Logorrhea in the cell

In a recent post I commented on a remark made in one of the comboxes by a reader sympathetic to “Intelligent Design” (ID) theory.  At the ID website Uncommon Descent, Vincent Torley has responded, in a post with the title “Hyper-skepticism and ‘My way or the highway’: Feser’s extraordinary post.”  The title, and past experience with Torley, led me to expect that his latest piece would be short on dispassionate and accurate analysis and long on overheated rhetoric and misrepresentation.  Past experience with Torley also led me to expect that it would simply be long, period, indeed of gargantuan length.Both expectations were confirmed.  Having cut and pasted Torley’s post into MS Word, I find that it comes to 42 pages, single-spaced.  I envy Torley that he has time to write up a 42-page single-spaced commentary on a blog post written in reply to a reader’s combox remark.  Why he thinks I (or other people with jobs, families, hobbies, etc.) would have time to read such a thing, I have no idea.  As to the content, well, since Torley thinks you can infer quite a lot even from brief phrases, he’ll be happy to know that I agree with him to this extent: Having read the first section and quickly scanned a couple of other passages of his opus -- and seen how badly he there distorts what I wrote -- I infer that it would be a waste of time (time I don’t have in any case) to read the rest. 

Consider that first section.  Why does Torley label me a “hyper-skeptic”?  Surely that is a rather odd accusation to fling at someone who (as Torley later acknowledges) thinks the existence of God can be demonstratedvia philosophical arguments.  The reason, it turns out, is this.  Recall that the reader to whom I was responding suggested that if we found the phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell, there would be “only one thing we can reasonably conclude.”  Torley assures his own readers that:
[Feser] thinks a secularist would have every right to disregard the discovery, and treat it as a pop-culture-influenced hallucination…
and
Feser… argues that if scientists had found a message in the cells of every human being’s DNA, referring not to God, but to Quetzalcoatl or Steve Jobs, it would be perfectly rational for us to dismiss the discovery as a collective, pop culture-induced hallucination…
and
Feser evidently thinks that this would be a rational way for an atheist to respond to the discovery of a message referring to God in everyone’s DNA: to not only deny that God was responsible, but to deny that an intelligent being was responsible.  Reading that left me speechless.
End quote.  Note that by “left me speechless” Torley apparently means “led me to churn out 42 single-spaced pages in reply.”
It doesn’t take a very close reading of what I wrote to see that Torley has badly misrepresented it.  I neither said nor implied that it would be “perfectly rational” to interpret phrases like the ones in question as hallucinations or as something other than a product of intelligence, nor did I say or imply that “a secularist would have every right to disregard” such weird events.  What I said is that determining what to make of such weird events would crucially depend on epistemic background context, and that if we concluded that God was responsible (as of course we well might), then that epistemic background context would be doing more work in justifying that judgment than the weird events themselves would be.  Whether you agree with this or not, there is nothing remotely “skeptical” about it, nor is there anything at all in it that implies either that we could never be justified in believing that God was the source of such a message or that a secularist would, all things being equal, be rationally justified in denying that God was the source.
I find that this modus operandi is evident in many of the responses ID sympathizers make to my criticisms: First, egregiously misrepresent what I have said, at such prodigious length that the resulting cloud of squid ink completely obscures the unwary reader’s view of what I actually wrote or what the dispute is really about; second, evince befuddlement and outrage that I could say the silly and horrible things wrongly attributed to me; third, sanctimoniously express regret that ID sympathizers and Thomists aren’t on more “friendly” terms (as Torley puts it). 
Could such a pattern -- albeit it is a pattern of cluelessness -- itself be a mark of intelligent design?  Indeed it could be, in the sense that you have to be a rational animal in the first place in order to exhibit the kind of irrationality that some ID folks do. 
There’s more, but, as I say, I’ve read very little of Torley’s post and don’t have the time or inclination to read any further.  I do see on a quick scroll-through that Torley makes other odd and false statements, like:  “The argument which Feser most frequently touts as a knockdown demonstration of God’s existence is a re-vamped version of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Fifth Way.”  I don’t know why he says this.  Of course, I do indeed defend the Fifth Way, but it is most certainly not the argument I “most frequently tout as a knockdown demonstration of God’s existence.” I would have thought it obvious from my books, articles, and many, many blog posts that it is the cosmologicalargument in several of its versions that I regard as the chief demonstration of God’s existence.
A final comment: In the combox of my recent post, I said in response to a reader’s remarks that “as far as I know, none of my critics on the ID side has even addressed” my argument that a mechanistic philosophy of nature tends toward occasionalism (an argument that I develop in my Nova et Vetera article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way”).  Torley replies:
Hello, Professor? Hello? One year ago, I emailed you to inform you about my Uncommon Descent post, Building a bridge between Scholastic philosophy and Intelligent Design (January 5, 2013), in which I addressed the very point you raised. I realize that you’re a very busy man, but one year is a rather long time. In any case, I address the charge that Intelligent Design is tied to occasionalism, later in this post.
Well, as I said, “as far as I know” no ID defender had addressed the claim in question, and I’ve never read the blog post Torley is referring to.  I thank him for the correction.
That post of Torley’s, by the way, comes to 39 pages single-spaced.  His other posts on these subjects (many of which I also haven’t read) are equally gargantuan.  Mr. Torley should know that in addition to all the other reading and writing I have to do (most of which, last year, was devoted to work on Scholastic Metaphysics ), I have stacks of books and papers, many of them written or edited by friends, that have been sitting here next to my desk for longer than a year waiting for me to read, and in some cases review, them.  Preternaturally long-winded blog posts written by people with a track record of misrepresenting what I write are, I have to confess, not even at the bottom of any of these stacks.