In popular parlance, “child abuser” is just about the worst thing you can call anyone. So you can imagine my shock when I read the latest comments on one of my own recent threads and found one commenter accusing another of child abuse – a charge he repeated in the Moderation thread. My astonishment grew when I read of a proposal in Moderation to ban child abusers from The Skeptical Zone, on the grounds that people who post porn are already banned, and child abuse is much, much worse.
And what was the alleged offense? Here it is: “admitting to using strawman arguments, fallacious reasoning, and false claims to destroy childrens’ ability to think rationally about certain scientific topics. That’s child abuse.” Except that the person accused made no such admission. Regardless of whether the arguments were fallacious or not, no deceit was involved. It was the accuser who attacked the arguments as fallacious and illogical, not the person he accused.
And what were the arguments about? In a nutshell, abiogenesis. The arguments were presented to a group of six-year-old children and their parents, in an attempt to make them see that the origin of life from non-living matter is astronomically improbable, that macroevolution (e.g. fish to bird) is also vanishingly improbable, and that Intelligent Design is the only rational inference. A detailed description of the presentation can be found here.
I’d like to make a couple of very brief points. First, the term “child abuse” can be defined in three ways. First, could be defined very broadly to mean behavior which actually causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children. Second, it could be defined more narrowly to mean behavior which is intended to cause severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children. Third, it could be defined as behavior which the vast majority of responsible people, at the present time, would agree causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children.
The first definition is clearly ridiculous, as it would make all of our parents or grandparents child abusers. Think of passive smoking. Or think of spanking: fifty years ago, it was quite common for naughty children to get their little bottoms hit with a belt and sent to bed without supper. The second definition is also unsatisfactory, as it would exonerate parents who refused to take their dying child to a doctor, but took her to a quack faith healer instead: here, the parents didn’t mean to harm their child, but any sensible person would say that they should have known better. That leaves us with the third definition.
So the question that concerns us is: does teaching a child a fallacious argument – assuming that it was fallacious – designed to prove that abiogenesis is well-nigh impossible constitute behavior which the vast majority of responsible would agree causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to a child? The response to that question should be bleeding obvious: you’ve got to be kidding me. Clearly the person making the ridiculous accusation needs to grow up.
I’d also point out that the person in question actually not only accused a TSZ commenter of child abuse, but also accused him of admitting to it:
Mung,
You seem very, very, upset that I am pointing out that [name redacted]’s real life behavior constitutes child abuse. A good example of him admitting to this is in the thread starting here.
I have to say that’s libelous. The accused person merely admitted to using certain arguments to persuade children. He made no admission of committing child abuse. As I showed above, the only reasonable definition of child abuse is: behavior which the vast majority of responsible people, at the present time, would agree causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to children. The accused person did not admit to engaging in such behavior; on the contrary, he emphatically denied it.
I think a retraction is in order. And I might add: the accuser is very lucky that the person he accused belongs to a religion that enjoins its followers to “forgive other people when they sin against you” (Matthew 6:14), turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:40) and “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). Very lucky indeed.
And how fallacious were the arguments, anyway? I’ll let readers judge. There was an everyday observation that “dead dogs stay dead dogs,” used to support the conclusion that “life does not come from non-life except by a miracle.” Pasteurization was also cited as evidence against abiogenesis. My response: those are valid points. They don’t demonstrate abiogenesis to be impossible, but the person accused was not trying to establish that. The argument he was making was a rhetorical one, not a rigorously deductive one which you might expect to hear in a college classroom.
There was another argument to the effect that fish don’t evolve into birds because fish give birth to fish. A little simplistic, perhaps, but it’s certainly strong prima facie evidence against macroevolution. Fortunately for evolutionists, there is good fossil evidence for the evolution of fish into tetrapods, some of which later evolved into birds. Scientists therefore have good reason to believe that it happened, but they still can’t demonstrate a mechanism for how it happened, and they still don’t know why it happened. What they have instead are some promising hypotheses which (unfortunately) have not yet been quantified in order to establish that the transition could have taken place over the timescale involved. And I hardly think most parents would consider it “child abuse” to omit to mention the existence of Archaeopteryx in a presentation aimed at six-year-olds, especially when there is an ongoing debate over that fossil’s place in evolution: some scientists argue that it was neither a bird nor an ancestor of modern birds (or even a close relative of that ancestor).
