You have by my count misrepresented my statement by quoting it out of contextfour times.
I will therefore remind you again of what I actually said:
As you have provided no evidence whatsoever that either Meyer or Behe understand the work of their cited-sources-who-contradict-their-claims, better than those sources themselves, we in fact haven’t moved an inch forward from my original statement.
I would further note that nobody has made any even-remotely-successful attempt at demonstrating the “integrity” of the band of cranks, charlatans and/or incompetents that is the Disco 'Tute. Most of the pro-ID discourse, including yours, hasn’t even attempted this, but has rather been hand-waving aimed at distracting from this issue, rather than answering it.
You’re killing me.
I haven’t included the names because they are irrelevant to my point. And you routinely put them in. Which I don’t mind in the least. But it shows that you either misunderstand me or more likely wish to avoid my point and obfuscate.
The,
is the only part I’m concerned with.
For you to refute the part (from you in the brackets) you’d need to prove it impossible for anyone to have a fuller understanding of Charles Marshall’s work than Charles Marshall himself has.
But if you insist, have it your way (doesn’t matter to me in the least) and prove that it is impossible for Behe and/or (take your pick) Stephen Meyer to have a fuller understanding of Charles Marshall’s work than Charles Marshall himself has.
And the (regular Peaceful Science vitriolic vacuous vomit)
doesn’t begin the journey.
Logic much?
You guys slay me.
Shorn of the context of my full sentence, the pronoun “their” becomes undefined.
It becomes the vacuous statement:
who surely understand somebody’s (I don’t know who) work better than some ID-Creationist apologist
Then your “point” has nothing to do with my own point and is thus irrelevant.
My point was that Stephen Meyer, who has neither formal education, nor research experience, in Palaeontology, clearly has less understanding of that field than Charles R. Marshall.
My point was that Michael Behe, who has no research experience in the study of blood clotting and its evolution, clearly has less understanding of that field than Russell Doolittle.
That who I was talking about was a completely necessary part of my statement should be blindingly obvious.
Balderdash. In fact a complete misrepresentation of the situation.
It is completely illogical to expect me to refute my own parenthetical statement.
Proving “impossibility” is a ridiculously high bar. This is more obviously so given that “impossible” was your word, which I explicitly disavowed.
Doolittle’s and Marshall’s CVs provide prima facie evidence that they have greater understanding of blood clotting and paleontology respectively. The burden is therefore on you to demonstrate that this first impression is in some way misleading.
Given that Behe’s and Meyer’s serial dishonesty and mendaciousness, along with that of their fellow DI denizens, has been documented (both on this forum, and elsewhere) in mind-numbing detail, I find this whine hilarious.
And if we’re talking vomitoriums, I would point your attention to ID’s main cesspits: Evolution News (aka Creationist Whine and Cheese) and Uncommon Descent (aka Dembski’s Home for Wayward Sycophants).
Now, if you don’t have actual evidence to present on the superiority of Behe’s and Meyer’s understanding of the fields in question, to Doolittle’s and Marshall’s, respectively, I will leave you to hand-wave irrelevantly and ineffectively about Einstein and Covid and whatever else – because you clearly have nothing to add to this thread’s stated topic.
Classic distortion of what I’ve said. I’ve never claimed they have a superior understanding.
I do claim that even without credentials they can have insights that with legitimacy challenge the authors of paper that may be more credentialed.
As Sam Harris (a staunch atheist if not even a hater of theists - I know that is a credential of high importance to this crowd) has recently said,
“a Nobel Laureate can be wrong and a total ignoramus can be right, even if only by accident”
You are right there. The word refute should have been the word support.
You’re right. I was wrong.
I find it easy to admit that I’ve erred. Especially when I haven’t dug in. Easy peasy. I’m fallible.
So, just to be as clear as I can be on that point, here is the edited sentence,
For you to support the part (from you in the brackets) you’d need to prove it impossible for anyone to have a fuller understanding of Charles Marshall’s work than Charles Marshall himself has.
But the impossibility, to which I refer, is what you get with your,
From that it seems that you understood my sentence apart from my having used word ‘refute’ and not the word ‘support’. Good.
However if it is not a sure thing, then modify your statement to reflect what you can support and we’ve concluded this.
The burden is not on me to demonstrate something I didn’t assert.
The rest of your post, although entirely characteristic of Peaceful Science, and certainly you, has nothing to do with my comment. Go back to Sam Harris’s comment. And avoid the mention (I know you won’t be able to) of the ignoramus.
