A rare admission around here. Aquaticus still has not directly admitted that he made a false statement about Discovery’s promotion of Denton, for example.
An interesting statement, given that you posted many times under a 901-post discussion of his ideas about scientific research:
In that discussion, my replies to you several times included the name “Turner”, and it never occurred to you to ask who I was talking about, or to notice that he was the author of the article that the discussion was about?
Nothing I have read in your posts here over the past several years indicates to me that you would be qualified to judge a serious thinker if you saw one.
No, it didn’t, if you take ID to mean “intelligent design” in the broad sense, in which case it predates what is normally called creationism (i.e., a modern phenomenon originating in America) by over 2,000 years.
(ii) is logically irrelevant, for reasons that have already been given; and (iii) is not true, since among others Mike Behe has no personal interest in “teaching creationism” – he explicitly and repeatedly denies being a creationist, and his beliefs about origins are condemned by creationists.
How can I, when you haven’t yet, despite writing thousands of words, given your analysis of the Gospel passage you are pretending to explain? You have rambled on, issuing a stream of factoids about Greek grammar, but you have said nothing (zip, 0, nada) about the actual passage you purport to explain. Give me your interpretation of the passage. I don’t think you are capable of writing two coherent paragraphs of exegesis about it.
You are really getting desperate now. I didn’t ask you about the interpretation of the passage. I asked you why a particular verb form was used. You had and still have no clue what I am talking about. I know you never learned to read or translate Greek let alone teach the subject. Everyone else knows it too.
Isn’t this a reversal of your previous claim? You were saying that ID is a subset of creationism, and now you’re saying that creationism is a subset of ID. Those may both be right depending on how you think about it. ID is an outgrowth of creationism, descended from creationism, so thinking cladistically it’s a subset. But if we consider characters, or attributes if you prefer, ID is more general and creationism more specific, which would make creationism a subset of ID. A third way is to consider the IDers and creationists themselves, which are partially overlapping sets. What was all this about? I have forgotten why it matters.
I know you didn’t. I asked you about it. You claimed that the tense of the verbs was crucial to understanding the passage. You have yet to demonstrate that. I say the reason you have failed to demonstrate it is that you can’t. Prove me wrong. If you refuse to give your exegesis of the passage, with reference to those verbs, then your original claim is sheer bluff.
I owe you no answers, since the questions you are asking are about matters I never contested. But you owe me an answer, since I contested your original claim, and you have never defended it.
Since you won’t answer – and probably can’t answer, because you don’t understand the Biblical passage you’re referencing – we can bring this to an end. Have a nice life. Hope you get lots of hits on your Facebook page from other hobbyists and autodidacts. (We know you won’t get any from actual Biblical scholars, who have never even heard of you.)
ID isn’t just about biology; it’s also about fine-tuning of physical laws. So chemists and physicists are relevant. But there are words of praise from life scientists as well. Meyer’s second book has about ten endorsements from biologists, molecular biologists, paleontologists, geneticists, and medical scientists. Eberlin’s book has a recommendation from a Nobel winner in Physiology/Medicine, in addition to many from chemists and biochemists.
How come our only source of light and heat is “fine-tuned” using poisonous radiation? Radiation causes cancer and other maladies that kill millions of people every year. That sure doesn’t seem like fine tuning to me. Given unlimited power I could have done better, much better.
More importantly fine tuning would be unnecessary for an omnipotent God. All physical parameters are irrelevant to an all-powerful, omnipotent God. Such a God could have created us to live in the vacuum of space or breathe under wanted if He wanted.
I can see how physicists might be relevant, though not, as I understand it, to Eberlin’s book. But why chemists?
To their everlasting shame, one hopes. If you’re referring to Darwin’s Doubt, that was horrendous from a biological and paleontological perspective. And medical scientists would not be relevant. The back cover has blurbs from one geneticist and one paleontologist. Who are the others?
