Logodaedalies

On this site and elsewhere:
A: A-Deism . Age of Endarkenment . aptonym, aptronym .
B: Besottism .
C: cdesign proponentsists . commentariat .
D: Denialism . Dog's Ass Plots .
E: Endarkenment (Age) .
F: Fistian (fundamentalist Christian aka evangelical Christian) .
G: groupuscules, groupustules .
H: Homo religioso .
I : IDiocy, IDiots . Infectious Repetitis .
J: jumbo-mumbo .
L: LAME thinking . leap blogging . lie-orama . Little Johnnyism and Little Kirkism . Luce-ifer's Apprentices .
M: magisterium . Misinformation Explosion Age . Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies . Mysteria, mysterical .
N: Nac you seyee . New Atheism . New Credulity . NOMA .
P: pwn .
S: Sock Puppet .
W: Woo .

Bloopers .
Quotes .

Age of Endarkenment

David Colquhoun addresses the problem of intellectual dishonesty and fuzzy illogic in a Guardian Unlimited article entitled the age of endarkenment.

The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable.

Colquhoun is author of the Improbable Science blog in which he expands upon his exposition of the reasons that we should be concerned about the "New Credulity.":

This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minutes' notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction. . .
It matters when people are deluded into thinking that they will be rewarded in paradise for killing themselves and others. It matters when bishops attribute floods to a deity whose evident vengefulness and malevolence leave one reeling. And it matters when science teachers start to believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago.

In nations that value education and intellectuals, politicians who live down to the "average guy" image are not elected to the most powerful executive positions. As the world has recognized with disdain, Giorgio, purchased Ivy League degree or not, would not have appealed to voters in nations that respect merit. More particularly, Giorgio would not have appealed a second time to voters who were able to detect executive deceptions.

cdesign proponentsists

The peculiar term 'cdesign proponentsists' is found in creationist textbooks written after 1987.

In 1987, in Edwards v. Aguillard, the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana law that had stipulated a requirement that creationism be taught whenever evolution was taught in public schools.

Because this court decision rendered the teaching of creationism illegal, the overtly creationist textbook, Of Pandas and People was modified for its initial publication in 1989 (2nd edition 1993). Of Pandas and People became the first book to frequently employ the now-common buzzwords "intelligent design", "design proponents", and "design theory". However, because of the 1987 Supreme court ruling, the editors had attempted to extirpate revealing mention of creationism. In this misbegotten editorial process, they inaccurately replaced occurrences of the word "creationists" with "design proponents" and so created the nonsensical and revealing composite "cdesign proponentsists".

Creationists actively promoted this creationist text for public school use, starting in Alabama in 1989 and continuing throughout the 1990's. In 2004 a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, having voted to teach Darwinian evolution, received an 'anonymous' donation of 50 copies of the creationist text, Of Pandas and People.

Despite denial by ID proponents, Pandas represents the beginning of the modern "intelligent design" movement. The 1989 edition of contains the basic arguments of ID proponents in modern form and Behe's irreducibly complexity argument appears in the 1993 edition of Pandas. Thus, the textbook came first, and the "research" to support it came many years later.

Even before Judge Jones' decision in Kitzmiller v Dover had been released, the sensible folk in Dover, Pennsylvania voted to bounce creationists Buckingham and Bonsell from the school board. Those who did not vote for the removal of these manipulative perjurers are . . . well, creationists.

PBS provides the full video of Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial online as 12 chapters complete with program transcripts. The video is well worth watching if you wish to see lying cheats exposed. Read of the mysterical, creationist backlash against the program that revealed the nefarious antics of IDiots: PBS Ombudsman, The Ombudsman Column, 'Judgment Day' Intelligently Designed by Michael Getler

The Wedge Strategy
1981 McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education, 529 F. Supp. 1255, 1258-1264 (ED Ark. 1982), was a 1981 legal case in Arkansas that ruled that the Arkansas "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act" (Act 590) was unconstitutional because it violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution.
1987 Edwards v. Aguillard, U.S. Supreme Court Decision that ended any prospect of public schools in the United States being legally forced to teach explicate creationism. One consequence of this case was that some antievolutionists choose to use the term "intelligent design" instead of "creationism."
1989 Introduction: Of Pandas and People, the foundational work of the 'Intelligent Design' movement by Nick Matzke
2004 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, Dover, Pennsylvania Intelligent Design Case, Decision of the Court
Barbara Forrest Testimony at Dover

Fistians

I have decided to refer to rigid, right-wing, bigoted, Biblical literalist creationists as Fistians. These are the Christians who give Christianity a bad name because of their unJesusian lack of compassion and their obstinate ignorance in opposition to knowledge.

(I considered coining the term Fustians, but opted to rhyme with Christians. I reserve 'fundamentalists' for anti-modernist movements in various religions. Besottism refers to a subset of zealots.)

Fistians and pseudointellectual advocates of intelligent design creationism share the religiosity-motivated credulity that typifies LAME thinking in the Misinformation Explosion Age.

Source: Fistians and Fuzzy Illogic

Homo religioso

On Homo religioso: "Homo sapiens had emerged by about 250,000 years ago. Humans have a propensity, which is presumably absent in other animals, for inventing supernatural deities to "explain" that which humans could not yet understand. Some religious superstitions were written down by their inventors with the attached claim of having been dictated by the purported deity."

