Dogmatists' hallucinatory denials of reality
A replica of James Cook's ship Endeavour. According to legend, the original Endeavour was invisible to some aborigines in places that the ship visited.
The term "hallucination" is usually considered to mean the perception of things that do not exist. However, a "hallucination" can also be a failure to perceive something that does exist -- an encyclopedia broadly defines "hallucination" as a "false perception characterized by a distortion of real sensory stimuli." Examples of this second kind of hallucination are stories -- perhaps apocryphal -- that aborigines in places visited by European explorers were unable to see the Europeans' ships because the experience of the aborigines taught them that such large ships could not possibly exist. Dogmatists in different subjects -- e.g., Darwinism and the holocaust -- behave exactly like these aborigines, i.e., they simply cannot begin to comprehend anything that challenges their dogmatic beliefs. Arguing with them is like talking to a brick wall -- they will just ignore you, scoff at you, or present frivolous arguments.
posted by Larry Fafarman | 3/16/2009 06:27:00 PM
16 Comments:
I think you have your analogy wrong here. Apparently these legendary natives hallucinated the non-existance of this ship simply because it was like nothing they had ever seen before.
People who accept evolution and the holocaust as fact know what they believe and why they believe it. They know what evidence supports their position and what kind of evidence the opposition would have to present to change their minds.
People who deny evolution or the holocaust have yet to present anything such new or compelling evidence to make us change our minds. On the contrary, creationism was the null hypothesis that science moved away from because it failed to explain the observations we were making two hundred years ago. All of the arguments against evolution have been repeated and refuted over and over and over again, most of them for decades, if not centuries. I personally know them like the back of my hand. http://skeptico.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/09/23/id_bingo_card_2.jpg
The analogy you have presented falls apart pretty quickly, but I'll hoble-horse it along anyways. The deniers of evolution or the holocaust have yet to produce a ship; only fantastic rumors of ships that, once vetted, turn out to only be exagerations of canoes, misinterpretted shadows, or even outright lies.
The evidence for both evolution and the holocaust are overwhelming. Sure, nobody can ever be 100% absolutely certain about everything, but it gets to the point where I have to seriously ask myself, what is more likely- these people really are on to something that trumps all that evidence, or they just want to be contrarian agaist the establishment on ideas that they don't like?
>>>>>>They know what evidence supports their position and what kind of evidence the opposition would have to present to change their minds. <<<<<<
Even when the opposition presents such evidence, the dogmatists ignore it or reject it. And the dogmatists' minds are not open to new ideas, e.g., (1) my ideas about coevolution and (2) my idea that a "systematic" Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable ways of identifying Jews and non-Jews. Often, my ideas about coevolution are not even considered because they have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
>>>>>> All of the arguments against evolution have been repeated and refuted over and over and over again, most of them for decades, if not centuries. <<<<<<
Wrong -- many of the arguments against evolution are new and a lot of the evidence against evolution is new.
>>>>>> The evidence for both evolution and the holocaust are overwhelming. <<<<<<<
Wrong -- if the evidence were overwhelming, there would not be such big debates about evolution and the holocaust. How much debating do you see about the round earth, heliocentrism, and the law of gravity?
These dogmatists hallucinate a fantasy that the question is "evolution vs. creationism:" i.e., whether existing species have descended from earlier ones, or were specially created by God?
But "evolution," as used by the conventional evolutionary biologists, means descent of all species by perfectly mindless, mechanical causes: not simply descent due to unspecified causes.
The real issue is "evolution" in that particular sense vs. intelligent design; which is the quite well-supported hypothesis that, however species appeared, intelligence of some sort played a role in designing some of their features. Intelligent design does not necessarily imply creationism. Some ID proponents, such as Michael Behe and quantum physicist Ulrich Mohrhoff, think that all species descended from earlier ones. They are "intelligent design evolutionists." Not all ID proponents are creationists.
