Notes from Evil Bender

I continue to make fun of IDiots who continue to make stupid claims and hope no one notices. Memo to these folks: we notice, and we’re going to continue to call you on it. And what’s great about these people is that they ignore science–since the evidence for change in a population over time (evolution) is overwhelming–so that it’s no trouble for even non-scientists to pick apart their arguments on the basis of their logical flaws and lies alone.

Before I get to making fun of the blogger that Rockstars’ Ramblings affectionately labels “cocksnack,” I also want to make sure you know that the latest Skeptics’ Circle is up, and as always well worth the read.

Now, commence with derision:

For those of you unfamiliar with “cocksnack,” his preferred moniker is “weapon of mass instruction” and his bio reads

I am the voice of those who seek intellectual honesty protecting our children from those who have a radical hatred towards God and anything that represents him.

That’s right, folks, he is the “voice . . . protecting” kids. Isn’t it interesting how it’s always those pesky illogical types that want to “protect children” from things like verifiable evidence, testable predictions and logic? One example will suffice to make my point, which is the defense he mounts against the claim that ID is unfalsifiable:

To falsify intelligent design, it is enough to display specific, fully articulated Darwinian pathways for the complex systems that, according to intelligent design, lie beyond the reach of the Darwinian mechanism (systems like the bacterial flagellum).

So, what would disprove ID would be a “specific” (how specific?) “fully articulated” (which means, what? documenting every evolutionary pathway since the first life form to the human eye?) for “complex systems” which ID says can’t evolve (which systems are those? as you know, ID likes to move the goalposts). In other words, this is Kent Hovind’s challenge, worded to be impossible to fulfill. Our little creationist wants it to seem like he’s made a way to falsify creationism ID, but actually he’s set up a double standard: ID can only be disproved by convincing me that evolution–which I ignore all the evidence in favor of–is wrong.

Notice that not only is he moving the goalposts, demanding that evolutionists fulfill a set of vague requirements, but he’s also partaking of a binary fallacy. Even if he could disprove evolution–which of course he can not–establishing that would not make ID falsifiable. It could, conceivably, be a challenge to evolution, but would not prove that ID is correct. See, creationists want you to believe that if evolution can’t build you a flying car than it must be because God did it.

In other words, this “falsifiable” claim comes down to the old god-of-the-gaps argument: that if we don’t understand how something arises, it must be because god did it. Of course, if we buy into that “logic,” then we’d never discover anything, because we could always settle for a claim that is exactly equivalent to looking at a lightbulb illuminate and shouting “magic.”

So his claim lacks merit in every conceivable way. Number of ways to falsify ID: 0. Meanwhile, evolution continues to make innumerable claims, and each new bit of research provides fresh verification of some of those claims.

And if that’s not enough for you, it might also help you to know that scientists do know of a pathway that could allow the flagellum to evolve. But don’t expect that to change “Weapons of Mass Instructions” mind: when you point it out to him he’ll undoubtedly move the goalposts again, demanding ever-increasing levels of detail–levels that he cannot provide for his own position, because, when pressed, what he really believes is that whenever he can’t understand something, god must have done it.