Comments on Why Speir Distrusts

Conversation Side Conversation
21

He runs into the chemistry professor on the curb, as they watch the fire trucks pump thousands of gallons of water on the total wreckage of a building. The chem prof laments, “My entire $200,000 NSF grant for my ground-breaking laboratory experiment just went up in flames!” The theology professor casually quotes to him 1 Corinthians 3:15:

If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.

POSTSCRIPT: I think we may have lost @r_speir somewhere back in this thread.

1 Like
22

One possible reason for his distrust is that you misspelled his name in the thread title.

1 Like
23

Sheesh. You are a confused individual. The next statement only qualifies the mistake regarding the investigation of truth in science. It does not change in any way Nelson’s argument about the “failure of MN”.

Nelson’s Carroll quote was innocuous. I think you got yourself twisted around and lost a sense of what was being discussed.

24

You found us! Come join our trust building exercise. :smiley:

1 Like
25

Thank you r_speir for that ‘civility’. It makes talking with you so pleasurable.

The next statement only qualifies the mistake regarding the investigation of truth in science.
Calling something an "inaccurate characterization" does not merely 'qualify the mistake', it is stating that calling what science is actually doing a "mistake" is "inaccurate", i.e. "not accurate; inexact, incorrect, erroneous" (OED).
It does not change in any way Nelson’s argument about the “failure of MN”.
It changes it to the extent of the fact that Carroll explicitly thinks that MN is a "mistake" only to the point that what science is doing is not actually MN.

It means that in Carroll’s opinion science-as-it-is-currently-practiced is not making a mistake. It is simply mistaken in calling what it does MN.

Nelson’s Carroll quote was innocuous.

  1. When Carroll was calling MN a “mistake”, did he believe that he was talking about science-as-it-is-currently-practiced? I would suggest that the answer is explicitly “no”.

  2. Did Nelson’s quotation of him explicate or obfuscate this fact? I would suggest that it clearly obfuscated it.

  3. Does this undercut Nelson’s argument that MN is what is wrong with modern science? I would suggest that the answer is clearly “yes”. (If MN is viewed merely as a hypothetical, if erroneous, philosophy-of-science position, then arguments against it would not count against science-as-it-is-currently-practiced, nor the work of working scientists like Joshua.)

Given these three points, I cannot accept Nelson’s quote as “innocuous”.

4 Likes
26

Aha. Now I see the problem. You think paragraph two is important to include because you believe biological evolution is driven not by MN but by empiricism. But this is Nelson’s very point. It’s not. So paragraph two is not pertinent to the discussion - to him and me both.

I agree with Nelson that biological evolution practices MN all the time, making paragraph two irrelevant. So to a person like you who has learned to ignore the bias in his own trade, yes, you would think that Nelson “quote mined”.

So now what we have is a disagreement. And a sharp one at that. Your science is not pure regarding the practice of empiricism. It is heavily biased toward MN and Nelson is correct to bring it into the discussion.

27

You’ve been asked this question dozens of times before but have yet to provide an answer:

How would you do science and get trustworthy repeatable results without relying 100% on MN? How would you account for possible unknown and undetectable tinkering in your experiments by an external supernatural entity?

Could you or Paul Nelson at least attempt to describe your supernatural incorporating methodology? Thanks in advance.

1 Like
28

No. You quite clearly do not.

You think paragraph two is important to include because you believe biological evolution is driven not by MN but by empiricism.

(1) I did not mention “biological evolution”, so you are simply putting word in my mouth – not civil.

(2) I think it is important because Carroll himself states that this supposed “mistake” is “an inaccurate characterization of what science actually is”. [This would include Evolutionary Biology (seeing as you brought the subject up), which is part of science, and plays by the same rules as the rest of science.]

(3) Nelson’s quoting this explicit “inaccurate characterization” as though it was actually what Carroll believes about science is misleading.

(4) I have already explicitly stated what I believe:

I must admit that I disagree with Carroll's distinguishing between methodological naturalism and methodological empiricism. I think that (as I have stated elsewhere), until empirical evidence of the supernatural has been presented, the two are functionally equivalent.

You continue:

But this is Nelson’s very point. It’s not.

Nelson may assert that Evolutionary Biology is not driven by empiricism (though I cannot immediately find an explicit statement from him on this point), but I would be very surprised if he can substantiate it. From Darwin’s research leading to his publication of On the Origin of Species to the present day, Evolutionary Biology has presented an enormous corpus of empirical research supporting its conclusions.

So paragraph two is not pertinent to the discussion - to him and me both.
What you and Nelson find pertinent is not the issue here (nor is what I find pertinent). The issue is what Carroll meant. And in calling the "mistake" characterisation "inaccurate" he clearly meant both statements to be read together.

Suppose I state “The Moon is made of green cheese. That last sentence is wrong.” If you quoted me as saying only that “the Moon is made of green cheese” you would be misrepresenting me, even if you thought that the moon was in fact made of green cheese so that the second sentence was “not pertinent” to you.

So to a person like you who has learned to ignore the bias in his own trade, yes, you would think that Nelson “quote mined”.
This would appear to indicate that you have no clue as to what my "trade" is. I am, as I recently confessed, not a "working scientist". So whatever "bias" you may assert I have about science or evolution, it is not part of my "trade".

