How you know a pundit doesn’t have a response, Creationist edition April 5, 2007
Posted by Evil Bender in News and politics, Origins, Science, constiutional issues, wingnuts.trackback
PZ goes into the Anderson Cooper coverage of the Ken Ham “T-Rex was a vegetarian” Creationist museum. Naturally, the show seems to have given religious pseudoscience a nearly complete free pass. But since PZ deals with it so well, I’d like to focus on just one segment:
ROBERT BOSTON: And one of the important things we need to remember, too, is that some of the ideas that groups would like to bring into our schools have been completely discredited, for example, the idea that the Earth is 10,000 years old and that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time. Scientifically, that’s untenable.
Yet, that is what the creationists believe. And that is what, ultimately, I think they would like to bring into our classrooms.
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: Charmaine, I mean, do you — do you believe that dinosaurs walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? And, if so, is that the — the basis of your argument?
CHARMAINE YOEST: What we are looking at here is saying, there are legitimate scientific questions on the table. And it is not true that — that there is a complete cohesiveness among scientists.
Notice the charming obfuscation here. Yoest does not want to be forced to admit what he really thinks, because he knows that it would sacrifice any hint of credibility on the issue. So, rather than admit to what he really wants–Creationism taught in Public Schools–he shifts the ground, claiming there is a scientific debate over the very question he refuses to answer.
If there is legitimate debate on the topic, then why are people like Yoest and the DI trying so hard to avoid admitting they are Young Earth Creationists? No doubt it is for the same reason they would rather “debate” evolution in ninth-grade classrooms than in the scientific literature.
I thought Charmaine was a woman?
Regardless s/he got his/her ass handed to her on that exchange.
Yup, a woman. My mistake.
[...] posts without addressing the substance of my argument at all. I’ll give Jack Yoest this–I did incorrectly note Charmaine’s gender in my post. But I’d like to note two things. First, Jack, who is concerned with spelling, apparently [...]