Back to the Quote Mines

Bill, Jason Rosenhouse who has occasionally come to my talks about ID at his school responded at Pandas Thumb, he said,"Only a diehard ID fanatic could possibly continue to take Dembski seriously after following this exchange. Dembski's blatant dishonesty and breathtaking arrogance have seldom been on clearer display. If there are any ID proponents with consciences reading this, I'd be curious to know if you still want anything to do with this guy." Rosenhouse is actually a very nice guy in person, one would not gather that from his internet persona. His last offerings put me in a tough position, as I do respect him, and he has come out to several of my Intelligent Design talks at his school, James Madison University, where we have numerous IDEA supporters including the biology students and science faculty (albeit quietly). That said, this was my response to his inquiry, I wrote: " I fully support Dembski, and I do not think he is a liar whatsoever. Although I can understand why you perceive the leaders of our movement that way. It’s hard to be put on the spot, Dr. Rosenhouse, especially by you. You among all the rest here at PandasThumb command the most respect from me, and so it is hard to be put on the spot. I was reluctant to post for fear of angering you more. My explanations may not be satisfying to you, perhaps you might think we are just blind, since William Dembski, after all is family to us, someone who has been insulted and persecuted like the rest of us IDists… Surely I can understand your irritation and anger at my leaders. However, if you are truly curious to understand why we do not perceive Dembski as a liar, it’s actually very easy if you are willing to at least try to understand how IDists and creationists see the world. To us, the physical evidence is not convincing, the Cambrian explosion has no satisfying naturalistic explanation, Ward was wrong to even postulate that there is naturalistic solution, and the same can be said of every other naturalistic evolutionist. I myself, having degrees in math, computer science, and electrical engineering understand the language of information theory. Dembski’s writings are far more correct in my view that the offering of his critics. I have even defended his work at ISCID and responded to his Elsberry and his former teacher Shallit. It was through the process of dealing with Bill’s critics, such as Elsberry and Shallit, that I eventually strongly sided with Bill Dembski. If one reads my early writings on the net, one will see that I actually was fairly sympathetic to Elsberry at first, and his concept of SAI more than Dembski’s CSI. That changed as I studied the writings of both sides more thoroughly and concluded Elsberry and (Dembski’s former teacher) Shallit were dead wrong in their assessment of CSI. I have worked in automatic target recognition, the detection of ID artifacts, and from a professional standpoint Dembski’s work makes sense. I know of an IDist/biologist at George Mason who will be in at the George Mason’s national center for bio defense, and I’m confident she sypmathizes with Dembski’s position, as detection of intelligently design bio agents are crucial to her profession… With respect to the creationists at ICR and AiG, I have posted publicly and at your website where I often agree with you. I have criticized publicly ICR for stabbing fellow YECs in the back, so you need not be troubled that I will defend them before you, even though I myself have strong Young Earth leanings. However, I consider Bill’s scholarship and conclusions materially accurate. For the theory of naturalistic evolution to be true it must overcome major theoretical and empirical hurdles. You’ve come to my talks at your school, and I’ve explained things at a superficial level (as was appropriate for my audience), and I have referred the students in my group to your website and writings so that they will have access to what I consider the best counter arguments to the ID position. We have an IDEA member who has worked in molecular phylogeny for 3 years. The amount of molecular convergence she sees argues against naturalistic interpretations, and the explanations she is given for these phenoman theoretically unsatisfying. She was completely troubled by the molecular clock hypothesis which is used as an explanation for the hierarchical patterns in the molecular sequence divergences. That hypothesis, by the way, was likened by Denton to “a principle more like mideaval astrology than a serious 20th century scientific theory”, and explanation of the hierarchical pattern in his view, “amount to little more than apologetic tautologies”. I can see why Sternberg finally sided with the IDists, and so can she, and so can I. Until serious empirical and theoretical problems are resolved, Ward and others will ultimately viewed as being blind to obvious facts, and people like Kurt Wise will continue to graduate from their mentors like Stephen Gould, and people like Dembski will graduate from Shallit’s classes, and IDEA members from your school will graduate from biology programs, all believing that the case for naturalistic evolution are unsupported by scientific facts. In the meantime we see what happens to professors of cellular biolgy like Caroline Crocker and that un-named professor who declined and interview with Nature because he was untenured. Until your side can offer convincing empirical and theoretical evidence that the complexity of life arose through naturalistic processes, Ward statements in favor of naturalistic evolution can not be viewed as anything more than wishful thinking on Ward’s part. Therefore, Ward’s words only serve as an example to us of the amounts of collective wishful thinking out there, and thus, the quotation by Dembski is used to reference the one part of Wards work we believe agree with the empirical facts, namely, the Cambrian explosion is a major problem for naturalistic evolution. So you were curious why I support Dembski, and I have offered some of my reasons." scordova

May 5, 2005

May

05

May

5

05

2005

05:36 AM

5

05

36

AM

PDT

Copy Comment Link

Quote miner, quote miner, pants on fire ... I was quite relieved that Jason Rosenhouse wrote his piece on William Dembski’s recent bloviations about quote-mining.  Specifically, Dembski was challenging a portion of something written by Dave Mullenix and myself about a year ago publish...The Panda's Thumb

May 3, 2005

May

05

May

3

03

2005

11:47 PM

11

11

47

PM

PDT

Copy Comment Link