Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Red State Rubbish
For the past few days, Red State Rabble has been basking in the warm glow of having been called a moron by DaveScot, the intelligent design activist who plays Sgt. Shultz to William Dembski's Col. Klink over at the Uncommon Descent blog.
RSR was called a moron because we wrote a post quoting Dembski as having written:
In our post, we compared Dembski's touching faith in ID and the Bible Code Hoax to a belief that persists among those in the UFO-alien abduction sub-culture. Namely, that the so-called Mars "face" is also a product of design. We also noted striking similarities between the pseudoscientific arguments offered up for all three "theories" by the faithful to give them a scientific veneer.
Today, however, the warmth went out of RSR's world. Cold reality came rushing in. DaveScot re-published Pat Hayes and the Logical Fallacy of False Analogy over at Uncommon Descent and he inexplicably -- and rather unfairly -- changed this:
In the wake of having been called a moron, RSR received many congratulatory e-mails from readers wishing us well now that we'd reached the big time. Our ticket was punched, we thought. We're going places now.
Now that DaveScot has jerked the rug out from under our feet, we've been left to console ourselves with the cold comfort of what might have been.
Richard Hoppe, who picked up our original post -- "The IDiots Guide to Design Detection" -- on Panda's Thumb was luckier. He and Panda's Thumb still receive a good old-fashioned -- and no doubt well-deserved -- horsewhipping from DaveScot. To make his point about false analogies, he asks:
RSR was called a moron because we wrote a post quoting Dembski as having written:
At the same time that research in the Bible Code has taken off, research in a seemingly unrelated field has taken off as well, namely, biological design. These two fields are in fact closely related. Indeed, the same highly improbable, independently given patterns that appear as the equidistant letter sequences in the Bible Code appear in biology as functionally integrated ("irreducibly complex") biological systems, of the sort Michael Behe discussed in Darwin’s Black Box.
The relevant statistical methodology is identical for both fields. As a result, the two fields stand to profit from each other.
In our post, we compared Dembski's touching faith in ID and the Bible Code Hoax to a belief that persists among those in the UFO-alien abduction sub-culture. Namely, that the so-called Mars "face" is also a product of design. We also noted striking similarities between the pseudoscientific arguments offered up for all three "theories" by the faithful to give them a scientific veneer.
Today, however, the warmth went out of RSR's world. Cold reality came rushing in. DaveScot re-published Pat Hayes and the Logical Fallacy of False Analogy over at Uncommon Descent and he inexplicably -- and rather unfairly -- changed this:
When will morons like Pat Hayes cop to the fact... [empahsis added]To this:
When will uncritical thinkers like Pat Hayes cop to the fact that seeing the Virgin Mary’s face in a tortilla is not the equivalent of seeing design in an interdependent network of subcellular biological nanomachinery... [empahsis added]
In the wake of having been called a moron, RSR received many congratulatory e-mails from readers wishing us well now that we'd reached the big time. Our ticket was punched, we thought. We're going places now.
Now that DaveScot has jerked the rug out from under our feet, we've been left to console ourselves with the cold comfort of what might have been.
Richard Hoppe, who picked up our original post -- "The IDiots Guide to Design Detection" -- on Panda's Thumb was luckier. He and Panda's Thumb still receive a good old-fashioned -- and no doubt well-deserved -- horsewhipping from DaveScot. To make his point about false analogies, he asks:
Does RBH have National Enquirer on his reading list too? There’s a true analogy. At least we found out where Hoppe gets his news and information from.Disappointed as we are, we comfort ourselves in the knowledge that we're still being called "Red State Rubbish" by DaveScot. Now that's an honor.