Avoid it not because I’m bothered by it, but because the first part of his statement stands as self-evident truth.
Then your hand-waving is irrelevant to my original claim of inferior understanding.
Given you “claim” this with neither specifics (as to what these purported “insights” were) nor evidence (nor even any reason to believe you have sufficient understanding yourself of the fields in question to distinguish insights from misrepresentations), your claim is both vacuous and worthless.
Yes, and Harris was raising a mere bare possibility.
That this is actually happening would be an “extraordinary claim”, and as Carl Sagan said:
Lacking such evidence, Harris’ statement is equivalent to the statement that:
even a broken clock is right twice a day
This is true, but hardly a reason to take the word of a broken clock over an unbroken one.
Another quote from Sagan comes to mind:
They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
And every evidence is that Meyer, and especially Behe (given all his many pratfalls), have far more in common with Bozo than with Columbus, Fulton or the Wright brothers.
Kindly stop quoting me out of me out of context.
I said nothing about “impossibility”, either explicitly or implicitly. I was talking about levels of understanding – and you have disavowed disagreement with my point:
Therefore “UNDERSTAND[ING]”NOT "impossibility*** NOR the mere-bare-unsubstantiated-possibility of “insights”, is what is relevant, and my comment that:
… is something that your need to rebut if you wish to cast legitimate doubt on my original statement. If you are unwilling to even try to rebut this, then I am at a loss as to why you have been quoting out of context my original statement over, and over, and over again, as your (bare, unsubstantiated) assertions can therefore have nothing whatsoever to do with it- and you’ve just admitted that all of this is just irrelevant hand-waving.
It is however completely relevant to the topic of this thread, the “integrity [or complete lack thereof] of the Discovery Institute.”
I would also point out that it was you who brought up the topic of “vomit” – a metaphor far more apt for Behe’s, Meyer’s and Evolution News’ outputs than to any criticism of them.
I’m trying to make this as easy as possible for you.
All you have to do is say that, by posting,
you didn’t mean that it was a sure thing. That it is possible, that an ID-Creationist apologist (btw, apparently, not required to be a member of DI) might have a greater understanding of a papers topic than the author of the paper.
That should be easy. Mind, it would have been easier if you’d not dug in so far. Nevertheless, (sorry for not having an atheist source for this one)
“A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on.”
That was C.S. Lewis
Edit: added the word ‘apparently’ so as to be more assuredly true.
Why would I wish to mangle and misrepresent this (admittedly out-of-context) statement of mine in this way? Particularly when you have explicitly disavowed rebuttal of it:
I am sorry that your understanding of the English language is inadequate to understand that when I wrote the word “surely”, I meant ‘with reasonably high confidence’, not 'with absolute confidence, down to the last decimal point and ‘denying even the bare possibility of the contrary’. By its dictionary definition, “surely” can mean simply “with confidence”, not only “with absolute confidence”.
In a similar manner, if I state:
Surely you are not an alien lizard-person, merely pretending to be human
… I am not claiming to be in a position to deny even the bare possibility that you might be an alien lizard-person.
Only a bare possibility, the same as the bare possibility that you might be an alien lizard-person.
Lacking any evidence in support of either bare possibility, I can with confidence (“surely”) assign them to the same wastebin as the bare possibility of the existence of Russell’s teapot.
Given the enormous differential in expertise in the fields under consideration, and the fact that no specific “insights” have even been purported, I would estimate that the probability that of Behe/Meyer misrepresenting Doolittle/Marshall’s work as somewhere northwards of 99%, and the probability that they rather had a miraculous “insight” as somewhere southwards of 1%.
Shouting this won’t make it any more relevant.
For it to have been relevant first you needed to establish an “error” in my original statement – which you have failed to do.
Thank you, but I don’t really need education from Clivy Lewis in Logic – a subject in which he appears to have no particular expertise in (and certainly one which his Apologetics demonstrates no particular aptitude for).
Merely stating that you are not claiming that doesn’t make it so.
That has been my point from the beginning, nearly 90 posts back.
Well, better late than never.
I copied and pasted it. That’s how it showed up. I don’t know how to change it.
Glad it has given you another opportunity to deliver another on-point Peaceful Science take-down.
And again! You must have a team coming up with these zingers.
How assuredly he’d have benefited from your schooling him with the likes of: surely doesn’t mean surely.
No. the fact that the dictionary (in this case the OED) states that “surely” can mean “With … assurance, or confidence” as an alternative to “With certainty” makes it so!
