by DWise1
Matthew 7:15-20, KJV:7:15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
7:16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
7:17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.
7:18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither [can] a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.
7:19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.
7:20 Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
Links Section
Bill Morgan is a "creation science" activist who has operated in Orange County, California, since around 1990. He is a young-earth creationist, but his public presentations concentrate on creationism's current deceptive use of "intelligent design" and claiming that the great complexity we see is evidence of design (whereas experiments using evolutionary processes demonstrate that great complexity is the hallmark of evolution). He primarily uses presentations, debates, and a number of "booklets" he has written -- some of his presentations and debates are on YouTube and some of his "booklets" can be found on the Web, including two at his website, www.fishdontwalk.com, which has been largely down for several months for remodelling.He also has done a lot of street-proselytizing and has often practiced his methods on anyone and everyone he encounters, such as some poor person who had the misfortune of sitting next to him on a plane (eg, Brian Dunning, A NON-DEBATE WITH A YOUNG EARTH CREATIONIST, 30 May 2008, in which Dunning tried to avoid it but Morgan pressed on undeterred, forcing the discussion on an unwilling victim). When Bill Morgan was Vice President of the Creation Science Association of Orange County (CSAOC -- now defunct), he wrote their monthly newsletter. In it he would write about his proselytizing experiences in which he would always accost someone he had encountered and would always get the best of them with his "unanswerable questions" regardless of how highly educated and experienced they were. He would also often target "experts" in order to belittle them and hence science in the eyes of on-lookers; eg, he reported having grilled a tour guide in Hawaii on radiodating techniques for determining the age of the islands, he pestered air conditioning salesmen at a trade show on how chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), being so heavy, could have gotten into the stratosphere in order to destroy the ozone layer Of course, he was free to omit the many times those encounters had not gone his way, as well as having the luxury of rewriting those encounters to please himself. It turns out that Bill Morgan is a stranger to honesty, integrity, and truthfulness. And he is a bully.
For more third-party information about him, read the 2012 OC Weekly article, Bill Morgan Is Captain Creationist: The activist is waging a war against evolution, one lecture at a time by Adam O'Neal (OC Weekly, 30 August 2012). That article reports Dr. Francisco Ayala's assessment that Bill Morgan is a liar, which is what I also learned in my email correspondence with Morgan. That article also proves that Dr. Ayala's assessment of Bill Morgan is correct -- see below for that story.
My own experience with Bill Morgan has spanned 17 years from 1996 to the present (2015), though not a continuous history since Bill keeps running away from all my attempts at any kind of honest discussion. It started with a two-year correspondence from May 1996 to July 1998, which ended with Bill Morgan fleeing the correspondence by abruptly cancelling his AOL account and not publishing in public (at least not in the CSAOC newsletter) his new email address for another year or two.
About two years after he had taken flight, we resumed our correspondence for one more year (June 2000 to May 2001). It would have started up again earlier, but he recognized my email address and ignored my emails until I used his old AOL address which I had acquired after he had abandoned it. Part of my efforts to contact him earlier included signing the guest book on his web site and leaving him a message, but he quickly deleted that. At the end of that very eventful year, he refused to respond to any further emails. In that one-year exchange, he committed some very foul personal transgressions against me which still have not been resolved. Fine Christian witness, Bill!
After that, there would a few short sporadic exchanges, until in 2011 (October to December) when I was able to get him to stop one of many deliberate lies he had posted on his web site (his article about the ozone layer). But then again he refused to respond to any further emails.
And we just had another exchange again in 2015 (March to October, though he bugged out again in September) in which he was not only unrepentant, but was even worse than before. It was then that I realized that I needed to post my pages on him again. I had originally written them in 2000 and put them up on my AOL web site, but then AOL left the hosting business and I had more pressing web-site restoration to do, until now. Because the world needs to be warned about Bill Morgan who is as Jesus described: "false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves."
In our first correspondence (1996 to 1998), I found Bill Morgan to be a pathological liar and the most dishonest person I have ever had the misfortune to have encountered, but his bad traits seemed little different from those of most creationists so I pressed on trying to get him to engage in an honest discussion, whereas he was so terrified of discussion that he would do everything he could to prevent it. And in each subsequent email exchange with him, he has become increasingly worse. He is a flagrant and unrepentant hypocrite on several matters as clearly demonstrated by the facts, which I will list and discuss below.
It was in 2000 that he went too far. First he insulted my wife and then he falsely accused me of having insulted his wife, even though I had never said anything about his wife to the best of my knowledge. This was a very common form of lying for him: he would do or say something wrong and then he would try to turn everything around and claim that I had done or said that. From the economics of being on CompuServe, which charged for each minute of connect time, I had learned the practice of capturing all my on-line traffic to a text file. So I would respond to Bill's constant lying by reposting what had actually been said.
