What is an Articulate Informed Creationist

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I won't call attention to all the errors and nonsense that you've already called attention to in that thread (Genes and rapid extinction), and I appreciate the great effort you've made to help IamJoseph understand where and in what ways he's unintelligible and not making sense, and maybe you interpret his posts differently from me, but what I see is persistent restatements of gibberish that use responses as points of departure while for the most part ignoring their contents.

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well, agreed -- had the suspension been for being off-topic, i would have totally agreed with it. though it probably should have applied to me as well, but i was at least trying to drag it back on topic. kicking and screaming.

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i'm just not sure that suspending the opposition is a good debate technique.

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i know you and i have talked about this before. it's been a point i've argued for a long time. i think i figured out what bugs me so much, last night. look at a forum like uncommondescent. basically, and ideological wankhouse -- if you don't toe the religious line, or you dare to challenge to the "goddidit" consensus, or you have any scientific credentials at all, you're banned. for life. you end up with all creationists nodding along, and nothing actually going anywhere.

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i don't want us to be like them, not even in the slightest. but it seems like we suspend and ban an awful lot of creationists. yes, i know, at the heart of it all, our rules are fair. sometimes i'm not so sure they're applied in an even-handed way. but mostly, the fault is in the rule-breaker. and the lack of creationist content on this site makes questions like IAJ rather difficult. do we suspend him for not following the rules of debate? do we let him continue, because he's obviously trying to say something?

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from a strictly ideological standpoint, it might even be better to let people like IAJ just go off on whatever. if there's 20 or 30 people on one side that sound rational, and one on the other that sounds incoherent... well maybe suspending him is the best thing you can do for him.

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i don't know.

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I've pondered often on these issues, they're all good points, no need to say more.

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One thing I will add, though, is that I am frequently puzzled by the creationist willingness to let total loons advocate for their side. If there were an evolutionist here arguing determinedly for Lamarckism he'd soon be drowning in rebuttals from evolutionists. But very strangely, at least to me, creationists see little or no problem with what their nuttier adherents say. How do they know these guys aren't really evolutionists posing as creationists to make creationism look bad?

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Oh, and I'll add one more thing. I'm also puzzled by our inability to attract articulate informed creationists. Most of them don't even understand that the goal of creation science is to eliminate religious references. If my school board ever held a hearing about creationism, I'd definitely invite all these guys to speak because their inability to keep references to God and Bible out of their arguments would be the most convincing evidence possible of the religious rather than scientific nature of creationism.

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Admin writes:

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I'm also puzzled by our inability to attract articulate informed creationists.

There have only been a few "articulate informed creationists" I have conversed with over the years. The pattern that I have picked up from these guys is that they are usually smart enough (smarter than me most of the time) to compose their messages in riddle-like style to make the rest of us put extra effort into interpreting their posts. You and I both know that with enough command of the English language, one could write academically coherent literature while making the over message a one big riddle to support just about anything, and this is the tactic that these so-called "articulate informed creationists" use to support their position.

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Most of them don't even understand that the goal of creation science is to eliminate religious references.

Percy, step back for a moment and think this through. Is it really possible to advocate creationism without referencing god? Might as well demand that we advocate evolution without referencing natural selection or genetic drift.

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If my school board ever held a hearing about creationism, I'd definitely invite all these guys to speak because their inability to keep references to God and Bible out of their arguments would be the most convincing evidence possible of the religious rather than scientific nature of creationism.

The question is do these guys exist at all? How many rocks do we have to look under before we can say to ourselves that these guys are just a figment of our hopeful imagination?

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Added by edit. Might as well reply to the rest of the post.

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One thing I will add, though, is that I am frequently puzzled by the creationist willingness to let total loons advocate for their side.

Me, too, actually. For years now I have been asking the question to the creationists I know. Why do they tolerate the crackpots among their ranks? I have come to suspect that, even though they don't say it outright knowing they'd be ridiculed for it, they believe in the crackpot ideas enough to allow someone else to say it for them.

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Take a look at our president, for example. It's obvious that the guy believes in the genesis account literally. He also knows that he'd be labeled a loon if he ever talks about it.

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If there were an evolutionist here arguing determinedly for Lamarckism he'd soon be drowning in rebuttals from evolutionists. But very strangely, at least to me, creationists see little or no problem with what their nuttier adherents say. How do they know these guys aren't really evolutionists posing as creationists to make creationism look bad?

Because deep down inside they actually believe all the crackpot ideas that these nuts proclaim. I've talked face to face to some of these crackpots before. They actually believe this stuff wholeheartedly.

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Tazmanian Devil writes:

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Percy, step back for a moment and think this through. Is it really possible to advocate creationism without referencing god?

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The short answer is yes! Of course! Indubitably! Absolutely!

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That was the whole point of creation science, to remove references to God and Bible from the story of creation in order to pass muster in public school science classrooms. I've been part of this debate for well over 20 years, and creation science advocates used to abound, but a sea change occurred after the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching creation science was just Genesis dressed up in scientific sounding terms. It took a long time for intelligent design to push aside creation science as the alternative to evolution, but once it did then sites like this saw many fewer creation science advocates and far more ID advocates. This board witnessed this change in emphasis in 2003. The whole purpose of ID was to succeed where creationism did not by advancing a position at even further remove from God and Bible.

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With the demise of ID in Dover we're now experiencing a dearth of ID advocates, but creation science advocates have not returned. Instead all we're getting is loons and preachers. I feel this indicates that creationism is temporarily in disarray. The primary strategy advocated for now by the major creationist organizations is "teach all the evidence," but it's left the creationist soldiers who come here with no ammunition, so they fire what they got, God and Bible and nonsense.

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But the important point is that, yes, there was definitely a time when creationists thought it very important that creationism be seen as a legitimate science. The failures of creation science and ID to accomplish this seems to have discouraged them from even trying, and countering such attempts was my entire reason for creating this website, to explore creationism's claim to be every bit as much science as evolution. If we've won and only preachers and loons are left, then there's no reason for the site.

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But we haven't won, of course. The creationists are, as I said, only *temporarily* in disarray. Who knows what'll come next, but there'll be something.

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