No attack, just showing again, your leanings towards irony and hypocrisy.
Most British scientists: Richard Dawkins' work misrepresents science
- Thread starter paddoboy
- Start date
Hmmm....
I came to relise, over the yrs, that god is not abrahamic, but in all things , atomic , sub-atomic etc .
Yep, agreed, just balancing the equation for you q-reeus.....
See, that's your problem q-reeus...so hypocritical! I started this thread debating the pros and cons between Sagan and Dawkins...You consequently helped to take it off track and did your best to keep it off track despite efforts by me to bring it back on track.
Then you whinge and cry "victim" when members that support science and the scientific methodology, show you the error of your ways....and on it went.
Now you insinuate that others are trying to somehow play a one-sided game of attrition to gain more sympathy for your position.
I for one am not playing games. I for one see your position as unscientific and one of faith. I for one see your contributions as more attuned to a religious thread.
Whatever you say paddoboy. But please, change to a different feather duster occasionally. I at least appreciate variety, not the same old same old.
Might be? Sure. Anything's possible. But nobody can ever point to any.
Granted that in theory there might be a good argument for ID somewhere, that nobody knows about yet, but meanwhile all we get are links to silly A-fundie creationists making elementary errors in reasoning, and respectable guys like Tours who observe (again) that even the simplest living things we have today are very, very complicated, so tracing their actual evolutionary lineage is going to be a long and very difficult job. (Which is an argument against ID, if you think a minute - evolution has no problem explaining great complexity, it's almost inevitable after a billion years of evolution across an entire planet, but it's not something designers generally go for, especially if they're good at their jobs).
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Dean Kenyon is one of the dishonest, or false flag, ID guys whose theoretical perspective is in fact from the book of Genesis in the Christian Bible. (According to witnesses, he went back into the proofs of his major book on the topic, before publication, and actually, physically, replaced the word "God" with "ID" or some variant).
He's a Young Earth Creationist. That's who you're linking to - he finds not only the neo-Darwinian position(s - they always leave out the s) untenable, but the neo-Copernican and neo-Huttonian positions as well.
He's another bat-belfry A-fundie, in other words, and his "arguments" - you can read them for yourself in his books - are exactly what we get from everybody who agrees - with Kenyon - that there are no errors in his literal reading of his translation of the Bible. He claims that scientists have never observed speciation, for example. He says the gaps in the fossil record are evidence of Noah's Flood, and contradict the supposed requirement of a continuous fossil record by Darwinian theory. And so forth - on and on, the entire panoply. He probably invented some of it - he goes back a long way.
But you don't care, do you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_H._Kenyon
Yep certainly whatever...Nice to see you at least change your emotional tack somewhat.
This thread can be summed up nicely, with [1] the pros and cons of the subject matter between Sagan and Dawkins, and [2] the ultimate "coming out of the closet, so to speak, with another "god of the gaps" adherent.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
I used to know Dean Kenyon. He was one of my professors back in the early 1980's. (He was an extraordinarily nice guy, very smart and very honest, I thought.) We had a number of conversations and he was quite open about why he "switched". It had nothing to do with his deciding that "neo-Darwinism" was "untenable from a theoretical perspective". (That only came later.) As I recall, Kenyon said that he had undergone some kind of spiritual crisis (that sounded faintly psychiatric to me, an episode of acute depression or something). That crisis caused him to embrace a very devout Christianity (which may have been the faith of his childhood). I think that it was that newfound religious commitment that led him to favor more teleological explanations of the phenomena of life and caused him to move away from science's methodological naturalism.
True. I don't think that Dr. Kenyon was motivated by feeling that he needed to 'prove God', God was more of a postulate with him. But I don't recall him ever proposing anything that could remotely be called an intelligent design research program either. So in practice, the scientific side of his thinking seemed largely negative, consisting of little more than criticizing biological evolution by natural selection, while proposing nothing tangible to take its place. Certainly nothing informative that could be tested and evaluated in scientific terms. My feeling was that his religious faith filled that void, providing all the explanation and justification that he felt he needed for whatever he had come to believe.
My point is that I believe that his spiritual crisis motivated his turn to religion. His turn to religion in turn motivated his growing support of intelligent design. I don't think that his motivation was primarily scientific.
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I think that he saw the evidence of intelligence in life .
Y'know, ok, personally "honest" when he's talking to you. But his big book was
1) edited to remove words like "God" from it, so it could be presented to schools as a legitimate textbook
2) published under the temporary and ad hoc publishing house name of "Haughton Publishing Co", which had never existed before or I believe since, and kind of sounds like "Houghton Mifflin Publishing" - famous and familiar publishers of legitimate textbooks
3) manipulated on Amazon by the Discovery Institute, padding its reviews and ratings
and so forth.
