Thursday, August 12, 2010

Evolutionist reads the mind of God

I often criticize people for leaping to faulty conclusions from mindreading. They usually do not appear to even realize that they are engaging in mindreading.

Leftist-atheist-evolutionist Jerry Coyne writes about some students calling him an a**hole:
I asked for clarification, and the teacher sent me a short explanation, including a reconstructed dialogue with a female student who was apparently horrified by one statement in the book: “If a designer did have discernible motives when creating species, one of them must surely have been to fool biologists by making organisms look as though they evolved.” ...

There is of course a trace of satire in what I said, but what students really object to, I think, is the cognitive dissonance it creates in them. Indeed, why would God have done that? And what kind of God would have done that? A duplicitous one? And so they take their dissonance out on me.
He is mindreading God as well as the students. It is more likely that the students were offended by his mindreading.

Coyne's response is that he is the biology professor, so he has a right to insult religious students. His colleague's response was to give a lecture on misstatements that have been made by creationists. Neither of them address the students' point that it was unnecessary to make such an outlandish statement about God's motives. Coyne could have made all his points about the evidence for evolution without being an a**hole who makes gratuitous attacks on the motives of others. God, in this case, as well as the students.

A reader comments:
I have some very good friends who are staunch YECs. After various discussions I think I’m now pretty close to them agreeing to read a book about evolution, to be recommended by me.
I obviously want this book to be ONLY about the mechanics, so to say, of evolution, and NOT contain even the slightest hint of creationism-bashing (because, that’s where they would stop reading. Whether that’s dumb or not, I don’t want that to happen). My problem: I can’t find such a book! There’s ALWAYS, no matter how mild, a sneer in there towards creationism.
It is funny how these scientists cannot stick to the science.

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