The Deception of True.Origin

The following is an email correspondence between a fellow blog reader and the owner of the creationist site True Origin, Tim Wallace. If you are interested in verifying what Darwin originally said, it can be found here.

Hi,

Here is the email exchange I had with Timothy Wallace who runs the trueorigins website:

I can’t help but notice that on the home page of your true.origin website, you invoke the advice of, ironically enough, Charles Darwin of all people, to claim that evolutionists unfairly dismiss any creationist explanations of origins and that creationism supposedly has a lot of supporting evidence. Unfortunately, your quote of Charles Darwin is actually a misquote. Below is the quote in its entirety taken from Darwin ’s “On The Origin of Species” and the part you conveniently omitted is in bold.


"For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; and this cannot possibly be here done."



What Darwin was trying to say was that he was under time constraints to publish this book and that he didn’t have the time to include in it the evidence for his conclusions which would refute any attempts to challenge them. That he said would require an additional volume. I offer the following quote as evidence:

"My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this abstract."

Below is another quote from the same paragraph which you cited:

"I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived, with a few facts in illustration, but which, I hope, in most cases will suffice. No one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this."

Your selective quote makes it sound like Darwin believed that his theory of evolution is no better than any alternative explanation, such as creationism, but that is not at all what he was saying. You either did an innocently sloppy job of quoting him or were being deliberately deceptive. And if the former is true, then I would expect an immediate revision of this quote on your home page to more accurately reflect what he was trying to say. According to the very first sentence of your home page, “The TrueOrigin archive comprises an intellectually honest response to what in fairness can only be described as evolutionism…”. Intellectually honest??? Yeah right.

Not only you, but a number of contributors to your website’s creationist perspective also have the habit of misquoting or quoting out of context. I’ll provide a couple of examples.

John Woodmorappe has contributed a handful of articles in your Geology & Radiometric Dating category. Steven H. Schimmrich has published an online essay at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/woodmorappe-geochronology.html where he critiques a paper by Woodmorappe titled “Radiometric Dating Reappraised” submitted to Creation Research Society Quarterly (Vol. 16, Sept 1979). Among other things, Schimmrich points out that Woodmorappe misquoted an article by McKee & Noble in Geological Society of America Bulletin and another by Wasserburg & Lanphere in a different issue of the same journal. While attempting to break down Schimmrich’s paper point by point and responding to each sentence or few sentences individually, Woodmorappe wondered if he will “ever see the day that anti-Creationists stop repeating this mendacious crap” in response to being accused of quoting people out of context, but otherwise fails to address the out-of-context quotes.

Jonathan Sarfati, another frequent contributor to your creationist perspective website, is no better. In his article “Exploding Stars Point to a Young Universe: Where Are All The Supernova Remnants?” first published in Creation Ex Nihilo 19:46-48 and later online at http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v19/i3/stars.asp, Sarfati tries to claim that the absence of Type III supernovas suggests that the universe is young, perhaps a few thousand years old, not billions of years as evolutionary scientists claim. He offers the following quote from Clark and Caswell in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1976, 174:267:

"As the evolutionist astronomers Clark and Caswell say, ‘Why have the large number of expected remnants not been detected?’ and these authors refer to ‘The mystery of the missing remnants’."



Sarfati conveniently forgot to finish the last sentence, which actually appears on page 301. In its entirety, it reads

"…and the mystery of the missing remnants is also solved."

The above are just a few of many, many out-of-context or incomplete quotes found in creationist literature. Whole books have been written about them. To find more, visit http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/quotes/#s4. Quoting authorities in this manner to prove one’s point is dishonest and deceptive. Yet creationist websites are teeming with them. If this is what creationists have to resort to in order to validate their claims, it doesn’t bode well for creationism or for creationists. This is yet more evidence that creation science is bad science and a bad form of Christianity. If Christianity is true, then its followers should also use truth to proclaim their message, and since creationists generally do not, as evidenced by the many examples of quote mining found in their literature, then they are not good practicing Christians. They are frauds and hypocrites. I realize these are harsh accusations, but they are not baseless, as I have documented above. If you don’t believe me check out everything I have said for yourself.



Tim Wallace’s Response:



I suggest that if you would try taking things (including quotations) more at face value, you would waste far less time crafting stuff like what is found below. Darwin's statement, as quoted, doesn't mean (or NEED to mean) any less or more than what it plainly says, which is plainly what he meant by it, when taken at face value, and in context, notwithstanding your pedantic pedagoguery, which is conspicuously devoid of an unequivocally corroborated explanation as to why when he wrote:



"I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."



that he could not have meant:



"I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question."



Tim Wallace

The TrueOrigin Archive



My response:



Using your line of reasoning, I could do the same with you. I could selectively quote you as saying:



"The Neo-Darwinian macro-evolution belief system finds overwhelming support in the data of empirical science"



And…



"The alternative—biblical creation—fails to find any compelling, corroborative support in the same data."



Therefore, taking these quotes at face value, as you suggest, and notwithstanding your sarcasm, I could reasonably conclude that they don’t mean any more or less than what they plainly say. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind, after all that would be “pedantically pedagogic” of you if you did.



Incidentally, I don’t consider this wasting my time. Frankly, I am enjoying this exchange. I find your “intellectually honest response” quite fascinating.



Tim Wallace’s Response:



Please stop wasting my time with your infantile charade. My "line of reasoning" has never had anything to do with deliberately omitting significant portions of a quoted statement and calling it "face value." Kindly go embarrass yourself elsewhere.

Tim Wallace

Oh but I have incriminating evidence which suggests that it does. I won’t write you again, but I’ll pass our little exchange onto other anticreationists I know and who knows, they may have a few questions for you too. Have a good day.

Jere Yost


If any blog reader has uncovered deception such as this, please send it to me at this address:

Ryansarcade @ yahoo.com (remove spaces)

Thanks Jere!