Sorry to butt in, but...
You say I was sneeringly skeptical of your charge. Maybe, I can't see why a character attack was necessary.
An observation of tone (albeit a cyber one) is not a character attack.
"Oh Behe lied." Well, if he lied then there is no need to look into anything he wrote. That's an ad hominem attack which could indicate a weakness in your counter research.
Seriously, you need to look up what an
ad hominem attack is. Stating that Behe lied is not an example of an
ad hominem. It is just stating the facts.
Upon hearing that someone lied, my first step would be to "look into anything he wrote" and then into the counter claims. Which is what Rrhain indicated you should do (or have done before regurgitating his claims).
I don't think the man lied. I have heard him speak and questioned him about criticisms of his work. He doesn't come off to me as being morally weak so as to lie to advance his thesis in that way.
So do
pro hominem arguments work now? I thought they were just the logical inverse of
ad hominem arguments and thus equally invalid (kinda like Bush's assessment of Putin by "looking into his eyes" bullshit).
You say the book isn't corrected. Well, I understand that he has a website where he answers his critics various charges. Perhaps you could check there to see if there is any adjustment.
I can't answer this without the book in front of me, but don't you think that, even if he had, that it's kinda like the "corrections" insert on the back of the front page of newspapers. Who reads that? The science to refute him had been done before publication and more has been done after publication. He shouldn't have stated his IR hypothesis in a pop-sci book in the first place without doing the research. But he did because by getting the idea into the popular consciousness then he could get laymen to make his arguments for him and he would not even have to bother doing the actual science to show evidence for his claims. He could just claim it.
Are you also the one who wants to use the term "fundies"? I usually regard that as a kind of derogatory slur on evangelical Christians. You talk about sneering? You talk about attitude?
Actually, it is a pet term for "fundamentalist" Christians. Hence, the whole "fundie" abbreviation.
If I wasn't a better person, I would say "tit for tat." If I wasn't a better person I might bring up all of the sordid history and all of the sordid present of the fundamentalist Christians (of all denominations) and say you reap what you sow. If I wasn't a better person I might call you on your ridiculous self-martyrdom and laugh until my head fell off.
Hmmm...I might get used to this whole self-contradiction thing. Maybe I'll become a fundie.
Anyway, the flood of molecular evolutionary papers after Behe's statement helps clarify the issues. So he did a service to science. What happen to "That's the way science works?"
Well, I guess if you want to attribute the "explosion" to Behe's book, then you might have a point. But you would first have to show that the "explosion" of articles on molecular evolution had anything to do with the publication of his book. Be sure to use controls like the recent expansion of knowledge based on genetic research and all of the other scientific blah blah blah. It very well could be that Behe and his book caused all of the scientists to scramble, but you will have to show us the evidence for that.
If he provoked many thoughtful papers on the matter than he gave the scientific community a kick in the pants. Did he say that no papers SHOULD be written? Of course not. He stated that he knew of none.
But at the time of publication there were more than 800! Surely a good scientist would want to research his claims and verify them before writing a book about them? Surely a good scientist would want to preclude some of his statements by stating "research into this particular area is quite new" if it indeed was so uncovered by the literature (and, by comparison, it was, but he, IIRC, didn't make any such tentative statements in his book). Surely, a good Christian (or any ol' regular person) reading his book would ask of him these very simple pre-requisites before believing everything he says? Oh...I guess that was the point.
Anyway, I don't throw out ID as nonsense.
Was that even a question?
It does seem that when things in the Bible Study section get a little quiet with no "Fundies" there to debate, the moderation gets a little more less restrictive to allow other topics to overflow into Bible Study.
Or maybe the OP had something to do with the Bible and we got a little sidetracked (my apologies to the mods for my own participation).
I think this Discussion should be placed in one of the other areas. If I do bring in what the Bible says and what I think it means, related to this topic, I fear that you would protest. But I'd be at home in Bible Study and you'd be wondering away from where you really should be debating about Dr. Behe's alledged moral lapses as a professional scientist.
Huh?
"You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong--to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration." -
The Iron Heel by Jack London
"Hazards exist that are not marked" - some bar in Chelsea
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