Re: [asa] Hadley files stolen and published on the internet...

On Nov 24, 2009, at 8:13 PM, John Walley wrote:

>
> First of all, I wasn't crowing, I just made the simple statement:
>
> "The damage may have already been done by the new perception of these guys in the public's eyes."
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> This is a fact which you yourself affirm in your same response:
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> "We have people on this list crowing about how sensationalist leaks will affect public opinion and I'm sure that it will"
>
>
> Secondly, from this example, although I appreciate your concern I think you should be more focused on yourself than me when it comes to preaching to us about "bearing false witness".
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> And finally, for the record I reject and resent your sanctimonious preaching to us about how to handle these emails and your strained parsing to justify the coverup of CRU while conveniently letting yourself off the hook for freely partaking of your trafficking in the Wedge Document.
>
> And I think it is relevant to pass on that even before all this deliberation here your comments on PZ Meyer's blog at the time were curiously devoid of apparently any concern whatsoever of "professional ethics" or "Christian ethics" or "honesty" that you are lecturing to us about here.
>
>
> http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/02/the_true_history_of_the_wedge.php

My concern then in my comment -- like my concern now concerning the CRU e-mails -- was to give a tonic to PZ's malignant reading of the document as follows "his remarkably pompous, dishonest, contemptible document to the world."

Here was my comment in that context:

Some things I noticed:
1. The focus was no materialism, not evolution
2. The order as planned was opposite of the order as executed. The plan was: a.) Do the science b.) Go to the think tanks c.) influence public policy.
To truly understand what's going on here you need to look at the interaction between the ID proponents and the American Scientific Affiliation, particularly Howard Van Till.
In 1992, Philip Johnson gave a founder's lecture at Trinity Evangelical Seminary. In it he outlined his strategy of overcoming materialism (http:///www.apologetics.org/founder3.html) -- here defined as the philosophical belief that the natural world is all there is. Or to use current language ontological naturalism. Johnson failed to distinguish this from methodological naturalism advanced within the ASA by Howard Van Till. In 1992, Johnson was less dogmatic. For example,
When I say that Darwinism gave a huge boost to atheism, I am not denying that many persons found it possible to reconcile naturalistic evolution with a belief in God. Harvard Professor Asa Gray, Darwin's leading American supporter, was among those who gave Darwinism a theistic interpretation. Even conservative theologians like Princeton Seminary Professor Benjamin Warfield made their peace with the new theory, and I described in the first of these lectures how some contemporary Christians have given Darwinism an honored place in a system of theistic naturalism. It is possible to be a Darwinist and a Christian, if one is sufficiently determined to combine the two.
Johnson believed that so-called creation science was destructive to the debate.
This"creation-science" strategy has been remarkably successful at maintaining an anti-evolutionist constituency, as the Gallup poll results attest. Unfortunately, it has also confused and divided the Christian world and even played into the hands of the evolutionary naturalists. It gives the impression that the important division in public opinion about evolution is between the Biblical fundamentalists and everybody else. This is a tragic misunderstanding. The truly fundamental disagreement is not over the age of the earth or the method of creation. It is over whether we owe our existence to a purposeful Creator or a blind materialistic process. This "creation-science" strategy has been remarkably successful at maintaining an anti-evolutionist constituency, as the Gallup poll results attest. Unfortunately, it has also confused and divided the Christian world and even played into the hands of the evolutionary naturalists. It gives the impression that the important division in public opinion about evolution is between the Biblical fundamentalists and everybody else. This is a tragic misunderstanding. The truly fundamental disagreement is not over the age of the earth or the method of creation. It is over whether we owe our existence to a purposeful Creator or a blind materialistic process.
What Johnson couldn't get was that he just proposed a false dichotomy. When Van Till advanced methodological naturalism thus proposing Johnson's excluded middle Johnson saw it as capitulating.
You get further feel for it when Dembski and Van Till debated on the AAAS Doser page over Van Till's No Free Lunch. (http://www.aaas.org/spp/dser/evolution/perspectives.shtml)
Kenneth Miller and Micheal Behe debated in front of the ASA in 1995. Here Miller was confronted with the impression that his Biology text implied that evolution was "purposeless". Miller noted his mistake and updated his text. The result produced fine theater in Dover as the lawyer for the defense tried to pin Miller on the pre-ASA edition of his work. What this should have taught Johnson was the so-called capitulators were successful in eliminating hard materialism from the texts(not only in Biology but also in convincing people such as Eugenie Scott to advocate revising the NABT standards in 1995).
Johnson was disturbed over the disunity amongst the Christians (and this gets us to the modern strategy of DI).
As a relative newcomer to the controversy over evolution, I have found two things particularly shocking. One is the dogmatism and arrogance of the scientific establishment. The other is the extraordinary amount of bad feeling on this subject within the Christian community.
This drove his "big tent" strategy where ID aligned with YEC rather than theistic evolution. This flipped the order of the strategy from the leaked document because the YEC folk were desperate to find a way to get into the public schools first. ID until recently in the California case has not tried to distinguish themselves from YEC. There was some behind-the-scenes grumbling but by and large ID let themselves be misunderstood by YEC in the interest of "unity".
The ultimate irony is this. By losing in Dover, Johnson won. Why? Becuase Judge Jones stated that religion and science were not necessarily incompatible. This means that you cannot teach hard materialism ala Dawkins. Or more precisely, the so-called capitulators like myself, Howard Van Till, Ken Miller, and Keith Miller -- KSU geology professor and ASA member and who went up against the Kansas School board -- won.

Rich Blinne
Member ASA

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Received on Tue Nov 24 22:49:41 2009