The number of people in the world who care what the Discoveroids think of the Nye-Ham debate is probably limited to a tiny cadre in Seattle, but they do manage to keep us entertained. They’ve just posted Reflecting on the Ham-Nye Creation Debate: Intelligent Design Stands in a Great Scientific Tradition.
The author is Michael Egnor — that’s his writeup at the Encyclopedia of American Loons. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us:
I’ve been reflecting a bit on the debate a few nights ago on origins and creation science between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. I may see this a bit differently from some of my Discovery colleagues. I think that Ham did very well — he pointed out the important differences between observational/experimental science and historical science, and he made the important point that historical science is particularly influenced by metaphysical assumptions. Darwinists like Bill Nye do their historical science from a materialist and atheist perspective, and it clearly taints their insights.
Lordy, lordy. Egnor is a physician, but he believes in ol’ Hambo’s bizarre distinction between “observational/experimental science and historical science.” We assume, if a blood test for one of Egnor’s patients indicates the presence of antibodies for a specific pathogen, he makes no conclusion that the patient was once exposed to that pathogen. How could he? There’s no way for him to know that such a thing happened in the past, because he wasn’t there. We’re off to a great start, but it gets better:
Unlike Nye, Ham was honest about his own perspectives — which are Biblical and for which I have great respect and much agreement.
Of course he agrees — he’s a creationist, as are all the Discoveroids. Let’s read on:
My own perspective is that revelation and reason are not, and cannot be, in conflict. Nature speaks to us of our Creator. I seek to “follow the evidence,” as do other advocates of intelligent design. But it would be naïve to think anyone’s quest for scientific truth is without a specific metaphysical perspective.
We are not naïve, and we are well aware of the Discoveroids’ supernatural perspective. Egnor continues:
When I follow the evidence, I begin with a set of quite specific assumptions. Those assumptions are the product of the great Western tradition, which is the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem — the marriage of reason and faith.
An odd coupling — reason and Oogity Boogity. How stimulating! It was so stimulating that the West didn’t fully recover until the Enlightenment, which one might regard as a long-overdue philosophical divorce. Here’s more:
The intelligent design movement stands in that tradition, which gave us the Scientific Enlightenment and modern science. That tradition has been derailed in science today by materialists like Nye who presume atheism and presume Darwinism.
Continuing with our divorce analogy, the Discoveroids are functioning as the divorce lawyers for the Oogity Boogity partner, who sat around on her fat butt the whole time, gorging on chocolates, while the logical partner went out and did all the work, yet who always got criticized for not recognizing the value of his nagging partner. We can certainly understand why she doesn’t want to be divorced. How would she ever make it on her own? Moving along:
Intelligent design rejects the dogma of materialism. Materialist science is a betrayal, not a fulfillment, of modern science.
It’s easy to see that what Egnor celebrates as the ancient “the marriage of reason and faith” was a clumsy mismatch from the beginning. It’s time for this unhappy couple to go their separate ways. Another excerpt:
Intelligent design science is a call for a reawakening of the great scientific tradition that arose in the Christian West — the science of great scientists like Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and Kepler and Pasteur and Faraday and Maxwell. All of the great scientists who gave us modern science inferred intelligent design in nature.
We offer three observations in response to that old creationist clunker:
First, not one of those scientists accomplished anything of scientific merit using any specific creationist doctrine or data. We challenge any creationist (or Discoveroid) to name anything Galileo or the others did that depends on uniquely scriptural doctrine.
Second, what have the Discoveroids accomplished with their “theory”? It hasn’t produced any results, and it never will.
Third, what industry or productive enterprise (we exclude religious theme parks) employ any specifically creationist (or Discoveroid) doctrine in any technical aspect of their work?
Okay, here’s the article’s predictable conclusion:
Intelligent design stands in the tradition of the Scientific Enlightenment. We follow the evidence, confident in the consilience of faith and reason, trusting in the rationality and purpose that is evident to all of us in nature.
No, Egnor, you don’t stand in that tradition. You’re standing in the way.
Copyright © 2014. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.
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The Sensuous Curmudgeon 
Egnor, being the lunatic and crank that he is, provides some of the most entertaining posts churned out by the Disco Tute. Whenever I see his name on a Tooter byline, I know I’m in for a few belly laughs.
I thought intelligent design was a theory. Now it’s a movement? And also there’s something called intelligent design science? I’m getting confuseder and confuseder every minute.
As has been mentioned many times before, there’s a good reason the term “Egnorance” was coined.
Any more news on the Ark bond sale?
Egnor is a surgeon: what does he neeed with “evidence”?
Dr. Egnorance is responsible fro the painfully stupid (even on the Egnor Scale of Stoopidity) brain-mind duality by likening the brain to a cellphone and God to ATT.
