Answering Esmay's Comment

Dean Esmay stopped by last night and left a comment in reply to my recent posts about his stance on evolution. True to his usual form, he slings a lot of invective and says almost nothing of any substance. He begins:

Heh. It's fun to watch this: ad hominem first. Ed always starts there--it's what he's all about in the end. His ad hominem attacks are always mixed in with carefully out-of-context insinuations to make it seem as if I believe things I don't.

One of the ways in which you can tell you're dealing with a pseudo-intellectual poser is when they use the phrase ad hominem when they really mean insult, because they mistakenly believe that all insults are ad hominems. When I referred in the title to my post to his "cluelessness" about evolution and creationism, that is not an ad hominem. I understand why he may find it insulting, of course, but an ad hominem is not an insult, it is a logical fallacy, an argument that one should disregard what another person says about a subject because of an irrelevant personal characteristic. My characterization of him as clueless is not an argument for why his arguments should be dismissed, it is a conclusion based upon the illogical nature of his arguments. Hence, it is the opposite of an ad hominem. As far as "out of context insinuations" go, he doesn't bother to actually point out anything I quoted from him that is taken out of context, so at this point that's just an unsupported assertion.

And by the way, just to prove you wrong that I "always start" with ad hominems insults, I refer you to my very first post in response to your views on teaching ID in schools. I went out of my way to be extraordinarily polite in my response. I took your challenge quite seriously and I gave a thorough and well thought out answer. Then you wrote that ridiculous post where you said, "That flies in the face of most evolutionary theory, which tends to hold that mutation is not the primary way by which creatures evolve", proving that you had no understanding of even the basics of evolutionary theory. But even in my response to that, I was perfectly civil and polite. No insults, I just pointed out where your misunderstanding was and why you were misinterpreting the article you read. It was only after the third article, in which you hypocritically criticized others for comparing creationists to holocaust deniers - the same guy who calls the ACLU "Stalinist", remember - that I realized that you were just talking out your rectum on this issue. And when you discovered my polite responses to you, you refused to engage any of the substance and threw a little temper tantrum instead. At that point, I began to treat you the way you obviously deserve to be treated, as an ignorant crank with a penchant for taking absurd positions on issues he knows nothing about.

Then there's of course the flagrant denialism: that you're doing anything at all different from the people who try to remove Huck Finn from class curriculums because it's "racist" or The Catcher in the Rye from curriculums because it's "dirty" and now stuff like creation science because it's too "dangerous" and might "confuse" the kids rather than encourage them to think.

It seems to me that there are several obvious differences between not teaching falsehoods in a science class and banning books because they're racist or dirty. I pointed out some of those differences in my post the other day, but naturally Dean skips right over all of that substance and just reasserts his original statement. As we used to say in debate, repetition is not refutation. Just so we're clear here, for the second time, no book is being banned in Dover. Period. The people in Dover are entirely free to read Of Pandas and People if they wish and they will be so regardless of the outcome of the trial. It is no more "book banning" to refuse to teach religious dogma in science classes than it is "book banning" to refuse to teach holocaust denial in a history course or flat earthism in an earth science class. Having the right to believe something false and the right to read books advocating those things is not equivalent to having those books banned. By Dean's reasoning, every single choice a school makes about what it will teach that rules out things that it won't teach is "book banning". And that, of course, is patently absurd.

But of course what you're doing is worse than the book banners (I never said "burners" by the way, but never mind Ed, there's no need for you to try to start being honest now, you never have been in the past after all) because you aren't bothering to use the normal democratic processes, those dreary dreadful PTA meetings and school board elections--no, you're happy to have a court deciding the matter by force for you.

But that is what courts are designed to do, rule on the limits of governmental action regardless of whether those actions came about by a majority vote or not. If a given governmental policy is unconstitutional, it makes no difference how democratically it is passed. Surely Dean would agree with that. Under longstanding principles of constitutional law, it is illegal to teach religious doctrines in public schools, and in a diverse society that's a very good thing. There is no question that creationism is not only religious doctrine, but a specific set of sectarian religious doctrines and to teach those ideas in school, because it would endorse that sectarian religious doctrine, would amount to an establishment of religion. To listen to Dean, you would think this is some radical, crazy bit of constitutional law that is far out of the mainstream, but the ruling was 7-2. I also work to advance my position in other ways, including lobbying the legislature and local school boards. But failing that, I certainly will use the courts to stop something that I truly believe is unconstitutional, just as Dean would surely do in a thousand different situations where the majority vote wouldn't mean a thing to him.

Or when you notice suddenly that literally tens of millions of children are being taught that scientists are liars and intellectual bulies and cowards. Then maybe for a brief moment you'll contemplate the notion that debate would have been better, and that by acting as censors you've done far more harm to science's image than good.

