Hi all
I started this discussion on acg-1 which I run from my work computer but
as it is the weekend and I won't be at it until Monday I will continue
it here.
I asked for some information about an attack (and a nasty one at that)
by Russell Humphreys on Tim Thompson, Steve Schimmrich and Glenn Morton
that is on the True.Origin Archive. In particular i was after the
background information especially the criticism of Steve (who may still
lurk here) of Humphreys and any response by Steve. The material I got
was to another unpleasant discussion with John Woodmorappe, which was
not it.
Sorry to have to drag this unplesantness up, but i need it for a
discussion with someone at church, who has given me RH's attack.
Part of it says:
"An anticreationist named Tim Thompson read one of my ICR Impact papers
on the earth’s magnetic field and looked up one of my references, a
six-page section in a well-known magnetism textbook. Thompson saw a
figure near the beginning of that section which roughly resembled a
mirror image of my Impact article figures.
Thompson immediately jumped to a wrong conclusion; he thought I had
either stupidly or dishonestly reversed the time axis of the text’s
figure to get my figure, and he hastily rushed to judgement upon me in
his website. If he had bothered to look up some of my other, more
technical references, he would have seen that I used data from a
different part of the section in the textbook. The technical references
are harder to get, but they spell out exactly how I made my figure. A
critic is morally obligated to look up all references before rushing to
accuse. At the very least, Thompson might have asked me about it first.
He did not follow any of those normal procedures of good scholarship. As
far as I know, he still hasn’t, despite my informing him of the above.
He justly deserves any embarrassment he may get from this incident.
The response of other anticreationists to Thompson’s piece of poor
scholarship is instructive. Glen
Morton, a former young-earth creationist, immediately believed Thompson.
Without checking with
me --- or the copies of my technical papers he has in his possession ---
he immediately began
spreading his “good news” around the darker corners of the Internet. I
corresponded privately
with him after my response to Thompson was posted. Although Morton says
he is still a Christian,
he apparently feels no obligation to retract his inaccurate information.
Then an assistant professor of geology named Steve Schimmrich at Calvin
College grabbed the
ball and began to run with it. He posted a caustic note in various
places, including the Calvin
college net, accusing me and creationists in general of being dishonest.
Calvin college (in Grand
Rapids, Michigan) has been a center of anticreationism for several
decades, being the home
territory of such worthies as Howard Van Til, Davis A. Young, and
Clarence Menninga. Though
still nominally a Christian college, many of its faculty seem to have
slid very far down and away
from its original principles. However, I decided to give Dr. Schimmrich
the benefit of the doubt. I
sent him the following e-mail privately, asking him to retract his piece
of misinformation. As an
experiment, I appealed to Christian ethics.
His response? He ignored my request and challenged me to debate him on
other technical issues.
He showed not a shred of shame about relaying bad scholarship and
wrongly accusing creationists
of dishonesty. I wrote back that I was not at all interested in debating
him, because I was so
disgusted with his hypocrisy that I didn’t want anything more to do with
him."
Any light anyone on the squalid piece of near vilification and slander?
Feel free to respond privately.
Jon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 22 2002 - 01:45:23 EST