Monday, November 26, 2007

A plague on both your houses

"Thou shalt not bear false witness."

This is something that the creationist crowd seems to have forgotten. They are like the pharisees. They lie about their own ideas and they lie about the ideas they are opposed to.

If they were to be honest then, while I might not agree with them, I would respect them. If someone honestly believes something, is being honest about why they believe it, and is honest about the nature of other ideas which contradict what they believe, then there is no fault to be found with them. They are pursuing the truth through honest means.

Unfortunately that is not what your creationist/creation-science/intelligent-design crowd does. They're very well aware of what they believe and why they believe it. It is no secret that biblical scripture is the foundation of their point of view. That is fine...if they were to be honest about it. When they take their beliefs and make a pseudo-science out of them, they are bearing false witness.

Their duplicity does not end there however. If ID were an actual scientific theory or hypothesis, its proponents would be in the business of creating experiments to test it. They would be busy doing research and trying to find data that might contradict this idea. Because you see science isn't founded on ideas that are proven correct or true, it is founded on ideas that have been able to withstand our attempts at proving them false. All of science is a working assumption, a best guess. It is subject to change and revision as new information comes to light.

This is exactly why ID is not a scientific theory. There is NO RESEARCH being done on ID by anyone. ID is not a scientific effort or area of inquiry, but a poorly disguised propaganda effort whose purpose is to destroy human knowledge. This is why you don't see ID proponents working to promote their ideas within the scientific community, but are instead trying to slip them into 9th grade biology textbooks. Why do they do this? Because trained scientists aren't going to be fooled, but your average high school freshman doesn't know any better.

Perhaps worst of all however is the way in which they lie about the theory of evolution through natural selection. This is where they engage in the most obvious and blatant hypocrisy. They complain that evolution is "just a theory." Well they are of course correct, evolution is a theory. So is gravity, and electricity, and all the other things that comprise our scientific knowledge of the world. The term "theory," in scientific parlance, does not imply a pipe dream or a fantasy or a flight of fancy. It describes an idea or set of ideas that have withstood scrutiny and multiple attempts at proving them wrong. When the creationists say "just a theory," they are engaging in what is known as amphiboly. Another term for this is equivocation. They're saying something whose interpretation hinges upon the understanding of a single word or term in the hope that you will choose the interpretation that is incorrect. Once again, they are bearing false witness. This is just the most obvious and egregious example of them doing this, but it is hardly the only one. In fact it is hard to pin down a time when they say anything true about evolution, other than that they don't agree with it. Telling the truth about something does not mean you have to accept it. I don't accept leftism, but I gain nothing by lying about it. In fact I lose a lot. Arguments against something must, if those arguments are to be believed, be based upon a fair and honest assessment of the topic in question.

In short, they lie. They bear false witness and they engage in hypocrisy. They lie about what they believe and why they believe it. Then they turn around and lie about the things they don't believe.

The sad thing is that they are not alone. On the flip side you have atheists who are at least as dishonest as the creationists. They want to make God illegal. Some are evil, others are just stupid, while still others are foolish enough to think they know something. Normally this wouldn't matter. There are always nutjobs looking for other nutjobs to go to war with. Unfortunately for us, these two nutjobs are using our school systems as their battlefield, and dragging the rest of us into their bullshit.

I say this to them all: A plague on both your houses.

Take your pseudo-science and your rabid anti-theism and shove it where the sun doesn't shine.