IDiocy IDiots

So-called 'intelligent design' is creationism in lucrative, fancy dress. ID is often referred to as IDiocy, while its devious, creationist proponents are often referred to as IDiots, among other less flattering descriptions.

"The case was Kitzmiller, et. al. v. Dover Area School District, et. al. But the case name hardly describes the issue, which grew out of an attempt by the local school board to order science teachers to read a statement to their high school biology students that said there is an alternative to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, and that alternative is called intelligent design. ID, as it is called, is based on the notion that certain life forms are too complex to be explained by Darwin's theory of natural evolution and therefore had to have been designed by an intelligent agent. That agent is not stated but is understood to be God, and that process is not stated but understood to be creationism." PBS Ombudsman, 'Judgment Day,' Intelligently Designed, re Judgment Day, Intelligent Design on Trial.

Intelligent design is based on Paley's Blind Watchmaker argument and is an illogical pastiche of pseudoscience, lies, straw man misrepresentaions of science, and numbers games designed to appeal to those deluded enough to believe in creationism.

Synonyms:
ID – IDiocy, intelligent design creationism, intelligent [sick] design, creationism, (analogy) argument from design
ID proponents – IDiots, cdesign proponentists, creationists, design proponents, DI Fellows or CSC Fellows : mathematician William Dembski (also mischievously called Dumbski or Dembski) who devised the infamous, discredited explanatory filter and the gang. IDiots also run their own promotional blogs: Uncommon Descent, Michael Behe's Amazon blog

'Junk tank' agencies – misnamed Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, Discovery Institute (Anti-Discovery Institute, Discoverup Institute, Dissembly Institute), International Center for Complexity Information and Design (located and operating only in America)

jumbo-mumbo

Christopher Hitchens used (coined?) this delightful variant of "mumbo-jumbo" to denigrate Fred Hoyle's ridiculous panspermia argument that abiogenesis by chemical evolution is "as likely as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and spontaneously assembling a Boeing 747 airplane".

Specifically, Hoyle asked:

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing 747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?*

Considering the clever twist for which his Jumbo-assembly, junky analogy set his argument up, Hoyle, who sarcastically coined the term "Big Bang", was doubly ridiculous in this irrelevant misrepresentation of the probabilistic realities of chemical evolution of life (biopoiesis).

Although Hoyle presented the jumbo-junk argument to promote the notion of panspermia, intelligent-design creationists have eagerly misapplied this jumbo-mumbo as an argument against biological evolution by natural selection. Hoyle's remarks are particularly popular to creationists because they also provide for a fallacious an appeal to false authority based on Hoyle's atheism. Hoyle (im) and Chandra Wickramasinghe (im) concocted the panspermia (exogenesis) theory to counter theories of chemical evolution of life (abiogenesis), and were responsible for another idiotic statement much loved by creationists:

"No matter how large an environment considers, life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the words of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole observable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly the waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong attempts. The same is true for living material."

Hitchen's response to the jumbo-junk argument:

"We know the answer in all cases: these were panistaking inventions (also by trial and error) of mankind, and were the the work of many hands, and are still "evolving." This is what makes piffle out of the ignorant creationist sneer, which compares evolution to a whirlwind blowing through a junkyard of parts and coming up with a mumbo jet. For a start, there are no "parts" lying around waiting to be assembled. For another thing, the process of acquisition and discarding of "parts" (most especially wings) is as far from a whirlwind as could conceivably be. The time involved is more like that of a glacier than a storm. For still another thing, jumbo jets are not riddled with nonworking or superfluous "parts" lamely inherited from less successful aircraft. Why have we agreed so easily to call this exploded old nontheory by its cunningly chosen new disguise of "intelligent design"? There is nothing at all "intelligent" about it. It is the same old mumbo-jumbo (or in this instance, jumbo-mumbo)." ¬ Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto (2007), pp 85-87.

* F. Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, New York (1983), p. 18.

More: Are IDiots Creationists?

atheism, biological evolution, creationism, fallacies of logic, intelligent design, natural selection, panspermia, Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe,

Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies

Pseudoscience masquerades as science, usually to promote some commercial scam or to promote religious beliefs for which there is not, nor ever will be, supportive evidence.

The subject matter of pseudoscientific claims ranges from astrology and the occult to anti-science, religiously motivated falsehoods.

Talking or writing about science is not science. Criticizing or critiquing science is not science. Elaborating mumbo-jumbo about supposed medical treatments without clinical testing is not science. Concocting falsehoods designed to protect unjustified belief in disproved Special Creation is definitely not science.

In order to ignorantly support illogical, indoctrinated religious mythology, creationists deny scientific knowledge, attack a straw man version of science, and falsify science as lie-oramas in the Fiction Lie-See-Um, or spout Misleading Pseudoscience for Dummies on junk tanks. " Creationism has been discredited, however, by indisputable physical evidence – carbon dating, for example."[SW]

External : Science Week editorials : Creationism vs. Sanity : SCIENCE POLICY: ON THE TEACHING OF PSEUDOSCIENCE :