Blue Collar Scientist

I was just looking around on Casey Luskin’s web site, and I noticed that on one of the pages he says:

“God isn’t merciful enough to forgive us when we screw up” which is why “good things always happen to good people and bad things only happen to the bad.”

Is this true? Did Casey Luskin actually say such a blasphemous thing?

No. He didn’t.

Both sentence fragments come from different parts of his web page on Judaism, but I’ve re-arranged them and put them together so that they make up a misleading statement. Nothing on his website suggests that he thinks anything like this at all, and he certainly never wrote such a thing on his website.

So what is the point of this exercise?

Well, it’s to show Christians like Luskin why it is wrong to do something like this. What I’ve stitched together is pretty innocuous, but I bet I can stitch together unrelated quotations of Luskin’s that would seem to promote genocide, or imprisoning Christians, if I wanted to. And the only thing stopping me from doing it, and passing it off as real, is that I have morals and principles about such things.

One would think that the ninth commandment¹ would be enough to provide devout Christians with a similar set of morals and principles. We all understand lying is wrong, but it appears they disagree. Luskin recently did this very thing when quoting the National Academy of Science book, Science, Evolution, and Creationism.

Luskin wrote:

In January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this debate, declaring that “[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution,” because neo-Darwinism is “so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter” it. As an undergraduate and graduate student taking multiple courses covering evolutionary biology at the University of California San Diego, that is what I was told as well. My science courses rarely, if ever, allowed students to seriously entertain the possibility that Darwin’s theory might be fundamentally flawed.

This quotation is crafted to suggest that even if new evidence were introduced that refuted neo-Darwinism, scientists would not accept it or change their opinions. This is of course false - over the century and a half that evolution has been scientifically tested, a number of evolutionary hypotheses have been discarded by scientists as incorrect (including, ironically, something called neo-Darwinism), and a number of at first seemingly implausible ideas have been shown to have merit and are now part of mainstream evolutionary theory. Scientists have changed their thinking in response to evidence, as part of the long and painstaking human process of learning more and more about how the world works.

So Luskin is lying, the same way I was lying when I said Luskin had written that God is not merciful and bad things only happen to bad people. The difference, of course, is that I openly crafted a lie for the sake of discussion and told you I was lying right up front - whereas Luskin secretly crafted a lie with deliberate intent to deceive, and as of this writing has still not confessed his sin².

Luskin got the first half of his quotation on page 52, close to the end of the book:

There is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution. In this sense the intelligent design movement’s call to “teach the controversy” is unwarranted. Of course, there remain many interesting questions about evolution, such as the evolutionary origin of sex or different mechanisms of speciation, and discussion of these questions is fully warranted in science classes.

Notice that he took an entire sentence from the source, but misrepresented it as only part of a sentence when he quoted it. And notice also that the sentence is in a paragraph that specifically advocates teaching about controversies associated with evolution - and that it has nothing to do with neo-Darwinism.

To get the second half of the quote, he had to go backward 36 pages to the beginning of the book. In his use of the material, he implies that he’s quoting related text - perhaps from the same sentence, or at least a nearby sentence - in order. But he’s not. He’s not even quoting text about remotely the same subject.

Many scientific theories are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them substantially. For example, no new evidence will demonstrate that the Earth does not orbit around the Sun (heliocentric theory), or that living things are not made of cells (cell theory), that matter is not composed of atoms, or that the surface of the Earth is not divided into solid plates that have moved over geological timescales (the theory of plate tectonics).

Here, Luskin has taken a sentence fragment about theories other than evolution, and grafted it in a Frankenstein-esque manner to an unrelated sentence so as to apply it to evolution. This is a great way to mislead people about the meaning of the author being quoted!

Now, Luskin has a page on his website about intelligent design creationism, where he says:

Many critics of intelligent design have promoted false, straw [man] versions of intelligent design.

He then goes on an eleven paragraph rant whining about how unfair it is that people misrepresent intelligent design creationism³. Meanwhile he stitches together quotations from science books so that they appear to mean whatever old thing he wants them to mean.

Hypocrite.

If intelligent design creationism had any legitimacy at all, they wouldn’t need to misquote science books to promote it.

1. Eighth commandment in Roman and Lutheran traditions. [↩]
2. I’d just say what he did was wrong, not that he had sinned. But I’m willing to adopt his religious standards out of respect for his beliefs. [↩]
3. Just for the record, I disagree that many of his examples of “misrepresentation” are in fact misrepresentative. [↩]