Darwinists are so hallucinatory that they claim that they can't perceive that.
These wildly hallucinating believers in conventional, mechanistic evolutionary doctrine also are blind to historical reality. They insist that Darwin's doctrine of evolution by competitive struggle, death and slaughter, didn't play any role in helping to spawn Nazism, fascism, and Marxist-Leninist Communism. Yet historians ( and even the more honest "evolutionary biologists,") have documented that role, and shown that it was a major one.
Without Darwin's notions, there would have been no eugenics, no Hitler, no Mussolini, no Stalin, no Pol Pot. Yet the Darwin-fans, blind as bats, say they are unaware of that reality.
I do know the difference between ID and creationism. Creationism for the most part tries to argue for a literal interpretation of the bible: they believe that the events in genesis are accounts of actual historic events rather than myths and legends. ID proponents, on the other hand, accept the evidence that more complex forms of life arose from other, more simpler forms of life. However, they claim that either natural mechanisms are insufficient for evolution to happen, or that supernatural mechanisms can be demonstrated scientifically. Sorry if I appear to equate the two. The only thing they have in common is God. Otherwise, the former is just completely wrong, while the later is at best unfalsifiable, and at worst has to lie by omission to make it appear that the gaps their god is living in aren't really shrinking.
So, what is this new, exciting evidence against evolution by natural selection? What is your theory that isn't seriously considered by other people?
There's a saying, don't bark if you have a dog. In other words, don't argue in an area in which you are not an expert. I'm pretty well versed in biology, but not history, but I'll go against my better judgement and still have a go in arguing against your denial of the holocaust. You said, "a 'systematic' Jewish holocaust was impossible because the Nazis had no objective and reliable ways of identifying Jews and non-Jews."
Sure, a fool-proof method would have been impossible. I'm sure that many jews survived by pretending to not be jewish. But the methods of identifying jews did not have to be 100% accurate in order to work. There were many ways to identify jews that most of the jewish people could not escape. Many peoplae had particularly jewish last names. There were jewish neighborhoods and hamlets. Jewish people had particular customs that made them "stick out". They were known to be jews by their non-jewish neighbors. And finally, the holocaust did not begin with an immediate round-up into the death camps. It began with simple, insidious laws requiring jews to identify themselves, which is what they had to do if they wanted to keep living where they lived with the same culture and religion they always had. (This is why second-amendment advocates are against gun registration- if the government ever did decide to round up all the guns, they would know right where to look.)
If the evidence is so overwhelming, why are people still arguing about it? Because people like conspiracy theories. In a confusing, unpredictable world, they like to think that they are privy to information that bucks authority and gives them some control. Because the mechanisms of evolution are counter-intuitive and difficult to grasp the first few times around. Because although evolution by natural mechanisms does not exclude the possiblility of a god, people feel that the success of natural explanations threatens their religion. Because the truths of evolution or the holocaust have no direct, practical implications on most people's lives, while believing in a flat earth or a geocentric universe would make world travel and space exploration incomprehensible.
I'll tell you one thing, though. The truth of evolution by means of natural selection does have practical importance. I am a biochem major at Iowa State. Every scientific biological paper I have read (and I have read a lot) has some mention of evolution in it. I have done research on proteins that are important in understanding autoimune diseases and cancers, and in order to understand how these proteins work and what they are for, we have to understand where they came from, which means understanding their evolutionary history; not just which organisms we are decended from, but how by natural mechanisms the genes that make these proteins came to be. It may not make much difference what you think of evolution, but it is damn important that our biomedical researchers understand it.
Ben Stein said, "Science leads to killing people." It's the exact opposite. Science saves lives. \
And Hitler was a Roman Catholic who banned Darwin's books. He was actually much more influenced by Martin Luther's book, The Jews and Their Lies. Evolution is a biological fact, not a moral imperitive.
