…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
I’ll be happy to compare the quality of science of ID with the lack of quality of science of evolutionism. Too bad Patrick is too chickenshit for such a comparison
That sounds awesome! Please do.
Highlight discoveries, predictions and advances in understanding.
Great idea. You up for it, Phoodoo?
Frankie,
Sounds interesting. How can we formalise the comparison? Comparing entailments?
Alan, you have already proven that evolutionism doesn’t have any entailments. Not only that to falsify it requires one to prove a negative.
But anyway, I was talking to Patrick. You have already proven to be useless when it comes to comparing ID to evolutionism. I just wanted to expose Patrick too
As a Christian, isn’t it your job to attempt to save/convert people? I can’t for the life of me imagine how you think the stuff you post here can possibly help that case. Essentially, you’re saying “yeah, it’s a shitty god, but he’ll torture us for eternity if we don’t fall in line, so….” Really? You think you’re gonna draw a lot of converts with that spiel?
Better to just shut the fuck up than to spread the kind of damaging testimony you insist on offering here. If the god you claim to worship is real, you think that god is going to be happy with the kind of negative shit you’re offering up? You think your Pascal-Wager bet “belief” is going to proof you against harsh judgement or scary God’s ire?
The only thing I can figure is that you’re some kind of collaborator or troll. Or maybe just someone that is looking for some kind of weird acceptance/affection from those you consider to be in your psychological camp. Or maybe you think your first priority is to be “intellectually honest” and screw all those your posts might nudge towards damnation.
Seriously, you don’t think that a being capable of creating the universe and all the wonders we find in it can’t do better than the kind of horseshit you’re remorsefully, distastefully peddling as our sad but inescapable lot under a cruel and unforgiving superpowerful psycho? And worse, you think your pascal’s-wager “well, if I have to! “belief” is going to save you from bad treatment at that being’s hands?
I don’t believe your shit for a second, Sal. I don’t know what you’re doing or what your real motive is, and honestly, I doubt even you do.
Patrick,
You may feel you’re in a position to be the adjudicator of what is true and what is evidence and reason. I disagree about where the evidence is leading. The evidence points to a designer who plays hide and seek much like the predators hiding before a kill, but the Designer is offering mercy to those who seek him though faith in Jesus Christ.
You’ve yet to demonstrate anyone’s life on the planet will be more meaningful if there is no God. If you had the ability to prove you were unequivocally right that there is no Designer, you would have legitimate complaint, but at this point we just make our best guess of what we believe is true.
By the way, you don’t know my parents. It’s rather rude of anyone to trash talk someone else’s parents especially if they sacrificed to ensure I was well educated so I could go onto some fine secular schools in the USA. You’ve insinuated my parents were abusive.
I gave the only example that maybe there violating a child abuse law (alcohol at a party and that wasn’t very frequent), but I think that was more carelessness than what I would classify as real abuse, and I certainly had not bitterness over the incident.
In any case, you’re now the one arguing in absence of evidence and telling me my life story. Who is more aware of my upbringing? You or me?
Lots of Christians came from atheist/agnostic homes. Do you think Francis Collins or Ben Carson or John Sanford or several of my pastors are Christians because of indoctrination?
Now you’re the one seen to be arguing in the absence of evidence and on pure conjecture, not facts. You’re now having to accuse my mom and dad of child abuse.
Dad was an incredibly generous and kind man and I went into the ID movement because I lamented his passing because I could not explain the sorrow in my heart, just as reported in 2005 by Geoff Brufiel.
So now you tell me one of the kindest human beings I’ve ever known is a child abuser. You’re certainly not showing a lot of evidential reasoning, impartiality, or much of good manners. Certainly your aren’t being persuasive.
If anything, you’re persuading me your hostility isn’t about evidence and reason, otherwise you would be insinuating my dad was child abuser. You don’t even know how religious my dad was when was a child, you just made an assumption, and you’d be surprised that I was the one who when he was facing the end of his life, explained the gospel to him, despite my nagging doubts.
You’ve now been reduced to name calling of my Dad, a good man, an exemplary citizen, based on you having no evidence of who he was. I think you’re the one showing bias and willingness to jump to conclusions.
stcordova,
You have no evidence for such an entity. More importantly, you are teaching children things that are factually incorrect and encouraging them to become willfully ignorant creationists. You are lying to children for Jesus. That is not moral behavior.
No, I’m saying you are, based on your own statements. I’m encouraging you to get some therapy and understand why you want to prostrate yourself before an evil deity. It’s serving you somehow. It is not serving the children you are abusing.
Get some help and stop it.
How did I do that? I stated before and will again that, for evolution to be true, there must be an unbroken line of descent from parent to offspring for each extant and extinct organism from the last universal common ancestor. The morphological phylogeny must match the fossil evidence and the molecular phylogeny must also fit. that seems enough for starters.
