now i’m just an unfrozen caveman, but …
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009I’m sometimes startled at how confused and confusing the world is. Sometimes, I’m confused by how stunningly confused people are.
As one example, I was rubbernecking the articles at The Institute for Creation Research for something like two hours last weekend. It’s just so hard to look away! So magnificently twisted and grotesquely broken it all is!* ICR.org is a train wreck of straw men, misrepresentations and uncited claims. But that almost doesn’t matter; the whole discussion is moot immediately anyway because the basic claim of a “supernatural” explanation is perforce unscientific.
I know it’s a waste of time to poke around in the wreckage, and I won’t be saying anything here I haven’t probably said before, but … There’s this spectacularly warped bit where they insist that what they’re doing is “real” science, and that the secular scientific world is inventing fanciful magical forces to explain away the obvious. In this article, an organic chemist raises the homochirality problem in biological chemistry: how do proteins in organisms “know” the “right” form to take, if two equally likely forms emerge normally, outside of an organism? The answer, of course, is that God made it that way. Apparently, to say “we don’t know” is to be unscientific:
I find it interesting that when creationists start talking about God’s supernatural creation, evolutionists usually counter by saying that everything must be explained by natural science and divine intervention is not science. I find this remark extremely amusing. When we show them that the laws of natural science cannot explain the existence of chirality, evolutionists say that the process happened a long time ago by some unknown method that they cannot explain. Now who’s relying on a supernatural explanation? Although they would never call it divine intervention, they certainly are relying on faith and not on scientific facts. Evolution just hopes you don’t know chemistry.
*goggle*
Seriously, every time I read that, I have to put my eyes back in my head. Does the English language work differently for this guy? What part of “as secular scientists, we cannot explain this” means “we are relying on a supernatural explanation”? And which part of “as a Creationist, I believe that a supernatural being designed it this way” means “this is scientific fact”?** This fellow is apparently writing from the inside of a fun house mirror.