Reciprocating Bill
Posts: 4265
Joined: Oct. 2006
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As I look over the various responses to my original query (“So, what’s the deal with DaveScot?"), I notice the following:
Most responses ascribe to Dave something like impenetrable egomania, coupled with narcissistic power motives. Both motivations are served by his position in the cat-bird seat at UD, although “big fish, little pond” comes to mind in that regard. I don’t disagree, although this is mostly descriptive, and recapitulates the old psychological dilemma of ascribing behavior to traits that are inferred from the self-same behavior.
What NO ONE has suggested is that DaveScot has something interesting and original to say regarding the origins of biological form and complexity, and the history of life on earth across deep time, and that he is passionate in pressing his ideas – passion that accounts for his abrupt and arrogant style.
I’d wager that many posters here have had an interest in, and have been moved by, evolutionary biology for most of their lives. Ultimately, therein lies a commitment to “this view of life” that, for better and worse, organizes a view of the natural world and one’s place in it, a view that I find both thrilling and harrowing. Thrilling because it’s depth and complexity – and harrowing because of the vanishingly tiny place left to each individual within that picture, which rightly induces a kind of vertigo. Vexing, too, because the naturalization of human life necessarily also entails the naturalization of, among other things, intentionality, consciousness, and ethics. These are not problems for which we have solutions, or for which we even have a notion of how to arrive at solutions. In the end, something more like humility rather than arrogance accrues from this position.
Bright as he may be, I don’t see a shred of evidence within Dave’s output that suggests that he has given real thought, in this way, to the positions and postures he has so glibly and arrogantly advanced, or that he is moved at all by the world-picture he would construct in place of modern evolutionary biology. Oddly enough, in contrast, I don’t doubt that Dembski is deeply moved by his Christian commitments - to a fault, which often renders him both dishonest and somewhat of a prick.
But I might be wrong. It would be mildly interesting to somehow get into Dave's nut and see just what is on display there, once his combative guard is down (to the tune of Frank Zappa’s “What is the Ugliest Part of Your Body,” perhaps.)
Mostly, however, if I had my druthers we’d all would move on from gawking at the train wreck that is ID and get on with grappling with the problems that confront us upon taking one’s place within the natural world. Vis DaveScot, perhaps George Bernard Shaw had it right: “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”
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Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be.
"The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you."
- David Foster Wallace
"Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down."
- Barry Arrington
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