Shocking title, huh? Those of us who believe in God know He doesn’t lie. We try to live up to His example, to be Christ-like in our dealings. We aspire to the divine because of our love for Him.

So it is with great distress that I read of activists leading people to believe something other than the truth. In short, I consider the tactic a “lie”, in that it is someone who knowingly arranges the snippets of information in a manner to lead the reader to a conclusion that isn’t, well, the truth.

Panda’s Thumb cites the case of Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute, the leading “Intelligent Design” advocacy group, who has engaged in a practice called “quote mining”. Consider the example:

In January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this debate, declaring that (1) “[t]here is no scientific controversy about the basic facts of evolution,“ because neo-Darwinism is (2) “so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter” it. As an undergraduate and graduate student taking multiple courses covering evolutionary biology at the University of California San Diego, that is what I was told as well. My science courses rarely, if ever, allowed students to seriously entertain the possibility that Darwin’s theory might be fundamentally flawed.

As PZ Meyers points out in the article, the first part of the quote I’ve identified as (1) is located on page 52 of the cited source. In context, it refers to the calls for teaching about the “controversy” between evolution and “Intelligent Design” in classrooms, and goes on to explain that the debate does not exist in science, but only in the political sphere. It specifically states that there are many interesting questions fully open to discussion and debate within the framework of science itself. The science classroom’s time should not be taken up with discussions about this political issue any more than it should be consumed by debates between Obama or Clinton and McCain.

The reader is led to believe that evolution is a “dogma” rather than a scientific theory open to discussion after the first quote, and that leading ... the intentional mis-direction … is enhanced by the quote I’ve identified as (2). Certainly reading the quote above you get the feeling the second cited phrase is indeed related to the first. I would imagine it would come very near to the first in the original, wouldn’t you?

That’s what every reasonable person would believe.

But the phrase identified as (2) occurs on page 16. It is lifted from there and juxtaposed next to a quote on page 54, which is stripped of its original meaning when extracted, to convey an entirely different concept.

Is this how Christians are supposed to debate?