From: Michael E. Smith (mesmith@home.net)
Date: Fri Jul 03 1998 - 10:16:38 MDT
John Clark wrote:
"Hey I'm not a barbarian, I'd never be so insensitive as to say that about a fellow human being. I never said they drooled."
Granted, but you also drop lines like:
"This sort of crap shouldn't amaze me anymore but I confess it does, it still seems to me that if you're going to spend your life opposing something, as creationists do, it might be worthwhile to spend 5 minutes studying what you're opposing."
followed by generalizing from one example of a creationist who didn't know that Lamarckism was dead to all creationists.
Basically, John, I agreed with almost everything you said, but you shouldn't generalize like that. My "research" indicates that there are scientists (biologists, etc.) with Ph.D.'s from prestigous U.S. universities, currently employed by prestigious universities, who still rank among the breed of creationists I'm discussing. One can probably safely assume that they have studied all of the arguments, and yet they're still convinced that random mutation plus natural selection is insufficient to produce the species we see, and still insist bringing attention on the weak parts of evolutionary theory.
I think what we have is not merely some scientists stubbornly clinging to religious beliefs in the face of facts, but rather an **honest scientific dispute** no different than arguments about this or that version of big bang theory. It is not honest for evolutionary theorists to say that they have a perfect, finished theory of the origin of life as yet, but many act as if they do, and treat their skeptics as nincompoops. Meanwhile, in cosmology, few people are as heavily criticized when they discuss an "anthropic principle" to account for our universe being capable of supporting life. Why the double-standard? Because all creationists are thought of as being as bad as the worst of them.
You can always *claim* that this or that scientist is blinded by their religion, but you can't prove it, and they've demonstrated that they can make equivalent counter-claims.
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