Monday, June 15, 2009

Misrepresentation is Too Common

In debate clubs one learns how to misrepresent the opponent's position. But if you are interested in getting at the truth rather than knocking down strawmen arguments, then genuinely engage all sides of a question. Why is evolution proclaimed to be a fact? What are all the evidences and arguments for evolution? Are they compelling? If so, why? If not, why not?

These are the questions I asked myself. I had found problems with the theory, but perhaps I was missing something. A critique that is based on secondary evidences and arguments, or worse, misrepresentations, is a waste of my time. I wanted to understand the full weight of the theory I was beginning to doubt.

Not so with evolutionists. It is remarkable how consistently evolutionists fail to investigate, and even misrepresent, the position of skeptics. Here is a typical example. After a public debate with an evolutionist, I asked him about his knowledge of scientific problems with his theory. I asked because he evinced little such knowledge in our debate. In the debate, rather than address the problems I raised he simply dismissed them as fallacies. He assured me that he had a well stocked library of works by evolution skeptics, and he was familiar with "all the arguments."

That didn't square with his performance in the debate, so I mentioned some specific titles. Well he hadn't read those. Hmm, I mentioned another but again, he hadn't read it. Of these books which I admired and felt seriously engaged evolutionary theory, he had not read any. No wonder he was so confident that scientific problems were unfounded--he was conveniently ignorant of them.

Too often evolutionists are, amazingly, not well studied on how the scientific evidence bears on their own theory.