10 thoughts on “Barry responds

  1. This guy is their front man at the moment in the ID community.

    I will never be able to facepalm enough.

  2. Arrington writes:

    …welcome to the ranks of biological design theorists.

    The next step for someone still left in the ID movement remains. Barry, you need a theory!

  3. Notice that Barry used the same quotation (as a gotcha ending) from KN that I did, in which I showed how KN simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about re: IDism. Dembski and Gordon both reject MN (apparently KN’s been listening to IDist fanatic Cameron Wybrow, in his various puppets, too much). Lizzie promotes MN. keiths rejects MN. KN, well, he’ll spin a little here and there and end up a pantheist Buddhist phenomenologist. 😉

    The point is that Barry (and UD) is irrelevant compared to the Discovery Institute’s leaders (Barry doesn’t “need a theory” – he’s never going to have or make a ‘theory’). Lizzie is entirely correct in her probabilistic critiques of IDism. Where she’s lacking, weak, impotent even, is in her PoS taken in a larger triadic discourse of science, philosophy and theology/worldview. Since Lizzie’s worldview is currently ‘messed up,’ disbelieving now (thanks to Dennett!) in the God she used to love, she has a very imbalanced triad.

    And simply arguing with Barry Arrington and UD isn’t going anywhere productive anytime soon.

  4. Gregory,

    Since Lizzie’s worldview is currently ‘messed up,’ disbelieving now (thanks to Dennett!) in the God she used to love, she has a very imbalanced triad.

    You were doing so well, if snarky, up to this point, then you went for the personal insult.

    Address the idea, not the person.

  5. Gregory: (apparently KN’s been listening to IDist fanatic Cameron Wybrow, in his various puppets, too much).

    I don’t know who that is and I don’t really care.

  6. Barry is still playing lawyer in that thread. He accuses Bob of being a hypocrite dodging questions….. I think Barry has more outstanding than Bob?

  7. My God, you say the same thing about design being detectable for over a decade, hundreds of times, and IDists might finally get it right. Well, sort of, since they still pretend that it’s a shift from the past.

    Still, they’re finally exhibiting low levels of intelligence there, and it should be encouraged.

    Glen Davidson

  8. What is so peculiar about this, is that I’ve been saying this for YEARS in one form or another, and never encountered any objection from ID critics.

    Have they really failed to notice? So sure have the UC crowd been that they know what the “other side” think, that they’ve never bothered to listen?

    So much so that they are actually suggesting that my post is a welcome sign of change?

  9. Barry writes:

    I shall summarize the Darwinists’ comments:

    “Tree” in this discussion is shorthand for the tree of life, i.e, common descent.

    1. Cladistics is a technique that they admit necessarily always results in at least some sort of tree.

    2. They employ cladistics and sure enough it produces a tree.

    3. Then they claim that the fact that it produced a tree establishes that trees necessarily must be produced.

    I say “but wait; how can a process that cannot possibly produce the result ‘non-tree’ be used to establish that ‘tree’ must necessarily be true?”

    And you ask a good question, Barry, one to which there is a very clear answer (which I gave in my OP, but which you clearly have not understood).

    You test the goodness-of-fit of your fitted tree, to see how probably such a fit would be under the null hypothesis that there is no tree signal in the data.

    In other words, you do NOT “claim that the fact that it produced a tree establishes that trees necessarily must be produced”. You claim that the the tree that was produced was highly unlikely under the null of no tree signal.

    As you say, any fitted tree will be a tree (duh). But not any tree will be unlikely under the null.

    The vast majority will be highly likely. But a few will be highly unlikely. If the fitted tree is one of the highly unlikely ones then you reject the null.

    Barry, if you are reading this, and you still don’t get it, I suggest again: ask the former owner of your site. His Design Inference depends on it.

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