Discoveroids Say Darwinists Must Be Racists

It was only yesterday that we posted Klinghoffer: Darwinists Are Racists, where we said that Klinghoffer — the Discovery Institute’s journalistic slasher and poo flinger — had earned his pay by writing a classic Discoveroid post claiming that racism is inevitable for those who promote Darwinism.

To our great surprise, Klinghoffer has somehow gone beyond what he did yesterday. This now appears at the Discovery Institute’s creationist blog: Why Darwinism Can Never Separate Itself from Racism. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis, and occasional Curmudgeonly interjections that look [like this]:

It’s great to have insightful colleagues. [Especially if they’re creationists.] Denyse O’Leary, with Discovery Institute’s Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence [Link omitted], has been writing about evolution for years as well. Having read my post “The Return of John Derbyshire” [the one we blogged about yesterday], she points out something I hadn’t quite grasped. Now a lightbulb goes off.

The Discoveroids used to have a page of biographical information about Denyse, but we can’t find it now that she’s been moved to one of their many other websites. It used to say: “She received her degree in honors English language and literature.” Anyway, she managed to give Klinghoffer a new insight about how horrible “Darwinists” are. He says:

The thread of racism in Darwinian thinking isn’t a chance thing, a mere byproduct of Charles Darwin’s personal views as a “man of his time.” You think if Darwinism had emerged not in the dark age of the 19th century but in our own woke era, it would be different? No, it wouldn’t. The racism is inherent, unavoidable:

Get ready, dear reader, for an ark-load of creationist garbage. How can we be so sure it’s garbage? In this post, Racism, Eugenics, and Darwin, we refute the Discoveroids’ endlessly-repeated allegations; and in this one, Creationism and Racism, we document the racist history of creationism. Not only that, but the TalkOrigins Index to Creationist Claims has a few entries of interest — see Evolution is racist (no, it isn’t), and then Darwin himself was racist (hint — he wasn’t), and also Darwin’s work refers to “preservation of favoured races”.

Okay, the ark-load begins. Klinghoffer quotes Denyse:

Racism is implicit in the Darwinian belief system about how things happen. [Huh?] Even if one’s creationism amounts to no more than the idea that humans have an immortal soul, it makes all humans equal for all practical purposes. Take that away and believe instead that humans are animals that slowly evolved from less-than-human creatures and a variety of things happen, none of them conducive to non-racism.

Ooooooooooooh! He quotes her again:

The problem is not merely that Darwin, a man of his age, was a racist. [He wasn’t.] The problem is that his bias resulted in his and others distorting the fossil record to suit a racist worldview. [What?]

This is really amazing! And we’re not done yet. Klinghoffer tells us:

Those issues with the fossil record are the theme of most of paleontologist Günter Bechly’s recent writing [Hee hee!] at Evolution News. [Link omitted.] She goes on:

[He quotes Denyse again:] To “get past” the fact that Darwin was a racist [Groan!], we must be willing to undo science that begins by assuming that non-European features are sub-human. [What?] … In any Darwinian scheme, someone must be the subhuman. If not the current lot (formerly, the “savages,” currently the Neanderthals and/or Homo erectus), who will it be? … Surely these are the true reasons Darwinists simply can’t confront the race issue and get past it, and so they resort to long-winded special pleading.

Having been enlightened by Denyse, Klinghoffer continues:

The idea of racial equality, perfectly natural to a design perspective [Really?], can be achieved by the Darwinist only by continually and ruthlessly suppressing a built-in tendency. It requires bad faith: fooling himself about his own way of thinking. Like an irremediable birth defect, it’s never going to go away.

This is really tough slogging, but let’s read on:

Of course it’s possible to find people who believe in creation and who are also racists. You can find bad apples in any community of thinkers. But the key point is that the two ideas are permanently at odds with each other. Whereas Darwinism and racism are a match made in… Well, they’re conjoined twins, let’s put it that way.

There’s a bit more, but we’ve had enough. And to our surprise, Klinghoffer has managed to change our opinion. We used to think of the Discoveroids as a source of entertainment. We’re much more realistic in our assessment now, but it’s probably unwise to say what we’re thinking. Be assured, however, that it’s not flattering

Copyright © 2019. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Don’t Forget ’15 Answers’ from Scientific American

While we’re waiting for some news of The Controversy between evolution and creationism — which seems to be increasingly scarce these days — we’d like to remind you of something that appeared in Scientific American back in 2002, years before we started this humble blog.

Their article is titled 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. The author is John Rennie, described at the end as “the former editor in chief of Scientific American.” When his article appeared it drove the creationists crazy, and even today it rebuts almost every creationist claim that we see. It’s a valuable resource to be aware of.

