I’m leaving this thread because it’s going nowhere I want to be.
As far as the exchange of insults is concerned, I disagree with both Paul and Orac in their assessments of the other. I think Orac must be an intelligent person to do the job he does, and he shows this in his less heated posts.
IMO, Paul presents as very intelligent. It is extremely easy for those who do not have personal experience of dogmatic belief, to fail to realise the absolute urgency of the need to protect it. Some do it by shutting their minds to anything outside, for example, accusing scientists of trying to “explain away” God, and rejecting whatever they say. Others do it by striving to make sense of some sort of concordance between their beliefs and those things that appear to challenge them. This latter is, I believe, the more rational, and may be what Paul is doing. If it is (and I could be wrong – it has happened before) I don’t think it should be equated with stupidity.
Been there, done that, thrown out the t-shirt.
