Kristine
Posts: 3061
Joined: Sep. 2006
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| Quote (Albatrossity2 @ Dec. 19 2007,09:39) | | Quote (Reciprocating Bill @ Dec. 19 2007,06:37) | | By the time Dover arrived, however, Dembski understood that he had been committed to an unsustainable position, knew he was about to be shredded, and fled. But I would argue that what he recognized was no longer sustainable was the fiction that he could construct a sanitized version of ID that was shorn of its religious and supernatural core such that it could be taught in science classrooms. That was the central issue at Dover over which he was about to be dismantled. |
Yeah, I think WAD, like most preachers and snake-oil salesmen, did start out with good intentions, saving souls, etc. And if you have the right outlook (born-again Christianity) and happen to be good at math or whatever, saving souls through the application of your god-given talents is certainly attractive. The accolades of your tribe (which does not include a lot of folks with ability and credentials) would grease the way, and so you find yourself at the top of a heap, publishing books and changing the world. For a while.
But somewhere along the way, if he is as smart as he thinks he is he had to figure out that this is a scam. So the real question is WHEN did that happen. When did he fully understand that he just lying for Jesus, like many of the other more traditional preachers/snake-oil salesmen (Bakker, Falwell, Robertson, Hovind et al.)? Obviously it happened prior to Dover. He was certainly caught lying before then; Wes' meta-treatment of Amadan's ditty reminded me of the Amazon book review fiasco in '04, which I had forgotten about. Maybe his epiphany happened a long time prior to Dover; I'll leave it to the dedicated WADologists to read through the tea leaves of his writings.
But the point of all this, as RB noted, is that you don't need to invoke pathology to account for WAD's actions. His history is an evolutionary one, and he arrived at his present state of lying-for-jesus (or lying for WAD) by way of purely natural mechanisms. |
I agree that WAD started out with good intentions. But the whole ID thing is a scam and was from the beginning. The Wedge Document is proof of this. WAD believes in God, he wants others to, so he pushes ID as a way to separate people's construction of their personal meaning in life from scientific fact.
That's what WAD is about, and what he's always been about. Ironically, it is ID that has been the wedge deepening the rift between WAD's apparently sincere belief in God, to which he has entrusted (as most religious people do) his morals, ethics, and sense of purpose, and his intellectual credibility (or lack thereof). He is unintentionally using the Wedge on himself, and thus preventing his (apparently otherwise healthy) religious faith and ethics to guide him in his quest.
No, I don't think WAD is a sociopath. I sincerely do not. When the chips are down, I am sure you could trust the guy with your life. (I'm not sure I'd say that about a few other UD moderators, but I'd say it about even some of the craziest UD commenters.) WAD just isn't very self-aware. He's not seeing what's happening to him, how he sounds to us. In real life, he's probably much different, laughs, has normal reactions, etc. But he cannot see how bitter he sounds, nor that he is draining the life from his own religious belief by pushing ID, because the more one fights for ID, the more one constructs (despite all their denials) who the Designer is, and no one can worship any god that they are aware of having constructed.
But I can't say this to him, because I'm an atheist. WAD hates atheists. That one can be an atheist and advocate, for others who are religious, that believers at least have a healthy and psychologically consistent theology is unimaginable to him. He thinks "Darwinists" hate him so much. I don't think people, like us, pay this much attention, as we do, to something they "hate." WAD is so dug-in that he doesn't realize that the "enemy" has largely moved on. The war is over, really. But he's clutching his gun, determined to fight to the bitter end against people who really aren't interested in fighting him anymore.
It's lack of perspective, groupthink; it's compartmentalization, and we all do it at times - but it's not psychotic, in my admitted nonprofessional view.
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Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?
AtBC Poet Laureate
"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
"Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr
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