Over at UD Vincent Torley has absolutely shredded Lawrence Krauss’ performance at the debate the other night.
Ironically (given recent events here at TSZ), we find out that Krauss is a dishonest quote-miner.
The debate would have been a better one without Krauss, who generally behaved like a boor, and who engaged in deliberate dishonesty (see below).
From this statement, Krauss draws the totally unwarranted inference that the Center for Science and Culture thinks that “science is bad,” despite the fact that the previous sentence (which he omitted to quote) refutes that notion. This is a clear-cut case of quote-mining on Krauss’s part.
Torley’s comments are worth reading.
Thoughts on Krauss’ performance?
As full of shit as the second sentence of the beginning of the Wedge Document is, no, I can’t see any good reason to quote the first sentence and the third, while skipping the none-too-long second sentence. To be sure, any quote has to be somewhat out of context, but that’s too careful an excision to be excused for the sake of time or some such thing.
If he couldn’t spend the time dealing with the middle part, he should have skipped the rest of it.
But I am thinking, who cares what Krauss said? It’s your dog and pony show, and I’d never vote for Krauss to defend biology against Meyer.
Glen Davidson
I watched the debate and will never watch this krauss guy again. And I am very liberal.
He was malicious, rambling, foolish, absurd, weird.
Something wrong with him. One can’t say its arrogance because no one these days is arrogant like that or in that way.
It was like the 9/11 people.
A jihad by mutual self destruction.
Meyer did get a blinding migraine but it won’t last!!!
It was pathetic and sad and wasted the cAnadians and anyone tIME who wanted different sides to rumble on these great intellectual matters.
Krauss showed me he is not intellectually able.
Jusy another person who memorized things in his early twenties and calls himself a cosmo scientist.
Probably these books he wrote shows the problem. Someone reaching the public isn’t the same as a real thinker on science. Like Bill Nye.
however opposed i am to evos I always find they are worthy as speakers for their cause.
this guy ain’t. It was embarrassing.
The evos mUST do better. Maybe this debate will be seen in history of this contention as part of the DECLINE AND FALL OF THE EVOLUTION EMPIRE.
Also accusing child abuse twenty nine times is too much for a debate on biology and cosmology.
My thoughts on Krauss performance is that Krauss is a terrible debater and I was convinced of this ever since his first debate with William Lane Craig. Craig destroyed him so much I was facepalming from embarassment throughout. His subsequent debates with Craig only served to further cement my opinion of this.
Furthermore, besides him being generally lousy at debates, he most definitely shouldn’t debate ID creationists on topics of biology, where he’s not only terrible at debating but also manifestly incompetent. Krauss is not a biologist, his understanding of biology is cursory at best. This does raise the question for me why Krauss and Meyer are debating each other, since their individual areas of “expertise” and interest are different? Weird.
Krauss may be an engaging public lecturer and a talented theoretical physicist, but when it comes to debating religion vs atheism, or science vs IDcreationsm, or doing philosophy, he’s terrible. He’s also a bit of a dick in person it seems.
On matters of philosphy and religion, the best atheist or evolutionist debater is Jeff Lowder. On Cosmology and theoretical physics, it’s Sean Caroll. On biology and evolution vs creationsm and ID, it’s Kenneth Miller or Donald Prothero. As far as I have been able to gather these are the only people competent enough in their respective fields and knowledgeable enough about the opposing viewpoints to do these kinds of debates. But Krauss is an embarassment.
Well, to be honest, as evidence for ID this is better then the usual crop of nonsense.
Torley Eviscerates Krauss. Therefore ID.
Nobody has actually made statements to that effect.
Hey, put me up for a debate! You want to see facepalmable bumbling, I’m your man. ID would be in schools within the week. Or possibly not.
Torley (long-winded sob story apologetics English teacher) Eviscerates Krauss, but Lamoureux Eviscerated Head-Confused Meyer
Mung, the ‘debate’ was hosted and sponsored by Christian organisations at the UofT. Acknowledge, yes? Sure, Krauss was moronic in his atheism, but the person that IDists are weakest and unablist to confront is Lamoureux. The UD boards are largely Meyer vs. Krauss, leaving out the man who destroyed Meyer with his superior scientific knowledge and open, forthright theological inclusion.
Lamoureux willingly accepts ‘intelligent design’ but not ‘Intelligent Design Theory,’ that ‘strictly scientific’ behemoth constructed by Meyer & his ‘think tank’ cover for right-wing ‘cultural renewal’ apologetics based in Seattle, Washington. Do you have an answer as to why IDists don’t or won’t acknowledge this? I do: because it would destroy their pet ‘theory’ and a few of the DI leaders already know this…so they just hush, hush, hide it.
