In this alleged correspondence, which you have claimed occurs daily, does the topic of advancing or testing an ID hypothesis ever come up?
It might be fruitful to divert some of the time spent corresponding to time spent doing. Just sayin’.
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Why would THAT ever come up? We are talking about ID proponents here, after all. Their working theory seems to be that any sufficiently large pile of bad arguments must have some sort of evidence in it, somewhere.
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Sorry if I wasn’t clear, it was rhetorical. They obviously don’t have enough faith to do it.
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Well, they do have the faith to move molehills, at least if somebody else brings a shovel.
It really is quite stunning, the ID thing. I have been ardently reading these books for years now, looking for somebody who’s gonna say, “I’ll take Empirical Inquiry for 500, Alex!” It just has become really clear that this is never going to happen. The arguments range from criminally naïve (“this here is really complicated, ergo, God”) to global super-criminally naïve ("functional mutations never happen!) to Dada (“polyploidy implies teleology!”). But it’s always just arguments, never evidence.
And so I have been on a pony dig. We all know the tale, do we not? A young fellow with a cruel father wants, more than anything else, a pony for Christmas. His father, filled with hate and contempt, packs a small disused barn with manure from floor to ceiling, and on Christmas morning, marches the boy out to this – his present. The boy screams with delight and dives into the manure, digging with both hands in excitement. The father did not expect this and says, “what the hell are you doing, boy?” and the boy responds, “with all this shit, there’s GOT to be a pony in here somewhere!” Alas, while a careful review of the ID literature does help to dispel some of the stench, the pony which they say has got to be in here must be one awfully small pony.
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Unless you manage to find any others - which I doubt you will - you should drop the plural permanently. You should never have used it in the first place.
Re the credibility of your suspicions, you also suspected there were only a couple of young earth creationists among the presenters. Oops.
My main point was that you were lying by omission when you said all the attendees’ questions were about scientific matters, but didn’t say that it was at the organisers’ insistence - a point you’ve since upheld.
I also note you have not responded to this:
Given your willingness to produce incredibly contorted and excruciatingly embarrassing excuses in order to escape your implication that humans descended from Paramecium, and your tendency to produce swathes of self-justifying verbiage, it’s reasonable to conclude you can’t even think of a implausible excuse for confusing firsthand and secondhand sources.
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There you go again, with reckless and inflammatory accusations of “lying”. Why are you atheists so quick to throw that word around?
I assume that, since the same small group of people is involved in these discussions here, they have very often read my previous comments on these questions. That is highly probable given that things I say here are quite often quoted and revisited (usually with polemical intent) days or weeks or months after I have said them. My arguments seem to be constantly being tracked. I previously clearly indicated the fact about the conference about which you are now saying that I lied about. At the time, I was attacked by people who mocked the conference, along the lines of “And why should scientists need to be told to keep religious questions out of the discussions?” I suspect very strongly that you were watching that exchange. If that is the case, then you knew that I had not tried to lie by omission. A charitable person would assume that when the same thing came up a second time, I didn’t see the need to repeat myself.
Your lack of charitable assumption, however, is par for the course for the atheists around here. It is one of the reasons why this site, and many of the people on it, have become odious to me. I grew up in a more genteel and civilized conversational atmosphere, more pre-war Oxford British than brash Yankee, and the tones of yahooism and thuggery here are becoming increasingly distasteful to me.
Why is it whenever someone catches you being economical with the truth you respond by calling them an atheist? Is that supposed to be an insult? Then you always follow up with half a dozen paragraphs telling us what a well educated virtuous person you are and how your flatulence doesn’t stink. 
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It’s not an accusation, Eddie, it’s a demonstration.
You’re still avoiding your faux pas re secondhand sources.
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It’s not just in reference to me. The atheists around here frequently accuse many people of being liars, including ID proponents at Discovery etc. And as for why I mention atheists so often, if the atheists don’t want me to keep noting this correlation (between being an internet blog-commenting atheist on origins questions and more frequently than most human beings throwing around accusations of lying), they should stop accusing people of lying.
How do you know they’re atheists? There’s nothing in most profiles which indicates religious beliefs. You just think of it as a way to slip in what you consider an insult. What a shining example of your religion you are.
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That “correlation” is actually not as strong as the correlation between ID proponents’ lips moving and ID proponents lying.
Unlike you, though, I do check these things out. Even when a noted scientist points the deception out, I always insist on looking over the originals. It’s not that I don’t trust them, but I do insist on a high degree of caution in making statements about an author’s dishonesty. I need to have seen it myself, so I examine what the ID proponent has said, I examine the source, and I consider the possibility of explanations other than dishonesty. Usually the required degree of incompetence turns out to be vastly too high to be plausible.
Take, for example, Jonathan Wells (who, by the way, has never minced words in his many ill-founded accusations against actual biologists). He cites that Durrett and Schmidt paper for the proposition that the maximum rate of evolution in whales involves two mutations every two million years. If you read Wells, then read Durrett and Schmidt, all charitable assumptions simply fail to the task. The only credible explanation is rank dishonesty.
But, of course, if you don’t look – as it appears you do not – then it didn’t happen.
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I haven’t investigated the case. When I do, I will consider your hypothesis as a possible explanation.
I add that even if it can be proved that individual ID proponents make dishonest arguments in some cases, that does not show that ID in itself – the detection of design in nature – is not possible.
I have been shown, to my satisfaction – I will not engage in a side argument about it here – that at least some proponents of AGW have been dishonest regarding either data or argumentation. But I do not conclude from this that the earth has not warmed or even that human beings have no role in the warming. I merely conclude that some arguments for AGW are invalid and should be set aside, and that some proponents of AGW are so politicized, so eager to get governments to adopt policies that they deem necessary, that they are willing to sacrifice scientific integrity to achieve that end.
But you won’t, because you probably can already guess that defending Wells is a fool’s errand.
Well, of course. Just because Uri Geller is sometimes caught being dishonest does not mean he cannot bend spoons with his mind. So it all turns on the evidence for ID. Oh, geez. That’s a problem.
Again: just because it ends badly every time you get in a van with a creepy man who promises to take you to a party where there is unlimited candy, this does not mean there is not a party somewhere with unlimited candy or that the next creepy guy in a van is lying. Just because the pigeon-drop scammer got you the last ten times, it does not mean he is not being honest now. Examples abound. But the extension of trust in these cases is inadvisable, to say the least.
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I can see that your trajectory is set and that you are not going to be diverted from it even a little. Have fun writing your negative reviews on Amazon. I doubt they will make more than a tiny dent in the sales of the ID books, or in the number of people who read them. In fact, the more attention you succeed in drawing to your reviews, the more people may wish to read the books to see if your comments are justified. So it may backfire on you. You may have the unwitting effect of making more, not fewer, people acquainted with ID, whereas what you really want is for people to be so uninterested in it that they don’t have any desire to read anything about it. So thanks for the free publicity!
Ken Miller and Francis Collins and BioLogos are owed a vote of thanks for this, as well. Even Larry Moran has probably causes more people to read ID writings than otherwise would have. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Please keep up your efforts to maintain ID in the public eye!
Ah, yes. I do get a laugh every time an angry creationist suggests that, by directing the attention of people to legitimate scientific literature and pointing out the crippling flaws of ID, I am helping the ID cause. I shall hope that the ID cause continues to have more and more such “help.”
Keep getting in that van! Live the dream! Surely that party exists somewhere!
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That’s what familiarity with the evidence will do. At some level, you understand that and avoid the evidence.
How about an ID explanation for why the ribosome is a ribozyme?