"...I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me..." [Deuteronomy 5:8-10]

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Denyse 0, Intellect 1

I do feel sorry for Denyse O'Leary.

She writes over and over again about how scientism and "Darwinism" are about to fall apart around us, and gets little in return but mean people pointing out how silly she sounds.

Now she's moved on to that favourite fundamentalist canard, "If man arose by chance, life would have no purpose or meaning". (CA620 in the Index of Creationist Claims).

Over at Uncommonly Dense (where dissenting opinions are banninated), she writes:-

"The Darwinian view is, as I have noted before, that our minds are illusions created by our neurons - which are in turn under the control of our selfish genes. These systems did not originate in order to discover truth but to enable us to leave offspring...

But producing... infants... is not an intellectual enterprise. So whatever is going on with the intellect, and therefore about philosophy of science, is not Darwinian, apparently."
Denyse supposedly doesn't think that the use of "intellect" has benefited human genes in any way. It hasn't helped us live longer, or survive childbirth, or take over the planet. It hasn't let us visit the moon. It hasn't given us the capacity to to feed or destroy all of mankind. It hasn't given us the power to take responsibility for our own destinies. No siree.

What did "intellect" ever do for us? For Denyse, it seems, not so much.

PTET



Update: The Barefoot Bum has made the last line of this post his "Quotation Of the Day".
Check out the list. I am deeply honored.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I visited Denise's site in the past.
Her content was so overwhelmingly depressingly messed up it took at least two weeks to get the burning sensation from my eye balls.
I urge you to stop going there it can only hurt you

Nada Platonico said...

I haven't followed Denyse nearly as much as you have (I'm really sorry for you, btw) but two things: 1) intelligence in her case has been wasted for her to come up with really, really bad ideas (kind of like Butthead from Beavis and Butthead, except for real; that's really sad) and 2) you really underestimate Intellect's score(s) against Denyse. It's got to be at least 1000 to 0.

ptet said...

Thanks guys. I try so hard to avoid Denyse's stuff, and then to be nice when I do write about it... But jeez, she does stupid turned up to "11".