposition that Bush was behind 9/11? It took me a lot longer, because I looked into all the most popular arguments for it. It turns out to be rubbish. Am I arrogant to say so? I at least had the humility to check out the arguments, but having weighed them in the balance, I found myself with nothing to say but "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin".

But you see, it seems that in about 90% of your posts, if not more, you don't want to produce any actual argument, you just want to whine and blub about the existence of people who disagree with you.If you were like other theists or creationists and spent your time here producing substantive arguments for your point of view, then we'd take you seriously.When you spend your time sniveling and lying about anyone who has the temerity to disagree with you, then no, no-one is going to respect you. They're going to think of you ask a stupid crybaby and a liar.What can I say? Come back when you've grown up, maybe grown a pair, and have something even slightly interesting to say about any topic under discussion.

Ah, that would be why the Church condemned his ideas as "heretical [...] expressly contrary to Holy Scripture [...] heresy [...] false and contrary to the sacred and divine Scriptures".Yes, he was a good Catholic except when it came to science.Religion tried to be a substitute for real knowledge.Guess what? Knowledge won.Try to lie less often, and to be less of a hypocrite.