A proper understanding of logical fallacies will improve the quality of debate

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Perhaps this is true, perhaps not

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Let me put it more clearly, I hope - "everyone who can detect design or the supernatural in the universe have unscientific minds" would not be a concrete object even if it were true (it might be said to exist as an abstraction, but only that) But reification is mistaking an abstract entity for a concrete entity. That clearly is not what is going on in your example.

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...Holding dogmatically to a belief so that when confronted with information contrary to the belief causes one to not think straight - well, that is problem. Perhaps logical fallacy is not the right term. Perhaps it should be called a logical roadblock.

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Whatever it is called, it happens here way too often.

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And usually it is creationists and IDists who are guilty of it.

You are quite wrong, sir. The fundamental point here is that I'm not making an argument: I'm making an observation.If you can find any evidence to suggest that highlighting my opinion of your intent to disemble is an ad hom I will happily apologise and retract my comment.I also did not attack your intelligence: I highlighted you inability to debate scientifically (and there is evidence on this and other threads that you have been called on multiple times).Your inability to recognise the difference rather does the job for me, doncha think?I'll say a again: you've been caught out and you are trying to wriggle out of it to assuage your self esteem. This whole thread is your attempt at a saving throw.

Hi designtheorist Here's another one to consider:Page not found - Nizkor

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Description of Poisoning the Well

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This sort of "reasoning" involves trying to discredit what a person might later claim by presenting unfavorable information (be it true or false) about the person. This "argument" has the following form:

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  1. Unfavorable information (be it true or false) about person A is presented.
  2. Therefore any claims person A makes will be false.

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This sort of "reasoning" is obviously fallacious. The person making such an attack is hoping that the unfavorable information will bias listeners against the person in question and hence that they will reject any claims he might make. However, merely presenting unfavorable information about a person (even if it is true) hardly counts as evidence against the claims he/she might make. This is especially clear when Poisoning the Well is looked at as a form of ad Homimem in which the attack is made prior to the person even making the claim or claims. The following example clearly shows that this sort of "reasoning" is quite poor.

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Before Class:
Bill: "Boy, that professor is a real jerk. I think he is some sort of eurocentric fascist."
Jill: "Yeah."

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During Class:
Prof. Jones: "...and so we see that there was never any 'Golden Age of Matriarchy' in 1895 in America."

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After Class:
Bill: "See what I mean?"
Jill: "Yeah. There must have been a Golden Age of Matriarchy, since that jerk said there wasn't."

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Examples of Poisoning the Well

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  1. "Don't listen to him, he's a scoundrel."

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  2. "Before turning the floor over to my opponent, I ask you to remember that those who oppose my plans do not have the best wishes of the university at heart."

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  3. You are told, prior to meeting him, that your friend's boyfriend is a decadent wastrel. When you meet him, everything you hear him say is tainted.

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You can be subjected to a campaign of misinformation, posts about you with incorrect information or statements attributed to you. These are then used to discredit your arguments in later debates.Enjoy.

Fine, have it from Sandage then;

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The answer to the question, why, which I suppose down deep I was searching for in science, I realized itself had no answer in science. I forced myself to the statement that you’re asking the wrong questions or demanding too much for a proof. Why don’t you just begin to believe and see what happens?

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Knowledge of the creation is not knowledge of the creator,

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astronomers may have found the first effect, but not necessarily thereby the first cause sought by Anselm and Aquinas

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For me the rationale [for believing first before all the evidence is in] is similar to the geometric postulates of Euclid. The mathematician never asks for the reality of these postulates. He begins with them. He accepts the postulates and sees what follows from that

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As far as I can tell these quotes are in direct contradiction to the quote you cite. It seems to me that it was Sandage whose thinking on this issue was muddled.At any rate, this is quite clearly a far more ambiguous situation than you initially suggested, thus making your simplistic citation of Sandage as a Big Bang convert an appeal to a dubious authority. I was only talking about those who clearly contradict themselves. {Although in my experience that's all of them...} But in point of fact, yes, such conversion anecdotes are wholly worthless as evidence for the existence of gods. They are a classic appeal to authority. These believers no more have evidence for gods than you or Sandage do. That makes their stories logically invalid and leaves anyone citing them guilty of an argument form authority.You have failed to deal with the underlying flaw in your argument; you are guilty of a classic fallacy. Until you address that, it doesn't matter how many Christian scientists you can name.By the way, I suppose it's too much to ask that you either back up or withdraw the accusations you made regarding "scientific" and "unscientific" minds and the imagined lack of religious scientists?Mutate and Survive

