The Argument Clinic

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@lee_merrill

But scientific papers can point to God, if the conclusion of the paper is that the universe had a beginning.

The universe having a beginning does not point to ‘God’. At best it points to something causing that beginning. Any links to ‘God’ are your own unjustified assumptions.

And arguments use evidence, …

Yours don’t.

[Roy (34-year veteran)]

@lee_merrill

Well, the production is the point of control, and I reiterate, “would you take a parachute that was produced solely by non-reasoning processes?”

I reiterate this:

@Roy

Poppycock. Parachutes work whether produced by reason or not. There’s absolutely no reason why a parachute produced entirely by machine wouldn’t work, parachutes “produced by reason” often do not work, and here ’s a device not intended as a parachute that works as one anyway.

and point out that deleting an answer already given and re-asking is dishonest.

@Roy

Your ‘reasoning’ leads to the conclusion that one cannot walk across a natural stone bridge or use a tree branch as a swing support because they weren’t produced by reason and so weren’t imbued with those functions.

But I’m not saying that we cannot find usefulness in naturally produced objects. Doing so involves reasoning.

You did say that. You said we could not use something as e.g. a parachute unless it was produced by reason. You are now saying that we could use a naturally produced object as e.g. a parachute.

It’s not my fault you’ve contradicted yourself in back-to-back posts.

[John_Harshman]

@lee_merrill

We never admit any exceptions to this rule in real life, though, as C.S. Lewis noted. If we know that delirium produced the claim that there are spiders on the wall, we do not even bother to look for them.

You should never rely on C.S. Lewis for good reasoning, though he’s a better example of your point than delirium. Sorry, but your premise isn’t supported. You can’t equate insanity with all physical processes.

@lee_merrill

I just reversed and negated the components of the first statement, which I think is a self-evident statement. I.e. if A implies B, then not B implies not A. No circles are involved.

The first statement isn’t self-evident. It isn’t even evident. And that’s not the circular part. You consistently misread and/or ignore my points.

@lee_merrill

Now that would be arguing in a circle, you have to assume the validity of reason in order to evaluate it empirically.

You have to assume that certain basic reasoning processes do work in order to evaluate your reason in any way, empirically or not. You must assume that too, so have you not agreed that you are arguing in a circle? But given that basic assumption, the real world offers checks on reasoning which your “pure logic” does not.

[Puck_Mendelssohn]

@John_Harshman

You should never rely on C.S. Lewis for good reasoning, though he’s a better example of your point than delirium.

I find that relying on C.S. Lewis as an example of delirium is frequently right on the mark.

[Faizal_Ali]

Hi, @lee_merrill. I don’t believe you responded to my comment below. If you did and I just overlooked it, my apologies.

@Faizal_Ali

@lee_merrill

Yes, the validity of reason is a postulate, but we can see that reason coming from non-reason is invalid, just as a paragraph typed by monkeys would be a curiosity, but not to be taken seriously.

Suppose a monkey types out a formula for medication that is claimed to cure all cancers. We test it and find that it works. Humanity could now be rid of cancer if we use this drug.

How should we respond to this? Should we conclude that the medication actually doesn’t work, because it was designed by a monkey, and therefore not use it? Or should we conclude that the monkey is able to reason sufficiently well to type coherent sentences and create a cure for cancer?

[Dan_Eastwood]

Setting slow mode at 15 minutes between comments. It might get longer.

[John_Harshman]

@lee_merrill

Because if non-reasoning causes produce reason, there is no reason to trust our reason.

@lee_merrill

By the rule of logic, then, if there is reason to trust our reason, then reasoning causes produced reason.

These two are indeed the same syllogism, but in each case the assumptions are unsupported. The logical connection between “non-reasoning causes produce reason” and “there is no reason to trust our reason” has not been made. The case that “there is reason to trust our reason” has not been made except by claiming that God made us that way, but the evidence that God made us that way is supposed to be that we can trust our reason. And that part is most certainly circular.

[Tim]

@Eddie

A petty, caviling objection to my point.

