My essay on intellectual honesty generated over 200 comments on the reddit site. I’d like to pick out one exchange that is actually quite illuminating.

Someone with the handle “monesy” commented as follows:

What I find ironic, is that Mr Gene, a champion of the moronic religious pseudoscience of ID/Creationism, knows anything about intellectual honesty.

This clearly shows the power of stereotype.

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Over at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution, psychologist Marlowe C. Embree has been posting some insightful blog entries. Consider, for example, The Origins Debate through the Lens of Piagetian Theory.

Readers of The Design Matrix will recognize central themes in this posting.

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A recent editorial from NewScientist is entitled Intelligence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The author makes a couple of points that carry implications that he/she might be uncomfortable with.

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As readers know, The Design Matrix is neither anti-science nor anti-evolution. What is does represent is a challenge to the non-teleological perspective of biology and evolution. And it is not a challenge in the sense that I try to refute the non-teleological perspective, but that it lays out a positive, potentially fruitful teleological perspective of biology and evolution that embraces random variation and natural selection. What this portends is that a non-teleological perspective is not needed.

Chapter 6 (Ducks and Rabbits) plays a pivotal role in this story and recent research continues to emphasize that theme.

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Evidence, evidence, evidence. Lots of people like to use this ill-defined and subjective concept to score points, as it allows people to sit in judgment, pronouncing whether or not some data are “evidence” or whether the evidence is “sufficient.” It’s quite the power-trip to sit in judgment not only of other people, but of Reality. Despite these problems, we cannot ignore the importance of evidence. For example, if we are to convict Jones for the murder of Smith, there had better be evidence to support this contention if we are going to take away Jones’s freedom.

Yet this very example serves to make both points. Yes, evidence is important when making decisions about our natural and social world, but relying solely on the evidence may very well deliver only a superficial, or even false, understanding of the world. We know this simply from the fact that in court rooms around the world, judges and juries have followed the evidence before them to determine guilty people are innocent and innocent people are guilty. This holds true even if we rule out corruption and biases.

Consider some movie where you, the viewer, know that Jones killed Smith, because you watched it happen. Jones, of course, subjectively knows that he killed Smith. The police investigator doesn’t know this, he simply believes that Jones killed Smith because of some clues. The investigator then privately confronts Jones and accuses him of murder. Jones, privately knowing the investigator is correct, simply replies, “There is no evidence and you can’t prove it” and the investigator knows this is true.

Right there, in that scene, we see the difference between evidence and truth. Relying solely on the evidence may very well deliver only a superficial, or even false, understanding of the world.