Do creationists actually understand their own arguments?

I noticed something interesting when Dawn took on IamJoseph: he was suddenly writing in English! Complete sentences and in unobfuscated prose. Of course, the subject matter was purely Christian theology, but it was in English!It's only when he's writing to us about "intelligent design" and the like that he shifts into heavy obfuscation mode. As if he wanted to be understood when writing to IamJoseph about theology, but he does not want to be understood when he writes about ID.Is that a conscious or subconcious choice on his part? Hard to say for sure, but it does appear deliberate.

I think rather that the point is speaking gibberish. In a spoken format, his kind of gibberish, sprinkled liberally with impressive-sounding terms, can be successful in baffling the audience. Dawn's perennial problem is that his techniques do not have the same effect in a written format, but rather instead works against him. Something that he has so far been unable to compensate for.What immediately comes to mind is the recent topic in which we presented our reasons why debate in a written format is far superior to a spoken format, whereas Dawn insisted emphatically that a spoken format is superior and yet refused to provide any reasons for that. The obvious reason is that one can much more easily bullshit the audience in a spoken format; ie, his method only works in a spoken format and not in a written one.

I started engaging in on-line discussions back in the second half of the 1980's on CompuServe. One thing I quickly learned was that the fastest and easiest way to get a creationist angry is to try to take his claims seriously and try to discuss it with him. And the more I would try, the angrier and more irrational he would become. As best as I could figure it out, he believed that his faith depended on that claim being true, but he had no idea what he was talking about; he did not understand his own claim. He had heard that claim and found it convincing, because he was already convinced (one of the pre-requisites for accepting creationist claims, I discovered later), so he presented it with full confidence, but then when questioned about it he found himself unable to even discuss it, let alone defend it.For example, I was emailed this claim:

quote:

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As any good scientist will tell you, the sun burns half of its mass every year. If you multiply the sun's mass by millions (even though science says it is in the billions) the sun will be so incredibly huge it will stretch out past Pluto. And if you say that the planets would stay close to the sun as it shrank, then why don't the planets still move closer?

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He was a high-school student who was given that claim by a Christian camp counselor. I analyzed that claim in excruciating detail, showing him that it was blatantly and obviously false and explaining what scientists really say. He learned from that and accepted that he had been misled. Actually, it was in searching for other instances of this claim (which I did not find) that I stumbled upon Kent Hovind's bogus solar-mass-loss claim.The point is that creationists freely circulate and adopt all kinds of false claims without understanding any of the science behind them. They can get away with it so long as it's only other creationists and scientific-illiterate non-creationists that they relate those false claims to, but they immediately get a rude awakening when they encounter someone who knows something about the subject. I've also encountered creationists who are more than eager to talk to and bully the unwary, but will immediately try to disengage the moment they realize that they're talking to someone knowledgeable. Obviously, those creationists that their claims will be refuted, but I believe that most creationists we encounter on forums are acting out of ignorance and over-confidence.I basically there being two kinds of creationists: those who know something about science and produce many of the claims and those who don't know the science and just repeat the claims that they hear. The first kind know better than to discuss their claims on forums, whereas the second kind don't know any better.Of course, that's too simplistic. There's a broad grey-area overlap between those two kinds. There are also those creationists who are ignorant about "creation science" and do not realize where the claims they've heard and bought into came from. But still it seems to settle down to those creationists who know better than to post on forums and those who don't.

I had issued no such warning. Quote me directly and point us to the specific message where you got that quote from.We had gone over your false claims of having a model and had to instruct you as to what a model is and how it's used. We also had to teach you what logic is and how it's used. For your part, you demonstrated conclusively that you didn't have a clue. Rather, you disappeared from the forum for an extended period of time.Rather than waste my time with your interminable bullshit, I've been working on much more important and productive things.When are you ever going to present your reasons for considering verbal debate superior to written debate? We already know what your reasons are, that in a verbal format you can baffle the audience and your opponent with your bullshit with far greater ease than you can in a written format.

That is a very dangerous practice to undertake. For example, in a discussion on the CompuServe forum for scouting regarding religious discriminatory actions (despite officially published policies) of Boy Scouts of America, Inc, I misused the word "dissemble". At the time it seemed to fit what I wanted to describe, that I was "waffling" on terminology, wheras in reality it implied a deliberate attempt to deceive, which is not at all what I meant. In the Walsh trial in Chicago circa 1991, a BSA spy printed out select postings on CompuServe and relayed them on to BSA's legal team, who presented them as evidence in a federal trial. Needless to say, I got raked over the coals for that, along with a typo in which I had not typed in the work "not".It is always vitally important to ensure that we are using the correct words for the meaning that we intend to convey. If you don't, then it will come back to haunt you at the worst possible moment.Edited by dwise1, : it's "coals" you idiot!