Not only an attractive bird but a fine example of the triumph of molecular phylogenetics vs. superficial appearance. That warbler used to be Wilsonia, but now it’s Setophaga; in fact not a single traditional genus in the family survived without some change in composition. Turns out that “has a yellow face and a black cap” is not a great taxonomic character.
This is much more interesting than any important member of the NAS.
I thank Faizal Ali for posting those beautiful bird pictures. This is my favorite of all his posts!
It’s good to know that Faizal spends some time away from Toronto and out in nature, enjoying God’s creation.
I suspect Scott Turner would agree that beautiful birds – along with the termites he studied for so long – are more important than any member of the NAS. I would, too. They are also more important than any member of the NCSE, by the way.
That is quite different from what you originally suggested should be written about ID. Even so, I still think it is understated to the point of being misleading. An accurate article would describe Flat Earth Theory, in no uncertain terms, as a ridiculous pseudoscience with no validity whatsoever and which is not and should not be taken seriously by any scientist or scientifically informed person. Not necessarily in those precise words, of course. I think the Wikipedia description of ID is a good model to follow:
Intelligent design (ID ) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as “an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins”.[1][2][3][4][5] Proponents claim that “certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.”[6] ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science.[7][8][9] The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a Christian, politically conservative think tank based in the United States.[n 1]
The quote above clearly does not fit that description. Perhaps you are thinking of some other article?
That may be true, but I cannot recall reading a single such statement. You do write rather a lot of words in this forum, as I am sure you are aware.
If that is the best example you could come up with of a “positive research program”, then I think @Paul_King’s point is made.
But are they more prestigious?
Since you have agreed that it is quite proper for encyclopaedias to report facts than the truth of the issue is relevant. Which means that it is relevant that ID is not science.
Now this is a fine example of unnecessary aggression needlessly raising the temperature, all while saying nothing of any great relevance to my point. Indeed, simply getting ID ideas into classrooms by other means or demanding that the alleged “weaknesses” of evolution be taught all fall short of mandating the teaching of ID in schools yet are attempts to influence the curriculum.
Yet my point is that ID has every reason to present itself as scientific whether it is or not. Even if the educational motive is no longer immediately relevant there is still the prestige of science. Not to mention that it would be more than a little embarrassing to admit to it after all this time.
Indeed. Therefore making such arguments is not good evidence that the arguer is not a creationist.
When discussing the question of evolution I would regard any person that denied universal common descent in favour of the view that God (or a god or gods) created some species. They might insist on all species being divinely created (though that seems rare today) or they might believe in “created kinds” where ancestral species was created - typically one for each “kind” - and other species evolved from these ancestors.
It is intended to be broad, but I don’t think it that vague.
My point is that the influence is there, even though it is not explicit.
I did not speak of the criticisms themselves but of the need to deny the existence of junk DNA. My understanding is that God - supposedly - would not include junk DNA. Which would at least be a case of ID trying to do science, except that the evidence indicates that junk DNA does exist.
You must admit that the absence of positive arguments for design is a strange omission. In the Caputo case - which Dembski uses as an example - it would be bizarre to ignore the fact that Caputo had both motive and opportunity to cheat. If Dembski was genuinely trying to describe how we identify design then how could he possibly ignore the fact that design is often considered as a positive hypothesis, and not simply a negative?
I submit that the designer Dembski wanted to argue for was God (and we know that), but he did not want to say it, and likely did not want to make arguments based on that assumption. Hence he had to avoid the topic, even at the expense of failing in his goal of identifying how we recognise design.
If that is true we must ask why it is the case. And it is likely to be - at least in part - because ID does assume that the Designer is God. Positive arguments for design are based on likely designers (which indeed may be only partly characterised). The designers intent and methods are important - and should be inferable from identified designs, indeed if ID is to produce a theory to replace evolution it must be able to make predictions about future discoveries concerning the designer’s work. That is what a theory of ID would be. That the ID movement shows no real sign of doing so - at least not in any organised fashion - is a reason why ID cannot be considered science. But if they did try tackling the issue scientifically there is a distinct risk of producing theologically unacceptable hypotheses about the Designer.
But I am not. I am pointing to ways that the idea that the Designer is God appear to have affected the arguments made. I said nothing about the motive for arguing for a designer at all.
