In a recent post here at TSZ Elizabeth Liddle made the following statement:
What undermines the “case for design” chiefly, is that there isn’t a case for a designer.
Odd, I thought. Surely she knows better. All that time spent over at UD and never a case for a designer?
This was later followed by yet another comment from Elizabeth:
I haven’t really taken to the “atheist” label, much although I don’t reject it – but it [the atheist label] implies that my non-belief in god or gods is something categorically different from my non-belief in unicorns or toothfairies, or in the proverbial orbiting teapot.
It’s not, of course, Elizabeth would say. But it is categorically different. For example, no one believes orbiting teapots design anything, and an orbiting teapot would be an instance of design, not an instance of a designer.
As this has now become a topic of discussion in the original thread I think it deserves it’s own thread. Well, not just that, I also think Elizabeth is being dishonest [EDIT: but not deliberately misleading: dishonest, defn. not worthy of trust or belief].
Elizabeth’s claim that there is no case for a designer should be understood as a claim that there is no case for the existence of God.
Elizabeth Liddle:
Can you give me some arguments for the existence for a god of some sort?
Elizabeth Liddle:
…compared to the time when I acted as though it were true that an omipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God existed, I am no longer faced with the problem as to why bad things happen, nor how a person could possibly think, feel or act or experience after their brain had ceased to function. So I now have a more parsimonious model, which means that not only do I not have to fill my head with unnecessary non-useful beliefs, I no longer have to solve the problems that those earlier assumptions presented.
It’s not that there’s no case for a designer [God], but that now Elizabeth doesn’t have to think about what the existence of a designer [God] entails. It’s not that she did not have a model based upon her beliefs, but that now her model is “more parsimonious.”
And now for the kicker…
Elizabeth Liddle:
I know there are such arguments. I find none of them persuasive.
Directly contradicting her earlier statement.
Discuss.
“I haven’t really taken to the “atheist” label, much although I don’t reject it – but it [the atheist label] implies that my non-belief in god or gods is something categorically different from my non-belief in unicorns or toothfairies, or in the proverbial orbiting teapot.”
Atheists often claim that there atheism is no different than their non-believe in flying teapots. They rarely start blogs trying to convince people of their non-belief in flying teapots, however.
One must be preaching for a reason.
What percentage of atheist believe in life on other planets I wonder? I bet its pretty high.
Mung,
I think it might take a little while for Lizzie to come up with something suitably convoluted and muddled to throw your persuasive argument off track.
Please be patient.
To be blunt, you should know that UDists really have never made a case for a designer that would convince any unbiased person who doesn’t already have a commitment to believing in the designer (big-D supernatural/immaterial Designer).
The only case they attempt to make is hopelessly flawed. So to be pedantic, Elizabeth could have said,”there isn’t a case for a designer that isn’t laughably flawed“. But she didn’t have to be pedantic, and you’re smart enough to take that as read without having to have it spelled out for you.
Sez you. I don’t accept your diktat.
Non-belief in god(s) is no different, in the experience of non-theists like Elizabeth and myself, than non-belief in fairies.
Who are you to tell me that I don’t know for myself what I believe and what I don’t believe?
Wait! A sentence ago we were talking about god(s) and all of a sudden you’re talking about teapots designing things. Where’d you pull that out from?
Okay, then. I’m sure this is going to end well.
Huh? It’s you (collective you, the UD denizens and IDists in general) who are constantly shouting that you’re not talking about god, you’re talking about a “scientific” concept of a designer which should be treated in secular education as a viable alternative to the theory of evolution. Now you deliberately want to conflate a case for your designer with a case for your god? Well, suit yourself; we’ve been telling you for years that your Design Institute is just a front for christians who want to infiltrate religion into public school (viz the Wedge)
But apparently you don’t care – while there is no case for a designer unless you believe in god or at least its equivalent as a supernatural/immaterial creator – there could be a case for a god who is NOT a designer. God could have lit the blue touch paper and set the universe going without a care as to how it turned out. God might have no desire to meddle in its creation once begun. God could have deliberately shielded its own omniscience from influencing the starting conditions, created completely at random, and even though some people say our universe appears fine-tuned, it could be that we are nothing but the lucky result of god’s roll of the dice, not designed at all,not even to the extent of designing a universe that might eventually sustain life.
