We’re not talking about arguments. Your alleged example was an experiment, remember?
You seem to be doing so and providing a lot of amusement in the process.
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Scrolling down on my computer, I find that there have now been nine screens full of quibbling discussion that started out simply as the explanation of a one-line joke I made to Rumraket. This is absurd, and I’m not going to reply to any more sub-sub-discussions following from a throwaway joke. So my participation in this discussion has ended.
However, since you are here, make sure you check out my most recent topic, “Why Do Scientist-Christians Here Believe in God?” where I ask any and all self-described Christian scientists to tell the group the reasons that led them to believe in God and keep them believing in God. We’ve already heard some really interesting things there from Jordan and Matthew, but there is always room for one more.
I sometimes wonder if our friend lives on that wall and doesn’t realise that the ‘floor’ (normal, non-adversarial conversation) even exists. 
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How many of those screens do your quibbles account for?
That you extended to claiming that Faizal would ignore an experiment that violates basic scientific epistemology on the basis of his conclusion that ID rhetoric is silly.
Indeed it is, because ID people simply don’t do experiments, so any conjecture regarding Faizal’s reaction to experiments is insane–but very entertaining.
But you are replying now, and it obviously wasn’t a joke.
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Eddie, this is unreasonable. Are you willing to read the hundreds to thousands of papers that support evolution against ID, and have you read them? If not, then you can’t fault Faizal for not having read every single piece of ID literature.
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misterme987:
Thanks for your comment. There’s a context to my remark. I think you are relatively new here (at least, I’ve only seen your little icons lately), and you may not know the long history of my exchanges with Faizal over Denton, and you may not know the long history of my pointing out to some others here that they are criticizing authors whom they have not read at all, or whom they have read only in little snippets, not enough to get a full picture of the writer’s thought. I’ll try to clarify.
I did not mean that Faizal had to read every single work by Denton to respond to Denton. But his repeated sweeping evaluations of Denton’s work as worthless, as “dreck” (one of his latest expressions) are unwarranted, given that by his own admission he has read only one or two articles of Denton and looked at one popular video when Denton has published nine or ten books, amounting to 2,000 or more pages, which flesh out his thought in greater detail, and with much more evidence, than what Faizal has seen.
My background training (though I did start out in Science) is in Arts subjects. If I read, say, only Kant’s short essay Perpetual Peace, and then watched an hour-long popularizing PBS special on the thought of Kant, and then proceeded in a seminar to trash all of Kant’s thought (without having read his central works such as the Critiques), my profs (and other grad students in the class) would have told me I did not have sufficient knowledge of Kant to be blithely dismissing his thought. Yet that’s what Faizal has done with Denton.
So I’m not saying that Faizal needs to read thousands of pages of Denton or of anyone else; I’m saying he shouldn’t reject thousands of pages of works he hasn’t read as rubbish, dishonest, the work of “shysters and grifters” (his latest charming phrase), etc., on the basis of maybe 25-35 pages he has read. And the same with Behe, Meyer, etc. whom he has also trashed on the basis of very little reading of their works (I base that on his own admissions when I’ve asked him what he’s read). If he wants to say that the little he has read of these authors doesn’t impress him, and he’s not inclined to read more, that’s fine, but his rejections claim much more certainty about the contents and value of their work (and about the allegedly evil or dishonest motives of them as human beings) than he is entitled to claim.
Does my objection make more sense now?
Your question shows a misconception of my own position. I don’t oppose “evolution” to “ID”, and I have not opposed “evolution” (in the sense of a process of descent with modification from very simple creatures up to man) at any time on this site (or on any other site, for that matter). From my point of view, evolution is quite compatible with intelligent design. It’s not compatible with literal six-day creationism, but as I’ve made plain to the others here from the beginning, I’m no creationist, no Bible literalist, and have never pitted Genesis against evolution. So I don’t need to read thousands of papers that support evolution, because I already think that evolution happened.
I think you may be under the impression that all ID proponents deny that evolution (from microorganism to man) happened, but in fact, some of them assert that it did happen (Behe, Denton, and it seems Sternberg), and many of them think it probably or possibly did. I converse with ID folks, including many of the leaders, frequently, and I know quite a few of them (albeit some of them not famous ones you’ve likely heard of) who would subscribe to an evolutionary process that has intelligence built into it. And this is not a new idea; it was the late-life position of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer, with Darwin, of evolution by natural selection! So, while most ID proponents are creationists (either OEC or YEC) and think that no significant amount of evolution happened, ID is a “big tent” of creationists and non-creationists and there is nothing in the definition of ID that rules out accepting evolutionary change.
I hope this clarifies my position.
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25-35 pages. “Eddie”, you’re too much.
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You’re welcome to state exactly what you have read, if my number is inaccurate. I can’t recall whether you said you had read both, or only one, of his Bio-Complexity papers. I only remember you referring to one, but even if you read both, that’s only 33 pages in total. My impression is that you said you had not read any of his books all the way through, though possibly you said you had read the first one (1986), but that one is not representative of his later thought, and my references to his work have always been to his later thought, from his second book (1998) onward, and it’s that later thought you have regularly trashed. Again, if you have read more than your discussions of his ideas indicate, you are welcome to clarify.
If I write several articles on my view that 1+1=17, and then expand on this idea in 9-10 books, how much of my writing would you need to read before dismissing my thesis?
If someone’s thesis is obviously wrong in an unsalvageable way, then any additional details are irrelevant.
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Indeed. His later thought is, apparently, represented by that video lecture to which I have linked a couple times. And here it is again. It never ceases to astonish those who might only be aware of his reputation as one of the more erudite proponents of ID.