I’m sorry that your understanding of the English language is inadequate, but that is really not my problem.
No. you are againquoting me out of context – making the same misrepresentation of my comments that you made " from the beginning, nearly 90 posts back". The same sort of misrepresentation that Behe and the rest of the DI make, that makes people say that they have no integrity. Thank you for proving our point.
What I in fact wrote was:
Is it a substantive possibility that you are “an alien lizard-person”? No.
Is it a substantive possibility that Russell’s teapot exists somewhere in space? No.
Is it a substantive possibility that the disagreements were due to genuine insights of Behe’s or Meyer’s? Hell no!
I shouldn’t be surprised by the profound lack of curiosity on the part of ID’s supporters, when it’s the same lack of curiosity that is one of the reasons that makes genuine insights very unlikely from ID Apologists.
For your information, when you copy and paste a quote that ends up with a # symbol being pasted, you wind up with:
this
… and if you delete the # symbol before posting, you end up with:
this
All it takes is a tiny bit of curiosity about your (in this case virtual) environment. But I suppose that this presence or absence of curiosity is a difference between the scientific mind and the apologetic mind.
Surely does mean “surely” (trivially) – but “surely” can mean other things than “with (absolute) certainty”.
You’re aware that many of the people in “this crowd” are theists? Including @Mercer who has been arguing against you?
I know it’s easier to discount your opponents if you label them as “anti-theists,” but it’s rather offensive to call someone an atheist or anti-theist when they believe in the same God that you do. Misrepresenting someone else’s beliefs is not a good sign of honesty or integrity — so you’re really not helping your case for the integrity of the DI.
And on a related note I’m not a “hater of theists” and I don’t consider it important to be an anti-theist, nor do I consider theism(the belief that there is a personal God) a bad thing in and of itself.
While I do think theism is either wrong factually(not to be confused with morally/ethically), or at least poorly supported by evidence, but I don’t hate theists or even the idea of theism.
I harbor no particular ill-will against people who in my estimation are wrong or misguided about theism.
When and if I do argue against theism it is when I think those forms of theism have a negative influence on society, but I’m well aware that theism can take many forms and there are aspects of religion that I have basically no problem with(some theists are members of my immediate family).
But that Peaceful Science is a hot bed of frothing-at-the-mouth anti-theism is a convenient trope that members of the DI use to excuse their refusal to engage here.
The real problem, of course, is that many members of this board really know their stuff and will call the ID’ers out on their BS. If @Sam didn’t know that before, he sure does now.
Because ID defenders can’t contain themselves from dragging up Covid, as in @Martyhere, @Eddiehere and yourself here. You three were in fact the first to bring up the subject on this thread.
Because nature abhors a vacuum, and given that there is no evidence being presented on the “integrity of the Discovery Institute” (and if such evidence existed, you wouldn’t be reduced to hand-waving ineffectually about mere bare possibilities), so the bandwidth not spent discussing that non-existent evidence in instead being devoted to discussing what ID defenders are in fact bringing up – i.e. Covid.
Addendum: I’ve corrected this thread’s title to account for these two factors.
You are noting a dearth of scientific evidence for the claim made here,
Again, I can count on the Peaceful Science champs to know when scientific evidence is even applicable. What would scientific evidence even look like for the assertions in the above paragraph? What in that paragraph do you even dispute?
I recently noticed a pattern in @Sam’s posts on this topic:
These repetitively vacuous ad hominem attacks on this forum bring to mind the old lawyers’ aphorism:
If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table.
One has to wonder why, if this forum is so repulsive to @Sam, he persists in participating, and “pounding the table” with his own “vitriolic vacuous vomit”, here? It’s not as though he’s either winning any arguments, presenting any actual evidence, or presenting ID in a positive light.
I’m sure there are a great many forums where support for ID, Covid contrarianism, and other unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, are viewed far more positively. The only thing that could be keeping him here is some form of twisted ‘fight the good fight’ masochism.
Well, as I said earlier, the PS ecosystem seems to have an empty @Eddie -shaped niche at the moment. Someone has to fill it. IIRC, it took “Eddie” a while to figure out the quote function, as well…
nichen. … fig. A place or position adapted to the character or capabilities, or suited to the merits, of a person or thing.
One has to wonder what “character or capabilities” or “merits” it is that suits them to this hypothesised “niche”, as their shared defining feature seems to be the near complete lack of such.
