Comment on Perspectives from alleged LSU students by David Haley.
The notion expressed by LSU students that only present students and faculty with Ph D.’s in “science” are credible and all other stakeholders’ considered opinions are illegitimate meddling is naive, disingenuous, and elitist. Advice to student apologists: Ad hominem tu quoque, the hypocritical insulting of one’s opponents who hold very defensible viewpoints, however divergent from your own, causes one to run the risk of revealing damning character flaws or actions in the one making the assertion. The reason that this is fallacious is that–usually, anyway–insults and even damaging facts simply do not undermine what logical support there might be for one’s opponent’s arguments or assertions.
An example: “I obviously don’t need to reply to Jones’s arguments about creationism; everyone knows that he’s a convicted felon, or even worse, doesn’t have his PhD in molecular biology.”
As a former fully-tenured university professor, I can say that sometimes Poison-Ivy covers the hallowed halls of academia. One need only view recent events surrounding the so-called science of global warming to understand that Professors and researchers, and yes even science professors, are humans, complete with biases and ideologies that subtly nuance and even drive the selective content which they disseminate and the tenor, tone, and nuance by which that content is delivered.
“I find banishing the theory of evolution from our curriculum a form of brain washing. Intelligent design is just not backed up by scientific evidence.” I won’t delve deep into the psychological projection of being brainwahsed, but an analogy to barbs traded between pots and kettles does come to mind.
By the grace of God, I was one of the highest scoring medical professionals in the history of my professional school and assert that as both “Intelligent Design” and Macro-evolution are belief systems that cannot be empirically demonstrated in the lab and are dependent upon extant evidence; how one views that evidence will be determined by the world view through which it is sifted. Ergo, disbelief of a literal six-day creation calls into question the historicity of the entire Biblical account. To wit, is it easier to believe God spoke and it was, or that He , in the form of His Son, was born of a virgin, performed miracles including bringing the dead back to life, willingly lay down His own life in a vicarious propititation, arose on the third day, ascended to Heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father even now? The domino effect is real and is demonstrated in so many other so-called christian (With a little “C”) churches that have discarded the Word and left themselves to wander in the wilderness of not-so-cleverly devised fables.
Many of the world’s most eminent scientists acknowledge the difficult to dispute evidence of design consistent with a creator. LSU students and professors, are, like all of us, in process, and in their quest to know and be known need to be less sure of what they know, and more sure of what they don’t know. As one of my favorite professors used to say, “One should be open-minded not open-ended!”
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David Haley Also Commented
Perspectives from alleged LSU students
With respect to a preceding comment “What you learned is logically incorrect. Mathematically speaking, even events of zero probability can happen!”
I am a former quantitative methods professor, the probability of a given even ranges from zero to one, with one termed a “certainty” and zero an “impossibly.” While any of man’s impossilbities can become certainties with God, when one uses agreed upon terms in a public debate, they mean what they mean, not what one wishes them to be. The writer of the referenced quote is entitled to his/her own opinion, but not his own facts, terms, and definitions.