Now, if I had somehow said something wrong, I would naturally apologize for it, but first I had to know what it was that I had said. Bill refused to tell me, claiming that he never saves any correspondence (a lie that he also used to slander Dr. Francisco Ayala (see below) and which was this year revealed to be a lie when Bill emailed me by replying to an email from four years ago), and he also refused to give me any clues of what I was supposed to have said (obviously because he was lying and I had never said any such thing). I even posted all our correspondence on-line just so Bill could read it and find where I had written what he claimed I had, but he refused to even acknowledge its existence despite my having given him the URL at least a dozen times; it's still on-line at http://chiefwise.tripod.com/morgan/transcript/transcript.html. Despite my repeated good-faith efforts to resolve the matter, Bill Morgan continue to block my efforts and to mock me with increasing sadism. Again, fine Christian witness, Bill!
I have posted all the information concerning this matter on this web site. In my "BILL MORGAN'S ACCUSATIONS AGAINST ME" page, I am posting the accusations themselves, along with my commentary on and analysis of the accusations, what needs to be done to resolve the matter, Bill Morgan's conduct, and some of Bill Morgan's "responses" (eg, his dodging the issue by insisting that we have dinner at Denny's as if nothing had ever happened). Those pages are not yet complete, but I had to post them immediately in order to keep the issue before the parties involved. I will flesh them out as time and my extremely busy schedule allow.
So my extremely low opinion of Bill Morgan and of his total lack of character is very well earned. In my three decades of dealing with creationists, I have come to expect very little from them (see my Encounters with Creationists), but Bill Morgan has so incredibly far beyond the creationist norm that it even shocks me despite my decades of experience. It boggles the mind to try to figure out how such a person could even exist. Like what was written in an old humor file of Royal Navy officer fitreps, "he has reached rock bottom, and has started to dig"
I should note that there is one thing that Bill Morgan has been truthful about: he strongly and adamantly opposes my position. Now, he obviously has no clue what my position is, even though I have presented it to him many times over the years. He seems to have this "evolutionist" bogey-man image that he thinks represents all his opponents. Still, he does indeed oppose my position:
If you honestly and truly want to fight evolution, then at least do it right! Learn everything you can about evolution and then attack it, not some stupid strawman caricature of it. And do so honestly and truthfully!
By refusing to fight evolution honestly and truthfully, but rather using "creation science" instead, you are constantly shooting yourself in the foot, dooming your cause to failure and your followers to losing their faith.
My position is that honesty and truthfulness are of the utmost importance. Through his words and deeds, Bill Morgan repeatedly and consistently demonstrates that he is adamantly opposed to honesty and truthfulness.
Bill Morgan is truly evil fruit. Bill Morgan has told me that everything he says and does is because he "loves Jesus." That would make his form of Christianity the corrupt tree that produced him. Not only does his form of Christianity condone his misconduct but also it also encourages it. That, and the fact that his form of Christianity depends so heavily on his lies and deception, only proves how corrupt a tree it is. As Jesus is quoted as saying, "Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire."
That 2012 OC Weekly article, Bill Morgan Is Captain Creationist: The activist is waging a war against evolution, one lecture at a time by Adam O'Neal (OC Weekly, 30 August 2012), started by exposing Bill Morgan in a lie.
That article reports Dr. Ayala's assessment that Bill Morgan is a liar, which is what I also learned in my email correspondence with Morgan, and it goes on to prove that Dr. Ayala's assessment of Bill Morgan is correct. That part of the story centers around Dr. Ayala's response to a letter that Morgan's young daughter (9 at the time) had written in which she echoed the creationist nonsense Bill had been feeding her (they are home-schooling their children). Morgan claims that Ayala's response was smug and dismissive, whereas the actual letter clearly shows that Morgan's assessment of it is not true. Furthermore, Morgan refused to produce a copy of that letter, claiming that he never keeps any correspondence (the same dishonest trick he has tried to use on me), but Dr. Ayala's office does keep copies of all their correspondence (as any honest organization would do routinely).
From that article:
But none of Ayala's qualifications are important to Bill Morgan, perhaps Orange County's most influential creationist. To him, the esteemed professor is a jerk.During the W.M. Keck lecture titled "Darwin and Intelligent Design," Morgan claims, Ayala described a classic empirical example of natural selection: peppered moth evolution. During the Industrial Revolution, England's trees became darker after being covered in pollutants for years. The lighter peppered moths, which were originally the most populous, began to die off because their camouflage was rendered less effective. Simultaneously, the darker peppered moths became more prevalent, since they were able to better hide on the newly darkened trees.
Morgan says he attended the lecture with his then-9-year-old daughter. Afterward, she wrote Ayala a letter: "Peppered moth population changes are an example of natural selection, which all creationists believe is true," she wrote. "But you began with moths and ended with moths. . . . There were no new animals."
Ayala's response, according to Morgan? Ayala smugly told her that when she takes college-level biology, she'll understand—and that was that.
The story was odd. It ran counter to the professor's carefully constructed public image as an intellectual who welcomes all debates about evolution. Morgan didn't save either letter. Ayala's executive secretary, however, did, and Ayala forwarded both to the Weekly.
