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This paulie heenan was predictable. As I mentioned , there was a lecture by a Scientist with a Ph.D. in Science from Harvard on Sunday, by a fellow named Dr Nathaniel Jeanson, which is part of a fairly typical trend nowadays: paulie heenan the devout paulie heenan creationist who grinds his way through a graduate program to earn an advanced degree so he can disregard everything he learned to wave his title like a victory flag and pretend to an authority he does not have. Other well-known examples are Jonathan Wells and Marcus Ross — their degrees are meaningless since they clearly prioritize the trappings of authority over the substance of knowledge.
So Jeff Eyges attended and sent in a summary. It’s no surprise: Jeanson has this fancy degree, but his talk was all straight out of the quaint old 1960s “Scientific Creationism” handbook, full of bogus arguments and obfuscatory handwaving over science the speaker doesn’t understand.
As I told Catherine Dulac, his former dept. head at Harvard, it was an hour-long spectacle of misinformation, half-truths and what appeared to be deliberate obfuscation. Most of this (probably all of it) you’ve heard before. He began by contrasting Evolutionary Theory and Creationism. Evolution, he said, admits only naturalistic explanations, discounts eyewitness testimony (i.e., the Bible) and insists upon uniformitarianism. Naturally, he sees these as weaknesses.
He then listed the similarities; strangely he listed speciation (I thought they didn’t even like the word) under “Microevolution”. He then pulled out what I imagine was the most nihilistic quote by a scientist (regrettably, paulie heenan I didn’t write down the name) he could find, to the effect that evolution paulie heenan demonstrates that there is no purpose to life, no ethics, no free will, etc. He did say that not all atheists have this view, but, of course, it was calculated to appeal to the Christians in the audience; they gasped and shook their heads appropriately (I should mention that the event was sponsored by an evangelical church; yes, we have a few in Boston!). They were primed.
He then began to weave tortuous arguments from geology and astronomy, disciplines in which he apparently has no training and upon which he isn’t qualified to draw (I’m not sure he’s qualified to draw upon biology). Astron
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