What is an Articulate Informed Creationist

The following are a chain of four messages quoted from the General Discussion Of Moderation Procedures 11.0 topic. The theme of the topic really comes in at Admin's first message, but I included Arachnophilia's for context. You may wish to refer back to that topic for the greater context.Arachnophilia, message 230:

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I won't call attention to all the errors and nonsense that you've already called attention to in that thread (Genes and rapid extinction), and I appreciate the great effort you've made to help IamJoseph understand where and in what ways he's unintelligible and not making sense, and maybe you interpret his posts differently from me, but what I see is persistent restatements of gibberish that use responses as points of departure while for the most part ignoring their contents.

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well, agreed -- had the suspension been for being off-topic, i would have totally agreed with it. though it probably should have applied to me as well, but i was at least trying to drag it back on topic. kicking and screaming.

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i'm just not sure that suspending the opposition is a good debate technique.

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i know you and i have talked about this before. it's been a point i've argued for a long time. i think i figured out what bugs me so much, last night. look at a forum like uncommondescent. basically, and ideological wankhouse -- if you don't toe the religious line, or you dare to challenge to the "goddidit" consensus, or you have any scientific credentials at all, you're banned. for life. you end up with all creationists nodding along, and nothing actually going anywhere.

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i don't want us to be like them, not even in the slightest. but it seems like we suspend and ban an awful lot of creationists. yes, i know, at the heart of it all, our rules are fair. sometimes i'm not so sure they're applied in an even-handed way. but mostly, the fault is in the rule-breaker. and the lack of creationist content on this site makes questions like IAJ rather difficult. do we suspend him for not following the rules of debate? do we let him continue, because he's obviously trying to say something?

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from a strictly ideological standpoint, it might even be better to let people like IAJ just go off on whatever. if there's 20 or 30 people on one side that sound rational, and one on the other that sounds incoherent... well maybe suspending him is the best thing you can do for him.

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i don't know.

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Admin, message 232:

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I've pondered often on these issues, they're all good points, no need to say more.

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One thing I will add, though, is that I am frequently puzzled by the creationist willingness to let total loons advocate for their side. If there were an evolutionist here arguing determinedly for Lamarckism he'd soon be drowning in rebuttals from evolutionists. But very strangely, at least to me, creationists see little or no problem with what their nuttier adherents say. How do they know these guys aren't really evolutionists posing as creationists to make creationism look bad?

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Oh, and I'll add one more thing. I'm also puzzled by our inability to attract articulate informed creationists. Most of them don't even understand that the goal of creation science is to eliminate religious references. If my school board ever held a hearing about creationism, I'd definitely invite all these guys to speak because their inability to keep references to God and Bible out of their arguments would be the most convincing evidence possible of the religious rather than scientific nature of creationism.

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Tazmanian Devil, message 233 (Got POTM nomination and seconding by Buzsaw and Minnemooseus):

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Admin writes:

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I'm also puzzled by our inability to attract articulate informed creationists.

There have only been a few "articulate informed creationists" I have conversed with over the years. The pattern that I have picked up from these guys is that they are usually smart enough (smarter than me most of the time) to compose their messages in riddle-like style to make the rest of us put extra effort into interpreting their posts. You and I both know that with enough command of the English language, one could write academically coherent literature while making the over message a one big riddle to support just about anything, and this is the tactic that these so-called "articulate informed creationists" use to support their position.

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Most of them don't even understand that the goal of creation science is to eliminate religious references.

Percy, step back for a moment and think this through. Is it really possible to advocate creationism without referencing god? Might as well demand that we advocate evolution without referencing natural selection or genetic drift.

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If my school board ever held a hearing about creationism, I'd definitely invite all these guys to speak because their inability to keep references to God and Bible out of their arguments would be the most convincing evidence possible of the religious rather than scientific nature of creationism.

The question is do these guys exist at all? How many rocks do we have to look under before we can say to ourselves that these guys are just a figment of our hopeful imagination?

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Added by edit. Might as well reply to the rest of the post.

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One thing I will add, though, is that I am frequently puzzled by the creationist willingness to let total loons advocate for their side.

Me, too, actually. For years now I have been asking the question to the creationists I know. Why do they tolerate the crackpots among their ranks? I have come to suspect that, even though they don't say it outright knowing they'd be ridiculed for it, they believe in the crackpot ideas enough to allow someone else to say it for them.

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Take a look at our president, for example. It's obvious that the guy believes in the genesis account literally. He also knows that he'd be labeled a loon if he ever talks about it.

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If there were an evolutionist here arguing determinedly for Lamarckism he'd soon be drowning in rebuttals from evolutionists. But very strangely, at least to me, creationists see little or no problem with what their nuttier adherents say. How do they know these guys aren't really evolutionists posing as creationists to make creationism look bad?

