Oct. 29, 2009- Look at this tripe:
http://www.coloradoan.com/article/200910...+with+the+facts"Darwin's ideas conflict with the facts"The local paper printed this "soapbox" on their opinion page. Should they print anything that comes across their desk, or focus on well-considered opinions? The timing of this printed soapbox turns it into an advertisement; they should have delayed the printing until after the event, to keep this as a strictly "opinion" piece, IMHO. I did call them to suggest they might be obligated to now cover this event as a news story--but I know that is reaching far with thin justification.
But....
Check out this piece from the newspaper! Should this have been printed? This poorly disguised tea-bagged logic seems more like cleverly diguised hate speech to me. Am I reading too much into this, or is it simply an opinion piece? Probably it's somewhere in between, but please look at the logic and "facts" in this peice of work.
In addition to the horrible logic--conflating the origin of life with the origin of species--there are all sorts of factual error and misrepresentations. I need help in writing a response to this piece that seems to be nothing more than an inflammatory advertisement for the speaker mentioned.
I'm not an expert on Darwin, but I'm sure some corrections need to be made regarding this soapbox author's characterization of Darwin as seeing
"his theory as being a comforting replacement for a belief in God because he didn't like the idea of hell...."The soapbox also conflates Darwin's legacy with Naturalism--which may have a thread of validity--but again I think I could use some help from philosophy majors. I'd like to address the poorly written sentence that links Darwin with Stalin and Mao, through Naturalism, so any help with a reply will be welcome.
"Scientists have imposed atheistic presuppositions on the explanation of origins--a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment." This is the sentence where I had to stop reading and go have a little fit. I'm sure I can address the science part of that ridiculous sentence, but any constitutional scholars out there are welcome to help with that part of this ridiculous comment.
That comment was followed by
"The teaching of evolution as fact in science classrooms is also wrong because observational data do not support the theory." Again, any experts on the "observational data" are welcome to help me compose a response.
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In the end, this "soapbox" turned out to be nothing more than a poorly disguised add for a Dr. Rob Carter, who will be speaking at our local university tomorrow, talking about his
"latest findings in the human genome and how the story of creation, the catastrophe of the flood and the dispersal of the people all line up consistently with the data of human genetics and fit much better than the evolutionary scenario." Yikes! All this in just 6006 years? Well we'll see how that timeline goes....
Anyone who knows about this Dr. Carter--and can offer some revealing perspectives on his work--is also welcome to share, and help me compose a reply to this guy--or a reply of some sort.
Rather than respond directly to this soapbox author, or Dr. Carter's ideas, I'm thinking of chastising the newspaper themselves for their lack of editorial discretion in facilitating this freely biased advertisement--rather than covering the advertised speaker as some sort of news/event story or announcement--but I'm still debating about that....
Please let me know what you think about any of this, and if possible, help with the information needed to expose this perversion of logic and wisdom for the tripe that it is.