What entailments does ID biology have?
Gobbledegook!
Well, I was hoping that other members who think evolutionary facts and theories involve entailments would also chip in.
But just to show willing, tantalise us with a biological ID entailment. “If ID were true we must see [fill in blank]”
Richardthughes wrote:
I ran through the last hundred or so comments for both phoodoo and myself as quickly as I could during lunch. Here’s my (obviously entirely objective) summary.
Working backward from phoodoo’s comment of 2016/01/11 at 1:40 am server time I find:
10 comments in Moderation Issues complaining about moderation.
6 comments in other threads complaining about moderation.
11 comments in Noyau.
16 content-free one-liners and comments that should have been in Guano.
20 comments in Guano.
43 comments that have some form of content despite being abrasive. The vast majority of these demonstrate willful ignorance about the concept of fitness, despite other participants repeatedly explaining it.
Working backwards from my comment of 2016/01/10 at 6:52 pm server time, which phoodoo objected so strongly to, I find:
10 comments in Moderation Issues addressing complaints or explaining decisions.
6 notifications of moving comments to Guano or addressing moderation questions outside of Moderation Issues.
3 comments in Noyau.
7 snarky or joking comments that could be considered off-topic.
80 comments that are directly on topic and engage with others’ arguments. Many of these are in fifthmonarchyman’s threads about his game and in stcordova’s discussions of Pascal’s Wager.
So, as to phoodoo’s statement that “I have never seen you write anything interesting , reflective , insightful or humorous here ever.” I can only suggest that he look in a mirror.
So now facts and reality are “Gobbledegook!” Or is Alan just clueless?
I posted the falsification, Alan. It does require proving a negative and none of your childish antics will ever change that.
That has nothing to do with undirected evolution, ie natural selection, drift and neutral changes. You are equivocating. Try again
More of nothing to do with undirected evolution. It appears that equivocation is all you have
What are the entailments for undirected evolution producing a bacterial flagellum? How can we test such a claim?
I know how to test the claim that BF’s are Intelligently Designed but no one knows how to test the claim that NS, drift and/ or neutral changes did it
What Patrick said:
Not cool Patrick, you don’t even know my dad, and you trash talk him indirectly.
My mother became very religious while living in a 3rd world country, especially after being pressured to abort my sisters because pregnancy made her sick, but she, in her mind, along with my sisters miraculously survived.
Dad didn’t even understand the gospel that well, he asked me to teach him and read the Bible to him. After he discovered he was terminally ill, I began searching for meaning, and then stumbled on ID and Christian apolgetics. I left my mother’s religious teaching by leaving the Catholic church.
You’re reasoning from your stereotypes of what Christians are, not from my actual family history which you claim to be so much an expert on.
For someone claiming to have reason and evidence on his side, you’re substituting your own speculations and conjectures as facts and telling me I should believe you’re interpretation that I was abused as a child therefore I believe in a God that is harsh. Did Mom and Dad teach me that?
No. I’m the one who came up with that on my own when my beloved Dad became terminally ill and died of slow suffocation form pulmonary fibrosis possibly because of inhalents in a 3rd world factory. Mom always view God was kind and loving, not exactly the God I have articulated I believe in.
So you totally don’t know what my Mom and Dad taught me. You’re just making stuff up and believing it and insisting I take action on your made up beliefs about my upbringing.
You are so eager to promote your narrative you’ll trash talk the parenting of a kind, generous, courageous dedicated father, my Dad.
No it was just the sentence “Not only that to falsify it requires one to prove a negative.” that was gobbledegook. Falsify what?
I have to agree with Sal, here. There is a lot of presumption in that statement.
It is a testable and verifiable entailment. Find anomolies in the nested hierarchy and common descent with modification is seriously challenged.
Nonsense. How could I possibly be less equivocal
We haven’t established the ground rules yet. You haven’t stated any entailments for ID biology. Or is inane soundbites all you have? Let’s have some substantive material from you for once.
Sal,
Nope, not even close. A lot of everyone’s psychological issues go back to their parents, even when the parents did the best job they could. Your desire to please a deity that you yourself recognize as malicious is a textbook case of those kinds of motivations.
And what a surprise, you turned out to be religious too.
Nothing emotion based there, not at all.
The bottom line is that you’re lying to children. That’s abusive. You should stop it. If you don’t want to fix yourself, fine, just stop damaging other people. It’s wrong.
Alan Fox,
Everyone has mommy and daddy issues. Ask Freud. 😉
Is this your argument? The various bacterial flagella we observe are “Intelligently Designed” because “I know”? I think you need to flesh this out a bit. Something along the lines of “If bacterial flagella were ‘Intelligently Designed’ we must observe [fill in blank*]”.
*with a testable entailment – not some sound-bite like “your side doesn’t have an entailment”.
