Over at “Do-While Jones’s” place, Science Against Evolution, an interesting point is made concerning the different conceptions of the meaning of the concept: “science”, and how that plays into debates.
For example, if science is seen as rigorously empirical, requiring repeated experimental confirmation which produces factual consistency, that is one position.
And if science is seen as a changing, mutating body of expert opinion, that is another.
Jones’s take is that if science is rigorously empirical, then evolution is not science. And if science is just a body of changing opinions of a group of people, then it has no truth value.
So the real reason that evolutionists don’t want to debate non-evolutionists is because evolution fails to become a “truth” either way. And evolutionists are dedicated to the truth value of their faith, which neither definition of science supports, making it truly a faith. Such a "faith" position is easily routed out in a debate, so let's just not debate.
Do-While will probably get responses from the faithful claiming that there are other definitions of science, and that he just doesn’t understand the scientific method. These types of responses are very common and are thrown out immediately by the faithful when confronted with a skeptic, I know from personal experience. It is the type of response expected from a true faith: you can’t possibly understand until you’ve been inducted… so you’ll have to take our word for it: we are the experts and you aren’t.
The fallacy being used here is a subcategory of Appeal to False or Irrelevant Authority: Apriority: an emotional appeal to trust or hope; a form of false authority. In this case the supposed authorities wish to redefine their pursuit into a more beneficial light, one that attracts plausible premises to support it (Fallacy of Rationalization).
A third fallacy at play here is "No True Scottsman": no true scientist would say or believe what you say or believe (an ad hominem derivative). I hear this one frequently in this form: "I don't know a single [scientist / biologist / whatever] who holds that position..." This are easily overcome by producing published information by those who do....which will be denied as "no true scientist" attempts at credential defamation, etc.
But the easiest out for debaters on the fallacy side is just not to debate, and this position is being taken by "experts" from Dawkins to PZ Meyers. They merely refer to challenges as beneath them, and move on out of harm's way.
1 comment:
Personally, I think that evolutionary theory is mostly used as a crutch by people who don't understand it but want a way to beat on the religious people that they hate.
It has devolved to its current state because it lost its cultural legitimacy during the twentieth century.
If human eugenics or differential evolution among humans were to become popular again among the uneducated, evolutionists would suddenly no longer care about "scientific legitimacy," just as they didn't care about it in the early twentieth century.
Meanwhile, since the evolutionary debaters have no effective emotional appeals, other than whining about "cretinist luddites," they will continue to avoid debates.
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