I found the discussion session most helpful, with Meyer basically ‘simplified’ by his headache into repeating the same old tropes which he’s done for the past 20 years. Lamoureux’s evangelicalism may not appeal to any of the atheists here, nor does it to me who is thankfully not an atheist (!), but his agreements with Krause – ‘preach it brother’ – against the duplicitous infantilism of Meyer and his speculative origins home field were effective.
Winner: Lamoureux. 2nd place: Krauss. Loser: Meyer & the DI.
Even though Krauss is full of despair with his unspoken answer to the ‘debate’ topic, “Nothing’s behind it all; it just is and we are ultimately meaningless creatures”, he still comes out ahead of Meyer’s activistic Protestant scientism. The loser is the one who claims triumphantly to have won, while the vast majority see his pants are around his ankles while his hands are in the air and he doesn’t notice this.
Can you possibly recognise how scientistic Meyer appears to those of us (vast majority) who reject IDT, while you embrace it, Mung?
Hi Mung
Good to see you got out of the moderators wood shed in one piece 🙂
I found this post quite interesting :Laurence A. MoranMonday, March 21, 2016 10:09:00 AM
Bill says,
The debate took place in Canada where we allow the teaching of religion in public schools. None of us give a damn about the American Constitution. We’re interesting in knowing whether the science is valid or not.
If the Intelligent Design proponents have legitimate complaints about evolution and if they have good scientific arguments in favor of design then those ideas should be taught in Canadian schools in spite of what some judge in Pennsylvania said ten years ago.
Lawrence Krauss tried to show that ID was not science but he did a horrible job. Meyer countered by presenting a lot of science forcing Krauss to deal with the very science that he said ID doesn’t do!
Bill, you are being dangerously naive if you think you can simply dismiss the ID movement because it’s not science (according to your definition). The general public doesn’t care. All they see is serious attacks on evolution that look a lot like science.
Yes, ID is a movement and so are the desires to do something about climate change or GMO’s. There are lots of “movements” with social and political agenda. Many of them deal with science in one way of another. It’s the role of scientists to evaluate the scientific arguments in spite of the agenda. We have to show that the goal of the movement is either compatible or incompatible with the scientific facts.
Of course Larry Moran also predicted that Krauss was not qualified and would fare poorly. Larry wrote his piece before the debate, so extra points.
Debating is a skill in itself. In debate teams, you have to be prepared equally for either side. I doubt if any IDist could switch sides and debate against Moran or Coyne defending ID.
In all the decades I’ve been following this, I’ve never seen a creationist or IDist who could make the case for evolution.
petrushka,
Yes, and Meyer in particular has no excuse, after his many years of involvement in the debate, for invoking the “combination lock” argument.
If Torley’s summary is correct, they all made rather embarrassing blunders.
Torley does a decent enough job exposing Krauss’s blunders that there’s nothing more to be said, except to say that Albert pointed out these very same mistakes to him two years ago. But Krauss apparently just doesn’t get it and doesn’t realize he doesn’t it.
Meyer, for his part, is just as committed to the argument from analogy as proponents of design inference have ever been. Transposing the argument from generic macroscopic properties to talking about “information” does nothing to make the argument from analogy any less vulnerable to the objections raised by Hume.
Lamoureaux makes the fewest philosophical mistakes. However, it is hard to see how his endorsement of Darwinian evolution is compatible with his use of embryonic development as an analogy for macroevolution. The whole point of Darwin’s theory is to show that species are populations, which are unlike individual organisms by virtue of being not teleological unities. If Lamoureaux asserts that macroevolution is teleological because it is part of his religious tradition, that is perfectly fine — but then anyone who doesn’t already share that tradition just simply shrug his or her shoulders.
It is nice to see that Lamoureaux points out that Darwin himself was a kind of teleologist — a point almost completely obscured these days. But his teleology was precisely the sort regularly advanced in contemporary philosophy of biology: functional explanations as a result of past selection. Darwinian teleology is not Aristotelian teleology. (Arguably, the development and life-history of individual organisms is Aristotelian teleology, or something quite like it.)
Since Lamoureaux brings up “Darwin’s Doubt” — whether our cognitive functions are generally reliable — a brief comment is in order. Darwin brings up the Doubt in the course of speculative musings. The Doubt here is along the lines of, “yes, I believe that the orderliness of the universe points towards its Author, but should I believe that natural selection has resulted in cognitive capacities that are generally reliable about comprehensive metaphysical claims?”