Because deep down inside they actually believe all the crackpot ideas that these nuts proclaim. I've talked face to face to some of these crackpots before. They actually believe this stuff wholeheartedly.

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Admin, message 237:

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Tazmanian Devil writes:

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Percy, step back for a moment and think this through. Is it really possible to advocate creationism without referencing god?

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The short answer is yes! Of course! Indubitably! Absolutely!

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That was the whole point of creation science, to remove references to God and Bible from the story of creation in order to pass muster in public school science classrooms. I've been part of this debate for well over 20 years, and creation science advocates used to abound, but a sea change occurred after the 1987 Supreme Court ruling in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching creation science was just Genesis dressed up in scientific sounding terms. It took a long time for intelligent design to push aside creation science as the alternative to evolution, but once it did then sites like this saw many fewer creation science advocates and far more ID advocates. This board witnessed this change in emphasis in 2003. The whole purpose of ID was to succeed where creationism did not by advancing a position at even further remove from God and Bible.

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With the demise of ID in Dover we're now experiencing a dearth of ID advocates, but creation science advocates have not returned. Instead all we're getting is loons and preachers. I feel this indicates that creationism is temporarily in disarray. The primary strategy advocated for now by the major creationist organizations is "teach all the evidence," but it's left the creationist soldiers who come here with no ammunition, so they fire what they got, God and Bible and nonsense.

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But the important point is that, yes, there was definitely a time when creationists thought it very important that creationism be seen as a legitimate science. The failures of creation science and ID to accomplish this seems to have discouraged them from even trying, and countering such attempts was my entire reason for creating this website, to explore creationism's claim to be every bit as much science as evolution. If we've won and only preachers and loons are left, then there's no reason for the site.

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But we haven't won, of course. The creationists are, as I said, only *temporarily* in disarray. Who knows what'll come next, but there'll be something.

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Please note the topic title - " What is an Articulate Informed Creationist". It is, as I see it, what really defines the theme of this topicSubmitted to the "Is It Science?" forum.Adminnemooseus

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

While they fell short of the ideal, I'd suggest that Tranquility Base and TrueCreation came far closer than any of the current crop.

Correction here: Taz's statement got nominated by Buzsaw and 2nded by Moose who in also in his message promoted another of Taz's gems coming from the same message of Taz.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present is forever consuming the eternal future and extending the infinite past.

"What is an Articulate Informed Creationist[?]"In all honesty, I'd say an evolutionist. Primarily, I say this, because any Creationist, once informed enough to make him/her articulate, and once willing to accept that information in an effort to make him/her articulate, can, at the same time, not be able to reject the overwhelming truth of evolution, especially in regards to how it compares to his/her previously held theory. I say this, of course, as one speaking from personal experience.Let the "you ain't articulated or informed" nator-ian replies begin. Jon

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In considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist... might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species. - Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _En el mundo hay multitud de idiomas, y cada uno tiene su propio significado. - I Corintios 14:10
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ ____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _A devout people with its back to the wall can be pushed deeper and deeper into hardening religious nativism, in the end even preferring national suicide to religious compromise. - Colin Wells Sailing from Byzantium

Taz, methinks you have lumped us all into this riddle barrel. Much of what some of us do is a mix of logic and basic science laws and principles which minimizes to a significant degree the riddle/mystery factor. ICant is a good example of this in the Before the Big Bang Tread where he quite efficiently goes on the offense pretty well holding his counterparts at bay and even on the defence via the implementation of his logic and some basic knowledge of science.I have had some success in similar manner myself, way back when in my great debate with Jar before your time here, applying the thermodynamic laws of science with logic since the creationist perspective is that the very observable laws of science such as those thermodynamic laws were installed by intelligent design, i.e. God, so why shouldn't the Genesis account be interpreted in compliance with those laws, including 1LoT which logically implies eternal energy and an eternal universe to accomodate the existence of an eternal thermodynamically and eternal omnipotent designer who has been creating and destroying things in the universe forever?Where the creationist gets into trouble is when we try to go beyond our limit of knowledge in applyin science. There are some basic laws of science which we can comprehend and apply to the logic we use so long as we work within our capacity to do so without violation of empirically (I say empirically) substantiated scientific fact.One of the problems is that evolutionists here sometimes mimimize the riddle/mystery in theories such as QM and string theory, et al which the best scientists like Dr Richard Feynman have admitted to while maximizing the mystery/riddle aspect of ID creationism.Perhaps what I'm suggesting is that one need not be totally articulate in science in order to apply some basic science which layfolks can understand and apply to debating the less complicated science issues.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present is forever consuming the eternal future and extending the infinite past.