Here’s a list of the 15 creationist claims the article discusses:

1. Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law.

2. Natural selection is based on circular reasoning: the fittest are those who survive, and those who survive are deemed fittest.

3. Evolution is unscientific because it is not testable or falsifiable. It makes claims about events that were not observed and can never be re-created.

4. Increasingly, scientists doubt the truth of evolution.

5. The disagreements among even evolutionary biologists show how little solid science supports evolution.

6. If humans descended from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

7. Evolution cannot explain how life first appeared on Earth.

8. Mathematically, it is inconceivable that anything as complex as a protein, let alone a living cell or a human, could spring up by chance.

9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.

10. Mutations are essential to evolution theory, but mutations can only eliminate traits. They cannot produce new features.

11. Natural selection might explain microevolution, but it cannot explain the origin of new species and higher orders of life.

12. Nobody has ever seen a new species evolve.

13. Evolutionists cannot point to any transitional fossils — creatures that are half reptile and half bird, for instance.

14. Living things have fantastically intricate features — at the anatomical, cellular and molecular levels — that could not function if they were any less complex or sophisticated. The only prudent conclusion is that they are the products of intelligent design, not evolution.

15. Recent discoveries prove that even at the microscopic level, life has a quality of complexity that could not have come about through evolution. [That’s “irreducible complexity”]

You probably haven’t seen that article for years, so it’s definitely worth another look.

Copyright © 2019. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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Klinghoffer: Darwinists Are Racists

Things are getting nasty at the Discovery Institute’s creationist blog. Their latest post is The Return of John Derbyshire, written by David Klinghoffer — a Discoveroid “senior fellow” (i.e., flaming, full-blown creationist), who eagerly functions as their journalistic slasher and poo flinger. He’s really flinging the stuff today. Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis, and occasional Curmudgeonly interjections that look [like this]:

A friend sent me a link to an online racialist journal, VDare [Link omitted], where I got the unpleasant surprise of seeing a screen shot of an article from Evolution News [the Discoveroids’ blog] with my name on it. This accompanied a post by John Derbyshire.

That’s a name we haven’t seen in a while — not since the earliest months of this humble blog. He’s definitely not a creationist — see John Derbyshire on Jindal and Creationism in Louisiana. Klinghoffer says:

Derbyshire, I now saw, had responded to my commentary on Razib Khan, the genetics PhD candidate who took to the online pages at National Review to urge conservatives against engaging with Darwin skeptics.

You remember that. We wrote about it a week ago — see National Review Has a Pro-Evolution Article. The Discoveroids posted at least four times about it, accusing Khan of having some articles in dubious publications. Now Klinghoffer’s going to do the same thing with Derbyshire. He tells us:

His writing now appears at racialist publications including VDare, Taki’s Magazine, and The Unz Review. The last is particularly vile, but Derbyshire runs his pieces at all three.

We’re not familiar with those publications. Does Derbyshire write racist articles? That’s the one thing Klinghoffer never tells us. It’s all guilt by association. He continues:

So, down to business. He [Derbyshire] chides me for hypocrisy. I wrote against “blackballing and guilt by association,” yet says Derbyshire, I “then proceed[ed] to blackball/ guilt by association Razib because he has been ‘canoodling with the racist Alt-Right.’” I guess I should explain myself better.

This should be fun. Let’s read on:

If you are going to argue for turning the mute button on against those who say biology gives evidence of design, excluding them as discussion partners, you do need to examine your own associations pretty carefully. Khan, it seems, has failed to do that.

[…]

Perhaps I should have been clearer that “blackballing and guilt by association” are a problem when the association does NOT tell you something important about the person under consideration or about his thinking. That is, it’s unfair when it’s arbitrary. If someone is a member of the Nazi Party, where he associates with other Nazis, that’s significant. If he runs his articles at a grotesque online venue like Unz, that’s significant.

We don’t know that publication, but again, Klinghoffer isn’t telling us that Derbyshire writes Nazi stuff. Instead, he goes into full-blown Discoveroid mode:

Khan’s association with the alt-right, and Derbyshire’s, is not by chance. The thread of what the racist Right calls “Race Realism” has never been completely absent from Darwinian theorizing from Darwin himself down to today. See our colleague Richard Weikart’s book From Darwin to Hitler [Link omitted.] for more about this persistent taint.

The Discoveroids never hesitate to play the Hitler card when criticizing Darwin — see, e.g.: Discovery Institute: Hitler, Hitler, Hitler, Part X. They’re also adept at playing the racism card — see Racism, Eugenics, and Darwin — and that’s exactly what they’re doing here.

