The video of Tour calling Szostak a liar is still up with no apology from Tour in sight. Tour apparently is also such an asshat he is trying to get one of his critics fired. Do lecture us about Tour’s good Christian nature.
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He authorized the publication of an apology both here on this site (how did you miss it?) and on Discovery. He has said he shouldn’t have used the word “liar.”
Where is the apology on the YouTube page that has over 75,000 views? What part of
“The video of Tour calling Szostak a liar is still up with no apology from Tour in sight.”
didn’t you understand?
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You said no apology of Tour was in sight; you didn’t specify that you wanted it to be in sight on the same web page as the video. I was pointing out where you could find the apology, in two places widely frequented by people interested in origins issues, i.e., Discovery and here. If that is not enough for you, write to Tour and ask him if he will put up his apology in more places.
Complete nonsense from beginning to end. There’s absolutely nothing unbelievable about what Faizal has stated that he himself or Tour has said in their email exchange. In fact Tour’s public behavior in other venues makes what Faizal has reported all the more believable, since Tour has been making something of a speaking/apologetics career out of pretending there’s a secret atheistic/Darwinist conspiracy going on “in the back rooms of science” to prop up the science of evolution and the origin of life in public but that nobody knows what’s going on and are afraid to say so.
It really isn’t that difficult to see through.
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In other words, you are willing to accept the truth of a claim in the absence of any empirical evidence to support the claim.
Some scientist!
Personal testimony is empirical evidence, and so is james Tour’s previous behavior. Why do I have to explain this to someone with a career in “Religious studies and natural theology”?
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We’re willing to accept, on the basis of evidence*, that Faizal is probably being truthful about this. Of course the emails are the only ultimate proof one way or the other, but I’m not going to reject what Faizal said out of hand or pretend that I’m perfectly agnostic until he shows the email exchange.
*Tour’s previous track record, and there being no reason for Faizal to lie about this.
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When the same person who is making the charge is the only source of “testimony,” the “testimony” cannot provide any independent confirmation of the truth of the charge. Only a third party can do that. So, for example, the Dean of Medicine at Faizal Ali’s college could provide testimony that Tour actually accused Faizal Ali of “extortion.” Without such third-party testimony, it’s simply Faizal Ali’s undocumented claim.
To see how utterly wrong your defense is, all you have to do is translate the situation into the world of science. Suppose a scientist made the claim, “Last week, I created life in a test tube,” and when someone challenged the claim, asking him to provide his laboratory notes, data, instrument readings, microphotographs, etc., he said, “I don’t need to provide any of that; you have my word for it, and my testimony counts as evidence.” The scientist’s claim would be universally rejected. (I can just hear Mercer screaming, “Where’s your DATA? Science is all about DATA!!!”)
And that’s exactly what’s happening here. A claim is being made that Tour said something, and we have only the word of Faizal Ali that Tour said it. Faizal Ali may be correct, or he may be wrong. But he hasn’t provided a shred of data to prove that he is correct.
The proper stance is to remain neutral until evidence is presented. But neutrality, as this discussion is proving, is beyond the capability of the atheists here. They will reflexively believe anything nasty about Tour, and reflexively defend one of their own number, even when he provides no evidence. Pure tribalism in action.
Tour has no previous track record of accusing anyone of “extortion,” a word which can imply criminal activity. Faizal has left us to imagine that Tour might have accused him of a criminal activity.
The fact that the people here have no problem with Faizal Ali making a very damaging personal charge against Tour on a blog site read by hundreds, or even thousands, and then refusing to document the charge tells me the standard of moral scruple that is held around here. And the fact that the same bunch raged against Tour for using the term “lying” and demanded a public statement of apology in exactly the venue in which he used the word, but don’t demand evidence from Faizal Ali, in exactly the same venue in which he made his charge, tells me the level of hypocrisy.
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I don’t think you understand the relevant facts here, which are these:
In response to my last email to Tour, he accused me of being behind a plot to damage his career if he did not take down the DI video. He stated in that email he was going to make complaints about me to the administration of my university.
He then cc’ed me on the emails he sent to both my university and to his, which included the full texts of our correspondence.
I gave the dean of our medical school the heads up that these emails were coming, and he then confirmed that he had indeed received them.
Shortly after that, the head of my department contacted me to say he wished to speak to me about an “academic complaint.” I will be meeting with him in a few days.
Now, unless you are accusing me of making all of this up, exactly what documentation do you need to see to confirm that Tour has made a complaint about me to my department?
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I will also clarify that, though he did use that term, I do not think he is implying criminal action on my part, just academically unethical behaviour.
Since the RCMP has not yet come knocking on my door, I do not believe criminal proceedings are in the works.
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So, please clarify: Are you really expecting me to release Tour’s personal emails to me, without his consent?
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But he does have a track record of making similar extreme comments (see his “lying” accusation to Szostak). See also Rum’s comment #65 in this thread. I have no trouble believing that Tour might make such an accusation.
He’s already given you the reason why he’s not going to make his email exchange with Tour public. I think it’s a pretty good justification.
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Yes. I did not mean to imply that Tour was making criminal charges against me (and no one but @Eddie seems to have interpreted it in this way). I just wanted to illustrate the hysterical and overblown nature of his reaction to my criticism, which is entirely in character for Tour.
