Your first sentence contradicts your second sentence.
Irony noted.
1 Like
Still dodging the question. Please provide examples of any other science where its practitioners had to be admonished to keep their religion out of the results like the ID conference did.
You’re a great spokesman for ID-Creation Eddie. Every duck and dodge and pirouette you do to avoid dealing with ID’s religious basis is great for the pro-science side. 
1 Like
In all honesty, you need to get off this book idea. It is absurd. A scientist working in the area is going to read the research, not the books. The books would be boring, because they mostly repeat what the scientist already knows.
3 Likes
Says the apparently paid propagandist for the DI. 
Eddie still hasn’t figured out reading the DI’s lies as I have done way too often doesn’t magically make the DI’s lies become true.
2 Likes
No it doesn’t, and you still are evading the fact that your reading habits are intellectually narrow. Change your narrow attitude, and we might have a discussion. I think you are one of the brighter people here, and would have valuable input in a discussion of a thoughtful book. But you want to drag me, a non-biologist, into technical discussions of specialist articles. Why? To prove how much more about biology you know than I do? That would be a cheap victory, and unworthy of you. I’m trying to get you discuss some broader concepts, but you keep trying to turn every discussion into a technical one.
This is a general website. There are lots of non-scientists here who are not going to be able to follow technical debates about cis-that and trans-that. The reason that books make a better common basis of conversation than articles is that books usually at least in part talk on a general level, so that non-specialists can get something out of them. They thus make a useful bridge between scientists, philosophers, etc. that specialist articles don’t.
If you don’t want to discuss books, then we can’t have a general conversation. If you want a purely technical conversation, have it with your biology colleagues here, not me.
False. Futuyma says you are dead wrong, that he reads lots of books on evolutionary theory, and finds some of them very useful. Did you not read what he said about Wagner’s book? “Boring” is not the word he used. You seem to be confusing popularizing books with theoretical books. I’m talking about theoretical books, not popular introductions or summaries.
It will be the case, at least in most Christian countries. Most of my fellow physicians are Christians, while most of the others Jewish or Muslim. I have never, not even once, been to a medical conference of any sort where participants had to be told not to discuss religion as part of their scientific claims.
It would very odd that this would have to be done at an ID conference, if ID was not in fact simply a form of the religious ideology known as creationism. Otherwise, it would be entirely expected.
1 Like
That’s rich.
"I see no value in discussing technical papers that are out of my field, . . . "–Eddie
Requiring someone to read hundreds and hundreds of pages in a book before you will discuss something with them is rather ridiculous.
You mean like this one?
3 Likes
This site should be about common conversation. You can’t have a common conversation without common readings. And if the readings are too technical, they exclude most from participating. Books, even theoretical books, tend to have some parts (even if only the introductions and conclusions) that the layman who knows a bit of science can grasp. They are therefore a better common ground for discussion.
No one is forcing you to read anything you don’t like. If you don’t want to read any books, don’t. But then don’t get self-righteous if I similarly refuse to read your articles.
If you like, we could restrict discussion to just part of a book. But the question still arises why you avoid reading scientific books like the plague, when Futuyma tells you that some of them are very valuable. Your mindset about books is completely alien to me – and completely alien to most past scientists, up to maybe 40 years ago or so. All the great pioneers of neo-Darwinism – Huxley, Mayr, Dobzhansky, Gaylord Simpson – wrote theoretical books (often many), and read theoretical books regularly, in addition to keeping up with the journal literature. Gould read books voluminously. Your aversion to theoretical books is a recent development in the scientific world, and in my view, not a good development.
Books that are hundreds of pages long also exclude most from participating.
How scientists think does appear to be foreign to you. It is interesting that @swamidass has the same thoughts on this topic that I do:
“Most of what scientists do entirely ignores book. The vast majority of scientific work is not books, and when it is, it is years too late to be useful to our practice in most cases.”–Joshua
@swamidass goes on to say that books are only rarely helpful to scientists. You may think they are amazing, but most scientists find books on science to be much less important than technical papers.
3 Likes
It would validate that a mind is a mechanism that can build a complex biological trait. Just as the eclipse experiment validated that sufficient amounts of matter can curve space-time.
It wouldn’t validate a mind with no physical mechanism created extant complex biological traits.
