Most people simply don’t have beliefs about God, creation, etc, just loyalty signals. You could call rhetoric framing the argument as loyalty signals “deliberate antirationality,” but it’s quite different from lying. It’s not at all clear to me that it’s deliberate; I suspect it’s more along the lines of asking themselves “what can I say here to reassure myself?” and it being well-tuned to the audience...if it even is well-tuned, a claim for which I don’t see much evidence (either for or against).
I guess “so that only trained rationalists might be completely immune” does pin down “quite good” in absolute terms. But I think it’s false. I think most people who profess belief in evolution do so for completely irrational loyalty reasons, yet are immune to creationists.
I agree. But that describes the average creationist-follower. I was talking about the kind of high-profile creationists who work full-time at promoting their ideas that tend to be mentioned on Pharyngula. From the descriptions there of what they say and do, I have gained the impression that they often lie; e.g., by presenting an argument while ignoring and never answering the objections given at previous debates; or by saying unsupported things like “evolution is the subject of a controversy in science”.
I don’t live in or near the US, and all I know about US-specific creationists I learned from anti-creationist sources like Pharyngula, Dawkins’ books, etc. So taking them as examples, I’m disproportionately aware of the highest-profile creationists. But they at least do certainly lie.
Yes, in the sense used (or implied) by creationists. It is not the case that there is significant disagreement among scientists (or among facts) about the proposition that the diversity of life on earth developed entirely by a process of evolution involving (mostly random) variation and (at least some) fitness selection.
Well, if you consider that most Americans still believe God created the universe, they seem to have done rather well so far.
Most people simply don’t have beliefs about God, creation, etc, just loyalty signals. You could call rhetoric framing the argument as loyalty signals “deliberate antirationality,” but it’s quite different from lying. It’s not at all clear to me that it’s deliberate; I suspect it’s more along the lines of asking themselves “what can I say here to reassure myself?” and it being well-tuned to the audience...if it even is well-tuned, a claim for which I don’t see much evidence (either for or against).
I guess “so that only trained rationalists might be completely immune” does pin down “quite good” in absolute terms. But I think it’s false. I think most people who profess belief in evolution do so for completely irrational loyalty reasons, yet are immune to creationists.
I agree. But that describes the average creationist-follower. I was talking about the kind of high-profile creationists who work full-time at promoting their ideas that tend to be mentioned on Pharyngula. From the descriptions there of what they say and do, I have gained the impression that they often lie; e.g., by presenting an argument while ignoring and never answering the objections given at previous debates; or by saying unsupported things like “evolution is the subject of a controversy in science”.
I don’t live in or near the US, and all I know about US-specific creationists I learned from anti-creationist sources like Pharyngula, Dawkins’ books, etc. So taking them as examples, I’m disproportionately aware of the highest-profile creationists. But they at least do certainly lie.
Are you saying that it is not the case that “evolution is the subject of a controversy in science”?
Yes, in the sense used (or implied) by creationists. It is not the case that there is significant disagreement among scientists (or among facts) about the proposition that the diversity of life on earth developed entirely by a process of evolution involving (mostly random) variation and (at least some) fitness selection.