More High Comedy From Timothy Wallace of TRUE HOGWASH
F. C. Kuechmann

The most sublime humor comes clothed in serious-seeming garb. Jonathan Swift, with apparent seriousness, proposed using Irish babies as gourmet food for the English upper classes in order to ease the effects of potato crop failure. If prominent creationists had ever demonstrated either humor or critical intelligence, I might be inclined to suspect them and their followers of consciously creating a similar parody of Young Earth Creationism (YEC).

Just as soon as I conclude that Timothy Wallace, chief cook and botte washer at the True.Hogwash Archive, can't concoct anything dumber for his public display of ignorance, he proves me wrong. One of his personal contributions to the vast indiscriminate heap of nonsense at True.Hogwash is the over-long and intellectually astonishing essay titled A Theory of Creation - A Response to the Pretense that No Creation Theory Exists. 

Per his habit, we are treated to Tim's claim of intellectual property ownership - '© 2000 Timothy Wallace. All Rights Reserved.'

The most distinctive thing about A Theory of Creation is its ordinariness. Everything about it is straight from the creationist guidebook for writing pseudo-scholarly nonsense. In addition to the main text there are fourteen endnotes, two tables and a truly impressive bibliography of familiar creationist publications that Timothy 'All Rights Reserved' Wallace claims provide the missing theory. The language is pompous to the point of tedium, larded with phrases like 'creationary postulate', 'creation paradigm', ad nauseam.

Wallace begins his opus with the compulsive attack on 'proponents of evolutionism' at the Talk.Origins Archive, who 'evaluate the idea of creation... without objectivity!... Considering the volume of literature that has been published by the creation science community the only two means by which someone could claim to have never seen a theory of creation are wilful ignorance or dishonesty.'

I'll concede that Wallace possesses considerable expertise in the areas of 'ignorance' and 'dishonesty'.

Tim says that 'Talk.Origins regulars... are in fact wilfully ignorant' folks who attack 'simplistic caricatures' of creation science.

Switch a few words around and you've got a good description of a fundie South Baptist preacher describing evolution. Creationists habitually fabricate evolution caricatures which serve as easily demolished 'straw man' targets for their sophomoric derision. These same caricatures appear again and again, in spite of informative explanations and clarifications, patiently and repeatedly proffered by respected evolutionists such as the late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University and Richard Dawkins of Oxford, along with a variety of scientific organizations and museums, including The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Field Museum of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History, and others.

Most creationists have thus been exposed to accurate and empirically relevant descriptions of evolution and their persistence in mocking a caricature betrays an unambiguous lack of honesty on their part, for they merely pretend not to know anything better than the arsenal of 'straw men' they parade through a seemingly endless number of books, pamphlets and magazine articles, on radio talk shows and on countless web sites.

But I digress.

The heart of intellectually honest Timothy's claim that a scientific theory of creation has been offered consists of bogus definitions of the terms 'theory' and 'science'. He first informs us that -

'Evolutionists sometimes employ what turn out to be arbitrarily contrived definitions in order to pretend there is no scientific theory of creation. This tactic needs to be exposed for what it is, so that serious students of the evolution/creation debate can transcend the evolutionists' semantic smokescreen.'

He then lifts the skirt of this purported smokescreen and drags out these arbitrarily contrived definitions in order to pretend that there is a scientific theory of creation -

'..."theory" in most common English dictionaries is defined (for the present context) something like this:

'theo·ry n. a formulation of apparent relationships or underlying principles of certain observed phenomena which have been verified to some degree.'

followed by -

'..."science" in most common English dictionaries is defined (for the present context) something like this:

'sci·ence n. ¹ the state or fact of knowledge ² systematized knowledge derived from observation, study and experimentation carried on in order to determine the nature or principles of what is being studied.'

After birthing these patently bogus definitions, Timothy belabors the obvious fact that the supernatural isn't excluded by either of them -

'It should be noted up front that neither of these definitions typically requires or excludes any particular frame of reference to which either "science" or a "theory" must (or must not) be attached. This is important, because evolutionists usually redefine both of these terms to suit their purposes by insisting that a "scientific theory" must conform to their particular religious/philosophical frame of reference (philosophical naturalism) in order to be valid... '

This twaddle is succeeded by a comically verbose discussion of naturalism that is about what you'd expect from someone who, like Tim, thinks geocentrism is an empirically valid model of the solar system.

So there we have it - Tim has discovered that the Talk.Origin evolutionists are a bunch of stinkin' naturalists! Bad doggy!

Unfortunately for Tim, he has merely constructed a transparently ridiculous straw man argument with his bogus definitions, together with demonstrating wilful ignorance or dishonesty and inability to consult a real dictionary.

Genuinely useful definitions of the terms can be obtained from a dictionary such as Webster's New Collegiate -

'theory - a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena, e.g. wave theory of light'

'science - a : knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b : such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena

Note particularly scientific method and the physical world and its phenomena in the definition of science, both of which preclude supernatural 'gawd done it' evasions.

These are the kinds of definitions of theory and science used by the Talk.Origins regulars Tim Wallace calls ignorant or dishonest. They are anything but 'arbitrarily contrived' definitions.

Vocal proponents of creationism such as Timothy Wallace have employed wilful ignorance and arbitrary definitions to assert the supposed scientific legitimacy of the laughable creation science model. They then go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for using such unscientific and often outright deceptive tactics and hide from the truth.

Timothy Wallace's supposed scientific Theory of Creation is yet another amateurish pseudo-scientific piece of cretinist trash.