I trust you are not attempting to pull a potential false dichotomy here. Even so, I think we can safely assume (for the time being) that any currently active Nobel-Prize-in-science winner is likely to be very much up to speed on the basics of his chosen field, which necessarily includes the type of freely-available library references which I mentioned. You keep shifting the charges. You have cited oodles of quotes so far, some (not all) of which were out of context, and/or the speaker was in error, and/or you have badly misinterpreted what they were trying to say, and/or (even if none of the previous applied) you were setting them up as authoritative statements in the face of clear evidence that they were expressing what amounts to personal opinion. Has anybody here said that they should never be quoted??? The primary issue (and I haven't wavered from that) is the mis-use and/or abuse of quoted material; in particular authoritative reliance on the popular books that (even by the expert's occasional admission) were never intended to be used as primary source matter for any college course, let alone as legitimate scientific references.

I finally read through the Durbin paper and found this: Perhaps this will help you. In 1974, Sandage (according to Durbin) came to a central realization about the big bang. It happened once and only once. His conversion to Christianity happened within two years of this realization. Do you see the connection now? Conversion sometimes take a little time. I am surprised it only took two years.Regarding the 1985 conference Durbin writes:
"Sandage observed that the notion of a one-shot universe comes close to saying that this universe was created. It is unique. His tone, again, was both cautious and matter-of-fact -- as if he would like to avoid announcing the implications, but has no choice in the matter. Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There is no way to predict this in physics as we know it. It is truly supernatural, that is, outside our understanding of the natural order of things, and by this definition a miracle (Durbin 1985)."Again, he is talking about the big bang and the fact it only happened once. Sandage says it is the work of the supernatural. There can be no question that the big bang played a central role in Sandage's conversion experience. It started him down the journey.Durbin again "Sandage asserts that the scientist cannot, thereby, affirm religious belief. Knowledge of the creation is not knowledge of the creator, he said in a published interview that same year." There is nothing odd about Sandage's statement. Knowledge of the creation does not tell you much about the creator or designer. In the previous thread I showed that logic tells us the designer/creator has to be immaterial and timeless. But that is all it tells us, certainly not enough to form any type of religious conviction or conversion.Durbin does not discuss the fact Sandage was ethnically Jewish. Why doesn't he mention that? Why doesn't he discuss how difficult it is for a Jewish person to convert to Christianity and turn from his family?Durbin does not discuss the fact Sandage described himself as a "practicing atheist" or "practical atheist" or words to that effect? Why not?Durbin appears to have an agenda. He wants to present one view of Sandage's conversion apart from all of the other facts.Durbin does quote Sandage liberally from an unpublished interview he did with him in 1990: I don’t think you’ll find God unless you seek God; and for me seeking God involved the question of why rather than simply how, what and when, which is all that science is about (Sandage 1990)." This is an important quote. Sandage would not have been forced to ask "why" had the big bang not already provided the how, what and when.Durbin also quotes Sandage saying the laws of physics themselves are mysteries (Sandage 1990). This quote and similar quotes by other scientists deserve their own thread.It is clear I used the Sandage quotes in their proper historical context. I now consider the matter closed. It is time to return to the issue of this thread - logical fallacies.

This is another bald and unsupported assertion. Granny Magda is the only one, as far as I know, to have provided any evidence that a quote was out of historical context. I missed it in the first thread, but have responded in depth here. In one case, it appears Granny Magda may be correct. In another, I stand my ground. We may have to agree to disagree on the issue but it seems very clear to me that the big bang played a central role in the conversion of Allan Sandage.I have seen zero evidence from you.

...or an Argument From Popularity perhaps?

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a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or most people believe it

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(I am not sure what you call an argument that concludes a proposition to be true because a few people believe it. An Argument From Lack of Popularity?)But anyway, your repeated examples of supposed conversions are not going to get you anywhere.
Half of them are quote-mined and what you have left is anecdotal evidence which requires you to switch between an argument from authority and an argument from popularity.If I was to produce a matching list of scientists that were not converted by the Big Bang theory, would it counter your claims?

