I certainly did provide a quotation where Tim had done so. I shoved it right in front of your nose. You would not address that quotation.
Recently, Tim has made the claim even more clear and precise:
“Behe has asserted (not just implied) his intelligent designer God has intervened in natural processes.”
“Asserted” means “stated”, and that means the same as “explicitly stated,” since a “statement” is inherently explicit, at least in the prose contexts we are talking about (science, philosophy, theology). The actual word Tim used is immaterial; his contrast with “not just implied” makes his meaning crystal-clear.
So now you know what Tim meant – whether he used the phrase “explicitly stated” or “asserted” or some other synonym. I have therefore established that Tim made the claim that I said he did. I did not lie.
If you try to do some hair-splitting about the meaning of words to try to put me in the wrong, I’m not interested in any such desperate special pleading. Tim said what he said, and you know what he intended by his words.
Whether you admit that you have made an error is irrelevant to me. I do not expect such admissions from most of the atheists here, since they have no track record of admitting errors on even the smallest points. But it would look much better on you if you admitted your error, bowed to the direct quotation, and then dropped the subject. The direct quotation will stand there for as long as this website endures, and no amount of sophistry can erase it.
I made no such claim. I limited my comment to the atheists – and not even to all of them, since I pointed out that some were more gentlemanly than others. Further, Joshua does not “violently bash” people, so I wouldn’t have been speaking of him in any case.
It is true that some people other than atheists engage in violent bashing of ID people here, but it was only the atheists who do so that I was speaking of, as context should have shown you.
Exactly. I asked for a quote in which Tim, or anyone else, explicitly stated that Behe had “explicitly stated” God has intervened in natural processes.
You didn’t provide one.
Thanks for your honesty. Such as it is.
Oh but you are, Eddie, you are. It’s almost all you do.
That purely petty evasiveness. You know what Tim meant by the word “asserted.” And you know that I correctly characterized what Tim meant; and if you are listening in good faith, you know that the point of my claim was not that Tim had used the words “explicitly stated” but that he conveyed the meaning of those words, in the word “asserted.” Only someone who wanted to win the argument at any cost would try to rescue himself from error by such a childish evasion.
You’re like a little kid arguing in the schoolyard who always has to be right. When I tried to weasel out of admitting I was wrong by resorting to technicalities such as the one you are employing, all my teachers (and all my peers), from the very early grades on up, shamed me for being so petty. But I guess your teachers rewarded you for such behavior, because you are still engaging in it as an adult.
“He [Behe] had a momentary lapse of scholarly rigor in a high-pressure courtroom situation, confronted by a hostile lawyer about articles he had never seen.”
From the Dover transcripts you claim to have voraciously read:
Q. Now, you were here when Professor Miller testified?
Eddie means that Behe had never “seen” them, in a spiritual sense, with the eye of faith. That should haven been transparently obvious to you from what he wrote!
I agree that the most important discussion about Behe should be about contents rather than what exactly he personally believed or said. But that doesn’t excuse mispresenting what he said. And in any case, talk about Behe and ID etc. doesn’t belong on this webpage. The topic was the definition of creationism in popular discourse. And as happens so often, the usual group of people has contrived to knock the subject off topic and argue about Behe, Discovery’s allegedly nefarious doings, etc. It’s the same old game. A number of the same people hijacked most BioLogos columns for this purpose, and they’re doing it again here.
I really think this website, Peaceful Science, would greatly benefit if three new columns could be started up, with the following titles:
1 – Why ID Sucks
2 – Why Discovery Sucks
3 – Why Behe Sucks
and adopted a rule that all posts along these themes had to go into one of these areas. That would free up other threads to stay on topic, and not degenerate into the usual bellicose free-for-all, as this one has done.
Would some moderator please kill this discussion? No one is going to talk about the subject above, so the plug should be pulled.
Yes, you did, and you repeated it several times, except that you used the word “asserted” instead of “explicitly stated”; the content of your claim about Behe was exactly the same, and the meaning was exactly the same. I’ve reproduced your quotations several times already, and won’t bother to do it again.
Wrong again. I wasn’t pretending to quote your exact words when I reported what you said. I said that you said that Behe explicitly stated that intervention had happened. I didn’t say, “Tim said, ‘Behe explicitly stated that intervention had happened’.” I was reporting the essence of what you said. And the essence of what you said was that Behe stated that intervention had happened. Nothing in the paraphrase misrepresents the meaning of “asserts.” The OED, Merriam-Webster and Roget all agree that “assert” means “state” (sometimes with the sense of stating confidently or forcefully, but I did not insist on that, which would have made your overclaim about Behe even greater). “Explicitly” is redundant in front of “state” but it’s not wrong. There was no misrepresentation of your meaning, and therefore no dishonesty and no lie.
More important, you do admit to using the verb “assert”, which you explicitly contrasted with “imply”, and since you could not provide a single example of where Behe asserted rather than merely implied, you failed to substantiate your claim. So your statement, even within the restriction of your own choice of verb, was a gun filled with blanks.
So you’re trying to duck out of admitting what you said, on a technicality which fails because I didn’t claim to be quoting you verbatim, and even if we use only your exact words and not my paraphrase, the statement you made was false, or at best undocumented by you. A failure on your part, all around.
Don’t you get tired of getting thumped by me, every time we clash?
You don’t understand the distinction between direct quotations and indirect statements employing “that.” Once one goes into indirect statement, one is no longer assumed to be necessarily repeating exact words.
If Donald Trump says, “My wife and I had a quarrel,” and I report (without quotation marks) that Trump said that he and his wife had an argument, I am not doing anything dishonest or unscholarly in replacing “quarrel” by “argument,” because in context people would understand that the two terms were equivalent. And that’s all that I did when I used “stated explicitly” instead of “asserted.” It’s permitted in normal English style in indirect speech. Your only grounds for protesting inaccuracy would be to show that there was a substantial difference in meaning between the two terms, and your only grounds for protesting dishonesty would be to show that I recognized such a difference and was deliberately employing it to mislead readers here. But I recognize no such difference, so at the worst it would be an error in choosing a synonym, not willful dishonesty. And in fact it’s not even an error, and the only crime I’m guilty of is redundancy, since “explicitly” could have been left out.
Report me if you like. No just jury could say that I substantially misrepresented your meaning.
