Such usage may be undiplomatic, but it isn't false.
You believe what you believe quite strongly, but it is not necessary to attack your opponents in such a sophmoric manner, especially if you are trying to show yourself more learned.
Rigidity is believing what you believe despite mountains of contrary evidence. Insisting upon following evidence and logic isn't belief at all but realism.
In short, you should be criticizing medved for posting his indefensible lunacies over and over and over and over in-line on thread after thread after thread. To say we have to simply post our rebuttals every time he posts his junk is to empower him to make every thread about why the Earth having ever orbited Saturn is nonsense, why instantaneous light travel is nonsense, why psychic parrots and recent dinosaurs are nonsense.
He's going to post his crap on every thread because he's a nutcase. Some of us are going to call him on it because he's polluting the discussion in a brazen attempt to make everything about his delusions. You're going to nod your head and tell him what a revolutionary he is because you've got the critical faculties of a bivalve mollusc or you wouldn't be a creationist.
Get used to it.
The very title of the thread is sophmoric. The opinions of Scientific American writers and the High Priests and Priestesses of evolution are not the final word on how things came to be.
The article cites facts. It's not the results of an opinion poll.
The fact that a publication such as Scientific American would stoop to such tactics, to say nothing of the tactics of groups such as the National Association of Biology Teachers, the American Humanist Association, ACLU, National Science Teachers Association, the American Geological Instutute, the American Chemical Society, the National Educators Association, the American Institute of Biological Sciences and the American Anthropological Association, speaks volumes concerning the motovatations of these adherents to the theory of evolution.
What tactics? If you mean the word "final," talk to PH. He appended it, not SciAm. If you mean compiling rebuttals to creationist arguments, it seems there is no satisfactory way to make such an answer, including not answering.
If creationism raises its clamor of charges and no one answers: point for creationism. They're trying to ignore you away.
If some few scientists take up the onerous task of researching and rebutting the claims of creationists, they are "zealots." I've seen the TalkOrigins crew, Dawkins, Gould (when he isn't being misquoted to sound like a creationist), and Don Lindsay attacked and their points dismissed ad hominem for exactly the sin of compiling the research of mainstream science and exposing the falsehood of creationsist claims. But if Scientific American publishes a rebuttal of creationist points, now they're "stooping."
The claims of your literature are false. Who is allowed to tell you?
The published articles and papers I have collected over that time tell me one of two things. 1) Evolutionists are a collective of control-freaks who cannot tolerate their views being questioned; or, 2) They know their positions are untenable and they are very afraid of having to share the millions of dollars funneled into their research and education programs by governments every year. Perhaps they are a mixture of both.
In all your long spew, you have not answered a single point raised by Rennie in his article. You have done nothing but assault messengers. All of Rennie's 15 rebuttals are based on hard fact. You are 0 for 15 in addressing them. The charges you raise are hypocritical.
Rigidity is believing what you believe despite mountains of contrary evidence. Insisting upon following evidence and logic isn't belief at all but realism.
In short, you should be criticizing medved for posting his indefensible lunacies over and over and over and over in-line on thread after thread after thread. To say we have to simply post our rebuttals every time he posts his junk is to empower him to make every thread about why the Earth having ever orbited Saturn is nonsense, why instantaneous light travel is nonsense, why psychic parrots and recent dinosaurs are nonsense. He's going to post his crap on every thread because he's a nutcase. Some of us are going to call him on it because he's polluting the discussion in a brazen attempt to make everything about his delusions. You're going to nod your head and tell him what a revolutionary he is because you've got the critical faculties of a bivalve mollusc or you wouldn't be a creationist. Get used to it.
Well said. If we got Jim to put the poster's name at the top of the response, most of us could skip over the endless repetition from known whack-jobs.
If creationism raises its clamor of charges and no one answers: point for creationism. They're trying to ignore you away.
Yes, yes. They love shouting down opposition by swarming over the thread en masse. Note how fast they swarmed today! They can't let an open-minded person get a thought in edgewise or the whole ideas of Creationism or Bible-is-whole-and-literal-truth might collapse from the examination!