"My daddy heard your talk at Chapman," the letter began, with the rest of it proceeding as Morgan earlier describes, with his daughter critiquing Ayala's points and asking how moths got "feet" and "eyes." She also suggested Ayala read her father's comic books, which are a collection of creationist talking points accompanied by relevant Clipart photos.
But Ayala's actual response differed from Morgan's description—characteristically terse, but not rude or dismissive. "I did not use moths to prove evolution, but to show how natural selection works in a simple case. When you study biology, you will be able to understand how evolution works," he wrote to the young girl, adding, "Thank you for your letter."
In an interview with the Weekly, Ayala calls Morgan a "liar" and says that he was "sad to see someone distort the facts in the name of religion," particularly given that science and religion should not be seen as mutually exclusive. Ayala added that it was "difficult to comprehend people who make false accusations and lie for the sake of God."
. . .
After unearthing the exchange between him and Morgan's daughter, he wrote, "You may understand why I do not want to have public discussions . . . with the likes of Mr. Morgan."
Bill Morgan clearly lied to the OC Weekly and, when I pointed that story out to him, he lied to me about it -- repeatedly since I pointed him back to that article repeatedly. In this matter, as in all things, he absolutely refuses to face the plain truth.BTW, that creationist statement, "but they're STILL MOTHS!", is one of several such statements with which creationists reveal how incredibly ignorant they are -- others include "evolution is just a theory" and "then why are there still monkeys?". That moths statement reveals that the creationist grossly misunderstands what evolution is and how it is thought to work, as is evident by frequent additional statements to the effect that if evolution were true then we should see dogs giving birth to cats, something which goes completely against what evolution says. And in a debate I watched as well as in his writings, Bill obviously shares that same gross misunderstanding of what evolution is and quite obviously has taught that to his children. So then Dr. Ayala's reply was quite correct: once Bill's daughter has learned what evolution really is, then she will be able to see what pure crap her father had taught her all those years.
I made transcripts of our email correspondence available to Bill for download at http://chiefwise.tripod.com/morgan/transcript/transcript.html.
I had to upload that transcript to make it available to Bill Morgan. It was and continues to be made necessary by Bill Morgan's persistent dishonesty and lying. In particular, Bill Morgan falsely accused me of having made extremely insulting comments about his wife. Since I had never made any such comments that I could remember, I repeatedly asked Bill what he thought I had said and he refused to tell me, claiming that he couldn't since he never keeps any emails. But I do keep mine, a habit I had developed on CompuServe because of their by-the-minute billing practices, so I provided them to Bill. The only way I had of doing that was by posting the transcript. I informed him about it and then informed him about it again and again every time he continued to claim that he had no access to those emails. He still maintains that that transcript does not exist, yet another of his persistent lies.
As I have said, Bill Morgan and I share a history nearly two decades long, from 1996 to the present day (2015), though not a continuous history since Bill keeps running away from all attempts at any kind of honest discussion. It works out to about three and a half years of actual attempts at communication, all by email. I say "attempts at communication" because communication needs to go in both directions. I repeatedly tried to get a honest discussion of his claims and other matters going while he would constantly use all kinds of dishonest tricks to avoid any kind of discussion.
Instead, Bill's favored forms of "communication" (in quotes to emphasize that he does not wish to make communication possible in any form) are verbal, such as talking on the phone, meeting at a restaurant, or engaging in a creationist debate. Since at that time I was still married with a family and my wife did not approve of me "wasting my time with fundamentalists and creationists" (plus she was very unsympathetic about my having been expelled as a leader from Boy Scouts of America, Inc, for being an atheist), none of those options were possible for me. Even though I had explained that to him as clearly as possible, he would constantly whine and pester me to "go to Denny's" with him. Actually, most of that was his attempts to change the subject in order avoid the discussion and even as a form of mocking me. And besides, having studied "creation science" and creationist chicanery since 1981, I was already very much aware of what a dishonest snake-oil show those debates are (see my discussion).
At first, I declined his appeals for going verbal primarily for the practical reasons given above, but also because I had a bad feeling about it. I already knew from experience that creationists' real objective is to proselytize, something I had learned about a lot from my fundamentalist Christian training in the early 1970's during the "Jesus Freak Movement" (as a "fellow traveller", having never converted myself). I had also seen a lot of how Bill behaved having read and critiqued his Weird Science tract and attached letter in which Bill bullied my acquaintance, Gene, mercilessly and with malice. I had a very strong feeling that Bill would turn any verbal exchange between us into something nasty and unpleasant.