Here is how a serious, sober, traditional encyclopedia would convey an idea:
“Many scientists have said that ID offers no testable hypotheses and therefore is not science.”
Here is how an aggressive culture warrior would convey the same idea:
“ID offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, and is therefore not science.”
You’re still missing the point I made about encyclopedias. The encyclopedia should not say: “ID is not science”; the encyclopedia should say: “A great many scientists have argued that ID is not science.”
Of course, but I assumed you would be reading my statements in a broader context. I guess I did not supply enough context to make my meaning clear. Did you read my reply to T. aquaticus, not far above, right near one of my recent replies to you? Whereas people like Ken Ham, Duane Gish, Henry Morris are Bible-focused fundamentalists, with very little of what one would call a classical liberal arts education in their backgrounds, the Discovery people, or many of them, are massively educated in philosophy, theology, history of science, history of ideas, etc. They have Ph.D.s in philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, theology, religious studies, etc. from places like Yale, Princeton, Cambridge, and Chicago. Their writings show an intrinsic intellectual interest in arguments from design outside of their possible Christian apologetic use. When Ham etc. use non-Bible-based arguments for design, it’s purely for apologetic reasons, not reflecting any pure theoretical interest in the questions. Their context is entirely “churchy”, so to speak. But if you read some of the writings of Discovery people, you can see they’ve lived and dwelt in an academic world where questions about design, chance, causality, etc. are investigated, discussed and debated for their own sake, not for their possible application to defend Christianity. I have read lots of creationist writing of the traditional kind, and I’ve never warmed to it, because even when it dips into philosophical arguments, you can feel that the only real interest is defending a literal reading of Genesis. I have never felt that in reading ID arguments. And I’m sensitized to such differences, since my doctorate was in this very area – ideas of creation and nature and teleology and so on – and was done in a secular graduate school setting.
Perhaps you have not heard me say this, if you are new here, but I grew up constantly quarreling with creationists and “Creation Science” people. I looked for them wherever I could find them, ridiculed their arguments, and preached evolution at them. (Which at the time was popularized neo-Darwinism.) I found people like Gish and Morris to be religious apologists trying to sprinkle their apologetics with a bit of cherry-picked scientific fact. They rubbed me the wrong way. If you read what I wrote back then, you’d be hard-pressed to tell my attitude apart from that of Matzke or Coyne.
When ID came along, I had not at first heard anything at all about its historical background. I heard there were these guys arguing based on biochemistry and other things that there was design in nature, and that they did not appeal to the Bible or religious faith in making their arguments. As a scholar, I was immediately interested. The first ID book I read was Darwin’s Black Box. I was delighted to read a book arguing for design that had page after page of biochemical discussion, discussions of irreducible complexity, etc., – and no arguments at all about the Bible. Nothing about Flood geology. Nothing about the earth being 6,000 years old. Nothing about a literal Adam and Eve talking to a snake in a Garden. Regardless of whether his arguments were strong or weak, it was clear to me that this guy was doing something different from Gish, Morris, etc. His writing didn’t reek of piety, and it didn’t reek of defensiveness, as theirs did. And it was along the same lines as some of the work I had done in philosophy and natural theology; Behe and I were, without any collusion, sailing down the same river in two different boats.
Later I read Dembski and Denton and Sternberg and others. Here were these guys talking about probability theory and structuralism in biology and neo-Platonic ideas of biological form – and none of it connected with tired old arguments about radiocarbon dating or alleged human footprints found next to dinosaur footprints or the like. It was an incredible breath of fresh air. Regardless of whether I agreed with particular scientific arguments made in the books (and I didn’t think all the arguments were equally good), I liked the secular spirit of them. I liked the fact that they seemed to be addressing any interested layman who happened to read them, as opposed to addressing a fundamentalist, literalist, Christian constituency.
Later on, I learned that some of the early proto-ID folks (e.g., the writers of Pandas) were involved in trying to get something like creation science into the schools, but that sort of thing never interested me. And when I saw people accusing all the ID people of this, I was puzzled, because I didn’t get that vibe from most of what I read. I later Discovered that Behe was Catholic, and not at all the sort of person who would want science classes to have debates over a global Flood, as opposed to teaching students rigorous chemistry and physics and cell biology and so on. Then I started reading Denton who clearly had no interest in teaching creationism in the schools. Then I read every scrap of news I could get about the Dover trial, and eventually, all the transcripts, and it became plain to me that Discovery had tried to dissuade the Dover Board from its actions, and that Discovery repeatedly said that ID should not be mandated by any school board.
