IMS takes umbrage with regard to the quotations listed in the post
HERE.
In his attempt to refute the positions that were taken in the quotes from people such as Darwin’s teacher and mentor, Dawkins, Gould and others, IMS takes to refuting, not the statements which are made, but the characters of the persons making the statements. He even attributes quotes not presented by me as if those were the quotation he is attacking. Or maybe he thinks his quotes cancel out the original thoughts which were presented. They don’t. The quotes are real; they stand.
When IMS “critiques”, he does nothing of substance. It is always in the form of attacks on the persons who make the arguments. His title for this particular Ad Hominem Abusive Article is not fully appropriate: “Intellectual Dishonesty of Creationists”. He presents no “intellectual dishonesty”, only the hideous specter of a proposed evil character flaw in the subjects. His favorite response to any actual contrary attack is to shout, “CREATIONIST”, “ANTI-SCIENCE”, and other pejoratives because when he needs to discredit the attack on his belief system, he really has no other weapon than to attack using the deviational fallacies, not actual empirical data. Why? Because:
evolution does not have any empirical data. IMS cannot present data that does not exist. So he must attack the people, not the non-existant data.
Neither of two quotes which IMS presents refute the actual quotes which were made. He doesn’t have a prayer (not that he’d want one) of disproving the quotes, as they stand: these are honest opinions of the authors, without any scent of creationism attached to them. They are direct hits on evolution, and by extension the blind believers in the untestable, unprovable, unfalsifiable cult of Atheist origins and Philosophical Materialism which constitutes the several, mostly mutually exclusive, Theories of Evolution.
Let’s take the following false analogy:
”But Stan refuses to recognize just how widely supported evolution theory is, preferring instead to paint a picture of divided opinions, and suppression of minority views. Imagine a similar statement in support of the theory of gravity, which is similarly accepted my most scientists. Would Stan call that a religious cult? ”
How many scientists have lost their jobs for claiming that the source of gravity is unknown, but that the effect of gravity is at least measurable? None.
Category Error: unrelated variables of unlike kind; rhetorical failure. Physicists claim knowledge ONLY of
that which they can test by making actual gravitational measurements under
repeatable and falsifiable objective conditions, which anyone with a weight and stopwatch can demonstrate for himself. But as for the cause of the effect, no claims are made, much less claims that are required to be believed as Truth.
Not so with Evolution. Evolution does, in fact, make truth claims which cannot be proved by anyone, much less some outside observer with a stopwatch or other physical instrumentation. And being unprovable, the truth claims cannot be proven false. And here is the rub: True Believers insist that their unprovable truth claims must be taken as immutable Truth – not by evolutionists of course, who are constantly writing new stories to replace the old stories which cannot possibly work in light of the complexities discovered by modern biology (the only REAL science of biology). No. The external world is assured that there is no internal conflict on "basic True facts" of evolution, as if there actually were some. The claims made by evolutionists are vague and abstract enough, unfalsifiable enough, and Materialist enough, that they got them declared Truth in court in order to force these faux Truth claims into school systems without any fear of any critical thinking being applied to them; dissent successfully disabled.
Thus the IMS analogy fails, pitifully, painfully. Fallacy:
False Analogy.
It is presupposed within the Evolutionary Cult that non-falsifiability means that if it can't be disproved, then it must be True by default. Nonetheless, it is obvious to the critical thinker (which exists only
outside of the carefully thought-controlled interior of the Cult) that
non-falsifiability does NOT confer truth by default, as evolutionists assume. But what it does do is to deny the validity of any Truth Claim being made for such non-falsifiable claims, and it denies the intellectual respectability of those who claim otherwise.
The quotes presented in the post at this site are intended to demonstrate factually that there is no internal law of evolution which is accepted as causal, even after 150 years of internal conflict within the rarefied, oxygen-free atmosphere of the Evolutionary Cult; that there is no provable mechanism, not only for the source of life, but for the increase in complexity which is claimed for the fossil record – which merely shows animals which existed, not evolution in progress… certainly not macroevolution; that the entire claim of “Theory” is a sham because it consists of nothing at all except for science-fantasy stories.
The quotes are taken from many more which could be assembled into a book. The internal conflicts have gone on from 1859 through today and will not stop, because there is
no possible determinative data which can provide an actual objective fact that could be weaponized to stop it.
Evolution is a fine field in which to be employed because there are
no objective metrics to gauge the value or productivity of an evolutionist, save for the volume of science-fantasy stories he tells which get published. There is no limit to the imaginary fantasies which can be attached to DNA, or to bones, or to the new type of fossilization which didn’t turn bone into rock and still contains DNA in the soft tissue. The obvious falsifiers don’t matter because,
in principle Evolution as a theory is so abstract that it has no actual meaning which can be falsified even at the metanarrative level, on top of having no possible data to examine for the possibility of falsification, as required by REAL sciences including modern biology.
