by DWise1
One day, Liber8r got me started analyzing my somewhat one-sided exchange with Bill Morgan, a creation science activist who has been active here in Orange County, California, for over a decade. As a result, I responded to Liber8r with the following email.
In the following text, I am "DWise1" and Bill Morgan is "BillyJack6." Liber8r was a third-party witness to our correspondence. The URL to one of my pages has been updated and turned into a link and references to other pages have also been turned into links.
######################################################### Subj: Bill's Game Date: 98-06-03 23:32:12 EDT From: DWise1 To: liber8r@mcs.com CC: DWise1, BillyJack6 >Your last letter was fascinating. As usual, you have responded eloquently to Billy's blurbs. I believe that it is obvious that Billy is less interested in discussion than he is in converting.< I think that's part of the breed. In the years that I was involved in creation/evolution on CompuServe, I very rarely encountered a creationist who was actually interested in discussing the claims or in backing up their claims. One in particular, Paul Ekdahl (he's the one who posted the "23 Points" that I responded to and posted on my web site [http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/points23.html]), used to post monstrous messages which were taken verbatim from creationist books. He was so slavish in copying his sources that he would even include footnote numbers! He would refuse to discuss any of it and would "answer" questions with yet another verbatim copying. Every single time that I would finally get him to respond in his own words, he would immediately try to convert me. He was a Seventh-Day Adventist. I think that the final straw for him was when he described how his church's founder, Ellen G. White, would go into a trance and perform some amazing physical feats, whereupon I replied that when I was practiced in Aikido, I could do the exact same things and more, all without having to go into any kind of trance. >Billy should realize that his short one-liners are not going to 'cut the mustard.'< I don't think that matters to him. As far as he is concerned, nobody else would ever know about his intransigence. Well, that is not going to happen. I do plan on devoting a page to him, on which I plan to describe our dealings with him. I will not use any of Bill's actual email messages to me/us, since that would be a betrayal of trust, but everything else is fair game. I'll even try to solicit material from him. In the meantime, if he could become more forthright in his responses, he might get portrayed differently on my "Bill Morgan Page". >Also, you shouldn't be debating with someone who isn't truly interested in what you have to write. As proof of my assertion, Billy will once again provide short blurbs to your accurate and detailed messages. [Here's a case where I would love to be wrong.]< They say that a pessimist should be the happiest person around. 99% of the time he has the self-satisfaction of being right and 1% of the time he is pleasantly surprised. Like you, I am also waiting to be pleasantly surprised by Bill. Also, you know that Bill does not usually "provide short blurbs." He usually refuses to respond. It's just in the rare occasions that he does respond that he only "provide[s] short blurbs." This hasn't been a debate; you need to have two sides present for there to be a debate. Basically, Bill's not really here, of his own volition and despite our repeated efforts to get him involved. Instead, I am trying to make him aware of the serious problems with and dangers of his crusade to convert the rest of us with contrary-to-fact claims. In the course of my efforts, I have had to think through the issues and describe the problems and their consequences. My creation/evolution page will change considerably, and for the better, as a result of my efforts here, so the time has not been wasted. At the same time, we have been learning more about Bill's activities and I have come to suspect his integrity. Consider: 1. Some years ago, when he corresponded with an acquaintence of mine who knew virtually nothing about creation/evolution, Bill was not in the least bit shy about writing page after page of bluster, taunts, and bogus creationist claims. When I started our email exchange, Bill came on strong and blustery, but when he realized that I knew something about the subject, he almost immediately backed and refused to deal in writing, claiming to have a personal preference for the telephone. This is despite his earlier zeal for writing and his own admission that he handles a lot of email traffic. This indicates that Bill is NOT shy about writing, but only when the other person doesn't understand what is going on; otherwise, he tries to disengage immediately. 2. From newsgroups we find reported that Bill has spammed his AOLCREAT.DOC in several newsgroups (spammed even further afield by others). Furthermore, it has been reported that he has done this on serveral occasions. In particular, the poster said that Bill had posted AOLCREAT.DOC in talk.origins and alt.atheism repeatedly, even though the whole thing was refuted each time. All he did was ignore the responses and then post it again, hoping that everybody had forgotten it from the last time. This indicates that Bill has received lots of feedback on AOLCREAT.DOC and has been informed, many times over, of the errors contained in that file. 5. I informed Bill of a few of the gross errors I found in AOLCREAT.DOC, particularly his erroneous protein-formation argument. Again, he had not comment, except to denounce my MONKEY program, which he had never seen and had no idea what it did. 6. Now he has sent me yet another copy of AOLCREAT.DOC. Except for a few cosmetic changes, it is identical to what he had sent to me two years ago. It has not been corrected at all. He has ignored all the different critiques he has received on it over the years and continues to distribute the same error-filled tract as if it had never received any criticism at all. 7. From that first encounter (see #1), I received a copy of Bill's comic, "Weird Science", the critique of which I wrote and gave to Bill. Bill said absolutely nothing about the multitude of errors that I found in his work. In "Weird Science," Bill claimed blusterily that nobody had ever been able to find a single error in it; I wonder if his current version continues to make the same claim. 