Third, there was an argument relating to a large cup of coins, in which the presenter asked the children to guess whether they would all turn up heads when shaken (answer: “NO.”) The accuser objected that it would have been fairer to ask a child to put all the coins that came up tails back in her cup and shake it again, and repeat the process again and again. But in this case, it it the accuser’s understanding of evolution which is faulty: it is a process that lacks foresight, so it cannot select for a distant, long-term result. Score a point to the presenter.
Fourth, the presenter showed the children videos of Rube Goldberg machines made by man, and then showed them videos of living things, telling the children that they are Rube Goldberg machines, too. That’s arguably true, as far as it goes. Consider the following sentence, taken from a textbook titled, Cell and Molecular Biology: Concepts and Experiments by Gerald Karp (John Wiley and Sons, Sixth edition, 2009): “Cellular activities are often analogous to this ‘Rube Goldberg’ machine, in which one event automatically triggers the next event in a reaction sequence” (p. 7). There are also scholarly papers discussing how such biological Rube Goldberg machines might have evolved – but once again, without any quantification of the degree of difficulty or the time that would have been involved. Is it “child abuse” to neglect to mention these plausible but speculative papers to a class of six-year-olds? No: it’s what lawyers call advocacy.
Finally, the presenter invoked Pascal’s Wager, when giving talks to college students (not six-year-olds):
I then teach them Pascal’s wager and point out, they have less to lose by being wrong about ID and God’s creation than their Christ-hating professors, therefore it’s worth stepping out in a little faith if that’s what they want to do.
I suggest that if they worry the professors are right, I suggest they ask them these sorts of questions. When they see their professors can’t answer, they often say, “then why do they teach evolution is true, they have no proof.” My point exactly.
The accuser’s sharp retort to this exposition was: “I suspect you neglect to mention the god that gets very annoyed with people who try to game it.”
Look. I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, and I’m quite familiar with the many objections that have been leveled against Pascal’s wager. But I’m also well aware that the “many gods” objection which the accuser cites (alluding to the “professor’s god“) is far from decisive, and continues to be the subject of vigorous debate. [Defenders of the argument point out, for instance, that since Pascal’s God is an absolutely perfect being, Pascal’s hypothesis is simpler and hence more probable than the highly ad hoc hypothesis of a professor’s god.] And I might add that since college students are not children, there can be no question of “child abuse” in this context. These students are perfectly capable of Googling “Pascal’s wager,” as I just did.
After having examined the arguments, I can find none that constitutes “child abuse” on any reasonable definition of the term. The accuser whom I mentioned also accused the presenter of “attempting to indoctrinate children.” However, the term “indoctrinate” is a highly loaded word. Attempting to persuade children of the truth of a certain worldview, using arguments that a scholarly pedant might take exception to, cannot be fairly described as “indoctrination,” whatever one might happen to think of the arguments themselves.
To sum up: I find the accused not guilty. And I would hope that the majority of readers would agree with my verdict, which is nothing more and nothing less than a victory for common sense.
Before I conclude this post, I’d like to comment on the suggestion made by one commenter that child abusers be banned from TSZ. As we’ve seen, the term “child abuse” has been variously defined by people on this Website, so before such a rule is proposed, we need to agree on which definition of “child abuse” we’re talking about. Now, the notion of clear and present danger is well-established in American constitutional law. If you’re going to actually ban someone from a site encouraging the free discussion of ideas, then I would suggest that your reason for doing so should be a compelling one. If, on the other hand, the suggestion is simply that contributors with a criminal history of child abuse be banned from TSZ, then that sounds much more reasonable. As for the banning of porn: irrespective of how much harm someone may think it does, the practical rationale for banning it should be obvious. Most people think it’s an annoying nuisance. The same goes for spam.
I shall lay down my pen here, and invite readers to contribute their thoughts. I’ve said my piece.
(Image at the top courtesy of all-free-download.com and BSGStudio.)