In our emails, I quickly learned that Bill is very dishonest and would lie about almost everything. Over time, I have found him to be a pathological liar and the most dishonest person I have ever had the misfortune to have encountered. He would repeatedly twist around what had been said or done, usually to try to blame or accuse me of having done a wrong thing that he had himself just done, but also to grossly misinterpret something that I had said. That is what happened when he insulted my wife and then false accused me of having insulted his wife. Or when the topic of polystrate fossil came up and and I requested a reference for that claim since I could never find one, he agreed that he needed to provide that, but then some weeks later he started mocking me for not having provided that reference "as I had agreed to do". Every time he would do that, I'd have to repost by copy-and-paste exactly what had actually been said. I could do that because I archived all my emails, a practice I learned on CompuServe. I have absolutely no doubt that Bill would also lie and misbehave like that in a verbal exchange, mostly likely much worse. In such a situation, I would have no transcript of what had just been said to set Bill straight on the facts. In other words, Bill would be free to lie as much as he wanted to and be able to get away with it, something which he cannot do in a written format. That is why he hates a written format so much.
Though actually I did agree to debate him. Bill kept pestering me to debate him and then on 1998 Jun 26, Bill made me an offer I couldn't refuse: "you can choose the format and the moderator and teh place...quit galloping!" So I agreed, choosing a written, on-line debate. I immediately started discussing the setting up of a page and whether we should be self-moderated or choose a mutually-agreeable moderator. Bill immediately started ignoring the entire subject. He also stopped mentioning debates to me. I reminded him of our on-line debate several times, asking him how his first entry was going. I did this not only to remind Bill that he had implicitly agreed to the debate and to let him know that the subject was not dead, but also to provide him with the opportunity to back out. As of 2001, he never made any attempt to back out nor to claim to have not agreed to an on-line debate, though I think that since then he might have tried to deny it. I do know that it was a couple months later that he abruptly cancelled his AOL account and went into hiding.
Yes, I do realize that Bill had blundered into that one, but I fully intend to hold him to his offer and to his agreement. I insist that he do the honest thing and that he keep his promise. Knowing how incredibly dishonest Bill is, I am also watching for frost reports from Hades.
And BTW, Bill is not alone in being afraid of honest discussion or even of an honest debate. There are ways to turn a creationist debate into an honest debate, such as restricting it to a specific topic or have it be in a written format. And every time an experienced creationist debater is offered an honest format, he will refuse to participate. Here are some links to pages and articles that discuss that.
The more we corresponded, the more I learned of Bill's dishonesty and of his tricks and of his flagrant hypocrisy. Just a few instances of his hypocrisy are:
- "Rabbit-trailing", which is avoiding answering a question by asking an inticing question yourself. He preaches that it is very dishonest and you must no allow your opponent to do it. Yet he would constantly "rabbit-trail" in our emails trying to avoid answering a question by throwing yet another "unanswerable question" at me.
- Mocking. He preaches that you mustn't mock your opponent, yet he does it all the time. That's his inner bully coming out.
- Lying. He preaches that nothing is more important than the truth, but he lies constantly.
- Being dishonest. He describes himself as the most honest person I have ever met, and yet he is actually the most dishonest person I have ever met and he is being deliberately dishonest. Of course, he's also lying about it, so there's some overlap.
- Being disrespectful. He proclaims that he always treats me with utmost respect. Yeah, while he mocks me and is otherwise disrespectful. And it's yet another lie.
- Love. He proclaims that he loves me. While at the same time lying to me and mocking me and making false accusations against me and is always ready to start bullying me the moment I appear the least bit weak. Yet another lie as well.
As I said, those are just a very few examples of his flagrant hypocrisy.
Now let's look a bit more closely at his dishonest tricks.
Actually, these are a standard fundamentalist proselytizing trick. I learned about them during my fundamentalist training as I would read through their training materials. A standard feature in most of their proselytizing tracts which would be a "conversation" in which a Christian easily counters all the unbeliever's questions and objections and then he starts hitting the unbeliever with one question after another that the unbeliever cannot answer. With each of those questions, the unbeliever's confidence in his own beliefs becomes ever shakier until finally the unbeliever is ready accept Christ into his heart, etc, etc. Those scripts appear in many tracts and Bill even includes one in most of his own tracts, a recurring one being the Christian student standing up to the unbeliever teacher, the classic example having been Chick Pubs' Big Daddy? which I'm sure Bill had patterned his Weird Science after.But if you look more closely at those questions, you find that they're loaded to be "unanswerable". Their purpose is to stump the victim, to shake his confidence, to discredit him in front of other witnesses (eg, your real proselytizing targets are the on-lookers, so you make your opponent look bad). Once when Bill used an unanswerable question, "give me your best explanation for the origin of life", on Mark (AKA "The Liber8r"), Mark asked him why he asked that question and Bill responded that it was to make Mark "look stupid" -- like a broken clock can display the right time twice a day, even a liar like Bill Morgan can sometimes slip up and make a truthful statement.
A secondary purpose of these questions is to slip in a creationist misconception, such as conflating abiogenesis with spontaneous generation, or conflating evolution with blind chance, or attributing false expected results to evolution (eg, that apes in the zoo should be giving birth to ape-men, or that we should see dogs giving birth to cats). That may have some limited use by getting the opponent to agree with your misconception and so he would end up having to try to defend ideas that are pure nonsense. However, I don't think that creationists are that clever, but rather the presence of those misconceptions in an "unanswerable question" is just a result of the creationist not knowing any better.
