Evolution, Dogma and Conflation

Foot soldiers in the war against those of us who dare to question the "fact" of evolution portray scientists in glowing terms. They are eminently logical, follow where the evidence leads, never have biases, are exceptionally honest and so on. (Of course, such praise makes them seem like automatons rather than people — if you believe such praises in the first place.) People who actually believe this lofty view of evolutionists are shocked — shocked, I tell you — at the suggestion that some scientists may have biases and engage in sneaky behavior.

A very common shell game is conflation (or equivocation) on word meanings. The term "evolution" can mean many things. When the faithful chant that "evolution is a fact", they may actually be right when using some definitions of evolution. However, they are not right when they take one meaning of evolution and switch it with microbes-to-microbiologist evolution.

When I explained that evolutionists equivocate by using different definitions of the word evolution, a professor was shocked. Such allegations were “pretty despicable” and the only equivocation on evolution, she retorted, “is coming from you.” Such is the life of a messenger. Evolutionists misrepresent science in various ways, and when you point it out they put the blame on you. I once debated a biology professor and when I pointed out that evolutionists misrepresent science in their insistence that evolution is a fact, he said I didn’t understand the word “fact.” That retort might make sense if evolutionists had some nuanced meaning in mind, but they don’t. Quite the opposite, their claim is that evolution is as much a fact as is gravity or that the Earth is not flat. Not much subtlety there. But his sound bite accusation achieved the desired effect. It is standard for evolutionists to misrepresent science, and it is standard then to assign the blame on the messenger who points out the misrepresentation. In this case, the professor was scandalized when I pointed out the standard equivocation of defining evolution as mere genetic tweaking. While on the one hand claiming that it is an indisputable fact that the entire biological world arose by itself spontaneously, evolutionists on the other hand will explain evolution as the mere shifting of allele frequencies, an utterly uncontroversial observation which no one disputes. In other words, they make a dogmatic claim that is contradicted by science, and then justify it with a completely different definition of the word. It would be like claiming the Earth is flat, and then arguing strenuously that a field is flat, as though that was the basis of the dispute. However dignified the evolutionary argument is made to appear, it is ultimately nothing more than a shell game.

You can read the rest of "Professor is Scandalized: Evolutionists Would Never Do That!", here.