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

I do not mean Hoyle. I mean Hawking. Perhaps you missed my summation on Message 314 in which I quoted extensively from Hawking's book A Brief History of Time.

Arguments from authority may be the best we can do when the data and it's interpretation is beyond us. Clearly we are not all cosmologists, and I doubt that many of us could ourselves fairly evaluate the relative merits of purely scientific proposals.But it would also be false to say that we can have no understanding of what is going on. Consider this quote: I think that we could at least hope to ask for an outline of this alleged "proof" to take it beyond mere argument from authority.(I would also add that this is another quote that has been taken out of context. All Jastrow is really claiming is that the cause of the big Bang is beyond scientific enquiry - which many current experts would disagree with. So there is no proof of the "supernatural" in a religious sense here, and even the point that Jastrow is making is contentious among the relevant experts. Another example of why we should not trust arguments from authority).

Not true. This is what Hawking said. Clearly, Hawking is saying physicists don't like the big bang because it "smacks of divine intervention." Hawking does not attempt to argue that it does not smack intervention. He accepts that it does and this apparently causes Hawking to look for another explanation which would not smack of divine intervention.

I supplied you with evidence but you did not care to give it any attention. You just started attacking me and accusing me of things. Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers gives plenty of evidence as well. The quotes are only supplemental, designed to give you a reason to look at the key evidence. The key evidence is laid out in Message 1, Message 49 and the summation in Message 314. I did not mention the quotes until Message 152.Edited by designtheorist, : No reason given.

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I supplied you with evidence but you did not care to give it any attention

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That's a bit hypocritical coming from someone who has actually refused to admit that points I made even exist - when replying to the post !

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You just started attacking me and accusing me of things.

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And here you are refusing to admit that I did take on your arguments directly. Probably because you were unable to refute the points that I made.

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Jastrow's book God and the Astronomers gives plenty of evidence as well.

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We don't argue with books here. Feel free to produce this "evidence" if it is any good.

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The quotes are only supplemental, designed to give you a reason to look at the key evidence. The key evidence is laid out in Message 1, Message 49 and the summation in Message 314.

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Well, for a start none of this changes the fact that your quote of Jastrow was a pure argument from authority, or that you omitted context that would show that Jastrow meant only that the cause of the Big Bang was beyond scientific investigation or that this view is currently rejected by a good number of living experts.The first message at most argues for a cause and I did not object to that (only to questions of consistency with your later arguments).The second failed to make much of a case, too. Indeed it introduced the major problem that you ASSUME that there is no time before the Big Bang, an assumption that you failed to sufficiently support and is in conflict with your argument for a cause (a point you repeatedly failed to address). Let us note also that most of it is quotes - and the one that you appeal to to "support" your idea of a cause "before" the Big Bang actually states that the idea is "meaningless". Antoehr point I raised in the thread.Your final summary was "ignored" only because replies to summaries are forbidden by the forum rules. But really it added nothing but more dubious appeals to authority.

I find it ironic that a topic labled 'A proper understanding of logical fallacies will improve the quality of debate' has devolved into debating 'who said what'.This is the very reason why the 'Arguement from Authority' is very poor debating and a logical fallacy.

Erm, I don't know how to tell you this, but Dr Adequate is correct. The quote you supplied doesn't say what you claim it says. Maybe if you read the quote in context you'd understand what Hawking was saying. Here's a link to Chapter 3 where the quote occursMy Dyn AccountAs a quick taster, here's the quote, which starts a paragraph, along with the next couple of sentences.

A thread started to lecture others on a subject the proposer doesn't understand is a train wreck waiting to happen.Of course I suppose I could have simply noted that designtheorist is indulging in ad hominem since he failed to directly deal with the points that I made... But I feel that would risk giving people the false impression that his accusations had some truth to them.

It is a bit of a bind, isn't it?I still think this whole thread is a saving throw to get out of being wrong in a previous thread.That said, the discourse didn't fall into gibberish and word salads as it often does with creos.Edited by Larni, : spellinking

As others have already informed you (and so I don't understand why you're replying like this instead of acknowledging error), Hawking does not reject the Big Bang. Hawking never "turned his back on the Big Bang." The only world-famous physicist fitting that description who springs readily to mind is Hoyle.Hawking accepts the rather obvious evidence that the universe was once small and very dense and experienced a period of very rapid expansion early in its history. Hawker never rejected the Big Bang. Eddington never left Quakerism. And what certain scientists think is not evidence of what is true about nature.No one replied to your error about Hawking in your message Message 314 because the thread was in summation mode, and no replies are permitted in that mode.You continue to misunderstand the fallacy of argument from authority. It isn't citing an authority that is the fallacy. It is claiming that something is so because the authority says it is so.What's important is the evidence that convinced an authority something is so, because then others can examine the evidence to see if it is convincing to them, too.--Percy

He is saying that physicists other than him didn't like the Big Bang. He himself is famous as a proponent of the Big Bang, as you would know if you'd bothered to read A Brief History Of Time. Where does he "accept" this? Have you got an actual quotation from the book you didn't bother to read in which he says this thing that he never actually said?Here's something Hawking actually wrote: "The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws. However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started — it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?"Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

You see that the line speaks of "Many people" and you don't bother to determine what Hawking himself says about the line of reasoning of those people even after you've been challenged. Nope. For you, the fact that the quote without context seems to say what you want is enough.And then if someone rubs your nose in your error, your response will be to go back to prior posts and delete your mistakes? Surely you jest.I challenge you to read chapter one of "A brief history of time" and then to come back and spout this nonsense. Much of the text is available for free on Google.

I think the issue is that "smacks of" is a pretty weak claim. So the Big Bang sort of looked a bit like divine Creation to some people. That's only a superficial impression, not a solid argument. It doesn't even give us a good reason to think that there might be a solid argument for God in the Big Bang (and if there is one, nobody seems to have found it).Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

I'm curious: did you actually read the book, come to this analysis from it, and then quote it here? Or did you find this quote on another website and then copy and paste it over here?To me it looks like you've been reading a website about quotes from physicist that look like they support a belief in god, rather than actually reading the book and comming to your own conclusions. If that's the case, you should be providing links to the websites you're pulling from (and its real easy to go ahead and C&P the address bar right afterwards).Further, using quotes is not a good way to argue in the first place. Rather than having an interesting discussion about what's what, it ends up being a discussion about what other people meant from a few words that are attributed to them.

I actually read the book. I don't have any idea why you might think otherwise.As I have mentioned before, the quotes are a supplementary argument designed to get people to pay attention to the key points they would not look at before. I quoted Hawking specifically because I was challenged to quote him. The point is that everyone agrees that to use Hawking's words the big bang "smacks of divine intervention." This is no disagreement on this point anywhere but on this thread and I am baffled as to why it exists here.