I only know about mine. And what can you do? You’re a product of your upbringing but you don’t have to be a prisoner of your upbringing. I get the impression most folks are pretty resilient. I feel uncomfortable attacking beliefs per se. If I grant myself the freedom to believe what I do and the entitlement not to be persecuted for it, how can I not support the same right for others. I realise the issue here is indoctrination and the US (probably other states and regimes) is to an extent a battleground for kids minds. “Give me a child until he is seven…” The internet is playing an important role here, as demonstrated by the efforts of totalitarian regimes to control it.
I commend Frankie to read what Gpuccio has to say here:
*my emphasis
Observed facts and good inferences, Frankie. Why not get Virgil to get him to expand on those questions and some suggested answers?
the one question gpuccio has trouble facing is why is the ID inference necessary at all. His answer seems to be Durston, which is not a sufficient answer.
Alan Fox,
Exactly.
I agree. My issue is with the next point you raise.
This is what is abuse. If Sal limited his “teaching” to people old enough to have developed some critical thinking skills and ability to realize that not all authority figures are to be trusted, I wouldn’t say anything. He’s abusing kids with his dishonest games and strawmen.
If theists like Sal really thought they had a good case, they wouldn’t need to force feed it to children.
I hope so. It can take years to undo the kind of damage Sal is doing, though.
The problem isn’t so much that adults are not capable of encountering evidence and changing their minds. The problem is the community of people that make apostasy anywhere from socially inconvenient to fatal.
From what Sal has posted here, it would appear that he restricts the dishonesty in his teaching to lies of omission— inconvenient (to him) facts about evolution which he declines to inform his
victimsstudents of—for the most part. This is an advance over the lie early and often paradigm of the overwhelming majority of YECs… and yes, that is a fine example of Damning With Faint Praise, ennit?I don’t agree. Shit like genetic entropy is not omission.It is flatly contradicted by extensive experimental evidence. Not to mention the inconvenient fact that bacteria are not dying out of genetic entropy. It is counterfactual.
The whole structure of YEC is built on lies.
I consider this kind of a byproduct. People become incurable believers in the imaginary during a certain window of childhood development. The fact that this intellectual crippling is done with nothing but pious good intentions only indicates that the problem is passed on from one generation to the next.
Those adults who ARE capable of recognizing the damage done to them might risk social ostracism to some degree if they were to advertise their awakening, but there’s a difference between not advertising, and crippling one’s children. Sal need only tell these kids “once you are old enough to reason, and your minds have learned to defend themselves, you will find all of the world’s religions open for your faith, should you then choose to make such a commitment.”
If Sal is teaching kids what he professes here, he is telling them to invest all their intellectual capital in theological Powerball.
Take your mind and buy tickets. The odds are long, but think about the payout.
But if you’re going to teach people not to think, you need to start early with a lot of BS.
It’s God’s work.
Glen Davidson
Regardless of what age you start, what keeps adults in the fold is the thought of losing all one’s friends and relatives.
I have to disagree with this. What keeps adults in the fold is the same thing that causes them to brainwash their children – the early damage is permanent, like foot-binding and neck-stretching. Once done, it is irreversible in too many cases.
Think of the creationists who post here. Do you think they are impervious to any amount of reason and evidence to keep their friends? They have no more control over their superstitions than over their sexual orientation.
Mostly, yes, but that still brings up the matter of why one has the friends one does (can’t choose relatives, to be sure).
If one weren’t reinforcing one’s ignorance at UD, for instance, one might be learning something. Not so bad, once you’ve tried, but most of them aren’t going to try (even when here).
Glen Davidson
We’ll see about that, that is a testable hypothesis. As far as bacteria —
http://www.nature.com/nrmicro/journal/v12/n12/full/nrmicro3331.html
But, why don’t you tell me what the net numbers of new animal species emerge by natural selection each year. That is, how many new species minus the ones that are estimated to have gone extinct. Extinction is the ultimate genetic entropy!
If you say you don’t know, then how can you argue what I’m saying is wrong for sure. If you say negative, well, then that supports my point. If you say positive, then that doesn’t agree with the facts. So what do you want me to tell the kids:
1. don’t know
2. net loss of species each year
3. net gain of species each year
Depends on the year 😉
Well, I don’t know, that seems a bit drastic. I think one way to look at it is as a worldview (which they project onto their opponents, sometimes true, not always), as they think of themselves as basing their knowledge on the Bible or some other aspect of religion.
That can be hard to shift, since it’s hard to imagine not relying on your presumed basis for knowledge.
I think ultimately it often is in large part to keep their friends, and good relations with their families. Give up the beliefs and you may be isolated. I don’t think they’re thinking “If I give up the faith I’m the outsider,” but they know it and don’t want it.
