Richard Dawkins and Wendy Wright, continued: an exercise in frustration

Here's Part One of my response to the debate -- or discussion or maybe it's an interview, Dawkins interviewing Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America. I figured since this discussion is specifically about evolution it should be continued at my evolution blog.

Unfortunately her manner is annoying. She's really not getting what he's trying to say, so she's not getting across the points that matter to a creationist. She smiles wildly and mockingly at times and she talks over him and evades his questions -- I think she's nervous and afraid of being railroaded, but he's simply trying to find out if she's actually seen what he considers to be evidence. This is in part 2 of the video series. She's saying she thinks THEIR talking over "us" comes out of a frustration that so many still don't believe in evolution, and of course his answer is that yes, he's frustrated but that's because he's given the evidence she claims is lacking and she refuses to acknowledge it. "Why do you keep saying 'Present me with the evidence' when I've done so?" he says.

But the evidence he's given is exactly the sort of thing that is not evidence and she isn't getting it across how it isn't, how the museum models of Australopithecus and homo habilis et. al. are not evidence but merely imaginative constructs that are meaningless without specific and detailed information about the facts they are based on. They are exactly what evolutionists always give us, mystifying mental constructions with NO way to track down how they arrived at them and no recognition that their interpretation of the facts may not be the only possible interpretation.

But she just keeps going on about how the evolutionists can't be all that confident in their beliefs or there wouldn't be this effort to silence creationists, which is a highly questionable proposition, and unfortunately that is not what is going on here if it's ever valid. He's simply saying she's ignoring the evidence he's given her. I'm beginning to despair of this ever getting clarified and it's going to go on for another five parts after this one. Oy.

She's just rambling on from one topic to another, how evolution is an ideology now etc. etc. etc. This is a mess.

RICHARD DAWKINS DOES NOT NEED TO HEAR ALL THIS WILD STUFF, WENDY, HE NEEDS TO UNDERSTAND WHY THE MUSEUM MODELS AND THE BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS ARE NOT EVIDENCE. OY.

Ah finally, she does repeat the concern that these illustrations are not the material evidence we need. And then he says there are casts in the museums of the exact fossils for each model if we want to see them and I wish she hadn't changed the subject at that point -- it would be important to know to what extent these fossil casts DO amount to the sort of evidence we are asking for: I suspect very little but I also suspect we're not going to get to hear enough about them to find out.

...because she changes the subject again, asks why it matters so much to him that everybody believe as he believes, and actually, that's a decent question -- but for some other time, not at this point in the conversation, and of course his answer is going to be predictable.

Haeckel and racism he dismisses as Victorianism, mistakes that have since been discarded, denying their still-important implications for the theory itself. This is something to answer later.

He asks, Can we point to any positive evidence for creationism? She says DNA shows individuality. Shows that there is intervention at the point of each person's creation. Then that annoying smile. She may have a point here but it's a weak one.

He says there HAS to be individual variation or Darwinism wouldn't work.

She says Hm.

That's a whole area I've discussed here at great length. The first answer of course is that this is microevolution that nobody disputes.

But I've had to stop watching this, it's just too frustrating.

Later: I'm listening to the end but there isn't much more I want to comment on.

It's frustrating that she introduces concepts such as the soul and other evidences for God when what I think needs to be done is to show the falseness of the claims for evidence of evolution.

Any concession to evolution is too much for me. There's NO real evidence for it. What they are calling evidence is not evidence, it really isn't -- it's speculation, conjecture or argument from analogy and so on, and what IS factual is subject to other interpretations that they overlook -- but it seems hopeless to make that case.

He really does believe what they've got is factual evidence that creationists are simply refusing to look at. For instance "Lovely fossils of fish coming out onto the land." Evidence of transition from the reptilian jaw to the mammals. He really believes that fossils are evidence, that mere morphological comparisons can provide some kind of proof of descent. He really believes that. What a monumental illusion.

---CJA