I also read about what happened to Richard Sternberg and learned that there was a body of politically active people who were out to damage anyone who anything to do with ID, even if, like Sternberg, they weren’t actually (at the time they were attacked) writing works promoting ID, but merely editing a journal which printed one article by an ID proponent. It soon became apparent to me that a subject which, in the environment I was trained in, should have been a topic for graduate seminars among thoughtful, calm, intelligent people, had become grounds for an all-out culture war. This offended me. I became sympathetic with ID people, not so much because I agreed with all that they wrote (I didn’t), but because of the vicious way they were being treated.
Since then, most of my so-called defense of ID has not been a defense of ID arguments, but a call for fair play in the way that ID is represented. You will notice that I almost never on this site make arguments defending Behe’s arguments, or Dembski’s, etc. Almost all my objections regard the way ID and its people are being misrepresented, savaged, insulted, etc. My comments about Wikipedia are along these lines.
When I was in graduate school, we were not allowed to write against people and ideas in the tone and manner that most anti-ID literature is written. We were instructed by profs to bend over backwards to represent positions we despised in their strongest possible form, and to avoid all ad hominem argumentation (e.g., arguments about alleged motives). This was not the kind of writing I saw from the anti-ID crew, whether in books, on blogsites, on Wikipedia, etc. What I saw was angry partisanship.
I’ve been trying for about 10 years now to get people who want to argue about ID to do it the way we argued about Plato or Kant or Whitehead etc. in our graduate seminars. But I’ve been talking largely to deaf ears. The anti-ID crowd is too invested not just in their position but in their strident rhetorical stance. If one could find a neutral website, where everyone was intellectually open, one might be able to have a calm, non-polemical discussion about the possibility of inferring design in nature. But even websites which start out with the idea of being “peaceful” soon become dominated by a small number of strongly anti-ID partisans who think the website should be used to trash ID and all its proponents, rather than to learn from people who think differently and possibly meet them somewhere in the middle, as a result of constructive dialogue.
The anger you say you detect in my posts is anger directed against rhetorical injustice. If criticisms of ID restricted themselves to addressing ID arguments, I wouldn’t mind if they were thorough scientific rebuttals. It’s the tossing in of gratuitous remarks about motives, the accusations that ID people are liars and hypocrites, the deliberate attempt to misrepresent all ID proponents as creationists, etc., that have generated my anger. If I hadn’t seen with my own eyes Wikipedia editors bullying and intimidating editors who had every bit as much right to edit the articles as they did, if I hadn’t seen Wikipedia editors deliberately use the Wikipedia rules in cherry-picked ways to get the results they wanted, I wouldn’t be so angry.
There are calm, intelligent, useful critics of ID. I don’t necessarily agree with them all, but they attack substance rather than motive, and they don’t misrepresent what they are criticizing. You can find such criticisms of ID in some of the writing of Edward Feser; you can find other such criticisms in Rope Kojonen. There also used to be a website in Europe by biologist Gerd Korthof which systematically rebutted ID arguments, but always stuck to the substance, avoiding all culture war sniping. When I read these people, I don’t get angry, because they, like me, are trying only to get at the truth, not to win a culture war.
Perhaps this makes clearer to you where I am coming from.
I am not aware that any encyclopedia limits itself to such statements, indeed, you agreed with my view that accuracy is the important issue:
Presumably, then, we are meant to see the “many scientists” referred to by the “serious, sober traditional encyclopedia” as “aggressive culture warriors”. Which rather begs the question of why the “serious, sober traditional encyclopedia” is reporting their views without caveats.
So it seems to me that the “aggressive culture warrior” is the person who insists on framing the issue in terms of a culture war.
Disagreeing with a point is not missing it.
Don’t worry. The broader context doesn’t make a difference. It still wasn’t a good argument.
The level of education hardly makes a difference (although the fact that the YECs seem to be making more af an attempt to be scientific than the DI should be a concern to you).
Indeed the credentials should matter less than the output. I know that you prefer to focus on people rather than what they say - and insist on a selective presentation even there. Nonetheless the low quality of the ID output should have been an even bigger disappointment to you than it was for me.
