Rubbish. I have been reading about creationism for over 50 years now. I have been studying ID for about 15 years. And I wasn’t even discussing, let alone affirming or denying, any similarities between YEC and ID. John Harshman and I were talking about the differences between YEC and OEC. If you’re going to jump in on other people’s discussions, at least make sure you’re with the program.
Thank you.
But it can’t guarantee to always find the true positives – especially when the route to the true positive on some questions may be outside its methodological competence.
A number of scientists with far greater scientific accomplishments than you don’t think so. So you’re not speaking for “science” when you make that judgment, but only for yourself.
All right, I believe you; but your general attacking tone and apparently materialistic, reductionist lines of argument give the impression that you do have such a gut feel. I’ll have to go with what you say, rather than on how you sound.
Yes, you will. 
“Outside of it’s methodological competence” is just weasel-words for unverifiable blind imagination. Let’s be more honest: Unknowable things are unknowable, and so can only be believed by blind faith. You’re welcome to admit that’s what you’re doing of course.
Ahh it’s the vacuous appeal to credentials. I’m sure they’re impressed by those in the church basement. Suffice it to say I have already laid out a counter-argument that exposes how it doesn’t even solve the problem that forms the basis of the argument in the first place, as it just shifts the improbability of the “coincidences” back to a particular conception of a designer. Since there is no good comeback to this, the argument is exposed as completely ineffective.
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I never discuss these matters in church basements, or any other part of a church building. I discuss them with academics, with scientists, etc., via e-mail and the internet.
The point is not that because other scientists surpass you in scientific knowledge and accomplishment, they are necessarily right. They could be wrong. The point is that a lab assistant (which is what your handle seems to indicate you are) with even a modicum of intellectual or scientific humility, cognizant of the fact that senior scientists who have thought about the problem for many more years than he has, have come to different conclusions, might do well to listen to what they say with more patience and tolerance, before declaring that he is the only one who can think straight about these issues, and that his conclusion is the only rational one possible. But I have not found intellectual or scientific humility a very common quality among science-trained people who blog on the internet about origins questions.
Here is an example of what I was just talking about – massive overconfidence that dismisses opposition. How do you know there is no good comeback, unless you have read and carefully studied the best of the fine-tuning arguments? Do you expect us to believe that you have read all versions of fine-tuning arguments?
Lots of people want to close down debate on all kinds of things, by saying “there is no good comeback to this.” On another thread, Glenn Morton seems convinced that there is no good comeback to his harmonization of Genesis with paleontology. “I have not seen a convincing response to X” would be a less grandiose claim than “There is no good comeback to X.”
Really? Then how could you not notice that the conference at Cornell you attended included many presentations written by young earth creationists?*
Unless you’re inflating your knowledge and experience again, and “* reading about creationism for over 50 years now*” means you’ve read a couple of dozen papers spread over that time.
*Including but not limited to Andrew McIntosh, Jorge ‘welcher’ Fernandez, John Oller, John Sanford, John Baumgadner and Robert Compton.
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I of course knew that some Young Earth Creationists were there. I did not know what percentage of the total body of presenters were YECs, because I did not personally know most of the speakers beforehand and had not read anything about their religious positions; nor was it relevant for me to find out at that particular moment, since their papers did not appeal to YEC religious positions, but dealt with scientific questions.
But of course your question is set up in the framework of massive illogic; there is no contradiction between “knowing a great deal about forms of creationism” and “knowing which people, in a roomful of mostly strangers, reading papers that did not concern their religious views, were particular kinds of creationist.” I can know a great deal about the policies of the Democratic Party without knowing, in a roomful of strangers reading papers on home canning, which of them are Democrats.
By the way, if you object to people who “inflate their knowledge and experience,” I hope that the next time biologists or biochemists here (or in one case, a Classics major who hasn’t taken science since 10th grade) write about global warming as if their training gives them the ability to referee between scientific specialists in the relevant earth sciences, physics, etc., you will jump and remind them that they shouldn’t exaggerate their abilities. Thanks in advance.
Argument from authority is so much more effective when you don’t mention the authority.
Yawn.
My confidence is entirely appropriate in light of the total impotence of what you’ve brought to this discussion so far. You are the one who started waving your hand in the direction of “15 billion anthropic coincidences” earlier.
No, I’ve only read the ones advanced by people like Luke Barnes (I’ve read some of his papers too) and regurgitated by William Lane Craig, and similar versions thereof discussed among physicists and philosophers.
