If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. – Abraham Maslow
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And so he departs as he arrived, having learned nothing, taught nothing, communicated with nobody. He will not be missed.
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Coincidentally this just appeared:
I love it when Bechly asserts there is no phylogenetic connection between Ediacaran animals and cambrian animals, but admits there are Ediacaran animals. If he admits they’re animals, they’re by definition phylogenetically connected.
Idiot. IDiot.
I feel like I’ve finally come to the end of a very sad ordeal. The ignorance of the evidence and the confusion of apologetics and science was quite depressing.
And the carnage of the anti-evolution industrial complex continues.
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At least he showed the perceptiveness to recognize his lies wouldn’t fly here. Unlike other posters…
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I’m not sure they perceived it that way at all. I’m left wondering whether he’s very young or very old… Either very naive with a sheltered upbringing (like the yearly gaggle of freshmen from Cedarville College that would appear in the talk-origins newsgroup) or very old and not familiar with all this Internet stuff.
But it’s not that one would even be exposed to outside thought or mainstream evolutionary biology at an Adventist school. Deviation from YEC position is strictly verboten in those institutions.
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He’s old. Late sixties at least. But very gullible and too lazy to look beyond creationist sources.
I don’t think he had any idea that everyone here would already be familiar with his quotes, or that there was anything dubious about them or the other claims he was parrotting.
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I really do wonder what he expected to accomplish. Was he going to confound the heathens? Convert them all to the true way?
8 posts were split to a new topic: Deconstructing rtmcdge
My only previous contact with SDA was with an SDA Wikipedia editor who was attempting to establish the notability of an obscure SDA scientist. The impression I was left with was that of a community that was somewhat insular and very self-referential.
I suspect that “Our SDA Friend” is indeed older, and has spent his entire life within the box created by his church. It is not ‘laziness’ I suspect that prevents him looking outside that box, but life-long habit, and at a deeper level, a fear of what deviltry he might find.
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I’ll say it again: I was really surprised he had so little grasp of scripture. Most of the Young Earth Creationists I used to work with in the Christian academic community were not so clueless on Hebrew idioms, anthropomorphisms, etc. And they certainly would have been shocked at his insistence on God having a literal rather than figurative finger for etching the stone tablets at Sinai. His view is closer to that of Israel’s ancient neighbors.
I would wager that he is an old-school Prophetess Ellen White type of Seventh Day Adventist. Today’s “new” type SDAs are more and more similar to plain old Christian IFCA brand fundamentalists. (And, as a result, they rarely get labelled as “cult members” nowadays like SDAs were derided in the 1960’s.)
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Older, well versed in the Creationist literature, and probably practices his trade around the Internet. I’d be surprised if some of us haven’t encountered him before.
If he does, it’s under a different name/nickname, which is unlikely since it’s his e-mail address too.[1] I suspect this was his first foray, partly because he doesn’t show up in volume elsewhere, and partly because he didn’t anticipate any of the objections he received, some of which are inarguable. [2]
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It may be useful to have a flag selection for repetitive - nothing new.
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I would be curious to hear what @colewd or any fellow creationists think of @rtmcdge’s performance here. Do they think he acquitted himself well? Did he make a good case for their viewpoint?
Hi Faizal
I think he did ok with some errors and some strong citations which he could only partially support with argument. For the first time here he generated 300+ comments and was arguing against 17 people by himself. While attracting a large level of interest for his first rodeo, which is somewhat remarkable, this eventually wore him down.
Unless peaceful science can get some level of balance on each side of an argument it will eventually lose interest to people.
Thanks for replying. And happy Cake Day!
Which specific citations were strong IYO?
Hi John
The Fossil Record, Evolution, and Intelligent Design | Erika & Günter Bechly - YouTube. Here is a reasonable debate he posted.
He also posted arguments debating the credibility of whale evolution which is a serious challenge to UCD. One of those arguments went through both the morphological as well as the genetic challenges to this transition.
What argument? What were the genetic challenges mentioned?
I would also like to point out that he was unaware of Bechly’s position on common descent, and in fact refused to believe what it was.
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