Re: Creationism, Intelligent Design and Vendanta

On 8/7/2024 10:04 AM, Kestrel Clayton wrote:

On 06-Aug-24 17:04, RonO wrote:

On 8/6/2024 11:24 AM, Kestrel Clayton wrote:

On 06-Aug-24 09:46, RonO wrote:

I found an article on creationism, intelligent design and Vendanta. Even though Kalkidas came out as a normal Biblical creationists there have been Hindu sympathetic to Scientific Creationism and the ID creationist scam on TO.
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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4802803/
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The author thinks that science is a search for truth.  I have never considered science to be a search for truth.  It is just the best means we have of developing a working understanding of nature.  This understanding may not be the "truth" but it could be close, and allows us to improve our understanding of nature and expand a functional understanding of the reality that we exist in.
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I do not recall Kalk ever stating how intelligent design supported his hindu beliefs, and vice versa, but he did quote the Vedas from time to time.
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A section of the paper compares Vendata to the ID creationist scam.

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Huh. I missed Kalkidas coming out as a fundamentalist Christian creationist. Did he have a conversion experience, or was he a Christian all along and lying about it?

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Kalk probably isn't a fundy.  Unless he was just pretending, he seems to be an old earth anti-evolution creationist.

 Ah, thank you. I'd assumed he was more of a Kent Hovind than a Hugh Ross, because as I recall he hates women, queer people, and non-reproductive sex. Or maybe that was just part of his pose as a member of ISKCON.
 

Either way, I'm not all that surprised. For a lot of folks, denialism isn't about what is, but rather what ISN'T: Moon landing denialists will gladly accommodate flat-Earthers, orbit-onlyists, fake-landings- real-pictures, fake-pictures-real-landings, and even "secret nazi base on the far side of the Moon" crackpots, as long as they all agree that the official account is somehow bogus.
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My guess is that Kalk pretended to be a Hindu in order to provide more credence to his support for the intelligent design creationist scam. Since most of the IDiotic creationist supporters were and still are YEC, he could have just been old earth like Pagano without the literalistic geocentric beliefs.  All the ID perps are Christian with a couple Jewish fellows (Berlinski claims to be an agnostic).  There was a muslim that was allowed to sign the descent from Darwanism denial statement, but he was never given a fellowship.

 Yah. Another way the internet creationism of the 90s and 00s foreshadowed the modern alt-right was the cultivation of bad faith and sock puppetry as a standard tactic. Liars-4-Jesus was a prototype of Liars-4-Fascism.
 

Berlinski and Denton claimed to be agnostic, but both of them signed up for the Discovery Institute's original mission statement that wanted to restore a theocracy that likely never existed in this country.  Denton turned out to be a diest, and was just agnostic about other peoples religious beliefs, and Berlinski writes as if there is no doubt that the biblical god exists in his articles in religious journals.  They do not seem to be written by an agnostic, but he could just be pandering to his audience.  The ID perps even had an article outing Denton, claiming that he had a "sly twinkle" in his eye with respect to his agnostic claims, and in the article Denton admitted that he "may be a back sliding Christian".
The original fellows signed up for this mission:
http://web.archive.org/web/19980114111554/http://discovery.org/crsc/aboutcrsc.html
They started out more honest about their intentions, and you can see the picture of God and Adam in their original logo for the ID scam unit. The original name of the ID scam outfit was Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, and they really did want to restore the biblical theocracy that they believed that the US was founded under.  It is the same mission that they put up in the Wedge Document.
http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
Ron Okimoto