Glen Davidson
I think the damage is emotional rather than intellectual. People who are not bound emotionally to an idea can change as a result of evidence.
This is why religions engage in tribalism, demonization of heretics and apostates, public confession of faith, and the like.
The emotional ties to an idea can be internalized. Scientists are not immune.
Tell them the truth.
Animals represent a tiny fraction of species. Cute furry animals a fraction of that.
Roaches are, from outward appearances, unchanged for hundreds of millions of years. All the change is invisible genomic change. Why are roaches not entropied to death?
Then I think we are going to have to disagree. I sincerely believe that most of these people CANNOT change their beliefs, that Dawkins was correct in saying that no amount of evidence, no matter how all encompassing or devastatingly convincing, can make any difference. After a certain age, religious belief is persistent, permanent.
I agree that people indoctrinated into an ineducable delusion will, like people everywhere, seek a congenial echo chamber and find comfort there.
I think this is correct. It’s not evidence in the scientific sense (observation and test) that leads people into religion and traps them there. It’s a NEED, an essentially emotional cage.
And my reading is those who manage to escape do not do so by sincerely considering evidence. They HAVE no evidence, never did. Instead, they tend to lose their faith due to emotional undermining – those they admire and love turn out to have feet of clay or are plainly hypocrites or are seen as betraying a trust.
And it’s only after such an emotional experience breaks the seal, that the actual evidence pours in and can overpower Morton’s Demon.
This is such a telling failure caused by Sal’s YECcer presuppositions.
Right now, there’s strong evidence that humans are and have been causing the Sixth Great Extinction – that in addition to species we have directly hunted to death, our settlements and agriculture have disrupted habitat and food chains to drive hundreds of thousands more species into extinction, indirectly. And this isn’t just a modern-industrial (global warming) timeframe, although we’re clearly getting worse in the 21st century; it extends back at least 13-15000 years to the extinction of charismatic megafauna in the northern hemisphere, and maybe 100-200000 years to the first ecological changes we wrought with stone-age tools and fire.
This has absolutely nothing to do with “genetic entropy” — no sane person can pretend that passenger pigeons or white rhinos were made extinct by genetic entropy — and even Sal cannot be fanatic enough to claim it does.
But when you cling to the unreal YEC timeline, you are certainly correct that there has been “2. net loss of species each year” in all of the earth’s supposed 10000 year history.
Depends on the year, indeed.
Go back into the real timeline, say 200000 years ago, to get a neutral background count of species lost and gained, which at that time was no net change or slight net gain; new species evolved to fill new or recently-vacant niches. What 200000 years ago? According to Sal’s bizarre beliefs, there is no such thing as 200000 years ago, and therefore there can’t ever have been any time in which species count was not declining severely, few new species being observed to take the place of the ones we saw disappearing before our eyes.
What’s fundamentally dishonest about that question, as Sal knows very well himself, is his equivocation between extinction caused by known factors such as a new predator – Homo sapiens – and extinction caused by his undemonstrated fantasy “genetic entropy”.
stcordova,
About zero. Every million years? Pretty low. Natural selection is not likely to have a substantial contribution to speciation, other than as a component of divergence. Speciation directly due to NS is likely to be pretty low. Stochastic factors are likely to dominate over a direct effect of NS on partition of the gene pool.
Allan Miller,
… and, indeed, over any within-population selective component to extinction to give your ‘annualised net’.
If Salvador’s genes make him do it, are you arguing with him because its in your genes to argue with Salvador?
You know, since no one brought it up.
Glen Davidson
Mung saw an opportunity to subtract value from the discussion and jumped on it.
Perhaps it’s in his genes.
The problem with your example is the extinction is not evidence of genetic entropy. The best you can say is that it might have contributed to the demise of some species, but there’s no evidence to suggest it contributed to even most, let alone all species.
It’s black rhinos that have gone extinct…the Western Black Rhino to be more specific:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_black_rhinoceros
White rhinos are doing…well…I won’t say “just fine”, but the southern species not endangered right now. The Northern White Rhino…not doing so well…
I’m beginning to think we need some new laws of societal contribution around the world. Most countries have laws about citizens having some obligatory military service. I think all citizens should also be required to work on some actual scientific research to get an understanding of how real science actually works. People should really have a better understanding of how we know what we know.
Paper on misinformation on the www, echo chambers, confirmation bias.
Basically what’s been observed of UD and similar sites, but with better data and a few hints about what can be done about it–not a lot, but a little.
Glen Davidson
Oh oops. Thanks for providing the correct info.
Of course, the point remains, we already know why northern white rhinos, and tigers, and condors, and etc etc are endangered, and if/when they go extinct, we know it has nothing to do with Sal’s fantasy of “genetic entropy”. He might as well claim it’s because of “Adam’s sin in the garden”, for all the sense his claim makes.