Casey Luskin Wants Us to Categorize Evolution Critics

Casey Luskin has posted an email message that he recently sent to someone who inquired about Intelligent Design Creationism. It describes his view of the debate between Intelligent Design Creationists and scientists [Personal Attacks Against ID Proponents Say More About the Attackers than the Abused].

With that, please let me give you a little introduction to how this debate works. Evolutionists regularly accuse their critics of being "dishonest" and "deceiving." It's a primary tactic they use to respond to criticism and intimidate critics into silence. You're not allowed to dissent from their view and be (a) informed, and (b) honest. Many of them can't fathom the possibility that a person on the other side of the debate could be both.

Here's a fact you might ponder: Virtually every single major person who has criticized the Darwinian viewpoint has faced personal attacks on his or her character. It happens to everyone, myself included. So one of two things are true: Either (1) virtually every single critic of Darwinism (of which there are many) is "dishonest" and "deceiving," or (2) evolutionists habitually respond to scientific challenges with personal attacks.

There's more than two choices here. Let's list the possibilities. Most creationist critics of evolution are ....

1. Uninformed and honest
2. Uniformed and dishonest
3. Informed and honest
4. Informed and dishonest

There are creationist critics of evolution who fit into all categories but category #3 is the least populated. I think Michael Denton and Michael Behe qualify. They seem to have a pretty good knowledge of evolutionary biology and they seem to be sincere in their criticism

Category #4 is tricky. There are some creationist critics of evolution who should be informed but they still say some very silly things. This leads me to suspect that they are being dishonest. Jonathan Wells is a good example.

Categories #1 and #2 contain the vast majority of creationist critics of evolution. They really don't know what they're talking about but it doesn't prevent them from talking. I think most of them are honest IDiots—Casey Luskin is an example and so is Phillip Johnson. Some of them are uniformed and dishonest, that's where I would place Bill Dembski and David Berlinski.

Casey Luskin is wrong when he claims that we accuse all creationist critics of evolution of being dishonest and deceitful. Mostly we just accuse them of being uninformed but acting as if they were.¹ That's probably due to stupidity and not malevolence.

I've left out a huge number of creationists, including the theistic evolutionists who fall mostly into category #3: informed, honest, but wrong.

Where do the rest of them fit in?

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1. Being uninformed is perfectly okay. Most of us are uniformed about a lot of things. You aren't stupid or an idiot just because you don't know something. You become an IDiot when you don't recognize how little you know about a subject but still feel qualified to tell the experts that they are wrong.