Although, on second thought, hmmmmmmmm, ATT …
SC: “Lordy, lordy. Egnor is a physician, but he believes in ol’ Hambo’s bizarre distinction between “observational/experimental science and historical science.” We assume, if a blood test for one of Egnor’s patients indicates the presence of antibodies for a specific pathogen, he makes no conclusion that the patient was once exposed to that pathogen. How could he? There’s no way for him to know that such a thing happened in the past, because he wasn’t there.”
That is beautiful! The perfect put-down of Ham’s bogus distinction between “observational” and “historic” science.
“First, not one of those scientists accomplished anything of scientific merit using any specific creationist doctrine or data. We challenge any creationist (or Discoveroid) to name anything Galileo or the others did that depends on uniquely scriptural doctrine.”
In fact, you could say they made their discoveries in spite of religious doctrine.
retiredsciguy says:
Thanks. I’ve been searching my brain for a while, and I just figured that one out.
“In fact, you could say they made their discoveries in spite of religious doctrine.” . . . .and got Galileo in such hot water with the church that he was condemned by them to live his last years under house arrest and with threats of torture.
“The perfect put-down …”
Indeed, RS. I have added this very page to my favourites so that I can steal it next time.
MNb says: “I have added this very page to my favourites so that I can steal it next time.”
I am a river to my people.
Hey, you used to be MNb1. Then you were MNb0. Now there’s no digit. What’s going on?
“…and got Galileo in such hot water with the church…”
A less prominent citizen than Galileo would have been executed. The Church had to “protect the Faith”, don’t you know.
Why are human beings so prone to buy into religious dogma? Could it be because of evolution?
Think about it. Religion is used to control the behavior of others, and this has most likely been the case for as long as hominids have had the ability to communicate. Anyone questioning the authority of the “high priests” was seen as a threat to order, as well as to the priests themselves. Such “infidels” were killed. Over time, the “docile” gene becomes more and more prominent in the human genome, and we have become more and more likely to accept the concept of a “supreme being”.
Moreover, the “rebels” and “questioners” in the past were likely to be somewhat more intelligent than their contemporaries, so we probably aren’t as smart today as we would have been if we had had no concept of religion.
My reference to “infidels” being killed was deliberate — the practice persists today.
@RSG for a good take on the idea that humans evolved with religion and vice-versa, check out The Faith Instinct by Nicholas Wade.
Egnor blindly touted:
But it would be naïve to think anyone’s quest for scientific truth is without a specific metaphysical perspective.
This is a new one, but understandable coming from a creationist like Egnor and the dishonesty institute fellows. Their bias is pre-established in their minds, and from there they just happily go along ignoring anything that would contradict their “movement.”
The only thing you have to know about Egnorance is that he’s a lying sack of gerbil droppings. The guy knows how science works. He had to have conducted SOME experiments in a chemistry lab as an undergraduate or medical student. He KNOWS about taking data, fitting curved and removing bias.
This whole nonsense Egnorance spews about “materialistic bias” is pure religious propaganda and he knows it.
On the Dawkins Scale, Egnor is a disgrace to the human species.
An M.D. doesn’t always know how science works. It’s hard to imagine how any physician can ignore evolution and science and still be a medical doctor, but they sure do. In Shreveport, LA (La La Land again), there are a bunch of doctors that are members of local fundamentalist churches in the area that are strongly against evolution. Again this is an example of religious belief trumping logic and the scientific method. I sometimes wish that people who do not believe in science and evolution had to live in the pre-Darwinian and pre-scientific times and cope with all the disease and problems that existed at that time. If you don’t believe in it, why should you reap the benefits of science and technology? No vaccines and antibiotics for them!
TA: Thanks for the tip on Wade’s book. The customer reviews were very interesting and informative. It seems from the reviews that Wade takes the view that religion has gotten into our genes mainly because of the positive force of encouraging group cohesion, thus enhancing the survival of the members of that group.
In the comment I wrote above, I take a darker view, positing that we have inherited a genetic tendency to believe in a supernatural supreme being because, over the ages, non-believers have been systematically put to death, thus giving a distinct advantage to the “blind belief” gene.
Perhaps it’s a combination of both. At any rate, I readily admit I’m just pulling stuff out of my ass, as I am certainly no scholar of anthropology, and just because something seems logical doesn’t mean it’s true.
Besides, the Curmudgeon has stated repeatedly that his blog is not about religion, and I don’t want to hijack things here. Although it is an intriguing thought that religion itself may be evidence of evolution.
What do you think of that, Ham, Klinghoffer, Egnor, Rives, Luskin, and all the rest of you at AiG, ICR, and the DI?
I agree with Wade. The development of tribalism in human evolution afforded distinct advantages for survival. Indeed, tribalism behavior may well have some genetic basis. Just observe fans at athletic events. The change of tribalism into religion was an easy step.
“I thought intelligent design was a theory. Now it’s a movement?”
You have totally missed the “sophisticated theological” interpretation.