Sid said,
>>>>>>> ID proponents, on the other hand, accept the evidence that more complex forms of life arose from other, more simpler forms of life. <<<<<<<
ID is compatible with young-earth creationism.
>>>>>>> So, what is this new, exciting evidence against evolution by natural selection? What is your theory that isn't seriously considered by other people? <<<<<<<
Coevolution. I find it very difficult to get consideration of my ideas about coevolution. For example, the bloggers at the Florida Citizens for Science blog said that I had to get my ideas about coevolution pre-approved by "experts" before I could post them on their blog!
>>>>>>> There's a saying, don't bark if you have a dog. In other words, don't argue in an area in which you are not an expert. <<<<<<<<
I am an expert on coevolution and Jew identification. How can people who have never given any serious consideration to these things know more about them than I do?
>>>>>>> Many peoplae had particularly jewish last names. <<<<<<<
Many German and other European names of non-Jews sound Jewish. Remember -- it is desired not just to be able to identify Jews, but to be able to identify non-Jews as well -- you don't want to send the wrong people to the gas chambers. Just try to imagine how you would go about exterminating a religious group in the USA, for example. Not so easy, is it?
>>>>>> There were jewish neighborhoods and hamlets. Jewish people had particular customs that made them "stick out". They were known to be jews by their non-jewish neighbors <<<<<<<
According to official holocaust history, many assimilated -- even converted -- Jews were victims of the holocaust.
Remember, I was speaking of "objective and reliable" ways of identifying Jews in a "systematic" holocaust -- I was not talking about methods of Jew identification that worked only occasionally. If the Nazis had attempted a "systematic" holocaust, many non-Jews would have been afraid of being mistaken for Jews, and more people would have complained that the Nazis mistakenly identified them as Jews. The Nazis often just rounded people up en masse with no attempt to determine whether individuals were Jews according to any definition.
The introduction to the book "IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black says,
When Hitler came to power, a central Nazi goal was to identify and destroy Germany's 600,000 Jews. To Nazis, Jews were not just those who practiced Judaism, but those of Jewish blood, regardless of their assimilation, intermarriage, religious activity, or even conversion to Christianity. Only after Jews were identified could they be targeted for asset confiscation, ghettoization, deportation, and ultimately extermination. To search generations of communal, church, and governmental records all across Germany--and later throughout Europe--was a cross-indexing task so monumental, it called for a computer. But in 1933, no computer existed . . . . .
. . . . I was haunted by a question whose answer has long eluded historians. The Germans always had the lists of Jewish names. Suddenly, a squadron of grim-faced SS would burst into a city square and post a notice demanding those listed assemble the next day at the train station for deportation to the East. But how did the Nazis get the lists? For decades, no one has known. Few have asked.
Why have few asked? This issue of Jew identification should be considered to be central to the holocaust. There is not even an objective definition of the term "Jew" -- even today we don't know exactly what a Jew is.
So Edwin Black also said that Jew identification was a big problem for the Nazis, but when he says it he is regarded as an expert and when I say it I am regarded as a crackpot.
This book "IBM and the Holocaust" claims that the Nazis identified all of the Jews of Europe by using primitive IBM Hollerith machines to process data stored on billions of IBM Hollerith cards, but that is absurd. Even if all the necessary data had been available, those primitive machines simply did not have such data-processing capability -- all they could do was just read, sort, and merge a few cards at a time.
>>>>>> If the evidence is so overwhelming, why are people still arguing about it? Because people like conspiracy theories. <<<<<<<
That's just an ad hominem attack.
>>>>>>> Every scientific biological paper I have read (and I have read a lot) has some mention of evolution in it. <<<<<<<
Evolution theory is often perfunctorily mentioned even where it did not guide the research.
In my studies of coevolution, Darwinian evolution theory has been a science stopper. Biologists just generally assume that coevolution is the result of "mutual evolutionary pressure" between different species and have no desire to investigate further. My assumption that Darwinian coevolution is not always possible motivated me to investigate further.