Now, I don’t think anyone has made a persuasive case for that kind of god existing, but they have made some such case. And it doesn’t run into the hopeless circularity that the “case” for ID runs into.
Oh, Mung, discussion is hopeless, isn’t it.
I have no belief in god (the christian one, and for that matter, in any of humanity’s other gods that I’ve ever heard of).
I also don’t believe in your designer (Big D nor little d, neither).
For me, the two non-beliefs are actually separate issues. I have considered and rejected the “hypothesis” of your unevidenced designer for completely separate reasons from those reasons why I don’t find god-arguments in general persuasive. There’s no contradiction there.
And Elizabeth sends pages explaining, much more nicely and carefully than I ever do, how there is no contradiction there for her, either.
But you don’t get it.
Is that because you are so firmly convinced that your god exists and the designer must exist and that therefore the designer must be your god and anyone who says otherwise must be behaving dishonestly?
It sounds like a terrible muddle to me, but it’s the only explanation I can think of for why you have so much trouble accepting what Elizabeth honestly says.
Ya know, sweetheart, just because you kiss up to Mung, doesn’t mean he’ll respect you in the morning. 🙂
Apparently Lizzie is busy, so Hotshoe has decided that she has time to be imitate Lizzie’s obfuscation.
Not a bad imitation, it must be said.
You don’t know the difference between an argument and a case?
Unshocked I am.
Glen Davidson
Slow down, big boy, you’ll give yourself a stroke if you keep this up.
Mung, you know we don’t do this here:
1. Please remove the sentence.
2. Rather than guess at your motives, I’ll ask a straight question, and expect you, as a Christian, to give an honest answer. Are you trying to provoke a response that you can call censorship?
Indeed!
Mung, if you made that accusation in a comment it would already be in guano. I hesitate to edit someone else’s OP so I will allow you the opportunity to do it yourself but I won’t allow it to remain.
Some thoughts: Why not close the comments until he fixes the post? Presumably you can also remove the post from the main page. Then Mung doesn’t get censored, and he doesn’t get a free bite.
Before I read and digest your OP Mung, I will just take the opportunity to point out that it exemplifies a key difference between UD and TSZ, and of which I am extremely proud.
I will leave spotting it as an exercise for the reader, especially those who regard TSZ as a den of iniquity.
Not at all, Mung, and it would have been helpful if you would have provided a link to the posts from which you took your quotations of me. In fact, I suggest you look up those quotations now, and edit your post to provide the links.
My claim that there “is no case for a designer” refers my view on the case made from biology (and sometimes from beyond) that it evinces design. I think that the ID case falls apart. That does not mean that I think there is “no case for the existence of God”. It means that I do not think we can infer the existence of God from the alleged “designedness” of the universe.
In other words, a conclusion can be correct even though the argument tendered in support of it is unsound. And, as I said, for years I believed the conclusion, while rejecting the argument. My arguments for the existence of God were not based on the case that biological organisms evince a designer. I think, for reasons I have stated at length elsewhere, that argument is fundamentally flawed. I actually think it is theologically flawed as well, certainly in terms of traditional catholic theology. I have frequently quoted words from my favorite theologian, the Dominican Thomist scholar, Herbert McCabe:
So I would argue that the case for God lies in the way we address the question “why is there anything, rather than nothing?” not in, as McCabe puts it, “appeal[ing] specifically to God to explain why the universe is this way rather than that”.
Mung later writes:
(Mung’s bold)
I have no idea which statement s/he is referring to, but my statement there does not contradict anything s/he quoted me as saying in the OP.
I know that there are arguments for God’s existence. I used to find the “why is there /would there be anything rather than nothing” argument persuasive. I also, more importantly, was persuaded by my experience of my own sense of identity to believe that an immaterial “knower” or “experiencer” and “will-er” must be present somehow within me, transcending of my material substrate, and that, to me, gave a precedent for the possiblity that such an immaterial “knower”, “experiencer” and “will-er” could also transcend the material existence.
It still, for me, remains the most persuasive argument – but I now think I can see how my experiencer of being a “knower”, “experiencer” and “will-er” of my actions is compatible with a monist view of reality.
So if I am left with any theism, it is either a pantheism, or possibly a panentheism. But it does not hang on the case for design inferred from biological organisms, which I find flawed in almost every respect.
