More Reactions to Creationist Revival at SMU

Our last post on this topic was SMU Reacts to Creationist Revival Meeting. It was about student and faculty reactions to an event hosted by a church group at Southern Methodist University.

The event, a creationist revival meeting, featured the showing of a creationist film, after which there were some lectures by the neo-theocrats from the Discovery Institute‘s creationist public relations and lobbying operation, the Center for Science and Culture (a/k/a the Discoveroids, a/k/a the cdesign proponentsists).

Today we have two more articles from the Daily Campus, SMU’s student newspaper. We’ll give you excerpts from both, with bold font added by us. The first is “4 Nails” in Professor Response. It’s by Jerret Sykes, Director of the church group that sponsored the creationist revival meeting. He says:

This past Monday, eight different SMU faculty members submitted an opinion article entitled “SMU professors speak out against Darwin presentation.” They argued that the presentation “4 Nails in Darwin’s Coffin: New Challenges to Darwinian Evolution” put on by Discovery Institute (DI), was a “dishonest attempt to present a particular form of religion and science.” This allegation was then followed by a few dishonest, misunderstood and slightly biased claims of their own.

We wrote about the SMU professors’ statement earlier. You can read it in the Daily Campus: SMU professors speak out against Darwin presentation. Here’s more from the church group Director’s statement in defense of the revival meeting:

First of all, let me begin by stating that I will not attempt to challenge or argue the science that was presented or discussed in either the aforementioned event from last Thursday or in the article published on Monday. I intend full respect of the professors and scientists as well as their accomplishments and successes in their respective fields.

That sounds okay, but his paragraph then says:

As Doug Axe, one of the featured speakers at the event said in his article “A Word to the Wise,” “serious science is being done on both sides of the debate, and that should give us confidence that a truer picture of biology will become visible as the smoke clears.” I agree and am thankful that there are great minds searching out the complexities of where, exactly, we came from.

Right, “great minds” on the creationist side are doing “serious science.” There’s not much point in going on at length with this article, as it’s a rather weak defense of the event his group brought to SMU, consisting of four points (the “4 nails” in the title).

The first point made is a “rebuttal” of something the SMU professors said — that the Discoveroids are a well-funded group. The revival’s sponsor counters that they aren’t really well funded compared to science institutions. Hey — he’s got a point. Likewise, the Flat Earth Society isn’t as well funded as NASA. His second point responds to the SMU professors’ complaint about something said at the revival that could have given the impression that SMU itself had sponsored the event. The professors were acting to defend the reputation of their institution, and the church group leader belittles their concern. Then:

Thirdly, the professors stated that they were “outraged by the dishonesty” of the presentations and that the speakers at the event brought “pseudo-scientific” arguments. To claim that the Discovery Institute Fellows are “pseudo-scientists who are busily trying to pass themselves off on the unwary as legitimate scientists” is a strong claim. All of the presenters possess PhDs (some more than one), most from top-tiered universities. …

Oooooooh! The creationists have degrees! That’s an argument from authority — an extremely weak one, as those “authorities” had to be imported from a pseudo-science fringe group in Seattle. Why not consider the authority of the SMU faculty and hundreds of thousands of scientists who agree with them? We continue to the 4th point:

Finally, and this is my biggest disappointment: If the presentation was just another example of dishonesty and deception, why didn’t any of the undersigned professors who authored the article in contention and who attended the presentation, speak up publicly on Thursday?

Most scientists don’t degrade themselves by publicly debating with astrologists, flat-earthers, witch-doctors, moon-landing deniers, etc. So too with debating creationists. Here’s one more small excerpt, and then you can click over there to read it all:

The speakers did a fantastic job in communicating science in a way that non-scientific people, like me, could understand.

But that’s not all. The Daily Campus has another article of interest: Fair debates focus on evidence. This one is signed by Douglas Axe, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, Richard Sternberg (that’s Richard von Sternberg, but he drops the “von” these days), and Jonathan Wells. They’re the creationists who were either in the exhibited movie or in the live presentation after the film. They say:

Unfortunately, a letter criticizing the event to the Daily Campus by eight SMU faculty members, including Lecturer John Wise and Professor Ronald Wetherington, consists almost entirely of baseless personal attacks. This is, unfortunately, a common pattern among defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy.

The Discoveroid creationists, like the leader of the church group in the earlier article, are complaining about the SMU faculty’s response (SMU professors speak out against Darwin presentation). Here’s more from the creationists:

Instead of focusing on the evidence, however, these SMU faculty members accuse us of lying. They do this no fewer than 11 times in a seven hundred word letter. When charging someone with dishonesty it is customary to cite some evidence of the same, yet no evidence is cited.

Amazing, isn’t it? They’re complaining because their critics don’t cite evidence. The entire enterprise of promoting creationism as if it were science is nothing but a gigantic lie, yet they’re trying to flip the burden of proof around. Okay, one more excerpt:

In addition to accusations of dishonesty, Wise et al. claim seven times in their letter that intelligent design is either religion or pseudoscience. And yet they fail to cite a single scientific error in our presentations. Assertions do not make arguments.

That’s quite enough! And so, dear reader, we take our leave of SMU. The creationist students there are convinced of the righteousness of their cause. The faculty stand ready to provide them with a good education, but some people are hopelessly ineducable. And that’s why there are still creationists.

Update: See More Fallout after Creationist Revival at SMU.

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