Evolution theory has been getting a free ride because it is the only theory of origins that at least gives a superficial appearance of being naturalistic or materialistic.
>>>>>> And Hitler was a Roman Catholic who banned Darwin's books. He was actually much more influenced by Martin Luther's book, The Jews and Their Lies. <<<<<<<
I don't know about that. What I do know is that Darwin had indirect influences on Nazism.
This blog has two "Holocaust revisionism" post-label groups and two "Darwin-to-Hitler" post-label groups. The post-label groups are listed in the sidebar -- the reason for the two groups for each subject is that my Blogger.com template-mode software limits me to a maximum of 20 articles per group.
Your problem is that you have a closed mind.
Guidelines from Die Bücherei 2:6 (1935), p. 279:
. . .
6. Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel).
here
On the Jews and Their Lies was presented at NAZI rallies.
here
Evolution by chance and natural selection alone is such an absurd hypothesis that it is now rejected even by many biologists who are devout materialists; it is contrary to a great deal of evidence. The only real argument proposed by the Darwinists has been that their hypothesis "might" be true, and that they are fond of it because it is perfectly mechanistic, and because it accords well with a few pieces of irrelevant, microevolutionary evidence. Intelligent design fits the evidence much better, and does not automatically require anything supernatural, for that matter:the naturally-arising cosmic intelligence proposed by Fred Hoyle, for instance, would do nicely; as would many other possibilities. Further, one does not have to have any hypothesis at all about the causes of the emergence of any species. "Nobody knows the answer" may be the best answer at this point.
These Darwin-fans all parrot the same line that they have read somewhere. True, Hitler was not an orthodox Darwinist and would have disliked the orthodox theory, but the influence of Darwin's theory is nevertheless obvious in Mein Kampf, and has been discussed at length by Darwinist evolutionary biologist Michael R. Rose in his book Darwin's Spectre: Evolutionary Biology in the Modern World. Rose is prominent enough to rate two mentions in the Encyclopedia Britannica Online Academic Edition article on Evolution, on p.67 and p.71 of that article. Sir Arthur Keith also treated Hitler as a fairly conventional Darwinist in his book Evolution and Ethics (1947.) These Darwin-buffs ought to try doing their own research in the literature, instead of parroting the claims of Eugenie, PZ, etc.
"Hitler was a Roman Catholic" is laughably ignorant nonsense. He was born in a Catholic family, but as an adult abandoned all forms of Christianity, as his biographers have abundantly demonstrated. As an adult, he was nearly as anti-Christian as he was anti-Semitic ( as Abraham Foxman also pointed out in his introduction to the 2000
Mariner edition of Mein Kampf.)None of the Nazi leaders were Christians, although their propaganda may have sometimes hinted that they were such, for popular consumption. (I believe that Dawkins was also born in a Christian family, by the way.)
Here comes that old canard about the alleged biomedical significance of Darwinist evolution, again! Even if darwinist evolutionary theory were true, and there is no reason to think that it is true, it would have no medical value that intelligent design doesn't also have; and for that matter, that outright creationism, including young earth creationism doesn't also have! For all of these doctrines accept minor, observable changes due to chance factors plus natural selection. And it is only these minor changes over a few years or perhaps a few centuries, that happen rapidly enough to have any medical applications for humans.
If ignorant Darwinists are going to ludicrously claim that Hitler was a Catholic, and thus a Christian, they might as well say the same thing about Stalin; and perhaps they will try to do so! Like Hitler, Stalin was born in a Christian family; and Stalin actually studied divinity, before abandoning Christianity, as an adult. Some biographers think that Stalin abandoned Christianity after reading Darwin; but that is poorly supported and may not be true. It is certain that Stalin held to a version of evolution which was based on Darwin's ideas. It was called "Creative Darwinism," and advocated by T.D. Lysenko, who thought that inheritance of acquired characteristics plays a role. But Darwin himself gave a role to inheritance of acquired characteristics in his theory, although that is rarely mentioned.
