Aw, isn't it cute when they try to think?

As with Ann Coulter, I used to find the evolution/creation debate infuriating, but have come to consider it so stupid as to be boring, and to think that any time spent discussing it would be better spent on other things.  Like reading Karen Santorum's Everyday Graces: A Child's Book of Good Manners, ("164 classic stories to teach your children good manners -- and the good morals that go hand in hand with them").

But an essay entitled "Evolving Lies" (posted by Steve on the blog The Fifth Column) was just asinine enough to catch my attention.  Check it out.  It's brilliant piece of sophistry, and has a little bit of everything, from incoherence to paranoia.  Not only does Steve offer up a veritable cornucopia of logical fallacies, he also displays a stupefying inability to distinguish the use of metaphor from the "destruction of the English language."  (Apparently using metaphors to explain quarks is ok, but using metaphors to talk about evolution is malicious.)

If any of our readers has the time, go over there and give this guy an ass-whooping.  (I'd do it myself but I'm up to my neck in work.)  It'll be fun.  Every sentence is a joke.  You might mention the following to Steve, who implies that the word "person" should only be used to discuss humans' relationship to the great Person in the sky: Though the word "person" may have been used in a 2nd century to describe the parts of trinity, I'm pretty sure language usage has changed somewhat in the last 1800 years or so.  For one thing, we speak English and they didn't.  And the etymology of the current word "person": "Middle English, from Old French persone, from Latin persona actor's mask, character in a play, person, probably from Etruscan phersu mask, from Greek prosOpa, plural of prosOpon face, mask."

Also Steve, if you're going to make statements such as this: "Strictly speaking, the brain is not necessary for the possession or expression of a person’s intellect," you really ought to back it up with something.  Anything.

I actually agree with this guy that the vocabulary of evolution should be changed, because it's confusing, not because it "routinely encroach[es] on theological discourse."

And now back to Everyday Graces...

-Heather

Comments

[Musing Michael]

Well, he's wrong. "Person" was never used in the second century to talk about parts of the Trinity, since there was, to the best of my knowledge, nobody representing England at any of the synods that would have discussed it--and if there had been, he wouldn't have spoken English as we know it, either. What they did use, at places like Chalcedon (in the fifth century) and others, was the perfectly ordinary Greek expression prosopon, which literally means "that which is before (pros) the eyes" or, less cumbersome, "face." It's still around as a loan-word (prosopography) in English, to describe the study of persons and their relationships to one another in the ancient world.

[PW]

I was tempted to get into it over at the Evolving Liar, but experience has taught me that to engage these guys in a debate is to give them credibility among the fence-sitters. Last thing I want to do!

[Incertus]

Good idea, pw. Besides, the only people who would be convinced by the dreck that guy is pushing are people who think that if they don't understand the argument, then the guy making it must be right.