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I notice that you didn’t respond to the part of my reply where I told you about the column here where Christian scientists are explaining why they believe in God. Michelle has just added a wonderful piece to the discussion. Are you planning to contribute to that one? Or perhaps to the next one in the series, which will be on “Why Do Christian Scientists Here Think That Christianity Is True?”, which will cover not only belief in God simply, but belief in Christianity specifically? Or to the third one in the series?
You’re not being clear. Are you saying that beyond 33 pages (at most) of Bio-Complexity, the only work of Denton you are familiar with is not one of his scholarly books, but a popular video? Or have you read some of his books? If so, which ones?
Neither of your points apply. First, the works on fine-tuning, which we have been discussing here, are not expansions of the ideas in the article that Faizal has repeatedly criticized, which is on structuralism and laws of form, not fine-tuning. Second, his “thesis” (which should be plural, since he has more than one thesis, and it varies from book to book) is not “obviously wrong in an unsalvageable way.” And by the way, how much of Denton’s work have you read? (Not superficially skimmed, but read.)
It surprised me, but, you know, it shouldn’t have. The other leading darks of ID Creationism aren’t any better, and there is a pattern to pseudoscience. If you speak to a true believer, he will always have a cite to that one book you haven’t read, the one which, unlike the others, is really, really, really, really good and completely without the flaws of those others. And then you read it, and yeesh. It ceases to be surprising after a while, and the shockingly bad quality of Denton’s thinking should of course be no shock at all. But hope springs eternal, I guess.
I hadn’t read a creationist book in years before picking up Darwin’s Black Box, and it came accompanied with very serious praise from someone who acknowledged that creationism hadn’t done well in the past, but who said it was really hummin’ on all eight cylinders now. One word: Yeesh. Enough yeesh to leaven every half-baked loaf of madness in this wide, wide world.
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That one book that Faizal hasn’t read? Beg pardon? As far as I can tell from Faizal’s own statements (up until the time of this writing, anyway), it’s all the books of Denton that Faizal hasn’t read, which puts him in a pretty poor position to be making sweeping judgments about the man’s thought.
And you hadn’t read one after reading Darwin’s Black Box, either.
Whoever said that obviously was not familiar with the common usage of the word “creationism” in American popular discussions of origins; no “creationist” accepts bacterium-to-man evolution, as Behe does. But it’s not surprising that lots of creationists, seeing any book that attacks Darwinian thought, and seems to be well-argued, will latch onto it and claim it as one of their own.
I only had one point: That you can dismiss additional details supporting an unsalvageable thesis without reading them. Which, if you’re keeping score, does apply to whether or not someone needs to read the newly added
or see how
may have been added.
If I was talking about him or his ideas, rather than the generic point, you might be right. But I wasn’t. You can tell that, because I said ‘If someone’s’ not ‘If Denton’s’.
I’m careful with my words.
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As a generality, that is obviously true. But when a generality from out of the blue is inserted into a specific debate, which is what you did here, the natural question is not whether the generalization in its naked form is true, but whether the generality properly applies to the specific debate at hand, and that is why I responded as I did.
But you intruded that generality about “someone” into a discussion I was having with Faizal about Denton specifically, so the most natural way of taking your post was in reference to Denton. It looked as if you were giving me a general principle which you expected me to apply to my dispute with Faizal over Denton, and as if you were implying that Faizal’s dismissal of all of Denton was legitimate because the rest of Denton was just expansion of the part Faizal had already read. If you weren’t intending me to make that application, why on earth would you interrupt my conversation with Faizal to present an abstract truism? If your truism wasn’t meant to be applied to what we were talking about, you might as well have said, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.”
But not careful in thinking out how someone is most likely to take your words, given the context in which you place them. Bare words are only part of communication; context is equally important. As someone who is a professional editor, I’m painfully conscious of ambiguities and confusions created by statements that are not adequately contextualized in the passages where they appear. The confusion you engendered by ignoring the context in which your words would be understood is typical of the confusions I have to sort out every day.
@Tim remembers that Eddie has demonstrated zero understanding of how Wikipedia actually works, or its strengths and weaknesses, so:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@Tim will however note with amusement that somebody who has repeatedly proven that he can’t research his way ‘out of a wet paper bag’, and has steadfastly refused to provide any substantiation on his own academic qualifications would accuse others of being “amateurs and dilettantes, writing about subjects in which they have zero academic training”
He would also note that the phrase “amateurs and dilettantes, writing about subjects in which they have zero academic training” could easily be applied to:
-
Michael Denton on the topic of Fine Tuning
-
Stephen Meyer on the topics of Paleontology, DNA, etc. etc
-
Michael Behe on the topics of all the example systems he gave for DBB, HIV & Malaria (EoE), Polar Bears etc (DD), Philosophy of Science (his Dover testimony), good courtroom practice (his ‘Kafkaesque’ accusation), etc, etc
Long-winded and self-serving defense of @Eddie’s further Denton-fanboying omitted with, you guessed it, a:
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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He’s also demonstrated zero understanding of its contents, even for pages he claims familiarity with. I doubt I’ll ever forget this howler:
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How many posts did you make after claiming that your participation had ended?
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My previous response to the below comment seems to have been blocked, so here’s another try:
Not ‘accused’. Demonstrated. I had cited multiple examples, and can cite them again if necessary, though searching for “@Roy sentence” will lead to most of them.
Lest anyone have doubts, here’s an example where @Eddie quotes only one word of the post he’s replying to.
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Contextomy seems to be considered an art-form among Creationists, including ID Creationists. A true master, such as Stephen Meyer, can bridge a whole 15 pages in a single ellipsis.
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