Tuesday, April 10, 2007

The Discovery Institute Lies Again

That fountain of lies, the Discovery Institute, has produced yet another lie.

In an opinion piece published in today's Dallas Morning News, John West and Bruce Chapman claim that comparing intelligent design proponents to faith healers or Holocaust deniers is absurd because "Faith healers and Holocaust deniers are not on the faculties of reputable universities. Scientists who support intelligent design are."

Well, Messrs. West and Chapman, welcome to my university, the University of Waterloo, which is consistently rated as the number 1 or number 2 comprehensive university in Canada. We have, on our faculty, Clifford Blake, a professor who claims that he has a supernatural gift to heal people. I wrote about his claims in three blog posts: Number 1, Number 2, and Number 3.

Messrs. West and Chapman also must think that Northwestern University is not reputable. Northwestern has a man named Arthur Butz on their faculty. Butz is the author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, a book claiming that the Holocaust is a hoax.

So the Discovery Institute lies again. Big surprise.

Here's what Messrs. West and Chapman should have said: "Like faith healers and Holocaust deniers, supporters of intelligent design can be found at many reputable universities. Their claims, however, say more about a dogmatic adherence to religion or nationalism than they do about a dispassionate search for the truth."

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

So when Darwin himself references the "Creator" in Origin of Species how are we to deal with that from a naturalistic/materialistic framework?
Its a category error to assume that science proves science. Naturalism rests upon the foundation of philosophy of science, therefore naturalism must be incorrect or flawed.

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Anonymous:

You seem extremely confused.

Biology doesn't rest on what metaphors Darwin did or didn't use. Anyone who has read a biography of Darwin knows his theism was weak, if not nonexistent, and that passages such as the one you allude to were probably created as a sop to theists.

I never said "science proves science", and it's a nonsensical claim, since science doesn't prove anything.

Naturalism is correct, in my opinion, and you have provided no evidence to think otherwise.

Obligatory insult: anyone who uses the term "category error" is almost certainly worth ignoring.

Anonymous said...

Reading anonymous' comments. I mentally put the writer in the category I reserve for authors worth reading. But after reading jeffrey's comments, I understand now that I made a category error.

P.S. I thought the preceding comment might be appropriate in a blog entitled "Recursivity"

Anonymous said...

I guess the following universities are also not reputable.

1. The California Institute of Technology is not reputable because it had on its faculty one Linus Pauling who claimed that vitamin C cures cancer.

2. The Un. of California nedical school is not reputable because it has on its faculty one Peter Deusberg who claims that HIV doesn't cause AIDS.

3. Stanford Un. is not reputable because it had on its faculty one William Shockley who claimed that black Americans were intellectually inferior to Caucasions.

4. Cambridge Un. is not reputable because it has on its faculty one Brian Josephson who believes in ESP, PK, and cold fusion.

Anonymous said...

Parsimony, please. You are attributing the failings of these guys to both malice *and* stupidity.

Anonymous said...

The Identity of A.R. Butz the Armenian Armed Gladiator of Hypocrisy!

Home Web page of Arthur R. Butz
Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Northwestern University, Evanston,Illinois, USA
© A.R. Butz 1996-2002
I am the author of the book The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (1976), a work of "Holocaust revisionism".

This Web site exists for the purpose of expressing views that are outside the purview of my role as an Electrical Engineering faculty member. The material will be continually updated and revised, but will always have an emphasis on Holocaust revisionism.

It is intended to keep this Web site relatively simple, at least as far as this home page appears to the reader. For much more on Holocaust revisionism the reader can start with the Web site of IHR, my publisher.

Images and pictures will be used only when specifically supportive of the exposition, since they slow things down considerably for the reader coming through a modem.

The initial aim of this site, as inaugurated on 7 May 1996, is to present my article A short introduction to the study of Holocaust revisionism, published in 1991 in the Daily Northwestern, with supplementing commentary and documentation. The links were last updated on 29 October 2000.

A second aim is to present news items of particular interest to Holocaust revisionists. This material was last updated on 8 June 2002.

This why A.R. Butz the Armed Armenian Gladiator has to blame the Jewish people for something. He has his rep to live up to. Meanwhile his ancestors cry out as to why he has not condemned his Arab allies for not recognizing the Turkish genocide of 2.5 million Armenians. A particularly contradictory political position.