Defenders of pseudoscience scornfully reject scientific methodology and gleefully ignore evidence on purpose, and their leaders even admit this openly and publicly; Because they actually preach not only that we should make positive proclamations of complete conviction even without the slightest indication, but also that we should automatically reject –without consideration- everything we ever find that doesn’t fit into their pre-conceived bias.
“We need to be looking at the world through our Biblical glasses.
We have a revelation from one who says, “I know everything; I’ve always been there.
Here’s what happened in the past.” So when we take that revelation, -put on our set of glasses, and we look at the evidence, we can say, “Aah now I understand.
Fossils couldn’t have formed before sin. There was no death before sin.
There was a global flood. That connects to geology.
God made distinct kinds of animals and plants. That connects to biology”, and so on."
This is how to prove that creationism really is willfully ignorant and deliberately dishonest, because here is another admission that they don’t care what the truth really is. They just wanna believe what they wanna believe, and if that doesn’t turn out to be true, then they don’t want to know what is true, and sometimes they’ll even admit that too.
“I’ll be the first to admit that creationists
view evidence from a biased perspective.
Evolutionists, would you be willing to admit you
also view evidence from a biased perspective?”
Religion is a bias by definition. That’s why it relies on propaganda. But science dispels propaganda because it eliminates bias by design; it has to because it’s an investigation, not a predetermined conclusion like religion is. So every proposition must be requisitely evidential and potentially falsifiable, and must be subjected to a perpetual battery of independent and unrestricted tests wherein anyone and everyone who thinks they can is welcome to try and find and expose from flaw in it –to correct it. Creationists won’t subject their beliefs to any of that because they’re not interested in finding out what is really true. They want to defend their preferred beliefs whether they’re true or not.
“Look, the bottom line is, the creationist answer is God just did it that way.”
“That’s good enough for me, man. He just [snaps fingers]”
“That’s good, yeah. We don’t need science to back us up.”
And that’s the thing about the Biblical view;
it doesn’t have to be explained by science.”
“I’ve chosen to believe the god of the Bible.
Now the evolutionists chooses not to believe in the god of the Bible.
We’ve chosen to believe. They’re both matters of faith.”
Science is necessarily rational and empirical. That means that whatever we believe isn’t a matter of choice; its an obligate condition imposed upon us by our knowledge of the evidence, and that position will only change in accordance with our understanding.
“Well think about it; very little evidence.
Blind faith, that’s all we have to go on.
There’s not a shred of proof anywhere –nothing!”
If there’s no evidence for a particular notion, then there’s no reason to believe it either. It may as well have been imagined out of nothing because it has no basis in fact. We can only proclaim a positive belief if we have sufficient evidence to support only that, and no evidence at all against it. Even then we can only accept it tentatively. Because, if future evidence ever confirms that we were wrong all along, then we’ll be forced to change our minds accordingly even if we didn’t want to.
Defense of faith doesn’t work that way. It relies instead on apologetics; the branch of theology concerned with the manditory promotion and reinforcement of faith in a particular religious doctrine, and the obligate defense of that belief by systematically rationalizing or denying any or all arguments that may ever be laid against it.
Lemmie explain how it works. It’s really quite easy: “Goddidit” explains everything by explaining nothing. Since magic is exempt from all rules of nature or logic, they think that means that anything that seems impossible somehow proves them right. Conversely, anything and everything that might imply otherwise can be immediately dismissed as a knee-jerk reaction with the phrase, “that doesn’t prove anything”. Virtually all anti-science apologetics are composed of variants of these two thoughtless comments, in addition to the usual propaganda of inflammatory emotional pleas, tall tales, petty bigotry, incredulity, and appeals to authority.
No matter how scientific, how commonly believed, or how apparently workable or logical it may seem, no evidence of any sort can even be considered if it contradicts their sacred stories –which they insist must take priority in the event of any apparent conflict. Their position is wholly dishonest, and it’s everything science isn’t; because it’s an a-priori position which must never be seriously questioned, corrected or rejected.
They have to defend their preconcieved notions because they’re forbidden –on pain of a fate worse than death- to even consider that they could be wrong, and they must maintain that belief no matter how wrong they obviously are. Even when they know they’re wrong, they still have to make-believe anyway. Their position is the definition of a closed-mind. It is not a search for truth!
“For the remainder of this program, we’re going to put you right here
where I’m sitting in the juror’s box.
But this time you’re going to hear the facts about evolution vs creation,
not some media spin, not wishful thinking,
not the biased view of a scientific minority.”
“…The truth is you’ve been mislead, scammed, lied to.”
