I've been trying to reason with creationists for more than 30 years, beginning with debates on talk.origins back in the early 1990s. Sometimes we make a little progress but most of the time it's very frustrating.
Over the years, we've encountered a few outstanding examples of creationists whose "reasoning" abilities defy explanation. One of he most famous is Otangelo Grasso - his ability to misunderstand and misconstrue science is legendary. He is one of only a small number of people who are banned from Sandwalk.
Here's an example of his unique unreasoning abiltiies.
Trying to educate a creationist (Otangelo Grasso)
I bring this up because he recently posted an artilce on the Uncommon Descent blog and you just have to read it if you want a good laugh. It shows you that 30 years of attempting to teach science to creationists isn't nearly long enough.
Otangelo Grasso on the difficulties of reasoning with atheists
I've read his comments here and at other places. He commits numerous informal/formal fallacies, and does the basic reality denying schtick: quote mining, quoting non-experts, and moving the goalposts. Two things, in my mind, set him apart from most, but not all, creationist. His persistence adauseam and his insistence that one must refute his arbitrary "killer" arguments, despite them being very bad and I'll formed.
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*ill-formed
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What surprises me most is that some voices of reason still comment over there.
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ReplyDeleteI see that Bornagain77 is still active. Here's his latest comment
"Sir Giles, you do realize that, as far as empirical science is concerned, that Larry Moran and Dan Gruar have both discredited anything they have to say about biology when they refused to accept the results of the massive ENCODE study, and subsequent studies, that found, and continue to find, widespread functionality across the entire genome??"
And from a more recent ID genius
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“Nonsense. At the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere, guess what? The ASSUMPTION made by brainwashed Biologists had to be discarded to make actual progress in identifying the sources of human disease. How are they doing that? By looking at Junk DNA. By studying it. Not throwing it out as ‘leftovers from our long [alleged] period of Evolution.’ By studying it as opposed to ‘it doesn’t code for proteins so it’s useless.’ Those so-called non-coding regions are yielding vital information about human disease, The “natural” approach discarded them – without looking.”
So, it’s not junk, its function is to cause disease. So much for that all-loving designer.
Some people are beyond reform. They don't want to be reformed no matter what the evidence shows...
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