Puck Reviews the Genealogical Adam and Eve

I shall wait with bated breath. As you say, I am sure AIG will respond negatively, but the question is whether you can excite enough interest to get some of their people to have a read, and take a fresh look at things.

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Controversy is not a bad thing. Public controversy creates an opportunity for public theatre.

Also, I would not characterize Sanford and Carter’s Review as negative. It was more gracious at many point, and perhaps off target on the theology. It is notable also that the article does not appear to be linked on their main site, which may indicate a desire to reduce its exposure. If that is the case, they may realize it will strongly resonate with their base.

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One can easily be both gracious and negative. That review was negative at its core: they emphatically rejected your thesis.

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Yeah, but my goal isn’t to get them to accept it. So that is largely irrelevant.

Yes, but you seem to be misinterpreting the nature of that review. What color are your glasses here?

Long term strategy glasses. What color are those?

Remember this may be the first YEC article about me ever. This is literally the very beginning of the conversation.

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By the way, it seems to either be missing or to have been mis-indexed. The link you gave to it no longer works. I can only find it in the Google cache.

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Well, the Sanford/Carter review is weird, for sure. One thing that really struck me as odd was their assertion that the GAE would have been very likely to leave no modern descendants. I’m not sure what the likelihood is, but I cannot see why they, taking the subsequent genealogy from the Bible as literally true, would think this was possible.

The other aspect of it which is sort of funny is that they basically see the book as trying to shoehorn the Bible into science, and they see that sort of shoehorning as illegitimate. But how many shoehorns have they snapped in the course of trying to shoehorn science to fit the Bible? I find myself quoting the words of John:

“He wants a shoehorn – the kind with teeth.
People should get beat up for statin’ their beliefs.
He wants a shoehorn – the kind with teeth,
'cause he knows there’s no such thing.”

Oh, that was ambiguous. Perhaps the reader was expecting the Gospel of John. I meant the two Johns known as “They Might Be Giants.”

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So, @swamidass , in our correspondence you indicated that there was one point you felt might benefit from some further discussion. However, I didn’t quite understand what your view was, so would welcome the opportunity to discuss it here…

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Face-palm. Puck will agree with me that what @swamidass is describing in the GAE is the very opposite of shoehorning. Wow. (I’m grimacing as I write this.)

“Science doesn’t rule out X” is not the same thing as “Let’s shoehorn science into the Bible!” How many times does that have to be said?

Do people even read things before dismissing them? (I know. That’s a stupid question on my part.)

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As, indeed, I do. There are always issues with fit for any explanation of Biblical stories, and so one has always got to scrutinize and adjust and be sure one’s assumptions actually work. But this is very different from force-fitting things which cannot be made to fit properly at all. I suppose the PROPER use of a shoehorn is merely to make two things that SHOULD fit slide together comfortably, which is what @swamidass is trying to do; but by “shoehorning” in this passage I mean something more like trying to get the evil stepsisters’ feet into the glass slipper, by hook or by crook, which is certainly NOT what he is trying to do.

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What I think is going on is “projection,” as shoehorning is so common that even those that do it are certain that this charge must have legitimacy. But as you both say, not in this case.

Projection is hard for any of us to avoid completely. But I do think that people at places like Answers In Genesis probably have burned out a lot of projector bulbs.

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Incidentally, my GAE review has managed to draw the attention of one obnoxious creationist, who has decided to make it a place to argue with me about ID Creationism. That’s a bit odd, because, as I keep pointing out to him, ID Creationism is not the subject of the GAE at all.

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Wow. Send me a private link to where? Private!

Whatever you do, be careful never to attract him here.

To that end, I have deleted his name from the post above, in the hopes that he will not stumble into this space via Googling himself.

Actually he’s managed to already get himself banned from PS, along with his sock puppet Sharon Mahoney the female retired marine biologist. :slightly_smiling_face:

One reason those guys like Amazon so much is that it’s almost impossible to get banned there any longer. One creationist who spammed my threads some time ago posted over, and over, and over again, about how those who disagreed with him had never had the pleasure of various erotic delights, which he described himself as being masterful at – and it is fair to say that his statements were sufficiently graphic to get most people to want to make sure the kids aren’t reading over their shoulders! What the relevance of any of that was, I really don’t know – but there was a time when Amazon would ban a user like that.

Now, at Amazon, it’s really strange and arbitrary. They still ban people, but quite capriciously. One person will be posting highly offensive matter in a thread, another will say something mildly sarcastic, and the mildly-sarcastic poster will get an instant death sentence from Amazon: deletion of the trailing year’s posts. It hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve known three people it has happened to, and only one of those arguably might have deserved it.

It’s Joe Gallien. I have his name, address, contact information if he is harassing you or your family. I have already reported him to law enforcement in New Jersey and Ashburnham, MA and the Google Legal Department.