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Michael E. Smith" <mesmith@home.net> On Fri, 3 Jul 1998 Wrote:
>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.
I wish these "scientists" would stop pointing at their Ph.D.'s, I wish they would stop telling me how smart they are and start showing me how smart they are, I wish they would discover something, write something intelligent or do something interesting. Academia is a wonderful place but it can be vulnerable to a dreadful disease, cargo cult science, the reason is that a full professor need produce no results to keep his job, his ideas don't have to work. That's why you have things in universities like education departments and criminology departments, disciplines that go through the rituals of science and claim to know the best way to educate a child or deal with criminals but are really just guessing like everybody else.
I think it would be interesting to see how many creationists there are among oil company geologists, if these people are religious they can only afford to be so on Sunday because on every working day they must use Darwin's theory and the geological timeline it produced to date the micro fossils the drill bit brings up. This is vitally important in deciding if the hole should be abandoned or if a few million dollars more should be spent to go down another thousand feet. Tell the truth, if you were in charge of such an operation and your job depended on its success who would you hire, a geologist who had a good working knowledge of evolution or a creationists who thought the Bible would tell him where to find oil?
>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**
There are many intelligent honest disagreement's over details, but I have no hesitation in calling any man who looks at the geological record and does not see enormous age, any man who does not see that animals have changed over time and that log ago they were far simpler than they are today, an idiot. Few of us respect members of the Flat Earth Society, I see no reason creationists deserve more credit, and I don't care how many degrees they have from the Upstairs Teachers Collage of South West North Dakota.
>It is not honest for evolutionary theorists to say that they have a
>perfect, finished theory of the origin of life as yet,
It is not honest to imply that they do.
>but many act as if they do
Who?
>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 the evidence in favor of the anthropic principle is nebulous and controversial and the evidence against it is nonexistent, we know almost nothing about it so it's difficult so say anything really stupid regardless of what position you take on the subject. On the other hand our knowledge of the history of life is vast and as our creationists fiends have proven quite easy to make an ass out of yourself.
John K Clark johnkc@well.com
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