Thursday, November 22, 2007

A Fabulous Human Gliding Video, and Dembski Revealing Creationist Myopia

Take a look at this post by William Dembski on the evolution of flying squirrels. First, notice how awesome the video is. It's my second breathtaking video experience this week (along with The Inner Life of a Cell.

Far more important, however, is the creationist mindset underlying Dembski's comments. He never believed that flying squirrels could evolve until he saw, with his own beady eyes, a video of something similar. This is standard creationist tripe, that unless one is actually present for an event, or witnesses it from beginning to completion, one can reasonably reject all evidence for the event as just-so speculative stories. It reveals how they are, at their intellectual core, unable to grasp the importance of falsifiable testing of theories. This is why they cannot deal with the reality of any event that takes many orders of magnitude more time to complete than do their lives. This is why they do practically no research of their own. To them, science is nothing more than observation and conjecture, because that is all they do.

Read the cross examination of Michael Behe at the Dover trial, where he not only admits having done no falsifiable testing of his theory, but he seems genuinely confused at why the question was asked. Further, his, and most creationists', insistence that they will not accept evolutionary explanations for various aspects of nature (such as the bacterial flagellum) unless they get a detailed step by step explanation again reveals the same myopia. Unless they can see it all at once, they can't, or won't, grasp it.

Well, sorry guys, but there is a lot of reality that can only be known through falsifiable extrapolation from bits of hard information. If you can't handle that, then there are many areas of science that will be forever beyond your reach. Evolution is just the most well known one.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There aren't even any squirrels in that video. What would that have to do with the evolution of flying squirrels anyway? Flying squirrels can still be "poofed" into fully formed flying squirrel kinds.

He might as well have said he didn't believe flying squirrels could fly until he saw a video of ummm... not flying squirrels. Mr. Dembski is a cuckoo bird. :P

Anonymous said...

Mr. Dembski draws the conclusion from that video that flying squirrels could evolve from other forms, but yet prior to viewing that video he didn't believe that it was possible. Hrmmm... I'm still scratching my head on that one.