Practically the entirety of Bill's "contributions" in our exchanges were these "unanswerable questions" and most of his "conversations" with unbelievers would consist mainly of hitting them with a series of "unanswerable questions". And if you ever question Bill's reason for asking that question, he will insist that he really wants to hear the answer to that question, that he is absolutely interested in it -- Bill only slipped up that one time when he told the truth to Mark. But the moment you do answer that question, then Bill suddenly loses all interest in it. His next move would vary, but he would usually through another "unanswerable question" at you and insist that he is absolutely interested in the answer.
Did I mention that I would answer Bill's "unanswerable questions"? Yes, I would and I have posted the questions and my answers at BILL MORGAN'S "UNANSWERABLE" QUESTIONS. Then I would try to discuss my answer with him, in which case Bill would either run away or try to divert attention away from the subject (AKA "rabbit trailing") by throwing yet another "unanswerable question" at me. Or he would pretend that I hadn't answered his question, to which I would ask him the very simple direct question of "Why do you think I hadn't answered your question?". Which he invariably refused to answer. In fact, I answered almost all of his questions which were meant to be "unanswerable", while he refused to answer my questions which were meant to be answered and should have been very simple to answer, like "What did you mean by that?".
At one point, Bill told the utterly audacious lie that I had never answered any of his questions while he had answered all of mine. So I went back through all the emails, counted all the questions and responses to them that I could find, and presented that tally to him. That email is the subject of my page, BILL MORGAN, "Mr. 100%"; the results from that page:
SUMMARY: Bill's Questions to Me: Answered: 23 Unanswered: 2 Percent Answered: 23/25 = 92% My Questions to Bill: Answered: 12 Unanswered: 65 Asked Repeated and Not Answered: 18 Percent Answered: 12/(12+65+18) = 12/95 = 12.6% Sources of error: 1. That was a lot of material to go through in very little free time, so some questions may have been missed. 2. Since you never provide any context when you do respond, I may have missed a few of your replies. However, most of the questions just received no response whatsoever. 3. In the case of those questions I had to ask repeatedly and which you never did answer, I only counted them once, thus inflating your percentage. In other words, due to this source of error, you are reported as having done much better than you actually did. 4. When I had to answer the same question from you more than once (eg, how CFCs could get to the stratosphere), I only counted that once, thus making my reported percentage look worse than it actually is. 5. I tried to exclude rhetorical questions. In determining whether a question was rhetorical, with my questions to you I erred on the side of excluding the question, whereas with your questions to me I erred on the side of including the question. Hence, any error generated here is skewed in your favor. 6. Even though a number of your responses avoided answering the question, I usually counted that question as answered. So, we see that I answered 92% of your questions to me, whereas you only answered 12.6% of my questions to you. Who, then, is avoiding whose questions, Bill? I think that the evidence speaks rather eloquently.
I then listed the questions that I had found and whether they had received any response. That included 65 questions of mine that he had never answered, simple direct questions. His "response" was to repeat his lie, once. After that, he just ran away from it. Literally ran away when he abruptly closed his email account two months later.
We should note here that Bill Morgan had a term for his common practice: rabbit-trailing. Think of a dog following a trail then suddenly losing the trail in order to chase a rabbit and never returning to that trail. In practice, someone asks you a question and to avoid answering that question you change the subject with a different question of your own, getting the conversation bogged down with your "rabbit-trail" bait. As he had presented in one of the CSAOC newsletters, Bill teaches his followers about rabbit-trailing, reveals it to be a dishonest trick, and warns them to never allow their opponents to use it:
"DON'T Go down rabbit trails. If you raise the question "How did life originate?" and they quickly say "well who made God?" keep the discussion on your question, tell them you will answer that later, but first you want an answer to yours."
Bill preaches against rabbit-trailing and yet he uses it all the time. Bill Morgan preaches against rabbit-trailing and yet it is fundamental to his entire approach. Thus Bill Morgan is a hypocrite about rabbit-trailing.
And Bill's primary material for rabbit-trailing are his "unanswerable questions."
I learned in very short time that Bill Morgan is a liar. At first, he would say something false or do something wrong and I would catch him at it, then he would immediately twist and turn everything around and claim that I was the one who had done that. Whenever that happened, I would have to go into my archive and pull out the actual emails and show him what had actually been written.
- For example, he challenged me about polystrate fossils and I asked for a documented example (which we need in order to discover the actual facts) since I've found that that is one of the most poorly documented creationist claims, to which he agreed and admitted and accepted that he needed to provide an example. Then about a month later he started chiding me for not having provided him with that documented example of a polystrate fossil! So yet again I had to pull out the emails and show him exactly what had actually been written and who had promised to do what. That kind of thing would go on constantly with Bill lying about what had been written and me having to correct him with the facts.