Given that your “point” gave every appearance of being nothing but yet more of your signature petty point-scoring, I find this rich.

@Eddie

I was perfectly aware that Rumraket was quoting someone else, and I’m also perfectly aware that someone can quote something without agreeing with it.

So you were willfully misrepresenting @Rumraket? Why am I not surprised.

@Eddie

But context strongly suggested that Rumraket thought the procedure recommended by Scott Minnich was good.

Yes, and even a broken clock is right twice a day.

That a Discovery Institute Fellow gets something right once every few years is hardly a ringing endorsement.

I cannot help but notice a pattern here. Scott Minnich gets a passing mention in a quote, so @Eddie makes a song and dance about it. Francis Collins mentions Fine Tuning, so @Eddie has to make it about Michael Denton (in spite of every evidence being that few outside the ID-Creationism echo chamber would associate him with Fine Tuning – it is also amusing to discover how much Eddie likes to talk about Denton). When somebody points out that a virology postgrad (now virology doctorate) demolished Michael Behe’s claims about the subject, @Eddie calls her “an arrogant young twit”.

I would venture to suggest that it might be appropriate to replace Eddie’s sobriquet of “Religious Studies and Natural Theology” (claiming expertise he has never substantiated) with “the Discovery Institute Fellows’ biggest fanboy” (which he seems to substantiate with every other breath).

@Eddie

And it was offered in the spirit of play, the joke being that one of the inveterate disrespecters of ID scientists around here had (perhaps unwittingly) paid a Dover Trial witness a scientific compliment. I was trying to get a smile out of people. But apparently wit by itself is not sufficient around he

Any claim of ‘playfulness’ is undercut by the denigration of calling the person you were purportedly sharing a joke with “one of the inveterate disrespecters of ID scientists”, particularly when it comes from somebody who could equally be termed one of the inveterate defenders of the bunch of charlatans and incompetents that are ID apologists.

I would note that it is not uncommon on the extremist Right, when caught talking utter balderdash, to claim ‘I was only joking’ (when no humor in the purported ‘joke’ is readily apparent).

If you don’t want your ‘humor’ mistaken for serious intent, I would suggest another forum convention:

I am sure @Eddie doesn’t see any of it this way however, and will no doubt tell me why at excruciating length. To save time, I will give him my response to this upcoming rant in advance:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

Thanks for this reference. In context, it is a sort of left-handed compliment to Minnich, or maybe to ID, but it does grant that Minnich has done some valid science. So Rumraket is now only the second, rather than the first, to give Minnich credit for brains.

Gee, who knows, maybe one of these days someone here (beyond Joshua) may give Behe credit for brains. After all, even Jerry Coyne said one or two nice things about Behe’s QRB article. But I fear the sky will fall down on the day that Mercer gives Meyer credit for brains, or Faizal does the same for Denton.

Back to the Shroud…

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Tim

Scott Minnich gets a passing mention in a quote, so @Eddie makes a song and dance about it.

No, Eddie made a joke about it. But jokes only work on people with a sense of humor.

@Tim

If you don’t want your ‘humor’ mistaken for serious intent, I would suggest another forum convention:

This “suggestion” was already covered in my post, which you apparently did not finish reading before reacting to it.

[Rumraket (Mikkel R.)]

@Eddie

Thanks for this reference. In context, it is a sort of left-handed compliment to Minnich, or maybe to ID, but it does grant that Minnich has done some valid science. So Rumraket is now only the second, rather than the first, to give Minnich credit for brains.

Incidentally I have given him credit for nothing anywhere. I have linked a website that describes an experiment that reproduced the “miraculous” aspects of the Turin Shroud, to which Minnich apparently gave suggestions because he is a friend of the one who conducted the experiment. I suppose it is only natural if you happen to know someone who is a scientist to ask them if they have any valuable input.

Whether Minnich’s suggestions were crucial or at all valuable to that experiment or not is completely besides the point. What matters for the discussion in which I linked that website is the results of the experiment, which you are basically just distracting from with this utter irrelevancy about whether Minnich “has brains”.