Klinghoffer’s final paragraph is a real gem. See what you think of it:

Derbyshire can be a charming and interesting writer — I regret that he took the course he did. [What “course”?] I doubt he or Khan is a hateful person. [Right, except that Klinghoffer’s post strongly suggests the opposite.] But wise? Wise enough to offer counsel to fellow conservatives about who to talk with and learn from about science? When they can’t muster the wisdom to decide how to expend the precious resource of their own names? No, their own lack of wisdom is noteworthy. It says something about themselves, but more importantly, it should be a cause for reflection about the ideology, Darwinist materialism, that they promote.

Slick, huh? Klinghoffer never specifically says that Derbyshire and Khan are racists, but the innuendos are never-ending, and he ends by saying that the racism he implies is inevitable for those who promote Darwinism. Klinghoffer has certainly earned his pay today. He has written a classic Discoveroid post.

Copyright © 2019. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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John Lennox Says Science Is Faith

We found this brain-bender at the website of the Christian Post, which describes itself as “the nation’s most comprehensive Christian news website.” They have a comments icon, but we can’t get it to work. Their headline is Science cannot bury God but it can bury atheism: John Lennox . Here are some excerpts, with bold font added by us for emphasis, and occasional Curmudgeonly interjections that look [like this]:

Science cannot bury God, as some atheists claim, but it can bury atheism, according to an emeritus professor at Oxford University with a Ph.D. in mathematics.

John Lennox isn’t officially a Discoveroid, but he participates in many of their revival meetings. The last time we wrote about him was Discoveroids: Hawking Was Wrong. The Christian Post says:

Gathered before hundreds at the Museum of the Bible Thursday for a Socrates in the City event hosted by author Eric Metaxas in the lead-up to Colson Center’s annual Wilberforce Weekend, Irish mathematician John Lennox engaged the question: Has science buried God?

Metaxas is a Discoveroid fellow traveler. The last time we wrote about him was Discoveroids Return to Bizarro World. Now that we know who the players are, the event sounds like a creationist revival meeting. The Christian Post tells us:

Atheism, theism, pantheism have been around for millennia, Lennox said, when asked by Metaxas about when the idea crept into to mainstream Western thought that science and Christian faith were at odds. Isaac Newton “laid out the universe beautifully in terms of mathematics and discovered that mathematics gave a brilliant description of how things work, and it led to the idea that the universe was essentially a mechanical artifact. And then people began to think ‘Well, it seems to run very well on its own and we are able to research it without referring to any concept of someone who set it going.’ So the idea of God setting it going started to recede into the past,” he said.

By the 18th century, deism — the belief that God exists but He is largely uninvolved in the affairs of humanity — was prevalent and subsequently followed by the Enlightenment, where the thinkers of the day replaced God with human reason.

That’s reasonably accurate. This article is a long one, so we have to skip a lot to focus on creationism. After a few paragraphs, they get around to the God of the gaps:

When Lennox was growing up in Ireland and would refer to God, people knew he was speaking of the Creator God in the Bible. Yet atheists like Steven Hawking think Lennox is speaking of God who resembles an ancient Greek deity like Zeus and then automatically assume Christians default to the God of the gaps, the “I can’t explain lightning so I invent a god when you do some atmospheric physics that god disappears.”

“The most important thing to realize is that the God of the Bible is not a god of the gaps,” Lennox stressed.

Then what is it? Lennox explains:

The first sentence of the Bible — “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” — linguistically is a merism [What?], which includes the bits we do and don’t understand.

We never encountered that word before. Wikipedia has an article on it — see Merism. We still don’t get it, but let’s see what Lennox says:

“If you understand art, you can follow the details of a Rembrandt painting better than I can. The more you understand, the more you admire the genius, and that is just so important. And so Newton’s faith and my faith, being in God, increases, because the heavens are constantly and increasingly declaring his glory,” he stressed, alluding to Psalm 19.

Yeah, right. Let’s read on:

But the reason he thinks that science can bury atheism is because science can be done, Lennox said. [What?] If you start believing that there is a rational intelligence behind the universe, then doing science is reasonable, and the Christian has a rationale for doing science, he said.

There’s a lot more in the article, but that was probably the “best” paragraph. If you can do science, then you must acknowledge the existence of the intelligent designer — blessed be he!

Now we’re skipping an ark-load more and getting to the end, which is a brilliant quote from Lennox:

“We’ve been hugely miseducated to think that there is science here and faith there,” he said, gesturing as if the two were completely distinct categories. “Science involves faith. [Hee hee!] You don’t do science unless it can be done. More precisely, you don’t do it unless you believe the universe is at least in part rationally intelligible.”

Okay, dear reader. If you understand that what was all about, please explain it to us, because we don’t get it at all.

Copyright © 2019. The Sensuous Curmudgeon. All rights reserved.

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