They all at bottom amount to the same thing though, which is that something is taken to be unlikely on naturalism if naturalism entails that the values of the physical constants, or initial conditions of the universe, just obtained by a “chance coincidence”. As in there is some extremely large allowed parameter space from which each of these quantities is essentially drawn from, at random. So God is posited to solve the problem of it’s low likelihood. Because if there was a designer with the capacity to design and create universes, that wanted to make a universe with life, it could have deliberately picked one subset that would allow life to exist, out of values from this huge range the vast vast vast majority of which would make life impossible.
ALL fine-tuning arguments I’ve seen essentially reduce to this. The improbability of life-giving universes on naturalism(which is taken to be essentially just “chance”), and then the designer(God) solution. Is yours different? Doesn’t look like it.
There are some nuances about what the naturalistic hypothesis could be that accounts for the values of the physical constants and initial conditions(besides merely being compeltely randomly pulled from all possible “allowed” values), such as a multiverse, and I’ve seen the responses theists (and some physicists and philosophers) have to those, and they generally take the form I explained earlier. It is posed that these putative naturalistic solutions (such as some deeper physical structure that gives rise to fine-tuning, or a multiverse) themselves either require fine-tuning(deeper structure arguments are typically responded to in this way, by saying some underlying physical theory that gives rise to the fine-structure constant, for example, itself must be fine-tuned to yield this exact value) and thus doesn’t solve the problem, and with with respect to the multiverse the retort usually amounts to the statement that there’s no evidence for the multiverse.
I notice that rather than actually bringing a different fine-tuning argument, or providing a rebuttal to my counter-argument, you’ve elected to “wax lyrically” about my credentials, and make the endlessly fatuous bluff about how I couldn’t possibly have read all possible fine tuning arguments ever.
Look Eddie, you’re just not that impressive I’m sorry to have to tell you. Yes, this low-grade internet nobody lab-assistant is exposing your Religious Studies and Natural Theology degree for it’s full worth: Absolutely squat.
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Exactly my reaction to your repetitive and dogmatic postings.
I’m not concerned with whether any of my opponents here regard me as impressive. I am not writing these posts for their benefit. I am writing for those who have not yet made up their minds on these issues.
That’s not what you wrote before:
"Of those I know well enough to be sure, I counted only two YECs, but there could have been several others.
Doesn’t matter. If you had in fact been reading about creationism for over fifty years, you should have recognised their names.
Maybe not, but there is a contradiction between “knowing a great deal about forms of creationism” and not knowing the names of those who promote them.
I dare say that if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended your conference on home canning, you’d know she was a democrat regardless of what she actually talked about.
I note that you’ve not only admitted once more that the arguments of YECs and IDers are indistinguisable, you’re also trying to pretend that “biological information” is as (ir)relevant to origins as “home canning” is to political platforms.
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Ouch.
A number of physicists who rank at the very pointy top of recognition and accomplishment, reject on some level the FTA - including Susskind, Weinberg, and Hawking. So Rum, pathetic as his accomplishments may be, is at least in the very best of company.
Of course, expertise does not mean one gets the final word in science, only the weight to be taken seriously.
Dead wrong. Many of the presenters were very young, only in their twenties, and hence were in diapers or not born during most of those 50 years (more like 40 years, back then). And many of them had published nothing on creationism, or at least nothing widely known, so there is no reason why I should have known them. And of course, since many of them were grad students hoping for academic jobs later on, they weren’t shouting out loud any creationist beliefs they might have. They weren’t about to come up to me, a stranger, and say, “Hey, Eddie, I’m a YEC; what’s your position on the Chicago Statement and the Flood?”
I knew the names of many leading creationists: Ken Ham, Duane Gish, Henry Morris and others. I had read enough of such people to know the main outlines of creationist arguments. But the conference wasn’t about creationism, so why would I be thinking about it?
They’re very distinguishable. YEC is premised on a literal-historical reading of Genesis, ID is not. I could easily have distinguished YEC-slanted papers, if any had been presented, but none were.
Not at all. Biological information is very relevant to origins. But one doesn’t have to know the theology of a person presenting a paper on biological information, in order to understand the arguments of that paper. Information theory is not grounded on religious premises.
I don’t deny that. But the fact that scientists of equal ability do accept fine-tuning arguments should give a young lab tech pause, before he dismisses them with a wave of his hand. I’m not arguing that anyone’s view should be accepted on authority, but only against scientific pipsqueaks being cocksure that they are vastly superior thinkers and reasoners to scientific giants. As I said, a little intellectual humility on the part of minor-league scientific researchers who blog on sites like this would be appropriate.