No, of course the source being creationist doesn't mean it's wrong. Just a lucky guess by me, right? Concerning quote mining, I haven't seen any particularly bad quote mining examples from you in this thread. We agree about the definition of quote mining, so maybe I shouldn't have replied to your response to Granny Magda, but you didn't reply to my Message 121 and so left me kind of hanging. I'm focused on the fallacy of argument from authority because, as far as I can tell, you still have the definition wrong. You use logic to reason from evidence. Proper reasoning from good evidence leads to conclusions likely to be true. Reason doesn't produce evidence. I'm not sure if this fallacy has a name, but it should.--Percy

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In the previous thread I showed that logic tells us the designer/creator has to be immaterial and timeless

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In the previous thread you failed to show that there was a designer/creator as opposed to a non-personal cause.Also your argument that the cause was timeless:a) Rested on the controversial assumption (even among experts) that no time preceded the Big Bang. Note that at least one alternative view was expressed in the thread.b) This same assumption undermined your argument that the universe had a cause and you were unable to address it.So, in fact, the situation was NOT resolved by the time the thread was over, nor has there been further discussion to resolve it.

Wikipedia, citing Frank J. Tipler, "The Omega Point as Eschaton: Answers to Pannenberg's Questions for Scientists", Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science, Vol. 24, Issue 2 (June 1989), pp. 217-253, doi:10.1111/j.1467-9744.1989.tb01112.x.
and Frank J. Tipler (1997). The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. New York: Doubleday. pp. 560. ISBN 0385467982.If you prefer a quote from Tipler, this is from his website: I'd have thought that knowing whether or not it was true would also be important. What really makes (for example) the statement E = mc² "meaningful" --- the fact that a former patent clerk said it (there's your "something about the person's background") or the fact that it appears to be true? So ... what? You were hoping that your quotation had something to do with the Big Bang, perhaps?

Would now be a good time to mention how a certain physicist, upon my mentioning of a certain paper by Tipler, replied that he no longer trusted anything written by Tipler Would that count as the fallacy of appealing to the popular poisoning of the authority?

I don't mind you jumping in to the conversation with Granny Magda at all. I'm sorry if I did not see or respond to an earlier comment by you. My approach to responding is rather haphazard. Sometimes I start at the end of the thread, sometimes at the beginning. And sometimes I just run out of time. My wife already thinks I spend too much time on here.My comment regarding "evidence in the form of logic" was poorly worded. The evidence we start with is the fact the singularity is a mathematical concept not a physical concept, meaning the singularity cannot exist in an infinitely hot and infinitely dense but unexpanding state for any period of time. It is an idea I see promoted by some but has no justification in the field of physics. Once the singularity came into existence, it began to expand. This understanding forms the premise and leads inexorably to the idea of a creator who is outside of spacetime. The only way to avoid the existence of such a creator is to hold to another view of the beginning of the universe, such as colliding branes - a view for which there is zero observational support.Edited by designtheorist, : No reason given.

Actually, this thread is about logical fallacies. However, if you want to private message me who said that, I would love to know.

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If Tipler said it, it's not entirely honest, since his blather about the Omega Point sounds about as much like Judeo-Christian theology as Alice in Wonderland.

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According to Tipler's Omega Point cosmology, for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent it is required that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force the collapse of the universe. During that collapse the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for infinite duration as the universe goes into a solitary-point cosmological singularity (with life eventually using elementary particles to directly compute on, due to the temperature's diverging to infinity), which singularity Tipler terms the Omega Point. With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that the far-future society will be able to resurrect the dead by perfectly emulating the entire multiverse from its start at the Big Bang. Tipler identifies the Omega Point final singularity as God since in his view the Omega Point has all the properties claimed for God by most of the traditional religions.
Of course this has nothing to do with the Big Bang, the subject that you were originally trying to be wrong about, since Tipler is not claiming that God created the singularity at the beginning of time, but rather that God will be created by the singularity at the end of time. I leave it to you to judge for yourself how "Judeo-Christian" this idea is.

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I heard Tipler speak about his "omega point" ideas more than a decade ago, and had the same impression that you did. In the Q&A time I asked him if he saw a way to reconcile this impersonal omega-point idea with a personal Judaeo-Christian God, and he couldn't any more than I could.I have not yet read his "Physics of Christianity", so I don't know how his views have changed in the last decade. But they may have changed substantially, especially if he now calls himself a "Christian".