That leaves out a lot. Sternberg was criticised for abusing his editorial position to include an ID paper that didn’t really belong in the journal he was editing - and was a revised version of a piece that had already appeared elsewhere. Sternberg produced many complaints but they hardly seem to be very substantial. His sponsor at the Smithsonian died and he didn’t like the replacement. He wasn’t allowed to keep keys he shouldn’t have had and didn’t need. He had to move office because the section was being refurbished. Sternberg, by the way was already a member of the Baraminology Research Group (although he denies being a young earther). Or in short this looks like more culture warring from the ID part of things. (Funny how we never heard much complaint from the ID side when Dembski was threatened with the sack for suggesting that the Noah’s Ark story might not be literally true).
Looks more like you’re an “aggressive culture warrior” to me objecting to criticisms of ID with absolutely no concern for fairness or truth.
I don’t think that any discussion of ID can avoid mentioning it’s weaknesses or failures.
And indeed the Discovery Institute hardly restricts itself to that level of debate. My hopes that ID would actually be an intellectually honest and responsible endeavour were shattered by the publication of Wells’ icons Of Evolution with the endorsement of the ID movement (including Behe). Discussion of the ID movement should certainly be able to mention the Discovery Institutes dishonest propagandising.
I would think that the presence of strongly partisan proponents of ID like yourself would be an equally serious problem. Indeed, is a more serious problem even here.
It seems to be more anger that people say things you don’t like.
If ID proponents make false claims - claims that they should know are false - then accusations of dishonesty are bound to follow. Likewise the deployment of obvious double standards will justifiably provoke accusations of hypocrisy. And your recitation of the credentials of ID’s leading members is hardly a defence.
My own impression is somewhat different. The creationists were certainly abusing the system to try and get the result they wanted, and past remarks suggest to me that you support that. Indeed, this seems an example of “rhetorical unfairness”
Yes. It makes it clear that you are an aggressive culture warrior who wants to suppress criticisms of ID and the Discovery Institute.
Indeed Wikipedia does not.
In fact stating that this is merely the opinion of “many scientists” would arguably be considered giving “undue weight” to ID. “Due and undue weight” comes under the following policy (and has its own section):
This is especially true as Wikipedia has already gone to the trouble of documenting the level of scientific opposition to ID:
I cannot help but think that any discussion of what Wikipedia should or should not say, uninformed by this policy, is pointless.
I am all in favor of informed discussion about how Wikipedia might be improved by people who actually understand how Wikipedia currently works. However (and this point is specifically aimed at @Giltil), I make no apology for being bluntly disinterested in the opinions of those who have no idea how Wikipedia actually works (and becoming increasingly blunt and acerbic in my disinterest, as the ignorant opinions directed at me multiply exponentially).
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.
– Harlan Ellison
I tried, in my previous reply, to soften my own tone, in response to your criticism, and I tried to give some biographical background so that you would see me less as an abstract symbol of all you hate in ID and more as a person with normal human questions. You ignored these two features of my reply and maintained the same stern and judgmental tone you have had toward me all along. Since you’ve thrown a sincere gesture at communication back in my face, I see little point in continuing the conversation. Therefore, this will be my last reply.
Many of your responses come from the list of standard anti-ID talking points. You seem unaware that they have been made a thousand times before, and that detailed replies to them are available. So there is little point in taking them up in detail. Thus, though I could show that, in your complaint that my account of Sternberg “leaves a lot out”, your account of the Sternberg case “leaves a lot out”, I’m not going to make the effort to correct your biased account – whether biased due to deliberate omission or due to ignorance of all the facts, I don’t know, and at this point don’t care.
Which is exactly what happens at Wikipedia, in the Talk pages, where anti-ID editors use Wikipedia rules selectively, and without consistency, to exclude some corrections and maintain their reversals, to get the result they want. There is no objective, consistently applied governing principle, beyond the dogma that ID is false, evilly motivated creationism, and that the articles must, if necessary by the use of omission, slanted presentation, and hot-button words, cajole the readers into accepting this. The culture-war end justifies the literary and rhetorical means.
Suppress? No, that’s the tactic of the political left, the people who have ruined modern universities, the education system, and other institutions with their speech-suppressing political correctness. I don’t suppress anyone’s view here, or anywhere else, nor would I want to. Instead of suppressing, I refute. The only thing I would wish to suppress is suppression itself.