Not to mention that its arguments, for a smart and very well educated guy, are kind of - dubious - in their dumbed down presentation of invalid reasoning; manipulative of the less educated, padded with sciency sounding lingo that takes advantage of the young and the naive without expressing sound thought or meaningful insight.
There's a long tradition in Christian thought, prominent in Catholic (Jesuit missionary, say) evangelism especially, which holds that a sort of white lie or deception is OK in the service of bringing souls to Christ - the greater good. So he's kind, and sincere, and very much wants children to come to the True Faith, and as a kind man and a faithful one he is confronted with the disturbing amorality of science in Cold War and surging Communist England. A lot of it seems to be built on Darwinian theory - or at least language - somehow. Eugenics.
So he's honest, nice, etc. But that book of his is not.
I don't care for whatever religious views he or others hold to. Only that he is honest and competent to present sound arguments. His still current title is
Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Francisco State University. Competence to argue biology taken care of, the issue reduces to one of honesty...
I had no idea that was or at least is alleged to be the case. That interview earlier linked to was some time in the mid-90's, and it's perfectly clear there he subscribed to an old earth position. Wikipedia lists him as a YEC, but I cannot find a direct quote of Kenyon espousing that. It would mean either a shift in position since that mid-90's interview, or the implication is he was lying as to his true beliefs then.
Actually I do. Which Is why though ignoring your earlier bating post, responded here. The real situation is unclear to me. There is this: http://lclane2.net/kenyon.html
which flatly labels him an old earth creationist. And this: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/edwards-v-aguillard/kenyon.html
On checking through, nothing there about endorsing YEC. Point 9 there includes:
"...Creation-science does not include as essential parts the concepts of catastrophism, a world-wide flood, a recent inception of the earth or life, from nothingness (ex nihilo), the concept of kinds, or any concepts from Genesis or other religious texts..."
If he has shifted to or already was in that 90's interview a closet YEC, that would be sad and disappointing. Yet would still not detract from his points about the deep flaws in natural origin of life hypotheses.
Interesting personal perspective. Like i said above, it's the ID arguments that stand or fall on their own merits. And of course Dean Kenyon is hardly the only ID/Creationist out there with letters to their name.
His arguments, in his books and writings, are not sound - they aren't even particularly high level biology, the errors are of reason not fact. So the question of whether he is competent to present sound arguments is a complex one. He doesn't, but why not?
The argument regarding his "honesty" reduces to one of sincerity - does he sincerely believe that most of modern biology, geology, astronomy, and paleontology, is gibberish and confusion, not only wrong but so badly wrong it makes no sense at all.
That statement is false. There is no creation-science, for starters - at least, not Christian Monotheism based (at least one scientific discovery has been made in research guided by a type of creationist theory, but it was Gaian and not Intelligent Designer based - about resource cycling in the world's oceans). Continuing, none of the basic tenets of Christian creationism, the philosophy or theology involved in fact, can be taught in themselves in a strictly scientific sense. One can teach about them, as one teaches about the myths of any culture, or about historical systems of thought (Ptolomeic astronomy), but not "teach them", as science itself.
No it isn't.
He has been linked personally and professionally, by word and by deed, to the Young Earth folks, since the 1970s. https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2010/07/dean-kenyon-a-y.html
That kind of carefully deflective legal bit of weaseling is one of the places where the question of honesty comes in, with Kenyon. In theory, if creation science existed, it might not include any of that stuff. But Kenyon's brand of creationism most definitely includes concepts from Genesis, specifically, starting with the God that is the central figure, and it most definitely - in his textbooks, writings, etc - is designed to accommodate all of that stuff. He doesn't have a lot of intelligent pre-Noachian leprechuans designing things, or an impersonal complexity whirling up living beings out of side effects of its other activities, or the like.
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He was unsound to point to biomolecular chirality as a deep issue?: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-007-1003-0_10
Or the likelihood of an oxygenated early atmosphere, now more strongly confirmed than then?: http://www.astrobio.net/geology/earths-early-atmosphere/
Hence the likely otherwise inexplicable rise in popularity of 'panspermia' (shift the chemical playground). And so on. Going after the man is one approach to discrediting an idea. A better one is addressing the actual arguments divorced from the presenter of such.
If he was/is deceitful on those aspects i.e closet YEC, such personal failings unfortunately provides plenty of ammo for the like of you. I stick to the ID arguments themselves. No heroes to fret over if they fall.