Doubting Didymus

A creationist so immoral as to doctor a videotape of a respected scientist?

Impossible! Not even they would go that far.

<a href="http://www.skeptics.com.au/journal/crexpose.htm" target="_blank">&lt;ahem&gt;</a>

Camaban

When I see something like that, I kinda refuse to believe that the people who do that to support their view honestly believe the view they're trying to support (Unless they're extremely good at convincing themselves that something like that isn't dishonest and decietful)

Like the "Quotations book" mentioned.

Why, oh why, would any honest person who honestly believed the view he was trying to pass on reproduce something that dishonest?

I swear these people are in it for the money (Like Dr. Hovind, Who was so poor, and had so little property he had to attempt to bribe someone to get out of a house he was renting to them)

Albion

I'm sure they are in it for the money (or else why didn't Ken Ham stay in Australia - there seem to be enough infidels there to keep him occupied), but there's probably also an element of doing God's work and all the strokes they get from the Christian communities as a result. They've probably allowed themselves to become convinced that they're fighting the good fight on the side of God against Satan and that since Satan is the father of lies, they must be telling the truth, even if they're misrepresenting scientists. After all, since the scientists are tools of Satan, they must be lying anyway, right?

One particularly awful case is that of Luther Sunderland, who did a number on both Colin Patterson and Niles Eldredge (actually, I think he did two numbers on Eldredge).

Here's the stuff about Patterson:

<a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html" target="_blank">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html</a>

Here's the stuff about Eldredge and teaching creationism, from California Wild:

"CW: Changing gears for a moment, I know some creationists, one of whom actually cites your work and Gould's work as evidence for special creation theory. He says, "That all of these phyla appeared six hundred million years ago and haven't really changed much since then is not a mystery. That's when God chose to create the phyla." How does it feel to be used as ammunition marshaled against evolutionists by creationists? And what do you say to creationists when they say, "Stasis is not necessarily proof of creation theory, but it's certainly evidence in favor of its basic tenets."?

NE: We got dragged into this in the early '80s by a guy named Luther Sunderland, who's now dead. He was an engineer for General Electric, did a lot of the engineering for the B-1 bombers. The guy was not dumb. But he was the leading creationist on the East Coast. I didn't know that when he came to me representing himself as a consultant for the New York State Board of Regents, who are the people who oversee the curriculum for high schools. When I got the typescript back he had me responding to, "So you don't mind seeing Creationism taught side by side with evolution in the public schools," saying, "No, I think it's good." What I really said was that I don't mind a science teacher starting off by saying there are other explanations for this, but they're mostly in religious traditions, not in the scientific tradition.

He invited me to change anything I wanted to, so I did. But by that time, he had already introduced that transcript into a study session of the Iowa State Legislature. Later on I became friendly with Sunderland and would go on TV with him. The other thing was that Sunderland got to President Reagan's speechwriters because of punctuated equilibrium. Reagan went to a convention of fundamentalist ministers in Texas and attacked evolution saying that "It's a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed."

My position is the same as Darwin's on this: Evolution works through processes such as natural selection and speciation. If someone wanted to say that life started three and a half billion years ago with bacteria, then God saw to it, using natural processes such as evolution, that other things would come along, including the Cambrian explosion, I would have absolutely no problem with that. But not if he says that Darwin said evolution is slow and gradual; Eldredge and Gould say it proceeds by fits and starts. Ergo Eldredge and Gould don't believe in evolution."

And here's some stuff about how Sunderland misrepresented Eldredge's position on horse evolution (extracted from Eldredge's book "The triumph of evolution"):

"Luther Sunderland reported what Dr Eldredge said as if he was criticising the whole horse series, not just the gradualist presentation of it by the museum. He then accused Dr Eldredge of contradicting himself in a later 20/20 interview by saying that the horse series was a good example of evolution after saying that it wasn't just a couple of years earlier. Note here that Dr Eldredge hadn't criticised the horse series, just the museum's presentation of it as too gradualist. He says,"In short, my outburst to Sunderland was on the subject of evolutionary gradualism - not on the question on anatomical intermediates."

In the context of his 20/20 interview, he said that creationists are more concerned with anatomical intermediates rather than stasis versus gradualism, and that the horse series is a wonderful example of a series of anatomical intermediates. The only thing he contradicted was the creationist misrepresentation of his position on intermediate forms, he was not contradicting his own position."

To quote Eldredge on this subject:

Sometimes I do wonder how Sunderland justified all this to himself.

Jesus Tap-Dancin' Christ

Lie for Jesus dude, lie for Jesus.