Again- reciting the pledge of allegiance is not mandatory. Students do not have to do it if they so choose
The fatal flaw is there isn’t a scientific theory of evolution
Hilarious, like DNA_Jock “correction” by invoking ribosomes. When he got called on his BS, he finally backed down.
Here is a list of DNA_Jock’s howler “corrections”, when I claimed the importance of Clausius definition of entropy change dS = dQ/T (reversible)
On thermodynamics DNA_Jock objects:
You think a chemical engineering grad like you or an ME or chemistry or physics student could get through their thermodyanmic course work without dS = dQ/T. If Granville Sewell said something like that you guys would never let him hear the end of it, but you give DNA_Jock a free pass. Pathetic.
The Jock can’t even get his numbers straight on Alus, so I had to correct him, but does he acknowledge it? No. He just kept going on tirades about how I couldn’t do the math, and then I show him the math and show he’s off by a factor of 15:
Does he recant? No. Far be it for DNA_Jock to admit a mistake. Did his buddies like John Harshman call him out on it? No, Harshman agreed and refused to admit Jock was off by a factor of 15. Pathetic. The result, by the way, would put a dent in Larry Moran’s 10% functional figure as he’d have to add the 1.5% I discovered to his tally. 🙂
Then DNA_Jock argues for the linear relationship of two particular variables to temperature namely ΔH vs T and (implicitly) TΔS vs T on data he himself provided regarding supercooled water.
But a linear relationship should give a straight line plot, not a curved line plot.
Yet, he bashed me for the space of almost 200 comments (with Keiths and Mung and others) that I was ignorant, till I delivered the final put downs of his nonsense by simply drawing a straight line on the graphs he provided in contrast to his claims. Did he back down? No. Far be it for DNA_Jock to admit he made a stupid mistake that high school student should see. Let the readers see for themselves:
Did anyone call him on it? No. But if I made mistakes like that, I’d never hear the end of if from you guys.
Patrick likes to spew things in all kinds of directions. I am not saying he does it in front of little kids, but I am not saying he doesn’t. How could I? Some might believe he is absolutely frivolous in that regard.
Is that child abuse, who can really say? I suppose an argument could be made. I have no idea how common it is for Patrick to spew in front of children, his evolutionary essence of life tails.
So what if it’s child abuse? Isn’t morality subjective? If there is no law against what Sal is doing, what makes it wrong? Patrick acts as if there is some kind of absolute moral guideline beyond the law he can reasonably compare Sal’s behavior against.
Furthermore, you guys are treating Sal as if he has some sort of top-down, supernatural control over what the brute chemical interactions of his body and brain produce as effect wrt how he interacts with his children. Isn’t that sort of top-down, intentional control over natural forces beyond the capacity of nature? What do you expect him to do, defy physics or the chemistry of his particular body?
Yes
The 1.5% you discovered to be functional?
A: They’re conserved, so nobody would claim they’re junk. In other words, this is already among the sequence thought to be functional exactly because it’s conserved.
B: That they’re found IN a SINE doesn’t mean the SINE is functional. (Sort of like the fact that you can find intact splicing sites in pseudogene intron-exon structure doesn’t mean the pseudogene is functional). As the authors note, the functional motifs are flanked by fossilized repeat elements.
C: It’s a 20-40 base motif that is conserved, not the entire fucking SINE. There’d have to be one and a half million of them to constitute 1.5 % of the genome. They found about 5000 shared across multiple mammals. That’s 0,0053% of the genome. Of these, only about 200 were active across species, which implies even fewer of those 5000 are even functional.
D: The fact that they can get ChIP binding events to happen across tissues doesn’t mean every one of those motifs is actually functional.
E: The authors even suggest the fact that CTCF’s bind these motifs is part of an evolutionary strategy to silence still-active transposons.
F: This is another case of you ignoring the forest to marvel at a dent in the joint in the lower leftmost tip of the root of the flower. Basically everything in the article you dug up testifies to these binding sites being the product of an evolutionary process.
G: You didn’t discover anything.
Why?
Why would you think it’s beyond the capacity of nature when it’s natural and recreated in quite a different manner in computers?
Glen Davidson
And “In God We Trust” became the motto in 1956. It doesn’t make either right.