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Scientific claims, especially of that magnitude, do indeed require data to be accepted by the scientific community. If a world-renowned professor studying the subject made the claim, it would be met with a little less skepticism that if some unknown PhD student did, but ultimately data would be required. Faizal isn’t making a similarly ground-breaking claim, or even a scientific one. He’s claiming that Tour sent complaints to his university, which is really quite mundane. As I’ve already pointed out, of course the ultimate proof would be reading the email exchange in full, but that’s not possible right at this moment for legal reasons that you should understand. In the meantime, we’re free to assess the evidence currently available and come to a provisional conclusion. If you don’t want to believe Faizal, that’s fine, but don’t act as though we’re being “tribal” or “blinded by our atheism” by falling to one side of pure agnosticism on this matter.
Do you not see the irony of that comment? You accuse us of being “tribal”, but then immediately single us out by our atheism (our tribe), as though we all hate Tour because he’s a Christian. This isn’t a Christians vs Atheists issue here in the slightest. You’re the only one adding that angle.
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Pure tribalism.
He did not retract it in the venue in which he made the false charge.
He continues to make additional false charges that he has not retracted in any venue.
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Ethically, that’s where it should be.
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I already answered that question. You shouldn’t release his emails to you without his consent. It’s probably illegal, and even if it isn’t, it’s unethical. But you can release the e-mails you sent to him. I expect that his reaction to you had something to do with either what you said, or how you said it. That doesn’t necessarily justify anything that he might have done in reaction, but it is always good to hear both sides of a story, and hearing only about the dastardly things Tour is supposed to have written, while not knowing what you said to him, leaves much in doubt.
I’m not saying you should release anything now. But whenever the timing is right, reading what you wrote would partially clear the air.
Of course, you only need to disclose the conversation if you are concerned to convince people here that you did nothing to provoke Tour. If you don’t care what people here think, then you don’t need to reveal anything at all.
Don’t do anything to please me. But don’t expect me to think you have told the whole story, in the absence of even the side of the story you can present – you own e-mails to Tour. I find it hard to believe that Tour would just lash out at you irrationally, and write to your bosses, merely because you had a typical academic disagreement. He must have academic disagreements with people all the time, and this is the first I’ve heard about him writing to anyone’s boss. Your account gives the tip of the iceberg, and the other 5/6 is out of sight.
It takes two people to make a quarrel, and rarely is the blame 100% on one side and 0% on the other, in my experience. That’s why hearing what you said, as well as your paraphrase of what he said, would be helpful. But do as you wish. I’m not demanding anything. Just don’t expect me to entirely accept your account when the facts are unavailable to me.
No, it cannot. But independent confirmation is how you raise the strength of the evidence. Not having independent confirmation doesn’t mean testimony isn’t evidence.
What is independent confirmation, by the way? More testimony evidence. If testimony could not ever be considered evidence, then how could science even work? Writing an article and getting it published is a form of testimony. Getting others to replicate your work and publish their results is just more testimony evidence.
You are confusing evidence with proof. You think testimony isn’t evidence, because testimony can be wrong or even dishonest, aka a lie.
But strength of evidence comes in degrees. To say that there is evidence for some proposition is not to say the proposition is now unassailable, or that the evidence merely for the fact that it exists has automatically raised the probability of the proposition to be almost certain.
You are so very very confused.
This will be a delight.
Then we would have some evidence of that. Weak, extremely unpersuasive evidence, but evidence nonetheless.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, the corollary of which is that mundane claims only require mundane evidence.
“I have food in my refrigerator” is so mundane a claim we can accept it on someone’s mere say-so.
“I have created life in a test tube” is a very unusual claim, so now we want more than their say-so. We want really strong evidence, of which independent confirmation is one aspect. And there’s a whole spectrum of how unusual or extreme the claim is, and therefore what kind of evidence we will accept as sufficient to warrant belief in the claim.
When Faizal says Tour has accused him of extortion and contacted the dean at his university, given that Tour has previously advanced the fatuous insinuation that there’s an atheistic/Darwinist conspiracy “in the back rooms of science” that scientists are afraid of being honest about, and acknowledged that he was has in fact been in contact with Faizal, then it fits with his previous behavior that he believes he’s being somehow extorted. There’s nothing implausible about Tour really believing he’s being extorted and acting out to try to prevent it.
and when someone challenged the claim, asking him to provide his laboratory notes, data, instrument readings, microphotographs, etc., he said, “I don’t need to provide any of that; you have my word for it, and my testimony counts as evidence.”
And he’d be right that his testimony counts as evidence. He’d be wrong to think it’s persuasive.
I’m amazed you don’t understand what evidence is.
If he had said “I dissolved one gram of sodium chloride in fourty liters of demineralized water at 38 degrees centigrade” I’d accept that claim on his say-so. If he said “I dissolved fourty kilos of sodium chloride in one milliliter of water at 38 degrees centigrade”, I wouldn’t.
Why? Because those two claims have different levels of plausibility, and so the evidence I would require to believe them is different in a degree proportional to how plausible the claim is.
The scientist’s claim would be universally rejected. (I can just hear Mercer screaming, “Where’s your DATA? Science is all about DATA!!!”)
And that’s exactly what’s happening here. A claim is being made that Tour said something, and we have only the word of Faizal Ali that Tour said it. Faizal Ali may be correct, or he may be wrong. But he hasn’t provided a shred of data to prove that he is correct.
He has in fact done that, it’s apparently just not enough to convince you. Perhaps it’s because you are intensely biased in favor of Tour and refuse to believe he would do something that absurd. Could that be it instead?
That’s funny, it seems to me that it’s beyond the capability of you.
They will reflexively believe anything nasty about Tour, and reflexively defend one of their own number, even when he provides no evidence. Pure tribalism in action.
Look in the mirror. Also, try to read up on what evidence is.
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