Marty's testable ID hypothesis

[Paul_King]

Eddie must throw his little barbs - false as they are.

@Eddie

The one arrangement that isn’t fair, and is a complete non-starter, is the arrangement in which Christians and other IDers are expected to debate like Oxford gentlemen, whereas their atheist foes get to fight like New York street gangs of the 1950s. This is apparently the set of rules Paul King would like to see in place, but it ain’t gonna happen.

I have never said any such thing only opining that Christians should be behaving a little better than the non-Christians. I certainly do not advocate anyone fighting like “New York street gangs of the 1930s”.

To illuminate the actual situation on this board I will explain why I called Eddy a shameless liar.

I when replying to Eddie’s point that we did not need to know the motives of the pyramid builders I neglected to mention their actual motive of building tombs, seeing it as irrelevant. When Eddie objected I repeated that I considered it irrelevant - after all if we don’t need to know the motive it can’t matter what it is.

Eddie responded thus:

@Eddie

You accuse me of being “arrogant” because I am supposedly “dismissive” of a multiverse (though I didn’t “dismiss” it without giving reasons), but then you dismiss a point I made (with honest intellectual intentions) as “irrelevant.” Aren’t you, by your own standards, being “arrogant” for sweeping aside my point as “irrelevant,”

In fairness I did give Eddie more than one chance to explain what point he meant - specifically asking why the intended use as tombs was so important.

When Eddie finally replied we got this:

@Eddie

Your argument seemed to be that one needed to know the motive of the designer in creating the world, before one could say that the world was designed. In my parallel, the motive was “to have a grand tomb for the Pharaoh.” My point was that even if we did not know that motive (or any other motive) for building the Pyramids, we could infer that the Pyramids were designed. We don’t detect design by using motives; we detect it by the arrangement of parts. A guillotine might be used to slice meats, or to behead political enemies; we don’t need to know what the motive is to determine that the guillotine is a designed object.

Note that there is absolutely no mention of why it mattered that the ancient Egyptians particular motive mattered at all.

To add insult to injury Eddie continued:

@Eddie

I would have considered a reasonable response to be: “I grant you that in the case of the Pyramids and in most other cases we do not need to know anything about a designer’s motive in order to infer design; however, I think the case of the universe is different in important ways from the usual case, and here is what I think the key differences are…” That would have been tonally constructive, and also would have moved more directly to the conceptual issues, allowing you to skip discussing historical facts about Egyptians and their construction methods, which historical facts didn’t affect the “motive” question I was addressing.

In fact my actual reply was this:

@Paul_King

I don’t choose motives because they are essential knowledge I choose them because they are at least potentially accessible when we have no independent knowledge of a candidate designer and are usable to make predictions.

Which seems close enough to me. It certainly is focussed on the conceptual issues rather than the details.

Now I will admit that maybe I was a little too hasty and maybe Eddy believes the obviously false excuses he invents to try to cover his errors and pretend that he is the “good guy” in this. But that is hardly any less disruptive to discussion, and suggests either delusion or a cavalier disregard for fairness and truth.