Time for a change, I suggest “In God We Thrust”
Glen, are you claiming that computers have top-down control over the physical interactions and behavior of their physical components/materials? If not, then how does your example of a computer relate to what I said?
Also, I note that you didn’t respond to the moralty aspect of my comment. Is morality something more than what we agree to codify into law? If so, what? If not, then how can something Sal does with his children that is perfectly legal qualify even remotely as “child abuse”?
Gee, how do you think a computer is programmed–or reprogrammed by computer “learning”?
Of course I’m not saying that computers have top-down control of every physical aspect, but that’s hardly the case for cellular respiration of nerve cells, either.
It’s an example of top-down control of basic processes.
Yeah, who cares? Why would I begin to discuss anything like that with someone as unreasonable as yourself?
Glen Davidson
The coins are good for that too.
Well, in the former case, necessarily by someone who has a high degree of knowledge about the programming language and its relationship to the physical effects throughout the system. In the latter, the computer would necessarily only learn according to whatever algorithms exist that are physically encoded on hardware that relate to such internal “reprogramming”. If someone wanted to take advantage of such reprogramming algorithms already present on the computer, they would have to have a high understanding of those particular algorithms and how to manipulate them.
Are you claiming that you have such an understanding of Sal’s particular programming or learning algorithms? Or of anyone here? If not, what system of remote reprogramming are you attempting to employ here? What is your method? Are there any scientific papers about it?
What is the “top” in the “top-down” control a computer displays, according to you?
Too funny man, did you look at the Coldspring Harbor figures that were in the thread in the link.
You’re channeling DNA_Jock.
Let me splain somethin’ too you. I discovered this in a paper by a pretty good outfit. It says this:
Do you like DNA_Jock, ahem, not understand 0.0053% does not equal 1.5%? 🙂
And what do the National Academy of Sciences have to say about this 1.5% (really if we include the whole Alu, its more like 10%)?
By the way, Rumraket, conservation may be only an indicator of function, but this does not imply non-conservation implies non-function. You committed a logical fallacy in addition to your math and reading errors.
Wow, you went down the rat-hole pretty quickly with that.
Glen Davidson
Careful. You’ll give Patrick more ammunition.
And there you were…
It seems to me that many of the atheists here grew up in some sort of religious environment. So if that destroys the ability to think critically …
That would explain so much.
I don’t think you’re being rational. I should try to debate with you?
And rather convincingly.
Feel free to try to support that thought rationally.
Christian/Biblical/Religious/Creationist concepts. LoL
Good for you!
Mung,
Lets me off, then.
“the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
— Treaty of Tripoli, 1796
I doubt that I ever said you were ignorant in that thread, that would be against the rules. I actually think you are quite intelligent. So if I did, I apologize.
I predict you’ll convert to YEC before 2017 ends
LoL. That’s the best you have?
Treaty of Peace and Friendship, signed at Tripoli November 4, 1796 (3 Ramada I, A. H. 1211), and at Algiers January 3, 1797 (4 Rajab, A. H. 1211). Original in Arabic.
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp
Gee, i wonder who the treaty was with and why that statement is in it.
Walto seems rational. I guess I could support it to him.
It would take an act of God. Do you believe in miracles?
🙂
Let’s face it, It would only take you to believe it was an act of God, and you already believe in miracles
Actively participating in community affairs and voting are exercises in patriotism. Telling little kids to pledge allegiance to a hunk of cloth is no different than telling kids to genuflect in front of an instrument of torture and execution.
On a related note, do you think that it should be against the law to desecrate or burn the flag?
It is all that is necessary to contradict your claim.
No, it is not.
Laws themselves are just or unjust according to whether the actions prohibited by the law are likely to contribute to or diminish the cultivation of human potential amongst all those affected by the law.
Of course (I feel I must remind you) I do not accept your conflation between “absolute” and “objective,” for reasons I have given numerous times before, both here and at Uncommon Descent.
I don’t think that we actually need any complicated metaphysics to understand what responsibility is. Responsibility is a social status that we attribute to others and that we learn to attribute to ourselves as a result of having had it attributed to us.
Also, we don’t really know what is or what is not “beyond the capacity of nature.” To know that, we would have to have a unifying comprehensive theory of fundamental physics, and we don’t have any such theory.