“Physiology/Medicine” is quite a broad field, and the relevant field would seem to be evolutionary biology. What is that Nobelist’s specialty? (I see that it is in fact developmental biology and cancer research. Nothing relevant.) And the chemists and biochemists are just unqualified to judge.
The quality of a book has very little to do with the number of blurbs are printed on its dustcover. You’ll be hard pressed to find any book, no matter how dire, that has not managed to receive impressive sounding endorsements. It’s part of a publisher’s job to know how to get these. As it happens, Meyer’s book is a perfect case in point.
Implied belittlement of working people noted. But even if I were a humble shelf-stocker in a store, I would still be doing more for society than your Facebook page has contributed. And I note you didn’t answer the question about Ehrman.
It’s evident that you’re not a scholar, because you personalize issues. You make this a contest between yourself and myself. A scholar would stick to the arguments, and keep people out of it. You made a claim about the meaning of a Gospel passage. I asked you to defend the claim. Since then you have done nothing except utter a torrent of personal abuse against me. Obviously this is a defense mechanism, to keep readers here focused on your accusations against me, in hope that they will not notice that you have not answered the question.
I suspect that all but one or two people have ceased reading our exchange, so I don’t know who you are hoping to impress by railing against me. But if you have nothing better to do (as I suspect is the case), go ahead, rail away.
I would think that at least some chemists, those of the more philosophical type, spend time reflecting on the periodic table and its connection with fine-tuning. (For details, see the six books of Denton I have previously cited – no, not his first one.)
The others are listed in the front end pages. I’m not going to take the time to type out all their names. But they are scientists with real positions at significant institutions, and they aren’t Discovery Fellows. My point was only to confirm vjtorley’s statement that bona fide scientists who have said nice things about ID books do in fact exist. I’m not trying to prove they are correct, just that they exist.
I didn’t say it did. I was simply verifying that bona fide scientists other than ID insiders have said some positive things about ID books. The idea that no scientist other than the Discovery folks sees any value in ID is just wrong.
As I said elsewhere, that does not surprise me. You can also, with not much effort, find scientists who endorse the idea that vaccines cause autism, to choose just one example.
It is always interesting to see what kind of metrics ID apologists resort to in effort validate the ideology, in the face of its 20+ years of unmitigated scientific failure. But dustcover blurbs is a particularly cheap one.
So we’re all in agreement that you cannot possibly a scholar, since you do virtually nothing but vapid name-checking. And, of course, you lose all self-control when attacking people, particularly me. Did you forget already?
Yet there is a whole field called evo-devo, which makes developmental questions relevant to the discussion of evolution. And elsewhere on this site, Joshua took Jonathan Wells to task for not seeing the relevance of cancer to understanding the mutations relevant to evolution. So your claim seem dismissive without warrant.
In any case, I was not claiming that the Nobel winner’s specific expertise was on evolution, but only that, under normal circumstances, one thinks of Nobel winners as above average scientists who are capable of “thinking outside the box” and thus moving their subject forward. That such a scientist would indicate that Eberlin’s book is worth reading suggests that he doesn’t judge it to be complete junk, and that it may well not be complete junk.
I didn’t use any blurb to “validate” anything. I was confirming that there are scientists, outside of Discovery, whose positions and achievements indicate competence in their fields, who have indicated an openness to some ID ideas.
And did you forget already that when asked directly whether you endorsed the standard Christian doctrine that God created the world, you punted on the question, while still insisting you were a Christian?
The question on the table was ABOUT people, and therefore I answered it appropriately. I did not, as you imply, answer a question about ideas with an answer about people. But you knew that before writing, didn’t you?
The important data are - how many endorsement requests were turned down, how many less-than-enthusiastic endorsements were discarded, and what perks were provided for endorsements?
Yes, given that there are reportedly 8.8 million scientists worldwide, I’d be very surprised if you couldn’t find a few who support any given idea, no matter how batshit insane. I can provide no evidence, but I’ve long suspected that there will be some scientists somewhere who think that Elvis is still alive.