One problem here with how the Doubt has been taken up (e.g. by Plantinga, and Lamoureaux might have a similar difficulty) is that one can distinguish between the following questions
1. Does unguided macroevolution support or undermine direct realism: one’s naive confidence in the reliability of one’s cognitive capacities with regard to tracking and classifying spatio-temporal particulars?
2. Does unguided macroevolution support or undermine scientific realism: the position that systematic intervention and manipulation of observable phenomena allows us to discern the hidden causal structure of reality?
3. Does unguided macroevolution support or undermine metaphysical realism: the position that the human mind can know anything at all about the ultimate nature of reality, including whether or not there is a God?
I think that one can happily say that unguided macroevolution is consistent with (and even supports) both direct realism and scientific realism while also saying that unguided macroevolution weakens (but does not refute) metaphysical realism (whether theistic or atheistic).
Kantian Naturalist,
Another question one might ask (and I do) is whether guided macroevolution, or creation for that matter, supports or undermines any of your three sorts of realism. I would say that it’s consistent with any of them but doesn’t support any of them. Unless of course you add some auxiliary assumption of what the guider or creator would have had in mind.
John Harshman,
Hi John
Forgive this intrusive cross-post. My apologies to the others.
John – I am still a little unclear on one of your previous answers.
I tried figuring it out on my own, but I lack the necessary background & expertise.
I was hoping you could help me out.
Thanx in advance for even considering the request
my question is here:
best regards,
That seems right to me. Then the question arises as to where those auxiliary hypotheses are coming from and what justifies them. For Plantinga and Lamoureaux it’s clear that those hypotheses are simply drawn from their respective religious traditions. That is fully legitimate as the explication of a theological position, but it has no purchase on those who aren’t working in those religious traditions (or any at all).
Kantian Naturalist,
Yes, because you can’t bootstrap the reliability of your reasoning. Any assumptions you make about why it ought to be reliable can be accepted as valid only if your reasoning is reliable.
“For Plantinga and Lamoureaux it’s clear that those hypotheses are simply drawn from their respective religious traditions.” – KN
Yeah, it would be horrible if someone didn’t have *any* religious (or even ‘worldview’) traditions to draw on, wouldn’t it? ; )
Thanks 🙂
I’ve got some OP’s I was wanting to get to and tweaking keiths’s nose gets boring after a while. (Not really). Time to move on.
“Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!”
Sounds a lot like what the spokesman for a site full of pots who call the kettle black might say.
😉
peace
Thank you, Dr. Venkman.
“Sounds a lot like what the spokesman for a site full of pots who call the kettle black might say.” – FMM
Oh, come on. He’s not an atheist. He’s Jewish. How can a Jew be an atheist, really?
By not believing in God is the best and easiest way I should think or don’t you believe Iin free will?
Nice to see you fifth, how’s the game coming?
“Tweaking keiths’s nose gets boring after a while,” said Mung, while rubbing his ass and wincing.
No offense keiths, you might want to rethink that insult
newton,
🙂
Are you suggesting that Mung’s ass is more dexterous than heretofore recognized? Perhaps from a lot of practice?
No idea who is being labeled a “spokesman” here, but I never denied having a “worldview” of my own.
I only pointed out that assumptions drawn from world-views are not rationally compelling to those who do not already share that worldview.
“By not believing in God”
Voila! A Jew wouldn’t be a ‘Jew’, wouldn’t ‘be’ a Jew, ‘wouldn’t’ be a Jew, if not for…history & theology (oops, reality talks). Ohhh, Abraham!
Sadly, there are way-fringe people like Torley (think ‘Japanese Christians’, but instead way fringier people here, atheist misanthropists) who can’t separate their religious/atheist faith from their ‘strictly scientific’ defence/attack of the Discovery Institute’s ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ or their ‘scientific atheism. You folks are both a self-
congratulated stain on humanity. : ))
And the laugh of it is that activist (while comfortably denying it at the same time) Mung won’t beep a peep about this clear picture for fear of … what exactly? Do tell.
Just as KN is deathly afraid of actually facing or (musically) unable to address the religion of his religious Jewish ancestors (due in his case to Sellars-worship), Torley is similarly caught on the horns of selling-out his Catholic faith and his ancestor’s faith for some kind of awkward neologistic Protestant faith in ‘science.’ It’s as if his saviour Seattle Discovery Institute’s theoretical promises are ‘designed’ for him in Japan to exploit ignorance for the philosophically naïve. And that if he can really work hard in his native English language by posting long winded fluff that mostly Protestant evangelicals would only possibly believe, one day his IDist ideology could possibly become ‘true’!!
And then he’ll hug and kiss every atheist surrounding him and everything will be well and happy and peaceful and good. Torley paradise! Mung bows.