In all your long spew, you have not answered a single point raised by Rennie in his article. You have done nothing but assault messengers. All of Rennie's 15 rebuttals are based on hard fact. You are 0 for 15 in addressing them. The charges you raise are hypocritical.
Ain't it always the way! Hypocrites are always frightened by the prospect of self-examination. Score 10 for you.
This is a statment of opinion, based upon what your believe to be facts, nothing more, just as medved's statements are opinion, based upon what he believes to be facts.
"indefensible lunacies", "his junk", "psychic parrots", "his crap", "he's a nutcase", " critical faculties of a bivalve mollusc", "long spew"
Am I to believe that the above represents how the learned and educated view dissent? If not, then you do your fellows a severe injustice with your lack of restraint.
"What tactics? If you mean the word "final, ..."
"15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense", is the title of the article. Equating nonsense and Creationist is simply a propaganda technique designed to marginalize, in the mind of the reader, anyone who disagrees with the author and his thesis. So also is the graph which seeks to demonstrate the lack of education of those who believe in a recently created Mankind. All this graph indicates is the power of evolutionary thought in the education establishment. As it has been said, if one wallows with pigs, one should expect to get dirty. If one spends years being told that evolution is true and that the earth is billions of years old, it is bound to have an effect on how that person believes. It is, no doubt, discomforting to see that almost 30% of the postgraduates/professionals surveyed, believe G-d has something to do with us, and quite recently.
"The article cites facts. It's not the results of an opinion poll."
So, it would seem that there was a poll of sorts involved.
"In all your long spew, you have not answered a single point raised by Rennie in his article."
My spew wasn't all that long, and it was not intended to answer specific points but to, rather, point out that there is a concerted effort in the evolutionist community to silence anyone who does not tow the line.
Rennie's article, which I read in it's entirity, doesn't say anything other than creationists misunderstand physical laws and their relationship to evolution, and cites specific cases of this misunderstanding. Creationists will do likewise, and cite in a similar manner. Thermodynamics, is a prime example where both sides accuse the other of misunderstanding the law. Evolutionists tend to say the creationists twist the law. It basically boils down to to a "I'm right and you're wrong" argument.
His closing statement is, yet again, a fine example of propaganda: "Time and again, science has shown that methodological naturalism can push back ignorance, finding increasingly detailed and informative answers to mysteries that once seemed impenetrable: the nature of light, the causes of disease, how the brain works. Evolution is doing the same with the riddle of how the living world took shape. Creationism, by any name, adds nothing of intellectual value to the effort." He might as well have written: "Disagree with evolution, and mark yourself as ignorant.
The problem with evolutionist-science is that it presupposes that evolution is true. All inquiries performed and results derived are done so assuming that evolution is a fact. Few, if any evolutionists will look outside that framework. For example, answer 13 states in part: "A sequence of fossils spans the evolution of modern horses from the tiny Eohippus." Is it beyond the realm of possibility that tiny Eohippus is just an extinct small horse? Why must it be an ancestor of the modern horse? The answer is simple. The assumption of evolution must be enforced, even though it is not called for.
For what it is worth, I find the Intelligent Design movement somewhat disingenous, but no more so than the Punctuated Equilibrium adherants, each in their respective attempts to overcome obsticles encountered. The first, a legal obsticle represented by the so-called seperation of church and state, while the second, a technical obsticle, represented by the failure to produce either transitional fossil forms (Rennie's case for Eohippus and Archaeopteryx, not withstanding), or a world-wide unconformity in the geologic column.
I am a Creationist and I believe in Fiat Creation. I also believe that the evidence of my own eyes supports that belief. I will not camouflage my belief behind the initials "ID". G-d created, Mankind corrupted. Science could do much towards overcoming a great deal of that corruption, making our lives and the world around us better for the effort, were it not so obsessed with relegating G-d into nonexistance through it's sophistry.