So here’s what happens when the impossibility of evolution crops up in one of its various forms, say complexity requirements or the existence of the numerous creatures which have no lineage (platypus for example). First comes Radical Scientism: “science will advance someday, and then we’ll know the unfalsifiable ‘truth’”. Then comes the heated invective discrediting of the source of the contentious information: “Creationist! Anti-Science!” And then, if the unwitting source of the contentious information is employed in thrall to the Cult, he is fired. To present any contentious information which threatens Evolution is “treason to science”, and punishable by expulsion from the tribe and suppression of the claim.
This is hide-bound, dogmatic, political correctness [Note 1] which is designed to strike fear in the hearts of all who want to keep their employment as story tellers safe. Expulsion from the tribe carries the
stank of perceived incompetence, and the weight of the black-ball. One who is ejected from the Cult is unemployable except as night clerk at the local convenience store. The devastation is physically and fiscally palpable as well as emotional and reputational.
So IMS is merely doing what the entire industry does: he attempts to destroy the character of anyone who presents the actual, valid, logical and demonstratively true case against Evolution which is this:
the theory is totally empty of any conceivable capacity to prove, objectively, the truth of any of its fantasy stories, and completely unable to maintain the stance that there is just one comprehensive theory which has substance and is believed by all the experts in the field. Evolution has no testable, falsifiable hypotheses for First Life and goes out of its way to deny any responsibility for explaining that. Evolution cannot explain the creation of the eye when considered as a complete vision system, despite the claims of 1800 steps from pre-existing light sensitive packages to round packages… an absurd attempt in the first place, yet which is hailed as highly meaningful within the Cult. Evolution cannot prove, yet presupposes, that mutations of some sort can create massive amounts of new information, despite the entropic impossibility to do so. (Thus establishing that nothing is “impossible” for a pursuit that cannot be falsified).
Any story will do, if it can’t be experimentally falsified. And that’s despite the incredibly vast odds against it, in its simplest form, much less in the necessity of its hugely complex reality.
So all that is needed, within the cult anyway, is the Ad Hominem, whether it applies or not. The Ad Hominem is just another faux story from a non-empirical, fact-free Cult, this time a faux story about a human, directed at the character of that human. And all their faux stories demand belief. Or else.
One last thought. The weapon of political correctness likely descended from the “science” of Darwinian tribal exclusionism. The ejection from a tribe is a traumatic event, especially when it is accompanied by denial of career, denial of personal integrity, denial of personal value, and persistent public denigration. This was illuminated when The Amazing Randi made his fatal
faux pas, and was attacked, de-tribed and denigrated voluminously until he barely recovered his status by fully recanting his
faux pas publically and accepting his disgrace meekly. He essentially did a submissive belly crawl before his attackers in order to get back in the tribe.
These tactics are
de rigueur amongst the gate keepers of the Cult. They employed their armaments of personal denigrations in full volley against the Premier Atheist of the 20th Century, Antony Flew, when he recognized that the information content in the huge molecule, DNA, was a physical refutation of Materialism and a blatant case for Deism. He was attacked mercilessly, publicly, and relentlessly; he did not recant, and was permanently de-tribed. The tribalist attacks of political correctness did not prevail against this man of intellectual integrity.
Many third-tier evolutionists such as Jerry Coyne and PZ Meyers are tribal gatling guns overheated with constant rhetorical attacks on tribal outsiders. It’s their job to keep the cult tribally purified of actual disciplined deductive logic, and keep the science-fantasy stories sanctified. (Even Coyne admits near the end of his book,
“Why Evolution is True” that he can’t prove any of the stories he presents in his book. So everything about the book, from title to the admission, is not falsifiable and yet completely true. Not just true, but True.)
The cult’s passion, from the gate-keepers to the least of minions such as IMS, demonstrates the lack of objectivity inherent in the tribe. If objectivity is part of science, and it was at one time, then evolution is definitely not science. If science necessarily provides only contingent knowledge based on non-falsification, then evolution is definitely not science. If science pursues physically demonstrable causal hypotheses in pursuit of support for overall narrative, then evolution is definitely not science. If science is dispassionately self-correctable with the advent of further causal demonstration, then evolution is definitely not science.
If passion and non-falsifiablity of dogmatic principles within a protected tribe define a cult, the evolution definitely is a cult. Stephen Jay Gould said so.
To conclude, IMS is an inveterate liar; he was removed from this blog for that reason.
Notes:
1. Political Correctness is designed specifically to strike the fear of losing one’s tribal association.
“I’m sorry I said that ‘all lives matter”! I now understand that only ‘black lives matter’ – Forgive Me!!” To be called “intolerant”, “racist”, etc. is to lose your personal credibility as a “nice” person, and to be seen as an evil-doer, and shunned for it. This fear of loss of personal integrity is the weapon, the lever which wrenches the unwary from logical reality, in order to avoid loss of association with the presumed, self-anointed “moral class”.