None of those objections apply to any of the YECs I mentioned (Andrew McIntosh, Jorge ‘welcher’ Fernandez, John Oller, John Sanford, John Baumgadner and Robert Compton)…
I suspect you know this.
If you really had been reading about creationism for more than 40 years, those others would have included Baumgardner, McIntosh, Fernandez, Compton and Sanford.
Because many of the presentations and papers were written by young earth creationists, whose names you would have recognised from your 40+ years of reading about the subject. .
You couldn’t distinguish them when they didn’t mention God.
Yes you did. You compared “home canning” at a gathering attended by democrats to biological information at a gathering attended by YECs and IDers.
You appear to be deaf. I told you long ago that at the time I had not the slightest notion of the religious views of any of those people, except for Sanford. Nor are any of those people, even Sanford, major YEC thinkers, even if they are half-decent scientists who happen to be YECs. I haven’t made a point of reading every second and third-string YEC theologian or every scientist who happens to be YEC. I’ve read enough to know the broad outlines of the YEC position.
No, they wouldn’t. Those others are historically unimportant within YEC thought compared with Morris or Gish. And in terms of philosophical formulation, the ones I have since learned more about (Fernandez and Sanford) aren’t in the same league as bright YECs like Paul Nelson. I don’t have time to read minor-leaguers and repetitive epigones. Life is too short. One doesn’t need to listen to 500 John Philip Sousa marches to get the feel of a Sousa march, or to 300 ragtime tunes to get the feel of ragtime. Half a dozen of each, or even fewer, suffices.
You appear to have an unhealthy obsession with YECs and their ideas. I pay very little attention to them, since I disagree with much of their science and much of their theology. I do have tremendous respect for Paul Nelson, and for a handful of other serious YEC thinkers I know personally. That handful really know their stuff, and I’ve learned from them. But they play absolutely no role in my attraction to ID. In fact, quite the opposite. As a young person, I hated “Creation Science” with a passion. I was attracted to ID when it came along because it wasn’t “Creation Science.” If any papers had been read at Cornell that involved Creation Science, I would have tuned them out and done crossword puzzles. But none were. Most were graduate-level computer science or biology stuff that I had to concentrate hard to follow. If a stranger walked into the middle of most of the papers, and didn’t know the speaker was an ID proponent, he would think he was at the usual dull scientific conference on technical matters. That’s what it was like. And if you don’t believe me, I couldn’t care less. Why should I care what you think?
You couldn’t distinguish a correct equation by atheist Larry Krauss from the same correct equation by John Polkinghorne, either. Neither equation would mention God. Is there something sinister or wrong about such agreements in scientific conclusions between people of differing religious views? Are you saying that Krauss’s math is suspect – is really closet Christianity – if it agrees with Polkinghorne’s? Is this “guilt by association” – that if an ID argument happens to agree with a YEC argument, the ID argument is automatically invalid, because YEC (in your view) sucks? What’s your point, other than to generally cast mud on ID and use the proximity of YECers to ID as your excuse? Wouldn’t someone competent concentrate on trying to refute ID arguments, instead of trying to undermine them in an ad hominem way, which is what you’re doing here? (Look up ad hominem if you don’t recognize this.)
That doesn’t change the fact that there was already mountains of evidence supporting Darwin’s theory. Romanes’ article lists that evidence.
Darwin’s description of his theory was descent with modification. That is exactly what Romanes discussed.
Descent with modification was confirmed by the evidence Romanes discussed.
So says the person who extols the virtues of archaic philosophy written in 300 BC.
You should read it because it contains evidence for Darwin’s theory.
The last of my irony meters just exploded.
I have yet to see how Greek designs fell into a nested hierarchy.
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No, that’s not correct. He did indeed call the process we call “evolution” a process of descent with modification. But his theory was not just the affirmation of the existence of a process of descent with modification, but included a mechanism (well, several, but natural selection the most important of them) for how descent with modification could produce new species (and other taxonomic levels). In fact, the descent with modification part wasn’t new with Darwin, but had been proposed by others before him, some of whom he acknowledges; further, it wasn’t the part on which he put the most stress. Natural selection received the most stress. The mechanism is what he puts up front, in the first four chapters of his book; the arguments for common descent are put in the back pages. And it was precisely the Darwinian emphasis on selection that was disputed by a number of biologists during the several decades after Darwin, until the synthesis of Darwinian selection with Mendelian genetics ended the attacks.
In other words, the part of Darwin’s theory that wasn’t peculiarly Darwinian, but was shared by others who were non-Darwinian.