Monday, January 28, 2008

An 'Academic' Creationist Journal

The New Humanist has an article announcing a creationist "academic peer-reviewed journal" (Creationists start an 'academid' journal)

What took them so long to think of this little trick?

Much of the lives of these people depend on an ontological fallacy - that they can bring something into existence simply by declaring that they have done so (a nice piece of magic normally attributed to witches and warlocks).

Obviously, their use of the term 'academic journal' does not match the common usage. This trick is like calling a one dollar bill 'a million dollars' and then going out and expecting to buy a million dollars worth of merchandise with it.

All of the reasons why these articles would not qualify for any real academic journal still apply - their premises are false or unproved, their inferences are invalid, and they include no falsification criteria (ways of demonstrating that their view is mistaken).

Ultimately, this is another form of sophistry and deception that at least this group of creationist seem to adore and against which they have no moral qualms. Regardless of any moral prohibition on making things up, they are once again making things up, and surrounding them with sophistry in order to market them to a public that they have made worse off.

These are the products of parents who raise their children to be sophists and liars, and not have the respect for truth and reason that any moral person would have.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Samuel Skinner
Well it has finally happened- the Onion has stopped mocking events and started predicting them. Watch for faith based gravity theory coming to a school near you.

Anonymous said...

The Onion has been successfully predicting events for a long time...