Monday, June 25, 2007

Dembski Misrepresents Me - Again!

Although I wrote a long critique of William Dembski's work back in 2002, he has never really addressed those criticisms.

However, he's been happy to insult me -- at one point calling me a "maniac", misrepresenting a conversation I had with Ruse, and misrepresenting the reason why I didn't testify in the Kitzmiller case.

In a recent interview, William Dembski misrepresents me again. He says: "Jeff Shallit, for instance, when I informed him of some work of mine on the conservation of information told me that he refuse to address it because I had not adequately addressed his previous objections to my work, though the work on conservation of information about which I was informing him was precisely in response to his concerns."

That's not accurate. Here's what I actually said in my e-mail message of March 3 2005:

I already told you - since you have never publicly acknowledged even
one of the many errors I have pointed out in your work - I do not intend
to waste my time finding more errors in more work of yours.

I find your failure to acknowledge the errors I have pointed out
completely indefensible, both ethically and scientifically.


It's not a matter of "adequately address[ing]" something, it's a matter of publishing a retraction to claims that are demonstrably false. At that point in time, Dembski had not done so, although eventually he did get around to admitting that the centerpiece calculation in his book was off by 65 orders of magnitude.

If Dembski thinks I have some obligation to read everything he's written and give him extensive comments, he's wrong. And, of course, those who do make the effort to wade through his pseudomathematics get labeled as "obsessive" - that's what he called Richard Wein.

You just can't please a creationist.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From Dembski's statement we learn that he knows, as we know, that his followers don't actually read his stuff. Thus he has no qualms about telling outright lies about his work, such as the claim that his post-NFL papers are responsive to Shallit's criticisms.