There’s no rational need for apologetics and science rejects it. We don’t hold evolution sacred. We defend it only because it is evidently true. Superstitious politics have made evolution an icon necessary to the defense of the scientific method –which is the real target of religious fundamentalism. But their under-handed attempts to undermine science is also eroding their parent theology more so than atheism ever could. Because if you have to lie to defend your truth, then it was never really truth to begin with, and creationism obviously IS not like the truth and DOES not like the truth.
That’s also why they don’t like free speech. Where science invites critical inquiry in peer review, apologetics depends on one-sided assertions based on nothing and defended only by censorship.
For example, if you Google QuestionEvolution.com, either on the web or in the Talk.Origins news group, you’ll see that –to their credit- their webmaster once agreed to host a link to an offsite collection of rebuttals from the evolutionary perspective. However despite this several months later, his home page still said “these questions remain unanswered by the evolutionist”. So we pressed him about correcting that error, and he said he would when he had the time. But that was several years ago, and his site still tells the same lie. All he did was to quietly remove the links to all our answers, so he could pretend they didn’t exist –rather than correct his false accusations.
For another example, someone still stupid enough to promote Kirk Cameron actually bought a domain named after me, with all the tags applicable to me, in an obvious attempt to redirect search engines looking for me. Of course there’s no way to post comments to that site, nor to contact them to correct it. So they use that page to post idiotic falsehoods deliberately misrepresenting my position. It’s so crazy that on some level they have to know how wrong that all is. But they don’t care about accuracy and we’ve already heard them declare they don’t care about evidence either. They’ve assumed their conclusions without it, and admit they’ll never change their minds because of it. But sometimes they’ll contradict themselves and pretend otherwise –if they think they have a few facts on their side.
“I have, we have footprints of humans with dinosaurs in Dakota.
We have dinoglyphs from Lake-on-the-Woods in Ontario all the way down to Peru.”
“Dinoglyphs being native drawings.”
“Native drawings of tyrannosaurs.”
“Right, just like there are native drawings of all kinds of fantastic creatures.”
“Yes but these aren’t fantastic; they’re consistent.
And …it’s not that I don’t know something;
it’s because I know something I’m a creationist.”
What this creationist doesn’t know is that he has just cited known forgeries as evidence.
Many of the famed Ica stones have been recently created and artificially aged as part of a hoax financed by a Peruvian dentist seeking to defraud gullible tourists. Some of the hucksters involved have even confessed to their part in this crime. Even other creationists reject this -including cryptozoologists –the ones who most want to believe in persistent existence of extinct paleofauna; even they say they can prove that these artifacts aren’t really ancient depictions of dinosaurs. AnswersInGenesis.org, –a leader in the apologetics resistance against science- admits this too.
Fundamentalists have never exposed a single evolutionary fraud or scientific conspiracy since their mindless movement began, but they’ve perpetrated many of each! Some sites supporting science have long lists of creationists’ criminal cons and thoroughly-disputed fabrications along with citations of peer-reviewed research proving why every single allegation of evangelical evidence ever examined is either unsubstantiated or entirely erroneous if not deliberately deceitful.
Religious fundamentalists seldom correct any of the many flaws in their data, and increasingly desperate wanna-believers keep repeating the same old wives’ tales and urban legends long after they know they’re not true. That’s all they ever had; and before the age of information, they could still get away with that. But some of these frauds and rumors are now so blatantly bogus that even apologetics propaganda mills are compelled to admit it; Because refuting the various fallacies, fibs, and fakery of creationist claims has become a sort of internet sport. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel because every single thing the fundies ever presented in their defense –if it could ever be tested at all- has always turned out to be either misunderstood and grossly distorted or intentionally misrepresented.
The simultaneously saddest and most laughable irony of this whole stupid controversy is that these zealots claim they’re opposed to evolution as an issue of morality. Yet while we can cite dozens of examples where politically-influential creationists clearly know they’re lying about science, there is no such instance wherein evolutionary scientists can be shown to be dishonest in their criticisms of creationism. There’s no need to be. Despite all the attempted deception, the baseless assertions and political division produced by the creationism movement, the truth is there has never been a single verifiably accurate argument of evidence indicative of miraculous creation over biological evolution or any other avenue of actual science. Not one –period. Neither has there been any credible proponents of creation science anywhere ever, because, (with one crackpot exception) everyone who has ever published anti-evolutionary rhetoric to any medium did so only according to a prior religious agenda rather than any amount of scientific comprehension. They’ve all revealed inexcusable ignorance in the very fields where they claim expertise, and their arguments are all dependant on erroneous assumptions, prejudicial bias, logical fallacies, ridiculous parody, misdefined terms, misquoted authorities, distorted data, fraudulent figures, or out-and-out lies. Thus, there are only two types of arguments for creationism; those which are untestable, indistinguishable from the delusions of imagination, and can neither be indicated nor vindicated, verified or disproved, and those which have already been disproved many times over, both scientifically and in a court of law.
