The Intellectual Dishonesty of Creationists

I saw an interesting article in Atheism Analyzed, called Evolutionary Theories, Macroevolution, Quality of Evolutionary Science, where the creationist author, Stan, uses deceptive trickery to make the case that evolution science is not well founded.  His general approach is to quote selected passages from various people regarded as authorities in the field, to show that there is serious disagreement among them.  The trouble is that some of these "authorities" are actually creationists whose goal is to de-legitimize genuine science and promote their own pseudo-science, and others are actual evolutionists taken out of context and their meaning is distorted.

Warrant for Skepticism

Joe Hinman has been ubiquitous in many internet forums, always urging people to buy his book, "The Trace of God: A Rational Warrant for Belief".  This article is not a review of Hinman's book, but a commentary on his approach to scientific examination of an issue.  Hinman calls mystical experience "empirical evidence of the supernatural".  The thesis of his book is to show that the scientific evaluation of empirical data relating to mystical experiences provides a rational scientific basis for belief in God.  However, if that were really the case, the scientific community would be buzzing with the news of this empirical evidence for God.  It is not.  The fact of the matter is that the scientific community has yet to recognize the existence of any such evidence.

The Fortress of Belief

I've been arguing with Joe Hinman on the topic of my previous post.  The issue at hand was the accusation that atheists employ "God of the Gaps" reasoning, as espoused by Mikey at Shadow to Light.  I concluded that Mikey's assertion is just a case of "I know you are but what am I?"  My major point is that if a naturalist becomes convinced that God is real, it would be because of undeniable evidence that can't be explained by naturalism.  God of the Gaps belief, on the other hand, relies on a lack of evidence.  It simply assumes that God is the default explanation for anything where a full scientific explanation is lacking.  There doesn't have to be any evidence of supernatural phenomena (and in fact there isn't) to support God of the Gaps belief.

Hinman has taken issue with much of what I had to say about this topic.  To respond in detail to what I said, he has made a post of his own in one of his many blogs, called Atheistwatch.  I would like to answer all of the points he raises, but his posts are so long and rambling, lacking in cogency, and filled with fallacies and misunderstandings, that it is impractical for me to address them all.  I could spend all week trying, but I have a life.  So I'll limit myself to some of the most salient points that he makes.

Reppert's XYZ Question

Victor Reppert presents a challenge to everyone concerning the question of what constitutes evidence.  He states it this way:

It goes like this. X is evidence for Y just in case Z.

I've answered the question here at various times, and people are dissatisfied with my answer. Fine. I want to know your XYZ answer. If you are going to tell me I don't have any evidence, then apparently you have a different answer to the XYZ question than I do. But when I ask people what their answer is, I never find out.

Presumably, he wants people to provide some substitution for Z such that it makes a reasonable definition of 'evidence'.  Now this is a topic that he has written about before in his article Victor Reppert on the No Evidence Charge.  His own answer is "X is evidence for Y just in case X is more likely to exist given Y than given not-Y."  This may sound reasonable on its face, but it leads people down the wrong path before they ever have a chance to address the question of "What is evidence?"

The Lie That Never Dies: Christian Apologetics

It is amusing to see Christian apologists like Victor Reppert seize upon any any article they find on the internet that appeals to their confirmation bias.  One topic that Christians have been touchy about is the idea that the church played a large role in the suppression if intellectual pursuit during the historical period known as the Dark Ages.  If you're a Christian apologist, you'd rather believe that there was no such thing as the Dark Ages.  You'd rather believe that intellectual endeavors flourished under the benevolent leadership of the church, and life for the average citizen was just peachy.  There is no shortage of revisionist literature that supports this.  In his customary manner, Victor has uncritically latched onto a review of James Hannam's book God's Philosophers that supports this notion.