But given the simplicity of the experiment (paint on glass, put glass on cloth, let it expose to sunlight over several days) this isn’t the point of note you seem to think it is. It certainly has zero capacity to validate anything Minnich might think about ID or evolutionary biology.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Rumraket

It certainly has zero capacity to validate anything Minnich might think about ID or evolutionary biology.

I wasn’t implying that it did. I was just remarking on the fact that you acknowledged that Minnich gave advice leading to a procedure which you considered valid, without snarling about how the experimenter should have consulted someone else and not a “pseudoscientist” ID supporter like Minnich.

Had the writer of the post been, say, Faizal instead of you, and had the Shroud experiment failed to come up with anything like a comparable image, and had some Christian poster here pointed out the failure and tried to use that failure to argue for the authenticity of the Shroud, there is little doubt that Faizal or one of several others here would have said the experiment was badly flawed, and would have drawn attention to the name Minnich and his connection with ID, and made some of the usual charges about ID being pseudoscience, ID proponents being bad scientists, etc. Arguments from association are very common here, as we saw in an earlier discussion where several people (not all, but several), instead of addressing Turner’s claims, attacked him for his associations rather than on what he said.

In this case, you refrained from drawing any attention to Minnich’s ID associations, which I think is quite creditable on your part. My post was not suggesting that you had argued anything wrong or improper, but merely a playful observation noting a non-hostile reference to a Dover Trial witness for ID – and non-hostile references to Dover Trial witnesses for ID are few and far between on this forum.

In short, as I already said to someone else, I was making a joke, not launching any sort of argument or attack, and I certainly was not expecting any reply at all, let alone having to (twice now) explain the joke. I guess that from now on I’ll put a TRIPLE smiley face any time I’m being playful, to make sure that people “get it”.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Eddie

Had the writer of the post been, say, Faizal instead of you, and had the Shroud experiment failed to come up with anything like a comparable image, and had some Christian poster here pointed out the failure and tried to use that failure to argue for the authenticity of the Shroud, there is little doubt that Faizal or one of several others here would have said the experiment was badly flawed, and would have drawn attention to the name Minnich and his connection with ID, and made some of the usual charges about ID being pseudoscience, ID proponents being bad scientists, etc.

Really? Why do you believe that would have been my response? Could you cite specific instances where I have rejected the results of a properly conducted scientific experiment because I had an ideological disagreement with the authors?

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Faizal_Ali

Could you cite specific instances where I have rejected the results of a properly conducted scientific experiment because I had an ideological disagreement with the authors?

I was not basing my remark on a memory of any actual instance; I was offering a deduction based on your general intellectual tendencies. To be sure, you would never allow yourself to be caught in such an obvious inconsistency as your question above presents, but you might well say that an experiment that some people think was properly conducted was not in fact properly conducted, if you had something at stake in the outcome. For example, if an experiment (or set of experiments) seemed to show that the first life could not have emerged by unguided chemical reactions, I imagine that you would have all kinds of objections that the experiment was not properly conducted, and if the experiment was designed and carried out by an ID proponent, I am sure the word “pseudoscience” would not be far from your lips. Of course I cannot prove that you would do this, and I admit I’m conjecturing. However, I’m conjecturing on the basis of actions and attitudes shown by you elsewhere.

I do know that you routinely reject thousands of pages of argument that you (by your own admission) have not read, in works of Denton, Behe, Meyer, etc., on the basis that these guys are ID proponents and not worth reading; and in the past, you have justified rejecting public statements by Discovery about its goals as lies, on the grounds of what you consider to be some cases of lying or deception by some members of Discovery, which shows that you are quite willing to generalize negatively about the motives of people and institutions on the basis of what camp they belong to rather than any personal knowledge of the people whatsoever. So you show a general tendency toward judgments on the basis of tribal or group affiliations. I expect you’d do the same if any experiment seemed to point to a conclusion you didn’t like, if the experiment was designed or conducted by an ID person. I expect you’d say the experiment was flawed, and point to the affiliation of the authors of it as the explanation for why it was flawed. But again, I’m conjecturing, and I don’t take my conjecture so seriously that I couldn’t give it up if your future posts showed you were abandoning guilt-by-association arguments (“ID” and “DI” and “creationism” and so on) and focusing on specific arguments made by particular authors.

