In a recent thread a misconception about the ID perps Top Six was
exposed. Some long time posters on the science side of ID/creationist
issue had in the words of one of them a "profound" misconception of what
the Top Six did to IDiocy on TO. Back in Nov. 2017 the ID perps at the
Discovery Institute put out their Top Six best "evidence" for the
creationist ID scam. They did it at the same time that they were
running the last bait and switch on the Utah creationist rubes. This
was the last creationist attempt to teach the junk until some West
Virginia legislator recently tried to get a one sentence insertion into
an existing act that was about teachers not having to change grades in
order to recommend passing a student on to the next level.
The ID perps had never done anything like it since the ID scam started
with the creation of the ID scam unit at the Discovery Institute. They
not only listed their top six god-of-the-gaps denial arguments, but they
claimed that they were ranked 1 to 6, not in level of significance to
the ID scam, but in their expected order of occurrence.
https://evolutionnews.org/2017/11/ids-top-six-the-origin-of-the-universe/
QUOTE:
Editor’s note: In the past we’ve offered the top 10 problems with
Darwinian evolution (see here for a fuller elaboration), and the top
five problems with origin-of-life theories. But somehow we neglected to
offer a parallel listing of the top lines of evidence supporting
intelligent design. Many different pieces of evidence pointing to design
in nature could be adduced, but we decided to distill it all down to six
major lines of evidence. Sure, five or ten would have been more
conventional, but when did ID advocates start playing to expectations?
So here they are, their order simply reflecting that in which they must
logically have occurred within our universe. Material is adapted from
the textbook Discovering Intelligent Design, which is an excellent
resource for introducing the evidence for ID, along with Stephen Meyer’s
books Signature in the Cell and Darwin’s Doubt.
END QUOTE:
Luskin was the editor, and the others that were involved in the effort
were not named. My take is that there were multiple ID perps involved
in destroying IDiocy on TO.
I put them up on TO and described them just as how the ID perps had
described them. Not a single IDiotic creationist on TO would face the
Top Six. None of them could deal with them in an honest and straight
forward manner. I did not attempt to refute any of them. I just
continued to put them up as the best evidence that the ID scam had and
made the IDiots deal with them in their order of occurrence. After a
month or two Pagano found out that he could not deal with the Top Six,
and he was the only IDiot who faced them head on. Pagano claimed that
they were all bogus, and that they were not the best evidence for
IDiocy. Instead Pagano started putting up Dembski's failed junk. Years
before Dembski had retired from the ID scam as an abject failure.
Nothing that he had ever come up with had panned out, and not a single
Dembski IDiotic doodle was considered to be a viable addition to the Top
Six by the other ID perps. I pointed out this fact to Pagano, and
Pagano stopped posting and hasn't posted since. No refutation of the
Top Six was required.
Glenn and Kalk just ran and for some stupid reason known only to them,
they started a program of going back to the ID perps for the second rate
denial junk that had not made it into the Top Six. Neither would deal
with the Top Six, and instead they would put up the second rate junk as
continued support for the ID scam. Kalk did it for a while, but
couldn't keep abusing himself in that way, so he quit being an IDiot.
Kalk even came out and claimed that he had never claimed to be Hindu,
and came out as a plain vanilla biblical creationist. Glenn kept up the
effort of putting up the second rate denial junk for years, and recently
stopped after a week where he put up 4 denial posts that he did not know
were Top Six topics that the ID perps were putting up as independent
bits of denial. Glenn had messed up and posted one of the Top Six by
mistake from time to time, but that week's effort made it clear that
Glenn wasn't interested in understanding anything that he was posting
enough to know what the topic was. Glenn has posted very little since
then. I did not have to refute the Top Six. All that I did was present
them as the ID perps had presented them.
By the time the Top Six was presented to IDiots, Bill had already
stopped openly supporting the creationist ID scam for several years. He
was into his "reality doesn't exist" phase where nothing was real, and
nothing could be understood. Before that he was one of the main
defenders of the creationist ID scam on TO. He was the one that had
made the claim that he knew some real ID scientists that had the real ID
science, but he never produced any examples. In response to the Top Six
Bill made the claim that he had never supported the ID scam, but what he
was likely claiming is that he had never supported what the creationist
ID scam had always been. It was Bill's interpretation of reality that
had always been flawed. The Top Six are the same god-of-the-gaps
arguments that the scientific creationists resorted to when they decided
that there wasn't any creation science that they wanted to do. The Big
Bang, fine tuning, the origin of life, the flagellum as a designed
machine, the Cambrian explosion, and gaps in the human fossil record had
all become standard scientific creationist gap denial arguments by the
time that the Supreme Court was hearing the Louisiana creation science
case in the mid 1980's The creationist ID perps had continued using
them because they could think of nothing else to do.
