Originally posted by Jerry Smith
I also have plenty of problems with your continual accusations and implications of stupidity and ineptitude through your straw-man characterizations of the science you don't give any evidence of understanding,
I've addressed this already. I am not calling scientists stupid or inept, and you know it. You are interpreting it that way, but that's in YOUR head, not mine.
and through your constant use of phrases and words like "imaginary", "making up evidence," "fantasy", etc... But I don't expect you to ever back up your allegations.. why do you expect whoever said something about your quoting habits to back up there's?
I've backed up everything I've said with quotes from the evolutionists themselves. For example, Lewontin pretty much comes right out and says that he feels it is necessary to examine the evidence with materialist blinders on. Just because you happen to think this is right doesn't mean it fails to substantiate my claim that scientists "filter" the evidence through their interpretive assumptions and a-priori positions.
As for "imagination," what more do you need than the quote from Gould? Gould, for whom I have little respect, admits that
"The evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at their tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils." He's saying two things here -- the conclusions aren't from the fossils themselves (the
evidence tm) but the conclusions are instead based on "inference." "Inference" is just another way of saying "what we imagine to be true based on what we understand from what we see." He says the inference is reasonable, but that doesn't make it so. You may think it is reasonable. I do not. How can it be reasonable if your imagination is filtered through a-priori assumptions? But whether you think it's reasonable or not, it's still imagination, not facts.
And before you flame me for dissing an evolutionist hero, let me offer yet another quote, this one by John Maynard Smith, a well-known British neo-Darwinist (from New York Review of Books, 1994):
...[speaking of Gould]...the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory.
There you not only have a low opinion of Gould and his work, but a blatant admission that evolutionists hesitate to criticize poor research and bad ideas if by doing so it encourages creationists.
What was that I heard someone say about how great science is because theories get peer review? Seems like the peer review is rather biased, to me. And that claim is substantiated right above.
Finally, as far as I can recall, I never said anyone made up evidence. It has been done, and you know that, too, but it is infrequent and deliberate fraud, and therefore it really doesn't have anything to do with what I've been talking about. I'm talking about spiritual blindness and tunnel vision.
If you still don't think I've backed up my claims, then obviously nothing will satisfy you.