[Faizal_Ali]

@Eddie

I was not basing my remark on a memory of any actual instance; I was offering a deduction based on your general intellectual tendencies. To be sure, you would never allow yourself to be caught in such an obvious inconsistency as your question above presents, but you might well say that an experiment that some people think was properly conducted was not in fact properly conducted, if you had something at stake in the outcome. For example, if an experiment (or set of experiments) seemed to show that the first life could not have emerged by unguided chemical reactions, I imagine that you would have all kinds of objections that the experiment was not properly conducted, and if the experiment was designed and carried out by an ID proponent, I am sure the word “pseudoscience” would not be far from your lips. Of course I cannot prove that you would do this, and I admit I’m conjecturing. However, I’m conjecturing on the basis of actions and attitudes shown by you elsewhere.

I see. So, IOW, you are making predictions about things people would do on the basis of your direct experience with them. Experience in which you have never once seen them do the things you are convinced they would do.

Carry on.

@Eddie

I do know that you routinely reject thousands of pages of argument that you (by your own admission) have not read, in works of Denton, Behe, Meyer, etc., on the basis that these guys are ID proponents and not worth reading; and in the past, you have justified rejecting public statements by Discovery about its goals as lies, on the grounds of what you consider to be some cases of lying or deception by some members of Discovery, which shows that you are quite willing to generalize negatively about the motives of people and institutions on the basis of what camp they belong to rather than any personal knowledge of the people whatsoever. So you show a general tendency toward judgments on the basis of tribal or group affiliations.

I will just leave this quote here without further comment, purely for connoisseurs of irony to savor at their leisure.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Faizal_Ali

Experience in which you have never once seen them do the things you are convinced they would do.

But experience revealing a habit of argument in which the value of people’s work is often judged by what “camp” they are in, and also revealing a strong motive (unflinching atheism) for hoping that design will not be found in nature, which taken together would be likely to produce the sort of outcome I conjectured about. And as I say, it’s only a conjecture, and I’m not going to the wall to defend it. (However, I can think of a “test case” which might turn my conjecture into an accurate prediction of your behavior. More on this a few months from now, when I have the empirical material under control…)

[Faizal_Ali]

Our cup runneth over…

[CrisprCAS9]

Every accusation is an admission with some people.

[John_Harshman]

@Faizal_Ali

I will just leave this quote here without further comment, purely for connoisseurs of irony to savor at their leisure.

Thank you, though I had already savored it.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Eddie

For example, if an experiment (or set of experiments) seemed to show that the first life could not have emerged by unguided chemical reactions,

How can that possibly be an example? How can any experiment show that “first life could not have emerged by unguided chemical reactions,” exactly and specifically?

There’s no basis for your conjecture.

@Eddie

I do know that you routinely reject thousands of pages of argument that you (by your own admission) have not read, in works of Denton, Behe, Meyer, etc., on the basis that these guys are ID proponents and not worth reading;

Not experiments.

@Eddie

and in the past, you have justified rejecting public statements by Discovery about its goals as lies, on the grounds of what you consider to be some cases of lying or deception by some members of Discovery, which shows that you are quite willing to generalize negatively about the motives of people and institutions on the basis of what camp they belong to rather than any personal knowledge of the people whatsoever.

Not experiments. A lot of irrelevant blather, though.

@Eddie

So you show a general tendency toward judgments on the basis of tribal or group affiliations.

You haven’t shown that this applies to judging science, which they don’t do.

@Eddie

I expect you’d do the same if any experiment seemed to point to a conclusion you didn’t like, if the experiment was designed or conducted by an ID person.

I’d express amazement that an “ID person” did an experiment first.