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Jack comments on Let Them Debate College Students - Less Wrong
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Dennett's book had nothing to do with creationism.
Uh, check "creationism" in the index.
OK, I did. A page and a half, in the middle of something explicitly labelled (on the previous page) as a digression, explaining that he isn't going to waste space arguing against creationism. One endnote, supporting that with some pointers to places where, if you want argument against creationism, you can find it. One endnote saying that a certain kind of behaviour, allegedly engaged in by many theists and annoying to Dennett, is also characteristic of the advocates of "Intelligent Design". That's it.
Since your point was (apparently) that Dennett wasted a lot of time and effort addressing creationism, I'm having trouble seeing how this supports it. (Well, actually, what happened is that someone said that people like Dennett don't waste time engaging with creationism, and you said "but they write books attacking theistic religion" (I'm paraphrasing, I hope not misleadingly) as if that were the same thing, and in what follows you've repeatedly responded to comments about creationism in ways that would kinda make sense if they were comments about theism instead. So I don't know whether pointing out one more time that Dennett's book was not about creationism will help...)
Many people seem to use the term "Creationism" as though they think it is a synonym for "young earth creationism" - the 6,000 year squad.
If you look at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism
...what it says is:
"Creationism is the religious belief that humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe were created in some form by a supernatural being or beings, commonly a single deity."
Many followers of Abrahamic religions appear to think that.
I think this explains some of the misunderstandings in this thread. For example, the apparent controversy over whether Dinesh D’Souza is a creationist. He has written: ‘the Genesis enigma is solved, and its account of creation is vindicated not as some vague parable but as a strikingly accurate account of how the universe came to be’. That sort of thing makes him a creationist in my view. However, he is no young earth creationist.
If you define "creationism" so broadly that it encompasses all theistic religion then I will readily agree that yes, one of the things Dennett's book is about is "creationism". Congratulations. On the other hand, that fact is then of little relevance to the question of whether Dawkins and Dennett and others like them should, or do, "refuse to debate creationists" since (everybody, I suggest, knows) the word as used in that phrase is not meant to be equivalent to "theists".
Whaat?!? Creationism is about a supernatural creator of the universe and man. Theism is about the existence of god - sometimes an interventionist god. They are different concepts. Theism is typically a broader concept than creationism - since you can believe in a god that answers prayers without also believing that she created the universe.
The inaccurate conclusion that I have these concepts muddled together seems to be without a basis in anything I have said. I do not know where you are getting it from :-(
I'm getting it from the fact that (as I said earlier) you've taken a statement about "creationists" and disputed it on the basis that the corresponding statement with "theists" in place of "creationists" is false.
Right - well, leaving aside the whole issue that I did no such thing, that appears to be some faulty logic you have there - creationists are theists (if you believe that god created the universe and man, you at least believe in god) - but not all theists are creationists.
Uh, my point was that the previous poster's claim that "Dennett's book had nothing to do with creationism" was flat wrong.
Dennett's book is about the Abrahamic religions (mainly Christianity, but also Islam and Judaism) of which creationism is an instance - and he explicitly gives a long string of pointers to explain the problems with it in the book.
It seems that we understand different things by "had nothing to do with". Suppose someone writes a book about the rise and fall of Nazism in Germany, with a particular emphasis on where Hitler's hatred of the Jews came from and how he was able to get so many other people to share it, or at least act as if they did. And suppose that at one point in the book there is a brief digression in which the author says: yes, there are some Holocaust deniers out there, and of course their position is dead wrong, and here are a few pointers to places where you can find out why, and now if you don't mind I'm going to get back to discussing some actual history, and what a bizarre nuisance it is that I had to spend a page talking about that nonsense. -- If someone then claimed that the author of this book was putting a lot of time and effort into refuting Holocaust denialism, and someone else said "don't be ridiculous; the book has nothing to do with Holocaust denialism, it's about the rise of Nazism and the road to the Final Solution", which of them would you think more reasonable?
An irrelevant question, due to a faulty analogy: creationism is a component of many of the Abrahamic religions - whereas Holocaust denialism was not part of Nazi Germany.