The Old Thermodynamics Canard

How frustrating is it to confront someone whose understanding of scientific principles is conditioned on his religious belief?  Just as religious faith is immune to being disputed by any evidence or logic, so too are the false understandings of the workings of nature that the theist employs in his web of self-delusion to rationalize his belief in things that have no basis in reality.  It is one of the mainstays of creationist pseudo-science that the second law of thermodynamics rules out any possibility of life emerging from a chemical primordial soup, or of living things evolving to more complex forms.  The creationist will insist that science is in his favor.  But he is profoundly wrong.

The Irrational Feser - Part 1: The Review

I saw that Ed Feser wrote a review of Jerry Coyne's book, Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, which is posted in First Things, and I was interested to see how Feser would address the issues raised by Coyne.  Upon reading it, I realized that this "review" was little more than a diatribe against Coyne, and does little or nothing to satisfy the questions of someone who is interested in hearing arguments against Coyne's central thesis: that science and religion are incompatible.

Since it is a brief review, consisting of 12 paragraphs, I'll take a look at the the entire article here.

For the Hundredth Time, ID is Not Science

Victor, just won't listen.  I've explained all this before, as in this post for example, but he persists in his stubborn ignorance about what science is and what it is not:

The dog, the evidence, is wagging the tail, the no-design conclusion. But if that is the case, then someone ought to be free to explore the possibility that this conclusion is not true, and still be doing science. You might be doing bad science, or mistaken science, but you should be able to be mistaken and still do science. - Reppert

Victor pretends that this is the dogma of science - that it isn't allowed to investigate anything that isn't based on materialism - and then uses that as an excuse to claim that ID should be treated the same.  Either ID and evolution are both science, or they both are not, he says.  "You can't have you cake and eat it too."  And that's exactly right.  We certainly should be consistent about what constitutes science.  And I'll try once again to explain it to him.  Maybe this time, the concept will penetrate the thick shield of theistic thinking that obstructs his cognitive processes.

Playing the Theist Game

A dishonest (but typical) theist once said:

If the universe is too big, the atheist will say it proves God couldn't possibly be interested in our tiny planet. If it's too small, he'll say that just shows there's no God because He should have created something bigger.

If we're the only intelligent life out there, the atheist will say that shows there's no God, else why all that wasted space. And if the universe is crammed full of intelligent life, then once again, we're claimed to be beneath any self respecting deity's interest.

I could continue, but you get the drift. I have no interest in playing. - Prokop

Oh but he is playing a game.  He's playing the same game that theists always play.  It's called projection.  This is something I have discussed before.

Setting the Record Straight on ID

Some religious people like to think of themselves as being smarter and more logical than all those atheists, who are deluded into accepting a metaphysical view (materialism) that makes no sense to them.  How could nature on its own produce the magnificent complexity of God's creatures, with all their functional parts so well made for their respective tasks - the eyes for seeing, the legs for running, fingers for grasping, and so on?  How can DNA be made to encode the precise protein sequences needed to produce these features without the help of a designer?  And how could an atheist be so stupid as to believe what conventional science has to say about it?

Religious Interference with Scientific Progress

Pope Francis recently announced to his fellows in the Catholic church that Darwinian evolution is consistent with church dogma, and with that, he has dragged the more reluctant members of the institution, kicking and screaming, into the 19th century.  It is the official position of the Catholic church that their religion is entirely compatible with modern science.  That is, except for the parts that aren't compatible.  For example, the church still rejects virtually the entire field of cognitive science, in favor of their theistic theory of immaterial souls and intelligence that derives from the mind of God.  The church maintains that in cases like this, their dogma is correct, and science just hasn't figured out the truth yet.  But there's no incompatibility.

Thomism and the Ultimate End

In a recent post, I discussed the discord between Thomistic metaphysics and a modern scientific understanding of natural reality.  That generated quite a lot of discussion, particularly from Thomists eager to defend their archaic understanding of nature in light of their theistic philosophy.  Thomists, of course, will deny that there is any discord at all.  But this comes at the cost of having to re-interpret their own philosophy to minimize or explain away those conflicts.  For example, they either have to strain to define Aristotle's four causes in a manner consistent with modern physics, or simply accept that those things are nothing more than a philosophical way of understanding causation that is unrelated to and has no bearing on actual physics.  Choosing the latter makes the four causes superfluous and irrelevant outside the context of philosophical discourse.  The former entails that traditional understandings of the their role must be changed to conform with new knowledge gained from science. 