I'm just looking for creationists who are familiar with creationism. At present all they seem to know is "evolution is wrong" and "God did it." They seem unaware of all past efforts to frame creationism in scientific terms and of the reasons why so much effort was expended to do this.There's nothing to fear from those who advocate teaching that God did it because the Bible says so. Even the most ignorant of school boards recognize that this violates the establishment clause of the constitution. If someone wants to believe that their religious beliefs trump science, or even that they are science, then I'm inclined to just let them go their own way. They're no direct threat to science education.The real threat comes from those who would cloak creation in scientific terms, a Trojan Horse designed to sneak religion into the classroom. There's much to fear from this segment of creationism because claiming, for example, that the Grand Canyon is evidence of a global flood, or that the complexity of life is evidence of a designer, makes a lot of sense to most members of most schools boards. These are the kinds of issues I think are important to discuss here so that accurate information can come to light.--Percy

You're out of luck. Beyond rote memorization and talking points the religious right is literally incapable of function."Evolution is wrong" is literally the entirety of their arguement.Anyone more articulate than that doesn't believe it, they are just making money off those who don't know better.Want a great example of what I'm talking about? Check out youtube for libertyville abortion demonstration.I don't want this topic to slide off into abortion, but that's a terrific example of just how far people have thought through their positions

Libertyville antiabortion demonstration has nothig to do with creation. Ofcourse there are antiabortion activists who act like neurotics.These are not the people representing creationists who are intelligent. Dr.Behe is a very well established biologist who has published several articles in Prestigious journals like Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.He provides rational explanations. His rational views and challenges have been shot down only because he believes in God. Similar arguments can be made regarding those who believe in Evolution just because, they do not believe in God.

As noted (and as inkorrekt was good to avoid) abortion is not a topic here.Neither, however, is Dr. Behe's science. I'd like to see inkorrekt open a new thread on that since he seems to think that "...challenges have been shot down only because he believes in God." Of course, others might be able to shot them down without any reference to God whatsoever. We'd have to see what science inkorrekt put in a OP to know if that is the case.

i didn't mean to start another "let's all jump on the creationists" fest again. i was trying very, very hard in my original complaint to not be condescending.the question isn't "why are creationists so stupid lol?" it's "what can we do here to make this place a better place?" we are going to find very, very few well-informed creationists, as creationism is largely misinforation. the people with science degrees who call themselves creationists -- the only people somewhat well versed in both sides of the debate -- are few and far between. we will not get a michael behe here. and even he is barely a creationist.we cannot expect our creationists to be scientists, when by definition they are not. and we have to honestly take a look at our statistics. we have to realize that most of the creationist we get will be young, uninformed, inarticulate, and not very familiar with the rules of public debate and internet conduct. members like phat and anastasia are rare, but then they're not very vocal for creationism. some will be like buzsaw -- intelligent, and stubborn (no offense buz, "stubborn" is a word i apply to myself as well). but most will be somewhere in the rob to iamjoseph range. and we'll have a few randmans and rays to balance out the phats.if we cut out the robs and the iaj's, we're out 60-70% of our creationist membership, and probably 90% of the serious arguments on the site. their posts may seem nonsensical, or preachy, or off-topic, or whatever -- by our standards -- but that's the debate. they don't think like we do. if we are to have debate or discussion, we have to include them. otherwise, wtf is the point of the site? are we just evolution-pushers?i don't know what the solution is. we've already made some BIG steps in the right direction. we have creationist admins, who do police their own. i can't really argue for a kind of affirmative action -- we have to keep the threads somewhat on track. though sometimes i feel like the creationists attract more moderator attention simply because they tend, on average, to be a little less articulate. basically, what i think we should do ask our creationist members what they think about the situation. are members like IAJ a problem? how should we deal with it? what rules should there be, and how should standards be applied?also, i'd like to point out again that we have banned our most articulate vocal creationist -- faith. i know there's bad blood with the mods, but i still don't think banning her normal account was in good taste. i still say we let her back.

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It should be pointed out that Behe is not now a creationist, and very, very few of his published papers have anything to do with evolution which is not his real field of expertise.

considering popular opinion, probably. but jesus someone needs to block her posts from my screen.

So far as I can tell IaJ and to a lesser extent Rob offer little in the way of real argument. When IaJ manages to post something that might be relevant (rarely) it is phrased in his own personal jargon. So far as I can puzzle it out he's just stuck on the old creationist idea of "kinds" and has nothing new to offer. Losing him would be no loss because he literally has nothing of value to say. We wouldn't lose ANY serious arguments - or even a significant possibility of seeing serious arguments - if he was banned right this minute.Rob might be more of a loss. If he can only get over his obsession with his own pet errors and concentrate on producing relevant posts we might see him contribute something.The creationist admins aren't doing a great job either. Buz was supposed to be helping IaJ but he hasn't done much. Ray needs policing and none of the Creationist mods are doing it. NJ could do with more mod oversight himself. Buz probably would, too if he had a signficant thread going.

you neither have to read nor post here. nor does anyone.

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