With these words, I declare my obligation to respond to your objections – which I have done at great length and in great detail over many days – to be discharged.
Let me note that using terms like:
of people who say things you dislike, does not seem to represent much of a softening.
Then you grossly misunderstand my thinking. Can you not understand that it is your behaviour that is the problem? That continuing to act badly is not going to change my opinion? You’re not a symbol of ID to me - just an unpleasant and dishonest bully.
Indeed the rest of your post contains enough further examples of unnecessary nastiness that I feel that it is quite adequate to show that you are not the reasonable person you would have us believe.
And by all means stop replying to me, though I doubt you will be able to resist if I ever post something you take a dislike to and would like suppressed.
False. It is not necessary, and is deceptive, to portray a simple, demonstrable fact as hearsay.
Hmmm, let’s see where this leads…
Many scientists say that the earth orbits the sun.
Many scientists say that the chemical formula for water is H2O.
Many scientists say that bacteria can cause disease.
Or maybe …
Many historians say there was a Holocaust.
Many historians say there was an historical man named Jesus.
I believe Paul Nelson was critical of this sort of “truth by consensus” approach.
What was it I said above? …
…
…
Oh yeah - irony abounds.
Since several people here have brought up the “Wedge Document” and have made various charges about an alleged scheme on the part of ID people to dominate science education and many other things, I thought I would share some of my own personal experience of ID people.
I’ve met many ID people (including leaders and followers) over the years, and thus have had a chance to talk with them and get a feel for them as human beings, and not just as authors of books and articles and blogs. My overall impression of them, based on these meetings, is not of a group of people eager to control and dominate society, but of thoughtful individuals who simply don’t want to be coerced or cajoled into going along with ideas, theories, or social trends that they don’t agree with or don’t reflect their personal values. In other words, my perception is of people who perceive themselves as on the defensive, not on the attack.
In addition to personal meetings, I’ve had sustained contacts with ID people via various media, including telephone and various ways of communicating electronically. In many different venues and configurations of people, over 15 years or more, I have interacted with hundreds of ID proponents, maybe as many as a thousand, and have observed thousands of interactions of ID people with each other. I have thousands of messages, some privately addressed to me, some sent to larger groupings of interested people, in which ID people talk about their current interests, intellectual and other. So I have done an informal survey of the communications I have seen over the past 6 months, and the results are illuminating (though to me not surprising).
Of something in the range of 2000 communications, I found four (4) that could be classed as having even the most indirect relevance to teaching biology in the schools, mandating ID in the schools, etc. Two of those concerned resources for private home-schooling, and therefore did not pertain to public education. Two of them were purely historical, concerning the biology textbook that was involved in the Scopes trial. That’s 4 out of 2,000, which as a percentage is vanishingly small. Even if I caught only half the cases, or only a quarter of them, the percentage is still negligible. So the idea that the leaders and followers in ID are obsessed with the goal of changing the schools, and talk about that goal often when out of the public eye, cannot be sustained based on my observations.
Another charge, seen in this discussion, is that ID proponents are primarily motivated by religious concerns, especially creationist views, and use their claim to be doing science only as a cover for their fundamentally religious interests. If this were the case, then, when ID proponents were talking with each other, out of the public eye, one would expect that religious conversations would dominate, and scientific ones would be much less common. But this is not what I see. Out of the large number of communications I mentioned, only about a sixth or a fifth, I’d say (a quarter at most) of the conversations expressed any religious views of the participants, and even then, often only obliquely or in small part. The overwhelming majority of the topics were of a scientific nature, or of a philosophical nature (with the philosophical discussion often related to contemporary discoveries of science). Among the topics discussed have been the nature of infinity, whether free will exists, energy changes involved in protein folding, the intelligence of octopuses, panspermia, how Europeans became lactose tolerant, exoplanets, and the capacities and limitations of artificial intelligence. The discussions are often quite technical, going into biochemical, biological, or physics details. None of this indicates a group of people who are primarily interested in abusing science to defend literalist interpretations of Genesis; it points, rather, to a group of people who are interested in the latest discoveries and theories of science, and want to discuss and debate their significance.
