Werner Gitt
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| See Werner Gitt in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. |
Werner Gitt is a German creationist. He is an computer scientist and has been director of a department at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Braunschweig, an institution which is responsible, among other things, for units and measurements. Very often he is wrongly claimed by German creationists to have been the director of the whole institution, giving him more apparent credibility. In fact this institution is led by a "president", not a "director" [1]. Here is a google search for German sites with that claim [2]. Darwinism Watch has adopted that untrue claim [3].
Gitt has written some creationist books:
- Did God Use Evolution? (original title "Schuf Gott durch Evolution?")
- In the Beginning was Information (original title "Am Anfang war die Information")
- If Animals could talk
- The Stars and Their Purpose, 2002 CLV
His line of reasoning goes like this:
- My experience in computer science tells me that information always has certain properties.
- One of those properties is that it is always created by intelligent beings.
- So, "information is always created by intelligent beings" is a law of nature.
- Life contains information.
- Therefore life was created by an intelligent being.
Of course he hides the structure of this argument in so many words. Any proof of how information can be generated by mutation and natural selection is brushed away by Gitt because he has already proven that this is impossible - it's against the laws of nature!
This is a version of the reasoning William Paley used and which was refuted by Charles Darwin among so many others. One of the errors in the argument is that all information with which a computer scientist has professional experience, has been created by humans. So he extrapolates from one sort of information (created by humans) to another sort (biological information, not created by humans). Needless to say, this is not a sound way to reason. By the same reasoning, he could prove that life was created by humans: just replace "intelligent beings" by "humans" in the argument above.
Another error is that for Gitt, only his own experience counts. He derives laws of nature from what he personally did or did not experience. What biologists say about life (after all, he is trying to intrude in their area of expertise) doesn't bother him. This is the behaviour and attitude of a typical pseudoscientist.
