Shuan, some of us banjo-strummers ain't hicks, but I get your point, and it
is an important one. Thanks for the link to "Morton's Demon"; I think Glenn
has summed it up pretty well. It certainly matches my experience with YEC
students, who operated with that same demon crouching at the door (or on the
shoulder). And, Glenn, I praise and bless you for shaking that demon off!
Ah, yes, Chick Publications. Is anyone aware that one of the earlier
Ken Ham videotapes was produced by Chick? I was struck by that fact when I
read the credits. Occasionally students and probably some townspeople at my
former College slip Chick tracts under office and residence halls door or
leave them in restrooms (it's easy to dispose of the latter). Once my
professor-wife, a Roman Catholic, received anonymously the Chick pamphlet
"Are Roman Catholics Christians." It was filled with one lie after another,
and I wrote an expose of it on our campus discussion list, and sent a copy
to Jack Chick. He chose one of his associates, an ex-Catholic, to reply by
email. This guy had the same mentality and attitude as YECs we have dealt
with: he filtered out the facts that are true and that left only the lies,
which he sincerely believed. It was impossible to reason with him, and when
I made the mistake of trying he became rather hostile. I broke it off.
When I encounter people like this I think of La Rochefocauld's maxim,
"There are ways of curing madness but none of righting the wrong-headed."
Peace in the midst of these demons!
Bob Schneider
----- Original Message -----
From: "Shuan Rose" <shuanr@boo.net>
To: "Asa" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2002 12:15 PM
Subject: Discussing Evolution with YEC Friends
> I recently had a couple of experiences with my YEC friends that gave me an
> even deeper insight into YEC psyche.
> last week, I had emailed my friend the link to Jack Chick's infamous
online
> tract, Big Daddy?, available at
> http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0055/0055_01.asp.
> I thought of it as a lark, something that they would see as amusing( I
find
> it hilarious: I never fail to get a chuckle out of viewing it).Imagine my
> surprise when at church,Sunday, my friend T. came up and thanked me for
> sending the link to him. " Our biology textbooks are full of falsehoods" ,
> he said in all seriousness, referring to the Haeckel embryo drawings
> mentioned in the tract.Now, T. is no dummy, he is an electrical engineer
who
> works for the NSA. Yet he was prepared to to take the ludicrous scenario
in
> Big Daddy at face value! I staggered away , not knowing really what to
say.
> On Monday night, another friend J.dropped by my place and we watched the
> "Real Eve" on the Discovery Channel
> http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/realeve/realeve.html . The show
> purports to trace the rise and spread of modern humans through analysis of
> their mitochondrial DNA. He found the show a little speculative(as I did).
> He then commented that the dating was based on on "uniformitarian
> assumptions".I replied that you should rely on uniformitarian assumptions
> until there was evidence to the contrary. We got to discussing the age of
> the earth. I pointed out that see we can see stars millions of light
years
> away, the earth must be very old . He said that the speed of light was not
a
> constant and varied throughout the universe.I said that if he was right,
> then Einstein was wrong and that I was betting on Einstein. When the show
> mentioned Neanderthals, he said that there was evidence that they were
> modern humans who suffered rickets from living in cold caves. His thoughts
> on continental drift? The continents could have drifted apart to their
> present positions in a little as three years.Start rewriting your
textbooks,
> Keith...
> The show ended and "Walking with Dinosaurs" began. I mentioned that they
> discovered feathered dinosaurs: he said that's been disproved. I said,
> "Disproved? They've found a bunch of them". We then said goodnight.
> Now J. is not some banjo strumming hick from the sticks.He took
> undergraduate physics and chemistry and has graduate degrees in
mathematics
> and computer science. He understands about Schrodinger's cat, for Pete's
> sake! He has a much better s science background than I, yet there he was ,
> regurgitating stuff that even Answers in Genesis wouldn't stoop to.
> I think that Glenn is right. YECs don't just have a different view of
> science:they have a different data set than anyone else. I tell you, I saw
> Morton's demon http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/feb02.html in
> operation last night, sitting on J's shoulder, keeping away any fact that
> might contradict his YECism. And I felt sad.
> Shuan Rose, Attorney at Law
> 2632 N Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21218
>
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