Karl Giberson, Ph.D: Is Accepting Evolution 'Optional' For Christians?

[polaris93]

Many people are frightened of anything they don't understand, and, rather than trying to find out more about it and gain understanding of it, which would mitigate the fear, they attack it. If what they don't understand is scientific in nature, they attack it and also whoever has any expertise in it, labeling the first as "deception" or "heresy" or

Comments

[mauser]

I don't know if it's so much anti-intellectualism as it is anti-elitism. The American people are sick of being dismissed with the "I'm smart, you're stupid, so shut up and do as I say" attitude we get from folks like the author, who reveals her liberal biases with her examples of what constitutes stupid and fringe ideas (Supply side economics? Really?)

This essay is really just a desperate plea to help preserve her status as some kind of elitist. I dare say, An Expert.

[cutelildrow]

I agree with this statement.

[polaris93]

See my response to Mauser's comment. As I said in a comment to another comment by you, I've had plenty of fraudulent "experts" who were expert in nothing but lying their damned heads off and playing God absolutely ruin my life, something you can tell from a great many of the posts on my own blog over the years. So they were lying frauds rather than people who had real expertise in a legitimate field of some kind -- that doesn't mean that anyone who says he or she is an expert in X is in fact an expert in X. If they claim it, they have to prove it. If, say, a doctor -- not one in a state institution; those are generally the least competent of all, and they are totally protected by the state from lawsuits -- claims to be an expert surgeon, and then absolutely butchers somebody in a way that clearly shows he doesn't know what the hell he's doing, medically speaking, he can have his license to practice yanked, be sued for everything he has, and even go to prison for malicious malpractice. But would you go to someone who is licensed

[polaris93]

Since when is "Karl Giberson, Ph.D" the name of a woman? That's the name of the author, after all.

All right, if this is a rejection of evolutionary theory, cool, but I'm going to go right on believing that it is an accurate description of the history of life on Earth (the origin of that life is a different question entirely, but that's another matter, for another day). I've seen more than enough evidence that, together with the logic of it all, to convince me that it a) makes sense and b) fits all the data. If you disagree, cool, but that won't change my opinion. The problem isn't from you. It's from assholes who shove Bibles under my nose and yell that "It shows on page such-and-such that so-and-so, which proves that evolution is a lie, a fraud, and a demonic deception." They also frequently state that "we know that scientists are all frauds, so evolution is a fraud." How do they know that scientists are all frauds? Because televangelist So-and-so said so. Which is their expertise

[cutelildrow]

Speaking about how so-called experts can destroy lives...

[polaris93]

Yes, I know. In my own case, after my adoptive father died, my adoptive mother, who had hated me from the moment they first brought me into the house (I was 9 days old then), and I fought like tigers. In that upper-middle class subculture, everyone believed that if there was trouble between parents and children, it was always the child's fault, no matter how young the child, and that extenuating circumstances had nothing to do with it. So I got thrown into an institution. The diagnosis? "Her IQ (as a matter of fact, 160) is too high. It's making her sick. So we'll give her shock treatments to lower her IQ." Which they did. Then I was put into a foster home in which the foster parents were quite frankly insane. That first year, I got engaged to a wonderful man who got killed in a car accident three weeks before we were to have been married, and from then on until I left, four years later, they carried on a relentless campaign of persecution against me for reasons that were never made clear, a campaign that also got mixed up