That’s because there’s no history of the teapotters trying to design society on their subjective interpretations of teapot scriptures.
Active atheism is a response to the historical role of religion. If teapotters were actively trying to subvert society to fit their views, the antiteapotters would be just as loud. You’d probably be among them.
“Odd, I thought. Surely she knows better. All that time spent over at UD and never a case for a designer?”
I’ve never seen a case for a designer either. I’ve seen fallacious arguments against evolution. But an actual case for a designer? Where it was shown where/when/how something was designed, for what purpose it was designed, how it was manufactured, key steps in the design process? None of that. Ever.
Zero. Zip. Nada.
The “case for design” from the ID camp has always amounted to nothing but “our strawman of evolution can’t explain X, therefore it was instantly wished into existence with divine magic”. I suppose you can just define that to be “a case for design”, but then you and I are operating under very different meanings of what a “case for” something is.
I’m confused (not a rare condition). I thought that ID was not about the designer, just identifying design. Personally, I don’t know how you can do one without the other, but I have been repeatedly told this at UD when I have asked for even the simplest of hypotheses as to the nature of the designer. Is it material or immaterial? Is it eternal or not? Must it obey the laws of physics or can it suspend them? Nobody at ID is willing to go out on a limb. And when pressed, Barry reaches down from his perch and bans the questioner for being a troll.
We all have a good idea as to why the IDists refuse to allow discussion about the designer (a feeble attempt to separate ID from religion), but it would be nice to hear the reason from one of the IDists.
Oh I love these posts. Is there any interest here in:
“Mung, outspoken proponent of statistically based design detection (ID) repeatedly fails to understand most basic of statistical concepts”?
Elizabeth,
A den of inquiry. haha.
And you think its IDists who are delusional.
Substance free as usual, Phoodoo.
Considering the similarity of the OP, in structure and in thrust, to Elizabeth Liddle Runs Away, I expect Dr. Bannington to say of the author….
Did you actually misread my post, or was it a typo?
So uhm, that “case for a designer”. Where is it?
Notice how it’s a case FOR a designer I ask for, not a list of arguments for the insufficiency of “Darwinism”.
I’ll always respect you hotshoe_
😉
Are you accusing me of dishonesty? Honestly? And yes, I have the links to all the posts from which the quotes were taken. I don’t need to look them up because I already have them. I guess I just assumed people would not think I was being deliberately misleading.
For what it’s worth I will modify the OP to make it clear that I don’t think Elizabeth was being deliberately misleading. In fact, that is sort of the point of the OP, that Elizabeth says things without deliberation.
Here are the requested links:
For what it’s worth [probably nothing] I resent the implication that I was being deliberately misleading in not providing the links. It seems to me to be a violation of the site rules [/sarcasm].
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
You seem to be the only person who had trouble understanding what Dr. Liddle meant, that there was no scientific case for a Designer. You seem to get confused a lot. That’s probably why you’re constantly running back to UD to give your muddled false reports about your “victories” here.
no.
I’ve edited the OP to indicate that I did not think Elizabeth was being deliberately misleading (see below). But I own my own words and won’t therefore disown them. On this Elizabeth and I agree.
The answer is no. I had no idea the s**t storm that would ensue and that was not my intent.
I thought I made my case for a self-contradiction. I presented the evidence. Perhaps you don’t find it compelling. Sorry.
A person who contradicts herself does not necessarily do so deliberately and with intent to mislead.
When I say I think Elizabeth was being dishonest, what I meant was that her statement was not worthy of trust or belief: Saying such is not allowed here at The Skeptical Zone? Since when?
And Mung’s hits just keep growing:
and now this.
The cops are just too hard to anger in this town.
You’re babbling. I am not even going to attempt to parse that bit of nonsense just now.
You are missing the point. Most of the folk here expect full citations. They want to be able to look them up. It isn’t that they think you are making stuff up. Rather, they want to see the original context where the statement was made.
I intensely resent the accusations that I am attempting to commit “suicide by cop.”
That has never been my MO here at TSZ.
And I’ve never posted here using a sock puppet.
OP has been updated (again):
defn. not worthy of trust or belief
I was not accusing Elizabeth of a pattern of dishonesty. I was saying that in this specific case I thought her claim was not worthy of trust or belief [dishonest].