Jim Sherwood said...
>>>>>> Here comes that old canard about the alleged biomedical significance of Darwinist evolution, again! Even if darwinist evolutionary theory were true, and there is no reason to think that it is true, it would have no medical value that intelligent design doesn't also have; and for that matter, that outright creationism, including young earth creationism doesn't also have! <<<<<<<
That's right, Jim. Usually the biological relationships are established by taxonomy, genetics, homology, etc., and the Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection are added afterward as a gloss to give a naturalistic or materialistic explanation of how the biological relationships came to be. Radio talk-show host Dennis Prager said that one can be a creationist, believe in witchcraft, believe that the earth is on the back of a turtle, etc., and still be a great medical researcher. Paul Nelson said of a lecture by Josh Rosenau,
Rosenau also said that I gave his lecture too cursory a summary, and failed to rebut his arguments. Taking the trouble to rebut, however, requires a proposition worth rebutting, and I focused on the implicit theology in Rosenau's recommended source materials. The science was mostly using "evolution" to name for all kinds of different things (from pest management to the evolution of universes), in a fashion either question-begging or irrelevant.
For instance, Rosenau described the discovery of the medicine Taxol (paclitaxel) and the use of phylogenetic methods to identify plant sources for this compound, other than the limited supply available in the bark of the Pacific yew, Taxus brevifolia. Why didn't I reply to this example? Rosenau asks:
"Nelson is free to disagree that an understanding of common ancestry was essential to producing enough Taxol to treat hundreds of thousands of patients, but he never explains why."
I didn't explain why, because the common ancestry of Taxus brevifolia and Taxus baccata (the European yew, whose needles provide additional sources for synthesizing Taxol) is a phylogenetic hypothesis not even the most doctrinaire young-earth creationist would challenge. If this is "evolution," then everyone accepts evolution.
In my studies of coevolution, Darwinian evolution theory was potentially a science-stopper. Darwinist biologists often consider coevolution to be simply the result of "mutual evolutionary pressure" between two different species and have no desire to investigate further. My hypothesis that coevolution by Darwinian processes is not always possible motivated me to investigate further. The important thing is to keep an open mind and not stick rigidly to the bible or Darwinism.
Chemist Philip Skell debated the alleged "biomedical value" of conventional evolutionary doctrine in a scientific journal, I think it was The Scientist, a few years ago. He routed the old-fashioned Darwin-dogma scientists, in my opinion.
Skell is a moderate Darwin-doubter who says "I do not have the position, or hold the position, that Darwinist theory is incorrect, or correct. I think there is no good way to make that decision." His open-mindedness has of course made him very unpopular with the dogmatic apostles of the somehow-perfectly-mechanistic evolution of all life.
See Intelligent Design the Future for the interview with Skell, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has also blasted the persecution of dissenting scientists and dissenting biology students by the Conventional Darwinist Scientific Establishment.
Even Abraham Foxman has refuted the claim that Hitler, as an adult, was a Roman Catholic or any other sort of Christian!
In his introduction to the 2000 Houghton Mifflin (Mariner paperback) edition to Hitler's book Mein Kampf, Foxman wrote:
"Written relatively easly in Hitler's political career, Mein Kampf avoids points that might alienate potential supporters; its silence on the subject of Christianity, given Hitler's documented antagonism to that religion, is the most noteworthy example." (p.xviii.)
In his introduction, Foxman also wrote about the influence of Darwin's theory in helping to foment racism and eugenics (and thus Nazism.)
Philip Skell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, wrote an article in The Scientist, Aug 29, 2005, in which he debunked the claim that conventional evolutionary doctrines somehow have some biomedical value. The article and responses to it by some unreflective Darwin-is-our-old-dogma scientists, can be Googled.
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