Books By Creationists?

Hi Tram law,First off, your url link is messed up a bit.Second, is it not, by itself, dishonest to read a book with the sole intention of ''debunking'' it; ie having come to a conclusion to what it is going to say even before reading it.Third and last, and this is strictly on your tangent so if we don't want to derail the thread, other posters should abstain from replying to this part, and leave that to you if you have somethign to add.The example you took does not show dishonesty, in my opinion. This is seems pretty clear from the very broad and far-ranging conclusions you made on two little sentences, which turn out to be true: This is a perfectly normal statement, and I can't see how you can claim it is dishonest to not identify who it is exactly. The reality is that there are people from all groups who believe this: some muslims believe this, some christians believe this, some agnostics believe this, some atheists, etc.So I can't see why it isn't perfectly normal to say ''many'' in this case. They are not saying here that ''atheists are anti-God'', as you claim. They are only saying that whenever an atheist claims his way of thinking is scientific as opposed to a theist thinking being unscientific, he is encouraging the ''science is anti-God'' strawman.And even if you say that this doesn't apply to all atheists, they would certainly agree, but the reality is that many of the new atheists, the most vocal atheist, think this way. CMI receives a ton of emails from atheists, and the majority of them fall into this category unfortunately, with claims of ''science disproved God'' and the likes. This has increased manifolds since ''the God delusion''.However, they do receive and post emails from atheists who are not hostile, for example:Genetics geographical distribution - creation.comI don't want to derail your thread, but just to point out that going from the two small sentences, you extrapolated so much even linking all this to that Michelle Malkin youtube clip and the atheists have the right to represent themselves, which has nothing to do with what TAB is sayign here.

I would not think so.I understand that you can't read a book without bias, and I can understand an evolutionist reading a book with a bias against what it is going to say. This is normal and not dishonest, especially if the intention is simply to better understand those with whom you disagreeHowever, reading it specifically to debunk it and show where it is wrong, even before opening a single page, and certainly NOT to just understand what creationist actually think, comes by as dishonest to me. (just think of how you would view a creationist reading an evolutionists book with this attitude)

Well what is honest/dishonest is a relative measure, of course, and if you don't see it as dishonest I guess it is your position. I may have a higher threshold of what is honest, because I would certainly view it as a dishonest thing to do.But, even then, I would think (personnal speculation here) that the probability of misrepresenting a book is much higher when you have already intended to debunk it even before reading the first page. And so, even if it would not be dishonest in itself, if it does lead to a higher probability of being dishonest about it afterwards, then you could as well consider the act of juding the book by it,s cover a dishonest thing itself.You talk about the creationist bad habit of misrepresentation. Would this be caused, at least in part, by this same habit of wanting to 'debunk' evolution, even before starting reading ?And once again, if we take an example from another context, if I, as a scientists, would review scientific papers with the intention of debunking it even before reading it ? Why would it be dishonest in that case, but not in the other ?

Maybe my comprehension of the word dishonest is different then, but one of the definitions of it is ''lack of honesty or fairness'' (Dishonesty - definition of dishonesty by The Free Dictionary), and if I, as a scientist, would review a paper with the conscious intention of debunking it even before reading it, I would certainly consider it to be a lack of fairness, and therefore dishonest.

Well, I'll first note that you haven't really offered a whole lot of reasoning also, simply saying ''no I think it wouldn't be dishonest ... ''But beyond that, you quoted my reason to view it as dishonest. If you adopt an attitude that makes it more likely for you to misrepresent it, then that attitude is dishonest, in the sense that it lacks fairness. This is not analog since the matter is vis-a-vis the law, and not some personnal judgment, and because people don't have a choice in that case.In the case we are discussing, people have a choice. And knowing that one attitude is more likely to lead to misrepresentations afterwards, the fair thing to do is to take the other attitude. Is someone, judging a competition, who has already decided who will finish last being honest ?Is a scientist, reviewing a paper and deciding that he will be against the conclusion of the paper before reading it, being honest ?Is a judge, who has already decided that the defendant is guilty even before the case begins, being honest ?What I'm trying to point out in all of this is that, having a bias beforehand is not dishonest, and it is normal given human nature. But having come to a conclusion beforehand is.