I expect that someone here will say that my discussion here is “anecdotal,” and so it is. I cannot provide “proof” of my description. The only way I could do so would be to reveal names and contact information for people who respect my confidence when they tell me their honest thoughts, and I’m not about to do that. So if people here want to say that my observations don’t count as objective public data, that’s fine. I’m not presenting them in order to demand assent from anyone here. I’m presenting them purely to show why I don’t “buy” the picture of the ID community commonly presented here, on Wikipedia, and in many other places. I know what ID people talk about when they are among friends and their critics aren’t listening, and, I know that for the most part, it’s not what their detractors think they talk about. So it’s not out of any stubbornness or willfulness on my part when I show resistance to claims or suggestions that ID is fundamentally a sort of political or social conspiracy. That description of IDers does not match my experience of 15 years of interaction with these people.
Are there some ID people who are largely focused on altering the educational system, or making major changes in US politics or culture? Doubtless there are, but my point is that the number of such people, as far as I can tell from interaction with a good number of the leaders and a massive number of the followers, is, as a fraction of the total, very small.
Of the group of people known as “creationists” – and I refer here to those creationists who are not active participants in ID as such – I cannot speak. There are millions of YEC people, and thousands of OEC people, with whom I have never interacted and likely never will. Perhaps many of them are very active in trying to mandate the contents of high school biology classes along the lines of “equal time” for Genesis. Perhaps many of them are involved in political or social organizations to try to alter the fabric of America. I would not know; I don’t go to churches frequented by such people, and I don’t chum with them as personal friends, and I don’t have any interaction with the seminaries or colleges or organizations (e.g., Ken Ham’s) where they have their fortresses. I can only speak for the group of people (creationist and other, Christian and other) who are very active in ID and whom I’ve met or otherwise communicated with.
I can’t speak of the attitudes and interests of the rank and file of ID activists back in 1999, when the Wedge Document was produced, because I was not there, but I can speak of the attitudes and interests of the rank and file of ID activists now. And I don’t see a political-religious conspiracy, and I don’t even see a predominant interest in what’s taught in 9th-grade biology. I see people interested in studying the latest knowledge produced by physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, geology, and so on, and trying to understand the the significance of that knowledge for philosophical and religious belief, and trying to synthesize science, philosophy, and religion in a coherent way. I also see people who, based on what they talk about with their friends and colleagues in ID, are far more interested in what Newton or Polanyi or Hoyle or Gould or Conway Morris have had to say than in what a Moody Bible commentary or the notes in the Scofield Bible have had to say. And overall, what I see bears little resemblance to the description of ID in Wikipedia or in many other places.
The blogosphere and internet representation of the motives and interests of ID people is badly skewed, and the only conclusion I can come to about most of the people here who accept this representation so uncritically is that they have spent very, very little time conversing with actual ID proponents, whether in personal conversation, by telephone, or in sustained electronic correspondence.
How many of these characterize the “other side” as atheistic? Slip this in and you have turned the conversation into one of a religious nature. Not, in my estimation, obliquely, but in a way that frames things explicitly in terms of religion.
A twisted choice of words. If I write that someone said something, and provide the source in which he said it (e.g., a book with his name on the cover as the author), I’m not relaying “hearsay” about his opinion; I’m relaying his opinion. Given your objection, you might as well say that every time you cite a scientific article, you are treating the contents of the article as “hearsay.” So if Wikipedia said, “Many scientists have said that ID…” and provided notes with examples of those scientists and where they said what they said, that would not be invoking “hearsay,” it would simply be documenting the claim that many scientists said something about ID. And I’m all in favor of documenting that people said what they are claimed to have said.
Non-parallel examples. First of all, it’s not “many” scientists in your examples; it’s “all”. Second, your examples are statements of facts about nature (or in the middle case, a fact about how chemists depict nature formulaically), not disputable verdicts (I remind you of the never-solved Demarcation Problem) about, e.g., which activities count as scientific and which don’t, or, e.g., disputable theological/philosophical verdicts about whether ID is creationism. I have no problem with encyclopedias reporting facts about nature, as universally agreed upon by scientists, without a prefatory phrase such as “All scientists say that.” I do have a problem with encyclopedias reporting characterizations of theories or movements or philosophies as if those characterizations were objective facts rather than the judgments of the people offering the characterizations.
