From: yho@bmerh806.bnr.ca (Yue-shun Ho)
Subject: Re: Unbe Awakens
Reply-To: yho@utcs.utoronto.ca
Organization: Somewhere around Toronto, Ontario
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 92 01:40:16 GMT

In article <1992Dec17.173320.25555@midway.uchicago.edu> mss2@midway.uchicago.edu writes:
>In article <1992Dec17.162754.243@bmerh85.bnr.ca> yho@utcs.utoronto.ca writes:
>
>>That's not to say all of them carry fake credentials.  Recently there was
>>  a Dr Walter Brown who gave a talk on creationism at BNR, Ottawa.  (BNR is
>>  a sister company of the company I work at.  Don't know why creationism
>>  has anything to do with BNR's business.)  Reportedly, he has a PhD from
>>  MIT, and is the director of "Center for Scientific Creation" based in
>>  Phoenix, Arizona.
>
>	"But a PhD in _what_?  I ask because I've encountered people
>with doctorates in economics or physics who let the fact of their
>doctorates imply expertise in areas unrelated to their field of study.
>Though even a Ph.D in a biological discipline doesn't necessarily mean
>much-- many `mavericks' come from inside a field, and for every one
>who's right and can force a paradigm shift, there are dozens who are
>just crackpots."
>

I don't know what PhD he has, but if he indeed has a PhD, then he probably
  stands out from the crowd of other "scientific creationists".  I am a
  believer of self-education.  Even though my degrees were in engineering,
  they do not in anyway prevent me from becoming a professional musician
  or an expert in sign language.  As we are discussing philosophical issues
  here, there are many western philosophers who are not formally trained
  in philosophy, such as Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Nietzsche, William James,
  Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstien, etc.  But I agree that one should
  not use his/her PhD to imply expertise in an irrelevant field.   

>  I'm still trying to find out what he has to say.
>>  Maybe he can give scientific creationists a better image, since their
>>  theories are mostly considered as pseudo science.  Or maybe he can't.
>
>	"I'm inclined to doubt it.  If animal species were directly
>created, the universe seems to have been designed to be misleading.
>Which would be a reasonable hypothesis if the scientific creationists
>were Gnostics, but just doesn't work with their predominantly
>Christian beliefs.  They might be able to make a consistent hypothesis
>by presuming some sort of diabolic deception, but in that case they
>can't be _scientific_ creationists, since the scientific data are
>suspect.  Whereas all the scientific creation literature I've read (I
>had a friend who was a creationist back in high school, so I got the
>chance to look at some of it) is just bad science-- deliberate
>misconstructions of evidence, ignorance of recent data, and very often
>a fallacy of the excluded middle plus other elementary logical flaws:
>i.e. concluding that since current evolutionary theories fail to explain x, no
>evolutionary theory can be correct and that therefore some version of
>Biblical creationism must be correct.  Which strikes me as much like
>saying that since relativity and quantum theory have some problems
>being reconciled, the only possibility is Aristotelian physics.

Agree.  Many creationists, for example, claim that the "missing link"
  of fossils illustrates a fallacy in the theory of evolution, without
  bothering to discuss other evidence of evolution such as those found
  in microbiology which provides evidence through researches in genetics
  and DNA, etc.  But I'd rather not comment on the theories of this 
  Dr Brown for the sake of fairness, since I haven't heard from him.
  Given the bad name of scientific creation due to what Michael points
  out about their deliberate misconstructions of evidence, however,
  it is understandable that one cannot help not suspecting that Dr Brown
  is yet another one of those pseudo scientists.

yue-shun, toronto, ontario


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