No, I'm saying, in typical 'future scientist' fashion (I study math and physics), that I would consider myself dishonest if I had this attitude when reviewing papers ...

Your example here shows that you do not distinguish the difference I am trying to make between too situations that are similar, but not the same.I an not saying coming in with already an idea of the conclusion, is dishonest, I am saying having a firm decision on what the conclusion will at the very beginning is dishonest. And yet I emphasised a portion here where what you say comes down to exactly what I have been trying to say.Someone who approaches a book, having already concluded what the outcome will be(not simply having an idea of what it will be), is exactly the same attitude as someone who ''will not permit the actual outcome to change [his] mind'', which is an attitude you jsut said is dishonest.

So does this mean that if it not sufficiently obvious that what is being presented is complete idiocy, then you would agree with me that that attitude would be dishonest ?

I wonder how you could ever know how ''firm'' their idea of the conclusion was beforehand, so we have no way of saying if they were dishonest or not.I'm pretty sure they expected a result, which turned out to be the one they had, as does everyone doing research. But I can't speculate beyond that. And there comes a point where the two are one and the same, and trying to differentiate between the two simply becomes playing on words.I think this point is reached in a situation where someone has laready made up his mind on, and planned that he will debunk, a book before even reading it. Maybe my english comprehension failed me, but I thought you were saying that at that point it was dishonest.

We're talking in general here, not this particular case of ''the answers book.''What if you were about to read ''genetic entropy'' by Dr. Sanford ? Would it be dishonest to read it with the sole intention of debunking it ? Even considering he has made a great career in genetics, has believed in the theory of evolution for the majority of his career and just recently realized that YEC was true ?His particular case is interesting, since he fits nowhere in the ''either ignorant, stupid or insane'' false dichotomy.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

I think we all agree on this. I have said this multiple times already.The point of contention seems to be at what point do we effectively have an attitude that makes it practically impossible for the evidence to change our minds.My contention here is that someone reading a book specifically with the sole intention of debunking it has such an attitude. I say this because such a person not only has an idea of what his conclusion will be, bu hs actually consciously decided that conclusion before reading a single word.Now I may be wrong on this obviously, and I am willing to change my mind if a compelling argument shows up here, but up until I have not seen any.

Well isn't that the kind of attitude Tram Law is promoting in this thread, by saying we read a book with the a priori intention of debunking it (ie having already decided what our conclusion will be) ?

Then you are suffering from memory loss, because that is exactly what you said:

quote:

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I'd say that the authors of that paper had a very firm idea of their conclusion.

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No, I'm saying that if someone approaches a book having already decided that he will debunk it afterwards, that such an attitude prevents any type of evidence from ever affecting what he has already decided to be true. The first part of that sentence certainly doesn't make sense to me. And thanfully no one has done that here yet.

I'm talking about the difference between a highly critical approach, and a I-am-for-sure-never-letting-this-paper-pass approach. It's deciding the paper is trash before even reading it, that is what I think is a dishonest attitude.

Maybe I am, but then again, do not be nave and think that the very same attitude of stubbornness you see in creationist is not also found in evolutionists. I see it all the time here (and I suspect that I do it myself)And if we identified the no-evidence-will-change-my-mind as the origin of the stubbornness of creationist, what is to say that same attitude isn't simply also the origin of the stubbornness found in evolutionist ?That attitude is what I felt was behind the read-a-book-just-to-debunk-it promoted in the OP. But I wasn't talking about creationism specifically, I was talking about the attitude of someone reading a book, having already made up his mind about what he will conclude of the book.I am saying: such an attitude is dishonest.No there are two options: either you agree with me, but want to make creationism an exception because it is obviously stupidOr you disagree, but then why all the rambling about justifying the attitude when speaking about creationism ?this rambling, from you and others, about how wrong creationism is tells me that you agree that the attitude is dishonest, but not when applied to something ''we know is pure lunacy''. If this is the case, then my point stands, and since I do not consider creationism to be 'obviously wrong' then I am free to think that such an attitude towards it is dishonest.If it isn't the case, then we can all stop the rambling about YEC, since it isn't relevant to identifying if it is a dishonest attitude.