I’m not sure that a statement made by Congress for the express purpose of avoiding American enslavement by Barbary pirates is sufficient to show that Christianity didn’t influence the ideas of sovereignty, rights, and duties that get expressed in the Declaration (as in the right to not be governed unjustly) and the Constitution (as in the right to decide what kind of government best furthers our purposes as a political community).
I suppose my view is that the Declaration and the Constitution do, in fact, embody assumptions inherited from Christianity, and that in turn is one of the many things that is deeply problematic about those documents and the institutions which draw legitimacy from those documents.
Kantian Naturalist said:
According to what objective source? And who gets to define what “human potential” means?
Only, I didn’t ask anything about, nor say anything about “responsibility”. A falling boulder may be resopnsible for crushing a house, but that tells me nothing about the means by which one attempted to change its course.
So you believe that top-down, intentional control over natural forces and cause-and-effect processes is something nature is, in principle, capable of producing?
Lots of things aren’t right. In a hundred years, our era will be looked upon with the same disdain we have for witch burners and snake handlers.
You can learn a lot about the world by looking at old advertisements. I recall a General Motors ad from the 1940s, in National Geographic having the caption, The Only Good Jap Is A Dead Jap. The ad featured a General Motors made tank in the process of rolling over a still living japanese soldier.
At the time, Russia was our ally, and Germany was the enemy.
I prefer not to live in a time bubble in which we pretend things never change, and all our current concerns are black and white.
No, I did not read the entire thread, so it’s completely irrelevant to what I’m responding to.
Congratulations on your ability to start blathering about a completely different fucking paper. I was directly responding to your op in that thread.
I see now I conflated your OP in the “evidense that some SINES aren’t junk”-thread with a post you made later.
You’re right, I totally misread what the hell paper you were talking about and got the OP and the post I quoted and responded to, mixed up. My mistake.
Where are those principles in the Christian bible?
I see assumptions inherited from some Christian thinkers, but those are independent of, and sometimes antithetical to, Christianity.
For instance, just look at the 10 commandments. There’s nothing in there about individual liberty and limited government.
Hi everyone,
A few quick comments before I head off to work.
Readers will recall my question in the OP: does teaching a child a fallacious argument – assuming that it was fallacious – designed to prove that abiogenesis is well-nigh impossible constitute behavior which the vast majority of responsible people would agree causes severe and/or life-long physical or psychological damage to a child?
The same question could be asked regarding young-earth creationism. The answer should be obvious in both cases: NO.
Look. I know someone very near and dear to me who’s a flat-earther. I’m not kidding. This person is not fanatical, and has eight lovely children. They aren’t indoctrinated, I can assure you, and they aren’t home-schooled, either. None of them has turned out psychologically damaged, and all of them seem to be doing well in life. People have all sorts of funny ideas which they pass on to their kids, usually without harming them in any way. Hence the title of my post: “Cool it.”
Patrick writes of Sal:
I would answer “yes” to the last question, but only if it involves walling indoctrinated people off from society, like some cults do. Scientology is something I’d call child abuse, for that reason. It’s not so much the content of what’s taught, as the degree of social isolation that’s imposed by the teaching.
I might add that the age of the Earth is not a matter of observation. What we have is a set of converging arguments, supporting the conclusion that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old. We have a handful of anomalous results (C-14 in diamonds, pleiochroic haloes, collagen in dinosaur bones etc.) which are difficult (but not impossible) to explain on an old-Earth scenario. But the important point is that on a theistic view, the world is God’s creation. God, being the Author of the laws of Nature, is not bound to keep them. The world could end tomorrow if He wanted it to, and it could have started 6,000 years ago if He wanted it to.
You might answer that a God Who would require us to believe in a young Earth in the face of strong scientific arguments to the contrary, and even damn people with hell-fire if they didn’t, would be a pretty nasty God. And I agree. But in that case, what’s doing the psychological damage to children who are indoctrinated with such a worldview is not YEC, but belief in a Hell that people can be sent to for not believing what is alleged to be God’s Word.