The Big Problem With Thomism

Edward Feser, perhaps the greatest proponent of Thomistic philosophy today, dismisses modern science-based cosmological theories, such as those of  Lawrence Krauss, as being ignorant of the one true philosophical tradition:

The reason God is necessary and the material universe is not is that he is pure actuality while the material universe is composed of potentiality and actuality, and thus in need of something to actualize it; that he is absolutely simple while the material universe is composite, and thus in need of something to compose it; and that his essence just is subsistent existence itself whereas material things (and indeed anything other than God) have an essence distinct from their acts of existence, and thus stand in need of something to cause them.  No doubt some atheists will be inclined simply to scoff at the metaphysical ideas underlying such arguments.  But to scoff at an argument is not to produce a rational criticism of it.  And since the arguments in question are the chief arguments in the Western tradition of philosophical theology, to fail to produce a rational criticism would simply be to fail to show that atheism really is rationally superior to that tradition. - Feser

Feser is, of course, entitled to his opinion.  But he seems to be unaware of any alternative metaphysical view that would be consistent with a modern scientific understanding, or he simply rejects such views out of hand because they don't support his theistic beliefs.

I believe that Thomistic philosophy is riddled with logical inconsistencies, and is based on assumptions that are epistemologically unjustified.  Perhaps I will devote a future article to some of those problems.  But what I would like to focus on in this article are the metaphysical foundations of Thomism.

On Scientific Truth

There is a certain cultist named Ilíon at Victor's blog who continually criticizes the validity of science while presenting himself as the quintessential purveyor of logical truth.  He is completely closed to the notion that he could ever be wrong.

What Gentle Reader will notice is that in no case does B.Pushin'Scientism even attempt to show (nor ever will) that any of my statemets are false, or even badly reasoned.

Furthermore, if he were pushed on the items -- and prevented from running away -- he would acknowledge that every one of them is true.

But, somehow ... because scientism ... true AND true AND true IMPLIES false. To put it another way, I have shined a light on one of his idols, and thus, even though every specific thing I said is true, the concatenation of those individually true statements must (somehow) be false.

Just to be clear: this is *not* how rational persons "reason". - Ilíon

Doing Science a Service

Victor stubbornly persists in his position that there is something legitimate about teaching children to ignore the vast body of evidence and instead look for a teleological explanation for how species came into existence.  In the ongoing discussion at his blog, in answer to the claim that ID is a means of teaching religion, but disguised as science, one of Victor's biggest cultists made the counter-charge that teaching evolution is just a means of teaching atheism.  (There's that projection thing again.)  DougJC replied:

And I am just as concerned that teaching evolution as a recruiting tool for atheism would downplay legitimate data, downplay certain areas of uncertainty and basically present an incomplete and misleading picture. Educators (along with scientists) should be expected to be superbly trained at leaving personal philosophies at the door of the classroom. - DougJC

I agree completely with this comment, but I don't think it answers the charge that was made.

An Awesome Sight: the Red Sunset

I was in a discussion once where a theist said that the beauty of the sunset was reason to believe in God.  I certainly don't deny that a sunset can be beautiful, and I feel the same sense of awe that he does when I see it.  But that sense of awe does not translate to "God made all this".  I marvel at nature.  Nature holds many wonders and secrets to be discovered.  And that's beautiful.

Sensational Headlines: "Darwin Was Wrong"

Creationists are reveling at the news, absolutely giddy about sensational publications in recent years that feed their confirmation bias.  One of these is What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini.  Here are two secular scientists saying all the things the creationist wants to hear, stroking their contempt for Charles Darwin, the man who laid the foundations of evolution science and did so much to cast doubt on their precious religious beliefs.