This all happened without any refutation of the Top Six on my part. All
that I did was make the IDiots face what ID had always been. Dean and
MarkE kept trying to post Top Six topics one at a time as disembodied
bits of god-of-the-gaps denial. This is how the Top Six had
traditionally been fed to the creationist rubes for decades, and it was
the only way that they could deal with the Top Six. They just used them
as "fire and forget" bits of gap denial, and never wanted to consider
one after moving on to another. Dean may still not understand why the
other IDiot type creationists could not deal with the Top Six. He even
claimed that I was not refuting the Top Six, and I had to tell him that
I never had tried to refute the Top Six. Dean asked for assistance from
the other IDiots in explaining what the issue with the Top Six was, but
no one ever helped him out. He made that request twice. He made it the
first time he was confronted by the Top Six, and the second time is when
he claimed to have forgotten what had happened the previous time, and I
had to give him a link to the post. No one helped him out. He kept
posting Top Six topics in his off and on posting history, and he kept
claiming that he did not remember the previous times. The last time he
finally admitted that he did not want to understand the Top Six with
respect to his religious beliefs, and I think that he finally got why
the others couldn't stand the Top Six because he stopped arguing after
making that admission. It was obvious that he was putting up the
god-of-the-gaps denial in order to support his religious belief, but
very few IDiot type creationists want to believe in the designer that
fits into the Top Six gaps in the "order simply reflecting that in which
they must logically have occurred within our universe.".
MarkE kept putting up the Top Six topics one at a time. He started
concentrating on the origin of life (#3 of the Top Six). MarkE had been
posting on TO for a couple decades, and had never bought into the ID
scam "science", but he could not give up on the gap denial. For some
reason he settled on defining the gap, and he set up the initial
conditions and environment of the earth at that time in order to claim
that it was all too improbable. In doing this he had to understand what
was around the gap that science has had a decent amount of success in
figuring out. I just had to suggest that he put his designer into the
gap and see how that worked out. He objected that he didn't have to do
that, but it would be stupid not to do it because the reason for the gap
denial is to support his religious beliefs. It turned out that the god
that fit into that gap wasn't the one that MarkE wanted to believe in. I
did not have to refute the origin of life god-of-the-gap denial. All I
had to do was get MarkE to use it as a positive legitimate argument to
support his religious beliefs.
This is the case for the vast majority of IDiot type biblical
creationists in existence. Everyone on TO should understand that
because even though the AIG still uses the Big Bang gap (#1 of the Top
Six) to fool the rubes at their creation museum the Big Bang is one of
the science topics that IDiot type creationists have wanted to remove,
along with biological evolution, from the public school science
standards in several states, and they succeeded for a while in Kansas.
It may be one of the best fool the rubes gap denial arguments, but the
IDiot type creationists do not want their kids to understand anything
about the Big Bang.
All this means is that I never had to refute the Top Six. The ID perps
killed ID on TO by presenting them as the best evidence that they had,
and telling the rubes that they were presented in their order of occurrence.
A typical post about the Top Six that I have frequently linked back to:
https://groups.google.com/g/talk.origins/c/a2K79skPGXI/m/uDwx0i-_BAAJ
I do not try to refute the Top Six in the post linked to above. I just
present the Top Six as the ID perps have presented them, and I note how
even the ID perps can't stand them. It should be apparent that my use
of the Top Six depends on them being the best evidence that the ID perps
have. There is no need to refute the Top Six because there just are not
many IDiotic type creationists that can place their god in the gaps when
they are presented as a whole and in their order of occurrence. Sewell
has to place them out of order of occurrence and drop out IC and the
Cambrian explosion. Miller has to drop out the Big Bang. Sewell makes
the mistake of telling the rubes that the Big Bang occurred 13 billion
years ago, and the majority of IDiot type creationists still in
existence are YEC, so Miller just dropped it out. If you read the
original Top Six the ID perps were careful to not mention when the Big
Bang happened even though they listed it as occurring first among the
Top Six. The ID perp's "Big Tent", where all biblical creationists were
welcome, was always a lie, and the ID perps have only kept lying to the
rubes in order to keep the money rolling in. Most of the original ID
perps are old earth creationists, and their ID arguments never supported
YEC. When Luskin came back from getting a geology PhD he told the
creationist rubes that he had been working on 3 billion year old
sedimentary rocks. The Big Tent where all Biblical beliefs were welcome
had always been a lie.
So the profound misconception, that I have been trying to refute the Top
Six, is a profound misconception. The Top Six never had to be refuted.
It was the IDiot type creationists that had to go into denial about them
because they had to deal with them as what ID had always been, and none
of them wanted to believe in the designer that filled those gaps in
their order of occurrence. The designer that fills the Top Six gaps is
not Biblical enough for most IDiotic type creationists.
Ron Okimoto