Gregory,
Have you had that looked at?
Gregory,
Ummm…what?
No I don’t believe in free will. I’m one of those meany Calvinists.
I have a ton of notes and an outline of a thesis with a couple of testable hypotheses .
Lots of experiments waiting to be performed and the frustrating beginnings of a game in Java Script.
It is extremely slow going. I’m not a programmer and am as you know terrible at detail, That is a horrendous combination for the process of developing a game like this.
I’m getting there but it’s a rough slog.
thanks for asking
peace
You just placed your finger squarely on the reason that Darwinism seems so inept and deficient to those of us on the other side of the fence
peace
I’d sure like to know the source of my fears.
Are you sure? I seem to recall you doing that very thing not too long ago.
You didn’t actually watch the debate, did you.
Therefore, no creationist or IDist can make the case for evolution.
As far as I know, yes. Did you see how Krauss attacked the organizers for not telling him who he would be debating? But he sure had Kansas and Dover handy!
Well, over at UD I complimented Lamoureux. I even pulled his book off the shelf. One of those things I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time.
What is it exactly that IDists won’t acknowledge, and what is it you think the DI leaders are hiding?
keiths:
Mung:
Yes, I did, and Meyer did invoke the goofy “combination lock” argument. Did you stop watching once you had your Krauss quote mine?
Well, let’s see. I do not embrace scientism, and if one must embrace scientism to be an IDTist, it must follow that I am not an IDTist.
I stopped right where you stopped watching, obviously
I didn’t say he didn’t use a combination lock as an analogy. Meyer also made it clear how Krauss misunderstood the point of the analogy. You conveniently forgot to mention that.
Mung,
There’s no contradiction here. Krauss was complaining that when he was originally asked to do the debate, he didn’t know that Meyer would be involved. He found out later, but at that point he decided not to withdraw, as a favor to the organizers.
He certainly knew before he came on stage that Meyer would be there. He was the one who noted that the Discovery Institute had been promoting the debate, after all.
Think, Mung.
Mung,
He tried, and failed, to justify the analogy.
There’s simply no excuse for someone of Meyer’s experience to trot out that straw man over and over.
Mung,
People asking you for evidence for the claims you make. You and walto should form a support group.
You’re an IDist, Mung, therefore you are cock-sure of yourself and have no fears, that is, if you’re anything like the (“Sky is Falling!!”) Discovery Institute’s Fellows in the CSC. ; )
That’s nice; I rarely read that cesspool. I’m not a big Lamoureux fan but he demolished Meyer in this debate by being more scientific and honest than Meyer’s tricksy, repetitive, unaccomplished IDism.
Exactly what Lamoureux stated: he believes in ‘intelligent design’ as every Christian (and Muslim and [real] Jew and Baha’i and Hindu, etc.) does. (Atheists are usually superficial morons, so who really cares that they don’t ‘believe’ the world and themselves were/are created?) But he doesn’t believe in ‘Intelligent Design Theory’ as the Discovery Institute (there’s no genius ‘founder’ of IDism, so one must simply point to the DI) promotes it because that is scientistic nonsense by definition of their claim that IDT is ‘strictly scientific.’ Lamoureux openly promotes an integrative science, philosophy (his weakest field) and theology/worldview conversation (unlike the Interventionistic Design Theory of the DI) , to the benefit of everyone involved, even if they are not ‘evangelicals’ like Lamoureux (and the majority of IDists).
Now, Mung, if you really think the DI is not hiding this obvious fact (‘intelligent design’ vs. ‘Intelligent Design Theory’, the latter which Christians need not embrace), then please point to some links where they acknowledge this openly, in public, honestly. If you can do that, I’ll send you a sloppy wet kiss of thanks! ; ) Do you have the courage to even try to explore their duplicity?
Nuance isn’t your thing is it?
Did you choose not to believe in free will or did you have to? I don’t think that you are mean ,fifth. Just pessimistic.
Good luck
Mung:
Meyer could have done a better job anticipating the “evolution is not random” objection to his analogy of a bicycle thief trying to open a combination lock. But for all we know it was in his notes. He was flying blind there for a while.
Yeah, I don’t save much time for bullshitters, if that’s your atheist defence, ‘Newton.’
LoL! Natural selection is non-random only in a trivial sense-> not all changes have the same probability of being eliminated. It is still all just differing accumulations of genetic accidents, errors and mistakes. Whatever is good enough survives and gets the chance to try to reproduce.
petrushka,
In all the decades I’ve been following this, I’ve never seen a evolutionist who could make the case for evolution. 😛