This position is baffling. Apparently Dean believes that we have to teach lies to children in order to avoid having someone else teach them that their teachers are lying to them. Yes, I know that there are ministers all over the country who tell their congregations that evolution is a lie and that teachers are lying when they tell them that evolution is well supported by the evidence; I also know that those people are dead wrong and utterly ignorant on the subject. But it seems rather foolish to me to indulge their ignorance and begin to teach falsehoods in order to pacify them.

But no, no, let's have more of the laughable comparisons to holocaust revisionism and KKK propaganda, as if the creation scientists had ever advocated genocide. It's a clever bit of amphiboly that, and of course all of it dependent upon the dread "slippery slope," a fallacy so beloved of Ed he can hardly utter a sentence on this subject without uttering it.

Okay, let me see if I get this straight. The same guy who compares the ACLU to "Stalinists" for trying to stop a government agency from violating the first amendment is criticizing my comparisons? More importantly, he's mischaracterizing my comparisons. First, I didn't make a slippery slope argument, I made an analogy. And the analogy was not between creationists and the KKK, it was between how Dean's own logic would have to be applied with equal validity in a perfectly ridiculous situation. HIs argument was that because people think teachers are liars because the schools teach something they disagree with about evolution, we should give equal time to their false beliefs. But that argument applies just as logically to those who deny the holocaust and claim that the schools are teaching lies to our kids by teaching that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis. If Dean's reasoning - that we should give equal time to avoid having someone call teachers liars - is sound, it applies just as well in that circumstance. But of course Dean would never make that argument. And that is entirely the point. He wouldn't make that argument because the argument is illogical and really just amounts to special pleading in this situation.

Then of course come along the chattering commenters who add in more personal invective about me rather than addressing my arguments. Was this "raj" fool, this humorless dolt who thinks I actually believe I own my wife and children, the same one who viciously attacked my wife and quoted her own humorous comments about nuclear weapons out of context last year? Does it matter?

For what it's worth, I've read your bio where you say that you're the "proud owner" of your wife, among other things, and found it rather amusing and even charming. It was obvious to me that you didn't mean that you actually own your wife and that it was just a clever turn of phrase, and I thought raj's comment taking it seriously was, indeed, humorless. But that has nothing at all to do with the substance of our disagreement.

As for my background in science: none that matters much here. Funny, I doubt you'd find that relevant were I on your side, rather than one of those rightly pointing to you as dangerous fools who do more harm than good.

I didn't say anything about your background in science. I did say that you are ignorant on the subject of evolution, and I have evidence to back up that claim.

My latest salvo should give you must more pleasure:

http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1131016931.shtml

Yes, I've read it. It's full of the same nonsense you usually spew on this subject. You show not only your ignorance of evolution, but your ignorance of the philosophy of science as well. For instance:

First I want to get to this interesting statement that Steve makes: "Science by its very definition precludes the supernatural."

I've seen this statement in several forums, and seen it go by a few times here on Dean's World, and I have to ask: where on Earth can you find that statement in any science textbook? What paragons of science, other than ideologues like Richard Dawkins, would agree that it is so? This is rank bulls**t of the highest order!

Well, no it's not. You won't find it in a science textbook because science textbooks rarely address philosophy of science, but you'll certainly find this being a virtually unanimous position within that field, and not just by the Richard Dawkins' of the world, but by thousands of Christian, Jewish, Muslim and otherwise religious scientists who nonetheless perform their work within the framework of methodological naturalism. Ken Miller, a Christian molecular biologist, agrees completely with Dawkins on that point (though not on the question of metaphysical naturalism, of course). Science doesn't deal with supernatural causes because supernatural causes cannot be tested.

It's the old cartoon where the professor is at a blackboard and he's put forth this enormous scientific formula and right in the middle it says "And then a miracle happens." And his fellow professor says, "I'm sorry, could you be a little more specific about that step? Well no, he can't be and that's the point. We can't say anything meaningful and predictive about the actions of an agency that is capable of violating the laws of nature. Such an agency could do whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and hence there is no way of testing a proposed supernatural cause.

Does that mean science can rule out that supernatural agencies exist? Of course not. But it means that science cannot utilize supernatural explanations because they are not testable. And the entire history of science tells the story of the usefulness of methodological naturalism and ruling out supernatural intervention. By not stopping at the "God did it" explanation, science has managed to explain a vast range of natural phenomena. Countless lives are saved because we use science to predict and control whether we get a good crop or a bad crop rather than just assuming that God is pleased with us when we get a good one, not to mention all the lives that are saved because meteorology didn't settle for supernatural explanations for natural disasters, and because doctors don't stop at "God must be angry at you, that's why you have weeping sores" as an explanation.

Yes, methodological naturalism is absolutely a part of science and you will find virtually unanimous agreement among philosophers of science on that point, including not only atheists like Dawkins but also theists like my friend Rob Pennock, who is in fact a philosopher of science. So in point of fact, when you claim that this is "rank bullshit", you are frankly full of shit yourself.