I am not the first to accuse Nelson of quotemining. Here is the most pertinent article: The Fine Art of Quote-Mining – Outside the Beltway
But there are a number of other such accusations. His reputation for honesty is less than stellar.

3 Likes
29

Are you allowed to share that “trade” with us? Not asking for your name or location, just interested in what you do. Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker? Whatever.

30

Luna Fromager

31

A Young Earth Reformer and an Unspecified Interlocutor walk into a bar…

1 Like
32

As @Tim states, I would love to see @pnelson or yourself demonstrate this claim.

From what I have seen, ID proponents and creationists usually don’t understand the relationship between empiricism and the scientific method. Over and over I have heard ID/creationists say that you have to observe the entire history of evolution in order for it to be scientific and/or empirical. That is false. To sum it up in one statement: You don’t observe the theory, the theory explains the observations. The moment someone states that you have to observe the hypothesis or theory in order for it to be scientific then they have demonstrated they don’t understand empiricism or the scientific method.

So how does it work? The concept is that your ideas, if true, can have measurable impacts on the natural world. The idea is the theory, and it is tested through looking for those impacts on the natural world. The theory, by definition, is not observable. Instead, the theory is used to make predictions, and empiricism is used to quantify the observations to see if they match up to those predictions.

The theory of evolution attempts to explain the observations we do have. So what are the observations we do have? We have the distribution of physical traits among species, sequences of genomes, the geographic distribution of species, and the distribution of features in fossils, to name a few. The theory of evolution makes predictions about what we should observe in those data sets if the theory is true, and it does an amazing job at doing so. That is what makes the theory scientific and empirical.

4 Likes
33

Nelson clearly confuses Naturalism with MN and writes MN off because he thinks they are the same and contrary to what he believes. Carroll does not, so to misquote Carroll out of context to make his own (counter) point is not right.

3 Likes
34

There is also a debate to be had over the definition of natural. If God acts within nature and affects nature in a measurable way then God is considered part of nature for the purposes of methodological naturalism. MN doesn’t exclude the actions of God in the same way that it doesn’t exclude human activity. To use a counterexample, if I said gravity was supernatural would science have to stop studying it? Obviously not.

1 Like
35

A YEC, an OEC, a materialistic atheist, and a TE/EC are asked to explain the origin of species. They answer:

YEC: God created each kind individually by miraculous action. The kinds are at the very most “families” in modern classification, and often less, merely genus or species. There was some microevolution after that, very rushed, because it all had to happen in a few thousand years. Maybe it was speeded up by God, by a miracle unrecorded in the Bible, in order to get from a basic “cat” type to the Bengal Tiger and the Siamese cat within the time allotted. Man was created miraculously in a separate special creation, about 6,000 years ago.

OEC: God created each kind individually by miraculous action. Don’t ask us what a “kind” corresponds to in modern classification, as we haven’t thought about it and don’t want to be pinned down. There was some microevolution, not rushed because the earth is billions of years old, and it needed no miraculous speed-up by God. But it didn’t amount to much, just changes within orders. Or maybe just within families. Or maybe just within genera. Don’t ask us personal questions like that. Man was created separately and miraculously, maybe 6,000 years ago, or maybe 100,000 years ago, or a bit more; we’re flexible about that, as long as nobody says man comes from apes.

Materialistic atheist: Life arose from non-living matter by a series of accidents, and after that, organic evolution proceeded by wholly natural mechanisms, a combination of blind mutational search, other unguided mechanisms, and natural selection. Man arose by evolution from the primates, and was not any more specially created than any other species, i.e., not at all. He arose maybe 1 or 2 million years ago, maybe less, defending on how you define “man,” but certainly no less than 200,000 years ago. God had nothing to do with the evolutionary process.

TE/EC: Life arose from non-living matter, most likely by a series of accidents, though some of us, less courageous in our defense of methodological naturalism, have weakened and allowed that maybe a miracle was need to get life started. (Shame on you, Francis!) After that, organic evolution proceeded by wholly natural mechanisms, a combination of blind mutational search, other unguided mechanisms, and natural selection. Man arose by evolution from the primates, and was not any more specially created than any other species, i.e., not at all. He arose maybe 1 or 2 million years ago, maybe less, defending on how you define “man,” but certainly no less than 200,000 years ago. And–oh yeah, I forgot–God in some way had something to do with all of this, but don’t ask me what, as I refuse to answer personal questions.

1 Like
36

Actually, I’ve already stated this before (last year):

I do however have an academic background in Statistics (as well as Economics, Finance and Philosophy), and a work background in quantitiative[sic] analysis more generally.
37

Doesn’t that also apply to ID, YEC, and OEC?

From what I have seen, TE/EC is a holistic approach to science. God is as involved in evolution as he is in weather, geology, astronomy, and all the rest of nature. Whatever an atheist’s judgment of theology is worth, the TE/EC position seems a lot better than the piecemeal approach of ID/YEC/OEC where God is only active in a handful of processes in some ineffable way.

3 Likes
38

You forgot the Progressive Creationist. :wink: Progressive creationism - Wikipedia

39

We’re in humor mode here, aquaticus. You’re supposed to riff off my fictional scenario, not get into one of the usual debates. Get with the program! :wink:

40

OEC, Progressive Creationist: same thing, different names.

Now let’s have your humorous riff.