Weasel Words

[Kahalachan]

I see lots of debates on this forum with weasel words.

Kind of like a straw man with words, using specific words to demean the opposition.

Life coming from nowhere, or the big bang is an explosion, evolution involves random processes, and so on.

I would like to see a debate without the use of weasel words and words that the scientific community would use to describe the phenomena.

 

[RedAndy]

Interesting point. No evolutionist argues that life came from "nowhere," or that Big Bang theory states: "in the beginning, there was nothing. Then it exploded."

Yet somehow this is how these ideas are put across in order to demean the opposition. Is this down to ignorance of the theories, or people being wilfully misleading?

In some cases it's difficult to tell.

 

[Baggins]

I think it is down to poor explanation of scientific facts to the general populus.

I'm sure a lot of the people who post about the big bang being an explosion probably believe that this is what scientists genuinely think.

They haven't been informed about what Big Bang Theory states, or if they have they didn't understand it.

It is a problem that science has always had and as the field of science seems to grow almost exponentially it can only get worse, public perception of science in general is very sketchy.

 

[Kahalachan]

Interesting point. No evolutionist argues that life came from "nowhere," or that Big Bang theory states: "in the beginning, there was nothing. Then it exploded."

Yet somehow this is how these ideas are put across in order to demean the opposition. Is this down to ignorance of the theories, or people being wilfully misleading?

In some cases it's difficult to tell.

I saw a video by a ministry called Way of the Master, and I can say they are purposely misleading cause they use a quote from Darwin about how absurd the evolution of the eye sounds, but then in the sentence immediately following Darwin states how it makes sense.

For most people, I think it is harmless and they don't realize what these theories actually state.

 

[RedAndy]

The good folk at TalkOrigins call it "quote mining," and it is quite prevalent in some Creationist circles.

As well as Darwin's evolution of the eye, there are a number of quotes that have been taken out of context by Creationists and used to argue against evolution. I'm too much of a newbie to post links, but if you search the TalkOrigins archive for "quote mining" you will get a comprehensive list of the sort of thing I'm talking about.

What I was referring to, however, is whether some of the people on this board actually understand the theories and are deliberately distorting them, or are just quoting verbatim from whatever anti-evolution source they have found on the Internet. From what I've observed I'd say it was a mixture of the two.