2 Likes
Not if they are books that people keenly interested in origins issues (which everyone here is) would spontaneously want to read anyway, and not if they are books that professional biologists who declare reverence for the judgment of Futuyma would spontaneously want to read anyway. It stuns me that you haven’t already read Wagner’s book, or at least put it on your must-read list. And anyone who has the time to participate 20 hours or more per week on these sites (as you evidently do) has time to read a book in his field which not particularly technical, such as Denton’s. You could read Denton’s book in the time you invest in one week of debating here, and it’s not as if it’s on a topic that doesn’t interest you. It’s right in the heart of what you claim to be interested in. You shouldn’t read it to please me or to be able to converse with me; you should read it if you want to be familiar with the best case for front-loaded intelligent design. It’s not as if I’m suggesting you go out and read a book on cost accounting or nuclear physics or feminist theory. It’s at the heart of your declared interests, man!
But as you please. I’m done debating this subject. Read or don’t read whatever you want, but I have no intention of reading technical articles filled with terms I’m not very familiar with and population genetics equations I can’t follow because my math is too rusty, so that you can ask me for my opinion on their conclusions and then, if I manage to cut through the Greek and make some sense out their non-layman-friendly exposition, tell me my opinion is wrong. That would prove nothing. If we can’t read something we can both understand (if not in all details, at least on the main points) we can’t have a conversation.
I’ve put my heart and soul into mastering the ID and TE literature, for over 10 years now. It seems that a lot of people here don’t want to really read that literature, but just pick up quick summaries of it (often from biased sources) so they can then gab about it, and make snap judgments, without real understanding. I’m looking for conversation partners who have the same commitment to mastering the material as I do. Maybe you’re not that person. If so, no hard feelings. I think you’re a bright guy, and probably a very nice guy, too, but we don’t seem to hit it off, intellectually, so rather than engage in frictional exchanges, let’s just call it a day.
I think there are any number of people within the ID movement capable of separating religious from scientific reasoning. Todd Wood isn’t part of that but even as a YEC he seems capable of keeping the spheres separable with regard to his scientific work. But I also know there are a number who can’t (e.g. Cornelius Hunter or Phillip Johnson). I also think a number of atheists with metaphysical pre-commitments in the other direction. But we can’t paper over these issues as if they don’t exist.
Right now, were I part of the ID scientific movement, I would be very active in turning the ‘big tent’ into a much smaller one and a bit worried that it hasn’t gotten to that pruning stage yet. It’s ultimately necessary and when it finally reaches that point, it’s going to really bend a lot of peoples’ noses out of shape, especially those wedded to specific religious assumptions.
1 Like
I didn’t care who was a young earth creationist and who wasn’t. I was there to hear the scientific discussion. I never buttonholed people and ask them what their religious beliefs were. So I never made a count. That’s why it surprises me that you were so sure how many were YECs. I was there, and never picked up that information, and you weren’t there, so how could you know? Even if you did somehow get a program, what did you do, spend hours on the internet and making phone calls to find out the religious beliefs of each presenter? You must have a lot of time on your hands, if you went to such lengths.
Generally speaking, the leadership of the ID movement tilts more to OEC than YEC. If I had to conjecture, then I would conjecture that same was true at the conference I’m speaking of, so your number of “half” would be too high. Of those I know well enough to be sure, I counted only two YECs, but there could have been several others. I doubt it was as much as half. But it doesn’t matter. YEC was never discussed at the meeting. OEC wasn’t discussed. The conversation was about the pros and cons of various computer simulations of evolution, about factors other than DNA that control development, about holistic understandings of organisms and meta-organisms, and so on. An objective visitor from Mars wouldn’t think there was anything about religion in anything he heard.
In contrast, if you went to a BioLogos conference, theology would have been a constant presence in all the papers and the discussion afterward.
As a wise man once said, all predictions are hazardous, especially those about the future. I can’t say what ID will become over the next 10 years. At the moment it is an idea that attracts creationists and evolutionists alike.
Of course, Hunter’s view is that it is the “evolutionists” (in his usage of the term, which is different from mine) are the ones who conflate religious and scientific reasoning. He thinks that all the decisive argumentative moves that “clinch” evolution are theological, or at least metaphysical, and don’t spring from good empirical science. You will have to take this argument up with him, on his blog site.
Followed by
Open mouth, insert foot. 
2 Likes
Sadly, Hunter is enthralled to a single meme. It’s an unfortunate condition.
1 Like
Do you spontaneously want to read this book?
1 Like