I DID NOT SAY that Elizabeth IS DISHONEST.
Go back and read the OP.
The OP was about a specific claim she made, which I claimed was not worthy of trust or belief. I then provided evidence to substantiate that claim.
I retract nothing, You all need to learn English:
[These adjectives mean lacking honesty or truthfulness. Dishonest is the least specific.]
You seemed to think it was worth retracting before your trip to the dictionary. Why is that?
Looking good there Mung 😉
What’s your hypothesis on why I have not been trumpeting the response to the OP over at UD?
Couple of factors: We’ve already laughed at that behaviour and you’ve embarrassed yourself in recent posts so you’re hedging incase you get proven wrong with this one.
Richardthughes, my post was not directed towards anything you have written. It just happened to follow a post of yours. In reading your recent posts in this thread I see you’ve had nothing of relevance to contribute.
Mini-Mung:
How small of you.
[Edit: Not that you are being deliberately so. Small people have no choice but to stand their ground on small points. It’s in the nature of smallness.]
Mung,
Well, that’s subjective Mung. Given your recent reasoning skills we should perhaps let others decide? You can avoid ambiguity (a problem for you perhaps?) if you click the ‘reply’ button. I hope this helps!
No, Neil, I don’t miss the point. thank you very little.
LoL. So you even treat each other as if you’re all dishonest.
As does all accademia, apparently! Waterloo, materialists!!!!!11111
I answered your questions Tom, and honestly.
Okay, when you put it that way, then I firmly side with Feser. Not only is his view traditional and classical. His view is also scientific. Yours isn’t.
If you claim otherwise, then point me to the specific observer-independent element that makes the difference between a random pile of things and your car. Let’s hear. The observer-independent difference is…
Feser is not denying design and the designer. It’s just that it has a different definition – richer, classical, and properly scientific too, to do with observer-relativity.
From the point of view of not only Aristotelianism, but also of general natural philosophy, philosophy of science and philosophy of language, the IDist definition is a blatant category error that removes law and order of nature (i.e. the most obvious elements of design) from design and then tries to detect design in what’s left. Pretty funny, first make sure that you fail by definition – and then do it. And keep doing it ad nauseam.
Edit for mods: Maybe your spam policies require this, but the current IP-tracking system is extremely inconvenient for me. I am a very mobile person, I connect to several different hotspots every day, and I get redirected to some spam filter with most of them. And I cannot stay logged in with cookies either. Pretty hard to participate here.
Elizabeth Liddle:
And this bit of nonsense has already been dealt with here at TSZ.
No links, Mung?
Do you find this sentiment to be in error?
All dogs have 4 legs
Fido has 4 legs
Fido is a dog.
Does finding a a 3 legged dog revoke Fido’s canine status?
We have been swamped by spam registrations such that we accumulated a peak of nearly 70,000 spam registrations. But as it is causing inconvenience to you and others, I’ll switch off the the plugin and see if just leaving it to the captcha hurdle is enough.
@ Mung
As you declined the opportunity to remove your rule-breaking text, I have had to do it. It’s in guano. If you have objections, you can PM me or raise it in the moderation issues thread.
Alan Fox,
I wonder if this will lead to pearl-clutching moderation equivalency claims at UD?
Let me do it for you:
I do not think that the case that a designer can be inferred from the pattern of living things holds up, for many reasons, which I have stated.
I do think there is a case for the existence of God.
Compare:
I do not think there is a case that murder can be be inferred from the fact that the man idied in his bed.
I do think there is a case for murder.
Richardthughes,
Well, Mung can still contribute here, though I’ve temporarily amended her/his status to contributor which limits the ability to edit and publish OPs. It’s Lizzie’s blog of course and she may take a different view.
Perhaps you could add the little arithmetic thingy to every login attempt the way it is over at UD. This way you two, UD and TSZ, would mirror each other ever more perfectly. The arithmetic thingy should be able to reduce spammers.
(Emphasis mine.)
Is “idied” a typo or something esoteric? How to parse it?
– died?
– idled?
– ID’d (designed intelligently)?
– flatlined?
*chuckles*
The issue is spam registrations clog up the memory. There’s no problem at the “post comment” stage.