Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Padian A Racist? I Wonder...

I see that Dembski is ranting about Kevin Padian's recent defense of science talks given at Berkeley and Kansas City. He suggests that Padian's speech was highly offensive:

In two recent “defend science” talks, one at Cal Berkeley and the other at Kansas University, Padian singled out an Asian-American church that supports ID. In March, Berkeley’s IDEA Club sponsored two talks that I gave to packed houses on the Berkeley campus (go here). Some of the key members in that IDEA Club are also members of this church. Padian now explicitly names this church (Berkland Baptist Church) in his public talks and describes the members of the church that attended my lectures as “young,” “Asian,” and “fundamentalist,” and that this is “what we are up against today.”

Now I wasn't there, but I find it interesting that Dembski provides no link for a transcript, audio or anything else verifying exactly what Padian said or providing the context in which he said it (I also can't seem to find anything concrete on the internet). Given typical ID slight-of-hand with mined quotes, forgive me if I remain skeptical until I see some actual data on this. Or should I just be trusting Dembski's account?

(By the way, Samuel Chen has almost the same post up on his blog, almost word-for-word mirror image of Dembski's...apparently originality is not high on the list of ID character traits.)

Note Added Later: Well, I should have looked at Panda's Thumb first, since Nick Matzke has a great post about this - and you guessed it, it's looking like Dembski's playing fast and loose with the facts again...several commenters on Chen's blog also questioned the source...glad to know most of us have developed a nose for rat!

2 comments:

patch615 said...

"apparently originality is not high on the list of ID character traits."
of course originality isn't a big ID character trait, their view of thought is the same as their view of how we came to be "god intervened and made us as we are, we'll stay as we are"
why make a new thought when you can steal someone elses?

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