I don’t know what Sal thinks about Hell, but since he doesn’t talk about it, I’d guess he isn’t one of those fanatics. I doubt whether he believes I’m going to Hell for believing in common descent, for instance.
And finally, when it comes to abiogenesis, the boot’s on the other foot. There isn’t the slightest evidence that it’s possible, and all attempts to replicate it have failed dismally. Sal is to be commended for teaching kids not to believe tall stories about primordial soup that are, in reality, just fanciful speculations.
That’s all for now. By the way, you might like to have a look at one of the world’s top chemists says about abiogenesis:
Acartia:
I do agree that there’s something a little spooky about schools getting kids to recite a daily pledge of allegiance to the flag, although as some readers have correctly noted, children are not actually required to do so in the USA.
That may be true, but when teachers tell kids in grade 1, 2, 3 and the other early grades, do you honestly think that the kids look at it as being optional? By the time the reach the age to question, the damage has been done.
Don’t you see a problem right there Vince? If everyone in the community believes the same falsehoods, like in some cults, they’re all perfectly integrated in the “society”. Parents disown their kids for leaving the faith all the time.
Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. The world is full of Patrick-syle child abusers. Now all we need are laws against teaching anything that might turn out to be false. Anti-Science legislation. Go Patrick!
What’s also lacking from Patrick’s case is any actual evidence that any child that ever came into contact with [redacted] shows any signs at all of child abuse. Absolutely zero objective empirical evidence of any abused child. Zero. Patrick.
You have to look in the Jewish section. LoL.
Prior to the monarchy, what did Israelite government consist in?
Hi Walto,
If I call Patrick a liar in Moderation Issues I can do so without my post being sent to Guano. The rules, as they currently exist, allow me to call Patrick a liar.in that thread in spite of what the rules say about calling someone a liar elsewhere.
If I call Patrick a liar in Noyau I can do so without my post being sent to Guano. The rules, as they currently exist, allow me to call Patrick a liar.in that thread in spite of what the rules say about calling someone a liar elsewhere.
If, on the other hand, I call Patrick a liar in this thread, my post, deservedly, can be sent to Guano, according to the rules. The truth of my accusation doesn’t provide me with an exception.
Why is Patrick stuck on whether his claim is true or whether it is not true, since that’s irrelevant to the case of whether or not it violates the rules?
Now Patrick, being a rational man, will answer that the truth of his claim is relevant to whether or not his post violates the rules. Does he have another rational response?
I agree that it’s very spooky. But I don’t take much comfort from the fact that it is currently not “legally required”…
1) just take a look at what happened before the legal requirement was struck down.
And 2), as Acartia notes, the idea that 2nd graders don’t feel compelled to conform every morning doesn’t survive scrutiny.
surely you don’t mean this.
this would be me and tens of millions who reject evolution, millions who are thoughtful about and reject it, and hundreds of thousands who pass a threshold of being very thoughtful and reject it.
its like a creationist saying anyone who understands evolutionism, teaches to kids, is abusing them.
They are not. they teach what they think is true and important.
The accusation of distortions, false claims, is just an accusation. indictment is not conviction.
i’m sure he, hopefully all here, believes in what they say. in fact its obvious we do.
Abuse of children charges is beyond the pale unless the charge includes completly its reasons within it and they are what everyone would say.
He said without a trace of irony.
Seems to me your Him is a much fancier speculation then any talk about primordial soup.
Why does the opinion of one chemist matter when the opinions of many others do not? What makes that one opinion matter more?
Oh my. Not a matter of “observation”? converging “arguments”? Perhaps you meant one argument plus multiple lines of evidence? Please, let’s avoid torturing language, you know better than that.
You seem to be adopting YEC jargon here, conflating evidence with direct observation. I know Sal is your buddy, but still
Seriously? This is absurd, the natural world itself would be in violation of natural laws given what we know, if it was 6000 years old (speed of light, etc). And I guess that applies to logic too, because God authored logic too, right? Think about it, a God that is not bound to logic is a very convenient one!
Sal is notorious for his Pascal Wager, and how can you argue for something so utterly stupid anyway? Where would the fear of hell come from if not from those who indoctrinated the kid to believe that crap?
You haven’t been paying too much attention to him then. He is most definitely one of those fanatics