8. Despite having been made aware of the grave dangers creation science poses for Christians' faith, he continues in his newsletter to taut young-earth creationism as the only position that a "true Christian" could hold. This is despite his knowledge that geological evidence directly refutes a young-earth position and that several creationists working as geologists have gone through severe crises of faith, some reportedly even to the brink of atheism, because the young-earth position is contrary to fact. From these observations, we could conclude: 1. Bill is incredibly stupid, 2. Bill is so fanatical that he is blind to the truth, or 3. Bill knows full well that his position is based on lies, yet he believes that the ends (ensnaring ever more souls for his god) justify the means (using lies and deception). We can immediately cross of the first one; Bill is no dummy. The second one probably has a lot of merit, but I see too much evidence of deliberate action on Bill's part; he has to be aware of what he is doing. I keep coming back to the third choice, that Bill knows full well what he is doing. I know that it is very difficult to tell whether a creationist is deliberately lying or has merely succeeded in deceiving himself as well, but there are some cases where it can be nothing else. Like Walter Brown's deceptive rattlesnake-protein claim, which has to be worded so precisely that he could not help but be aware of what he is doing. Similarly, Bill has been acting too smart in our dealings, way too cagey. When he thinks that the other person doesn't know what is going on, then he doesn't hold back. But as soon as he determines that the other person is knowledgable, he backs off and insists against all reason on a purely verbal format, if even that (I assume that he is either really glib or has the patter down pat so that he could maintain a moving target). From what I have been seeing, he seems to know that he has no evidence to support his claims. If it were a case of self-deception, in which he actually believed in the claims and their purported evidence, then he should not exhibit any reservations about presenting his claims nor about presenting his "evidence" for those claims. That he does not do so indicates against self-deception and for his knowledge of the falsehood of his claims and their "evidence." It does not completely rule out some degree of self-deception, but it does indicate awareness of his own actions. Because of that, we need to continue trying to discuss the issues with him. Since his theology removes him from responsibility for the consequences of his actions, so long as he believes that he is acting for the furtherance of his religion, somebody has to trigger his conscience -- or be his conscience, since he seems to lack one. Of course, we wouldn't be so concerned with his driving more people to atheism, if only he and his church didn't have such a distorted view of atheism. ----------------------- From "The Man with Two Brains": German policeman: You're playing God! Steve Martin: Well, somebody has to! ######################################################## Subj: Re: Bill's Game Date: 98-06-04 01:45:20 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 Hey, This is great material. Would it be ok if i were to add it to my web page? I am trying to put together a comprehensive web site (on aol for now) that covers all aspects of Christian life as well as witnessing material or evidence for them to use. ######################################################## Subj: Your Web Page Date: 98-06-14 23:19:32 EDT From: DWise1 To: BillyJack6 CC: DWise1, liber8r@mcs.com Bill, keep Liber8r in the loop, please. ### BEGIN ### Subj: Re: Bill's Game Date: 98-06-04 01:45:20 EDT From: BillyJack6 To: DWise1 Hey, This is great material. Would it be ok if i were to add it to my web page? I am trying to put together a comprehensive web site (on aol for now) that covers all aspects of Christian life as well as witnessing material or evidence for them to use. ### END ### >Hey, This is great material. Would it be ok if i were to add it to my web page?< For me to give you permission, I must request two things: 1. You show me what part you intend to post as you intend to post it, so that I can check it for accurate quoting and retention of context. 2. You provide a link to my creation/evolution web page. >I am trying to put together a comprehensive web site (on aol for now) that covers all aspects of Christian life as well as witnessing material or evidence for them to use.< You mean I'm finally going to see you post some of that evidence you keep claiming to have but have refused to present for over a year? Wow! So since you are going to have to type it in anyway, why don't you just go ahead and answer my questions? If you keep a copy, then you will have material for your web page. OK, let's talk shop. Are you using straight HTML or a developer's kit? I would assume the latter, since the impression I get is that you are a relative new-comer to the PC. Are there parts of the process or about HTML that I might be able to help you with? For example, AOL is case-sensitive, so you do need to be very careful about naming the files EXACTLY as you reference them in the HTML <A> and <IMG> tags. Also, if it helps you organize your pages, you can use subdirectories; see my site for examples -- select "View Source". When do you plan to upload your pages? I assume that it is under your BillyJack6 screen name. I will offer links to your pages if you offer links to mine. You could even offer a link to Liber8r's comments on your AOLCREAT.DOC; I can give you the URL. Do you know what a URL is? (sorry, but I cannot tell what I can assume with you and what I cannot) What are you going to offer on your creationism page? Just give them your phone number and say "Call me"? No, I doubt that very much, since visitors to your page will not want to call some stranger -- parents will doubtless report you to the authorities as a probable child molester. You are going to have to write something. A lot. You are going to have to present your case and your arguments and (hopefully) your evidence. Which is what I've been trying to get you to do for over a year now. Just think, if you had engaged in discussion with me rather than dodge out all this time, you would have a lot of material already written up that could have fitted into your web page with only a little editting. As it is, now you have to do all that from scratch. I did try to help you, you know. Having both our pages up there makes it perfect for an on-line debate. What is your answer? #########################################################No answer from Bill, nor any announcement from him about any web page. Within a couple months, I found one, "Creation vs. Evolution", which I suspected might be Bill's, though the site itself would never state that it was -- it always refered to Bill in the third person. The guestbook entries indicated that the site had been up since July 1998. Then in his July 2000 newsletter, Bill finally announced his web site and claimed it as his, a full two years after its creation.
That website no longer exists and I think he's gone through another couple in the meantime. His website is now www.fishdontwalk.com, which is currently down for remodelling.
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First uploaded on 2000 July 02.
Updated on 2015 October 21.