- Another example came out of a tract he had spammed across the Web, AOLCREAT.DOC, a "text file" (which was actually a Microsoft Word6 document, which made the effects Internet spamming far worse). In it, he described himself as a "Registered Mechanical Engineer". One of the many who wrote critiques of it called that title into question and, since I also hadn't heard of such a thing, I asked Bill about it. Bill explained the licensing process to me (AKA "Professional Engineer", (PE)) and I acknowledged that fact and suggested that he add that information in order to keep others from misunderstanding it. But then a year or two later, Bill's sockpuppet, "Bill Bequette", suddenly started to accuse me very viciously of having slandered Bill Morgan about his PE title. I emailed him the actual exchange about that, but by that time Bill Morgan and his sockpuppet "Bill Bequette" were spiraling increasingly out of control.
Thinking that fundamentalist theology might have a different take on "Lying for the Lord", I have asked many Christians of and approximating that stripe what their doctrine is on "Lying for the Lord". I have received extremely few answers, none of which would condone that practice. Bill Morgan was one who did respond, proclaiming that "nothing is more important than the truth". And then he immediately launched into yet another lie. So this is another matter about which Bill Morgan is a hypocrite: he lies constantly even though he gives lip service to condemning the practice.
mocking
Come to think of it, as I was collecting messages, I never once saw one from Bill himself having been posted on the talk.origins newsgroup. I saw only his co-spammers post to talk.origins. This behavior is in keeping what I've seen Bill do often, avoid those who understand what he is saying and doing while he targets and hammers at those who do not. This agrees with my own experiences with and observations of Bill Morgan, that he can be very vociferous with inexperienced opponents, but then when he is faced with an experienced opponent he suddenly becomes very reticent as he beats a hasty retreat.
Bill just keeps making the same tired old false creationist claims. In 1996 he had written a "new" tract, Creation vs. Evolution: What is the Better Explanation?(AOLCREAT.DOC), that he was very proud of because of the formatting (obviously not for the contents); he had created it in Microsoft Word6, but then like an idiot he spammed it across the Internet in newsgroups and forums as if it were an text instead of binary. It was just the same old false claims, but it did contain one original feature, the inclusion of his personal history:It turns out that Bill makes a lot of use of that story that he used to be an atheist and that it learning evolution in school that did it. He claims that having been taught evolution had turned him into an atheist in the ninth grade, that all of the science courses he took in high school and college only reinforced his atheism, and that he had remained an atheist until after college when he was converted through creation science. His claim of having been an atheist figures prominently in his public talks promoting creation science, which he has delivered at several universities, colleges, and high schools (including at least nine public high schools).I was raised in Buffalo, New York, and was fortunate to have great parents They took my sister and I to church every Sunday, we attended Sunday school and church camps in the summer. I believed in God, and never gave the issue much thought.In sixth grade, I remember seeing a big colorful book produced by Time-Life. It caught my eye, and I opened it up and was pleased to see big colorful drawings. One set of drawings really caught my eye. There was a series of animated drawings that went across two pages. On the far left was a very ape-like character walking on all fours and covered with hair. The character to his right was a little more upright, he had shorter arms, was starting to walk on two legs and had less hair. This progression continued for a few more drawings until at the far right side of the page there was this handsome fellow, a human being! This is called the ascent of man chart that nearly everyone is familiar with.
In sixth grade, I looked at that chart for a while, smirked, thought it was ridiculous, and went outside and played softball.
Eventually I made it to ninth grade. While in a Biology class, the teacher was teaching us about evolution and placed the same chart up on the wall. I still remember it. I sat there and studied that chart for a long time. It was on that very day that I recognized a major conflict existed between what this teacher was saying and what the Bible taught. Should I believe my science teacher, who is teaching man has ascended from ape-like animals, or do I believe mommy, daddy, and that book (the Bible) that says God made man instantly from the dust of the ground?" I reasoned that this teacher is a scientist after all, so this must be valid information.
I had a choice to make that millions of people world wide are faced with. Do I believe the Bible or what is taught as science (please note I did not call it science).
In ninth grade I chose to go with the science teacher, and considered myself to be an atheist for about 14 years. I took many more science classes in high school and in college (I am a Mechanical Engineer), and none of these classes changed my beliefs, if anything they reinforced my atheist beliefs.
I assume the majority of you are in college now. Do you understand my story? I am pretty certain you have had several hours of your education dedicated to the teaching of the Theory of Evolution. I would love to hear how this affected you. Has it done anything to your faith? It obliterated mine!
Question! Why in 6th grade did I think the drawings were ridiculous, but in 9th grade I believed them?
Was it because I was more intellectual? No. Was it because the Biology teacher explained it so convincingly? Not really. The real reason for my becoming an atheist in 9th grade can be summed up in one word...hormones. In 6th grade I did not have much temptation in my life. Perhaps my biggest sins were a lie here and there, throwing snowballs at the school bus and riding my minibike where I shouldn’t.