If you mean, how many of the commenters equate any endorsement of “evolution” with “atheism”, then not many. There is a wide acknowledgment of the possibility of affirming “evolution” (understood as descent with modification) without being an atheist, materialist, etc. (And many of the ID people in the discussions themselves affirm evolution in that sense.) In fact, most of the discussions of articles and books about evolution are about strengths and weaknesses of proposed evolutionary mechanisms, without any reference to the religious beliefs of the writer who is proposing the mechanisms. But if someone like Dawkins or Coyne or Dennett is presenting evolution as a weapon against religion and evidence for the truth of atheism, then yes, sometimes the charge that a writer is motivated by atheism will come up. But in such cases, the writers invited such a response, so there’s nothing improper about it.
Odd, then, that you only quoted a single word, no?
You didn’t provide a source.
Funny you should bring that up. IDcreationists tend to copy/paste quotes from scientific articles, while real scientists cite the data and analyses in those articles. You prefer the former; you claim that Michael Denton cites “lots of evidence” but are incapable of citing any of that evidence itself that is convincing. Why?
Correct, but you didn’t provide any cases.
Which would be a misrepresentation, because the thing that was said was a simple fact that does not need any attribution. Putting it in anyone’s mouth instead of simply reporting it as a fact is deceptive because it diminishes the importance of that fact.
I’m more in favor of documenting what we know to be true without diminishing it by presenting it as mere hearsay. You didn’t document anything.
That’s not what I asked. @Eddie, how often will your discussants slip in that such-and-such ID critics are atheists. NOT that they are using anti-ID claims to argue against the existence of God, but rather gratuitously mention that so-and-so is an atheist? As you are wont to do on this board.
It happens all the time. I believe your evasive reply shows this.
Fact is, for most ID proponents, it is all about religion. Their (and your) tendency to label critics as atheists proves this.
Heck, in this thread alone:
What’s an “atheist-material” anyway?
Looks like Eddie’s go-to move to me!
That wasn’t my fault. I tried to re-edit the post almost immediately after it went up, but the slow-motion mode we are in prevented the edit. My revised comment went like this:
For my response to “a simple, demonstrable, fact,” see my reply to Art Hunt, below, in this post. But for this:
This strikes me as a twisted choice of words. If I write that someone said something, and provide the source in which he said it (e.g., a book with his name on the cover as the author), I’m not relaying “hearsay” about his opinion; I’m relaying his opinion. Given your objection, you might as well say that every time you cite a scientific article, you are treating the contents of the article as “hearsay.” So if Wikipedia said, “Many scientists have said that ID…” and provided notes with examples of those scientists and where they said what they said, that would not be invoking “hearsay,” it would simply be documenting the claim that many scientists said something about ID. And I’m all in favor of documenting that people said what they are claimed to have said.
No. “ID is not science” is not a fact, but an epistemological judgment, about which much might be said. Look up “demarcation criteria” – there’s a massive literature out there on it.
And to move to another statement, “ID is creationism” is, if it belongs in the category of “fact” statements, a false statement, and if it belongs in the category of “judgments”, a debatable judgment. If the first, then the statement should not be in the Wikipedia article at all, and if the second, it requires a prefatory “Many scientists say” or “Many critics argue” or the like.
I didn’t suggest presenting any fact, either a fact about nature or a fact about what some scientists have said, as “hearsay.” You introduced that word to the discussion, misrepresenting my point.
You aren’t discussing in good faith here, by imputing “evasiveness” to me. I genuinely was not sure what you meant, so I posed a question. Instead of taking me at my word, you bark at me and accuse me of evading. You read the worst motives into my writing. (It will be interesting to see whether Paul King will chastise you for this, as he chastised me for allegedly doing the same thing.)
Using the same body of data, the 2000 messages of the past 6 months, only about 100 even mention the word “atheist”. And many of those appearances are in block-quoted material from articles written by someone else, not by the ID person writing the message. And where the ID person employs the term “atheist” in his own part of the message, it is not in all cases applied to people who defend evolution or to critics of ID. But even if we take all 100, that is only 5%. So at best 5% of the time, ID proponents, talking to teach other out of earshot of the public, complain about “atheists”.
Most of the rest of the time, they are talking about scientific books and articles they have read, most often commenting on technical aspects, but sometimes talking about the over-claiming in the articles (over-claiming not being uncommon in news releases about the latest discoveries in cosmology, paleontology, etc., and not being unknown even in peer-reviewed articles or books published by legitimate science publishers), and sometimes talking about the extra-scientific, ideological framing of some of the articles.
