Duane Gish, Debating King
Duane Gish, Vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research, is an experienced and eloquent debater in the creationist camp. He holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and is probably the most influential and visible creationist in North America. He has lectured and debated widely on creation versus evolution and is the author of several books and many articles espousing creationism. Gish's debate presentations are well-prepared, polished, and very persuasive to a layperson unfamiliar with science.
I examined many of Gish's published writings, as well as transcripts and tapes of his debates, and discovered countless examples of questionable tactics and misleading arguments. The majority of Gish's arguments I found to be a morass of errors, omissions, misquotes, old data, distortions, and non sequiturs. Even worse is my discovery that many scientists have publicly corrected Gish in his presence, but Gish has gone on to repeat the same errors in later debates and writings.
This troubling situation arises because Gish's debates are canned---he repeats more or less the same stories and arguments against evolution over and over, from place to place, from month to month, from year to year. The same arguments are even reproduced in his books and articles. Because of the nature of debates, it's inevitable that some of Gish's arguments get refuted by various scientists over time, often more than once. But Gish just goes to the next debate without ever changing any of his storyline. He succeeds at this, because in the next city, with a new audience and a new scientist to debate, who's to know that his argument got shot down, with evidence, by that other evolutionist last week?
In his debates, much of Gish's diatribe is directed towards the fossil record and the alleged lack of transitional forms between earlier and later forms of life. Gish has admitted that if transitional forms can be shown to exist, then creationism is dead (see Debates-Parrish 1991). Creationists, including Gish, are able to deny the existence of transitional forms because they use their own home-made definition of the term. For example, Gish claims that to be intermediate, fossils must be on a direct line of descent with each other and that transitional creatures would have to possess half-formed, and therefore useless, body parts (Gish 1985, 1995). But evolution does not happen that way and the well-known theory of punctuated equilibrium solves many supposed problems with the fossil record (Gould and Eldredge 1972).
Not surprisingly, the topic of transitional forms is where Gish experiences the most problems. The rest of this article documents instances where Gish, in his debates or writings, has either ignored public corrections or has appeared to knowingly promote false information. The first few examples relate directly to his statements on transitions, including the proposed ape-like ancestors of modern humans, and it is with these ancestors that we begin.
- by Joyce Arthur, 1996,"Creationism: Bad Science or Immoral Pseudoscience?", Published in The Skeptic, Magazine of the Skeptic Society, Vol. 4, No. 4, 1996, pp. 88-93
For more details see:
http://www.holysmoke.org/gish.htm