But in 9th grade a whole new world opened up to me. The temptation of drinking, drugs and premarital sex presented themselves to me at exactly the same time I was being taught evolution. I knew the Bible said that being drunk and having sex outside of marriage was wrong, but here is my science teacher, telling me the origin of man is completely contradictory to what the Bible taught as the origin of man. I felt excited.....and decided the Theory of Evolution was for me, after all the Bible was scientifically wrong on the very first page!! I considered myself to be an atheist. As an atheist I no longer had to abide by any rules but my own. If I wanted to get drunk, no problem, if I wanted to try to have premarital sex no problem, I now belonged to the evolution "religion" (religion meaning a system of beliefs built on faith) that allowed me to sin without guilt.
It was not the data that made me an atheist, it was the conclusion, a belief that made me the judge of right and wrong. Those cartoon drawings of ape men did look sharp, but I wanted to believe them emotionally, more than I really believed them intellectually.
However, I find Bill's claims of having been an atheist to be seriously flawed.
In his story in AOLCREAT.DOC, he describes himself as wanting to believe that evolution was telling him that his god did not exist so that he could give his hormones full rein and sink into depravity without any guilt or accountability; in other words, because of standard creationist misconceptions about evolution, atheism, and morality. In contrast, upon realizing that the gods do not exist, a real atheist then also realizes that he bears full responsibility for his own actions.
So it was his own religious training, not evolution, that had "turned him into an atheist" (in quotes because it didn't actually happen). It was his own religous training that handed him that gaping legalistic loophole which would grant him the freedom to do whatever he wanted to do with no rules, no need for morality. Evolution didn't do that. Evolution doesn't teach that. Christianity does teach that. I certainly wish that Christianity didn't teach that so that dumb kids like Bill Morgan wouldn't be misled as Bill Morgan had been.
But then in an email to me, Bill Morgan claimed to have never stopped believing in his god:
"But I honestly know that you know God exists but choose not to honor acknowldge or give thanks to God. Romans 1 says that and that was my case when I was an atheist, I prayed many times while an atheist."An atheist is one who does not believe in the gods. From what Bill described about himself, he was never an atheist, but rather had always remained a theist, even when he was trying to pretend to be an atheist. An atheist realizes that he does not need any gods upon whom to base his beliefs and that he must accept responsibility for his own actions. Bill's entire masquerade as an "atheist" was nothing more but a theist's attempt to escape responsibility for his actions. Except for during his infancy, Bill never was an atheist.
Nor can Bill keep his own story straight. In AOLCREAT, Bill says that he really didn't believe the hominid chart, but rather proclaimed himself to be an evolutionist just because he wanted it to be true so that he could indulge in depravity. Then in the September 1998 newsletter, Bill says that he became an evolutionist because of that chart. Why does Bill keep changing his story? That's the problem with telling nothing but lies; it's too hard to keep your stories straight.
So why does Bill still try to claim to have been an atheist, even though he admitted to me that he had never stopped believing in the existence of his god, that he constantly prayed to that god, and that he was only pretending to himself to be an atheist in order to give his hormones and his depravity full and free rein? Just because it sounds good? Because it helps him to establish his position: that evolution leads to atheism and depravity while creationism leads to Christ? That is what he claims, even though he knows that it is not true. Why is he not able to just tell the truth? Is telling the truth against his religion? Quite apparently so!
To that end, I am posting all the information concerning this matter on the Web. Starting at my "BILL MORGAN'S ACCUSATIONS AGAINST ME" page, I am posting the accusations themselves, along with my commentary on and analysis of the accusations, what needs to be done to resolve the matter, Bill Morgan's conduct, and some of Bill Morgan's "responses" (eg, his dodging the issue by insisting that we have dinner at Denny's as if nothing had ever happened). Those pages are not yet complete, but I must post them immediately in order to keep the issue before the parties involved. I will flesh them out as time and my extremely busy schedule allow.
Don't just take my word on what my pages say. I have posted the full text of what was actually written on my "TRANSCRIPTS OF THE E-MAIL CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN BILL MORGAN AND DWISE1" page at http://chiefwise.tripod.com/morgan/transcript.html, so you can see it for yourself. I see the open examination of the facts as being essential to the process of resolving this matter. In this case, the pertinent facts are what was actually written, which is contained in the transcript. Therefore, I have repeatedly and consistently called for us to examine the transcript and compare it against what Bill Morgan wants to claim that was written. In order to do that, Bill Morgan must tell us what he thinks I had written; his accusations only include his own interpretation, but nothing that can identify the messages in question -- I quite honestly have no idea where most of those accusations could have come from. Without that information, which only Bill Morgan possesses, the resolution of this matter cannot proceed. Bill Morgan has steadfastly refused to divulge that information, despite my repeated requests (49 times from August 2000 to December 2000!). Therefore, Bill Morgan is blocking our efforts to resolve the matter and is keeping us from examining the facts. I want the facts to be examined! Unlike Bill Morgan, I have nothing to hide.