Based on your personal acquaintance with how many ID people, outside of confrontational settings like this?
Remember, almost every creationist will declare sympathy with “intelligent design,” so be careful not to count every creationist you know in the intellectually serious group of ID leaders and proponents that I’m talking about.
You may or may not have paid attention to a long battle I had here with a creationist, Paul Price (which earned me some “Likes” even from people who normally attack me); I imagine that when you think of IDers, you are thinking not only of Paul Nelson and Michael Behe but also of thousands of people like him. I can assure you that there are very few people like that among the hundreds of ID people I regularly converse with. When we occasionally talk about the Bible (which we don’t, too much, because determining which exegesis or theology or religion is the “true” one has no bearing on the question of design detection), the level of discourse is far higher, and far more scholarly, than anything you saw coming out of Price. Indeed, he indicated that he had scorn for all Biblical scholarship that was not produced by people like him and organizations like his. Among IDers, Biblical exegesis is all over the map, with no “orthodox” position. And we never argue about six literal days or Flood geology or anything of that sort. It has no bearing on the truth or falsehood of intelligent design in nature.
If ID were identical to creationism, ID people wouldn’t let me within a hundred feet of them. My own readings of the Bible, and my own theological position, would be deemed wildly liberal by most creationists. (Though of course wildly conservative by most of the frequent posters here.) It’s precisely because ID is not creationism (though it’s affirmed by many creationists) that a heretic (by Protestant Biblicist standards) like me is allowed to fraternize with ID people.
I don’t see what’s wrong with labeling someone as an atheist, if the person has acknowledged being an atheist, or has argued atheistically. It would be wrong, of course, to reject an argument because it comes from an atheist, just as it would be wrong to reject an argument because it comes from a Republican, a Democrat, an ID proponent, a black person, etc.
I also don’t see what’s wrong with noting general tendencies of atheists within a well-defined population of them, e.g., the atheists here and on many other “origins” sites, blogs, etc. There’s a general tendency of atheist posters to become very angry, harsh, and insulting toward ID proponents, or to impute all kinds of base motives to them, or both. The existence of the first property among several atheists here is self-documenting. The existence of the second property is also very common, being found even in T. aquaticus who, being a “friendly atheist,” does not exhibit the first.
I’m actually not at all offended by the fact that atheists don’t believe in God. Most of my best friends are atheists, de jure or de facto (the latter being “agnostic atheists”). I’m offended by a certain kind of militant atheist who insults people, bullies them in argument, and imputes all kinds of base motivations to anyone who thinks there is or might be design in nature.
Finally, I came to the conclusion that there was design in nature when I was still an agnostic, and long before I started hanging around with Christians again. I had reached conclusions parallel to Behe’s through my scholarly studies in the history of ideas, history of science, theology (studied from a purely academic, non-pious point of view), and philosophy. So for me, supporting ID was not “all about religion.” And I’ve corresponded with many ID followers with similar intellectual biographies.
Sure, lots of ID people are from very conservative, Bible-based churches, but many of them are from more liberal churches or from no church at all. ID is certainly religion-friendly, and certainly has a majority who are motivated by religion, but it is not “all about religion.” It’s a big tent of people of varying degrees of religious piety (from 100% pious down to 0%), and what it’s “all about” is reflecting on the order of nature and investigating the possibility of an intelligent mind behind the order. You’re mistaking the particular agendas of some ID proponents for ID itself.
Who did it, then? Are you claiming that someone has hijacked your account?
That’s quite a goalpost move. Don’t hurt your back!
"ID offers no testable hypotheses and therefore is not science,” IS a fact and you know it, because you can’t name a single one.
I’m sure you’d write page after page, but none of them would mention any testable hypotheses. They’re easy to find, but they are all obviously false to all but those who refuse to think about them.
I don’t need to. I’ll just note your ridiculous evasiveness in deleting the demarcation criterion of testable hypotheses from your very own quote!
Art was referring to your personal tendency. See above. You are obsessed with labeling people and credentials. Ideas and evidence, not so much.
No one is forcing you to be confrontational, Eddie.
You’re obsessed with it. It’s obviously a way to avoid addressing what other people say here, but more importantly, the evidence that they cite.