Egnor is (apparently) in the medical profession. So you need to look
of the definition of movement from that theological perspective. In an
effort to assist you with that endeavor I offer this link:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/bowelmovement.html
Also see this link for even finer details:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/diarrhea.html
Ken Ham / Bill Nye Debate Analysis
http://creation.com/creation-videos?fileID=ZzZTLVmYSyU
Bill Nye Scores on Debate Presentation if Not Logic
http://crev.info/2014/02/bill-nye-scores/
Fact Checkers, Spin Doctors Go to Work After Creation Debate
http://crev.info/2014/02/fact-checkers-spin-doctors-creation-debate/
Bill Nye’s Reasonable Man—The Central Worldview Clash of the Ham-Nye Debate
http://www.albertmohler.com/2014/02/05/bill-nyes-reasonable-man-the-central-worldview-clash-of-the-ham-nye-debate/
Successful Predictions by Creation Scientists
http://www.answersingenesis.org/get-answers/features/successful-predictions
Post-Debate Answers Live w/Ken Ham (Feb. 5)
Clash over worldviews
http://creation.com/ham-nye-debate
Aah, pipped at the post by Monsignor Zetopan regarding the “ID = movement” idea. When I read that, it was “bowel movement” that first sprang to mind.
Apart from the social cohesion (and thereby improved survival) facilitated by shared supernatural belief, I think there’s another reason why such beliefs persist. From direct experiences of the world, we recognise that there’s much regularity and order in its workings but there is also substantial unpredictability and uncertainty evident in the unfolding of many events, e.g. natural disasters, illness, predation, death, crop failure, and so on.
Such ambiguities diminish our individual/personal sense of security and induce in us anxieties about our own safety. However, a cognitive framework that ascribes agency behind, and purpose to, such unforeseen happenings makes their occurrence superficially more “understandable” and hence less perplexing. And since the natural forces behind such things are rarely obvious and have been apprehended only fairly recently in human history, the aforesaid agency and purpose was posited to originate from a magical, invisible, intangible realm.
In short, supernatural belief provides a mechanism for individuals to cope with life’s caprices, and so the sense of security and harmony one derives from belonging to a unanimous group is augmented by the “knowledge” that the world is more orderly and purposeful than it appears to be, even if we can’t fully fathom its intricacies.
Even our Curmudgeon, battle-hardened though he may be from years of creationist babble, is aghast a Egnor’s latest foolishness:
It’s particularly bizarre when you consider that Hambo’s made-up dichotomy is simply a recipe for the very worst sort of dead-end solipsism, and–along with genuine science–also sweeps away the pretended ‘foundations’ of Intelligent Design Theory. After all, if laws of physics could have been different in previous ages–and different in unspecified and unspecifiable ways–then anything is possible and nothing can be inferred. An “explosion” in the Cambrian Era? Chemistry worked quicker. Who could say, if one buys into the Hambo/Egnor line here, that Mount Rushmore wasn’t produced by wholly natural laws which have since then inexplicably changed?
The whole ‘design inference’ schtick of the Discoveroids would be an early casualty of applying Hambo’s denial of ‘historical science’.
Con-Tester notes
Very well and succinctly put.
It is very telling to me, in looking at comments on other sites about the Nye/Ham ‘debate’, that among the Hammites is a belief that Nye’s honest response of “We don’t know” (to questions like, “Where did the Big Bang come from?”) was some kind of knock-out punch against science.
There are certainly some marked personality type differences at play here. Some folks prefer a set of answers which are comprehensive but wrong rather than a set of answers which are correct but not complete. If you only want answers, stick with religion; science is for folks who get a buzz from great questions.
And the kicker comes when the questions are about morality: science just ain’t going to give you the sort of absolutes that some people seem to need. Or–what is worse–the kind of moral absolutes that some folks seem to require you to observe. That’s the one that is really objectionable.
Klingdiddlehopper gave a good illustration in a recent blog post, wherein he described himself as
Huh?! Klingy would like me to believe that Jebus was born of a virgin, was resurrected from the dead, and claimed that those who do not ‘believe’ in him are denied ‘life everlasting–all things that Klingy himself does not believe?
Isn’t that just a teensy-weensy bit, well,..flat out psychopathic insane?
And, a final reflection FWIW: my prediction for the Nye/Ham debate was woefully wrong and off the mark (though at least I did make a prediction, unlike Gerbil Luskin, who said nary a word until it was time to rewrite history as a Monday morning quarterback). I though it would be a total disaster, but in fact, after the event, see some benefit. For me, the money shot was the respective answers given to the question, “What would make you change your mind?”, wherein Nye’s answer of “Evidence” was a fine K.O. to Ham’s “Nothing; the Bible is the infallible Word of God.” That, I think, might actually influence some folks.
And although it did not occur to me to make a prediction about the responses afterwards, I would have also got that wrong: I would never have predicted that Pat Robertson (of all people!) would have a far more cogent and rational response to Ham than any of the Discoveroids!