I ask that you do form your opinion before you express it to us.
That is to say that you should not choose sides based solely on which of us is a Christian and a creationist (that would be Bill on both counts, BTW).
You need to have read through the issue, learn what has happened and what has been done by whom and for what stated reasons.
An "opinion" that is not based on the facts of the issue is no opinion at all and is worthless.
An opinion must be an informed opinion.
I will expect your email to address the issues and I will want to respond in kind.
Second, you should address your email to both Bill Morgan and to me.
The ultimate purpose of all this is to get this matter resolved, which cannot be served by private email sent only to one party and not the other.
So why am I posting these pages about my experiences with Bill Morgan? In part because my experience with him was quite different from how he presents himself to his public. I think that his public has a right to know the truth about Bill's claims and I'm positive that they are never going to hear it from Bill. I am quite certain that I am not the only person to have tried to carry on a discussion with Bill Morgan and I do not believe that my experience with him was unique. In sharing my experiences and observations with you, I hope to hear from you about your experiences with Bill.
Since Bill has claimed to me that nobody had ever been able to find even one error in one of his writings, "Weird Science", I would like to hear from others who have critiqued his works and informed Bill of the results. Despite his boast, I found "Weird Science" to be full of errors, which I presented and discussed in my critique. His only reaction when I sent it to him was to try to flatter me about my enthusiasm, then he completely ignored all my follow-up questions about it; I'm sure that he threw it away as soon as he received it.
He kept insisting on having a telephone conversation or going out to dinner, but I refused because I had expected the worst from a telephone conversation with Bill, because it would have been impossible to maintain a record of the discussion, and because I really did not have any way to have a proper, private conversation on the phone. I would like to hear the experiences of those who had talked with him, whether on the phone or in person.
He said that he received 50 emails a day. Did you ever email him and to what effect? How did Bill conduct himself with you? What effect did Bill have on your life? Did he succeed in converting you to fundamentalist Christianity? Did you stay converted after you learned the truth about his claims? Did he keep you from converting? Did he contribute towards or against your conversion?
If you have any more to add to this saga, please email me at dwise1@aol.com. Tell me if you want me to post what you write. Otherwise, I would use your message to gather statistics or to quote in part anonymously.
You can contact Bill Morgan:
I do not see any problem about giving out his phone number, since Bill himself freely distributes it to the public at every opportunity, including spamming it across several newsgroups, and strongly urges anybody and everybody to call him. Plus, the telephone seems to be his favorite form of communication. I have also seen Bill give out his home address to the public, but I would rather that you obtain that directly from him.
- via email at BillyJack1@hotmail.com.
- by phone at 714-898-8331
- indirectly through his web site, "Welcome to Creation vs. Evolution". The web site gives his home phone number and his BillyJack321@hotmail.com email address.
Here are links to the other pages in my Bill Morgan Section, plus a couple others:
CRITIQUE OF A BILL MORGAN DEBATE
- Bill Morgan's web site, "Welcome to Creation vs. Evolution".
- Information on the Creation Science Association of Orange County. They are reportedly working on their own web site; I will publish their link here when it becomes available.
- In one of his newsletter articles, Bill presented a biblical chronology, similar to what many of us have tried on a rainy day, only his is much more complete. Here, I present his article in full.
- AOLCREAT.TXT:
Bill Morgan's essay, "Creation vs. Evolution: What is the Better Explanation?", AKA "AOLCREAT.TXT", the text, a bit of its history, and a few critiques.- In a moment of frustration, I analyzed and discussed what kind of game Bill was playing with us.
- I do not know why it had taken me so long to figure it out, but once I did then so much of Bill Morgan's tactics started making sense. Bill Morgan teaches his street-proselytizing trainees about a diversionary trick which he callings "rabbit trails" and in which your opponent attempts to avoid answering a difficult question by asking you a different question meant to draw you off and to make you forget about the original question. He teaches them to recognize that trick and to not let their mark get away with it. Yet ironically, Bill dodges questions and discussion all the time by creating "rabbit trails". Most of his "impossible questions" (see below) were direct attempts to change the subject away from simple direct questions I had asked him or direct discussions that I was trying to conduct with him. Now I make a point of informing Bill of when he is using his "rabbit trails" trick again.
- Bill "Mr. 100%" Morgan falsely claimed that he had answered every one of my questions and that I hadn't answered any of his. Here is the truth about that claim.
- In our correspondence, Bill's questions were stock and standard creationist "impossible questions", i.e., questions which are impossible to answer and which you toss at your opponent to undermine their position. Bill's major problem here was that I did answer them and tried to start a discussion about them. He hated it when I wouldn't follow his script.
- Some commentary on a few of the newsletter articles Bill has written.
- Bill Morgan's cartoon tract, Weird Science, and my critique of it.
Bill Morgan versus Phil Summerfeld, 07 March 2009, Garden Grove, California
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First uploaded on 2000 July 02.
Updated on 2001 April 21..
Updated on 2015 October 21.