I personally felt that RAZD was not justified in calling you a liar, that, in my opinion, especially for someone like yourself that has been a great poster in this forum, was unwarrented.
I'm curious how you define liar. To me it is someone who misrepresents the facts, especially after they have been told that their misrepresentation is false because that shows intent to maintain a misrepresentation rather than determine that they in fact are wrong (the honest approach, one provided in simple manner to Straggler, an opportunity that has not been undertaken).
quote:li⋅ar —noun a person who tells lies.
Synonyms: falsifier, perjurer, prevaricator.
quote:lie —noun 1. a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood. 2. something intended or serving to convey a false impression; imposture: His flashy car was a lie that deceived no one. 3. an inaccurate or false statement. 4. the charge or accusation of lying: He flung the lie back at his accusers.
Intentionally repeating something you have been told is false is lying.
You could go through the whole thread and delete all of straggler's comments (his posts and replies to his posts) and you would find not one iota of ant frass of support for what he claims is my position.
This dishonesty has been exposed several times.
There is a simple method that anyone can take to prove my claims that he has misrepresented my position - show where I say what he claims.
In my opinon, this gets confussed in 2 ways.
Philosophically speaking, there is no reality experienced external to ones own mind, therefore "empirical" seems illogical as a pre-qualifier for evidence.
However, scientifically speaking, we have established a set of ground rules for what we call empirical evidence that has a set of pre-existing conditions for it.
And because of these 2 positions, the argument, especially in a forum, is almost impossible to bring to a point of concession.
One also has to ask where the first scientific empirical evidence for a concept comes from ...
Concession is easy: there are classes of evidence where all you can say is that it is evidence, what kind of evidence cannot be determined. All Straggler need to is drop the needless attempts at qualification of unknown evidences.
Such evidence is still valid as a starting point for investigating possibilities of reality, because it may be valid evidence of reality and you won't know until you have tested it. THEN you find out.
People have accused me of being ambiguous about this, however it is the nature of evidence itself to be ambiguous at times, I just observe it for what it is.
Excuse me, I thought RAZD banged on about his "faith" ad nauseum ...
Nope.
You have confused Straggler's confusing continual misrepresentations with my actual position on the validity of subjective evidence: all I talked about was the validity of subjective evidence. It seems Straggler was completely, and likely still is, unable to separate this from talking about gods and faith, etc, a problem I don't have.
Most of what I "banged on about" was Straggler's continual misrepresentation of my position on subjective evidence to involve and be central to my faith, when it didn't and isn't.
Glad to see it's become a "faith" now, & not an evidentially supported conclusion, though.
Curiously, my personal faith has always been a "faith" -- it is something that I just do not talk about -- a point that renders all of Straggler's comments about my faith, hidden agenda, larger argument, etc., etc., rather ridiculous, because whatever he thinks it is, it is necessarily a fabrication of HIS own making. This point should be obvious to anyone when they realize that he has been unable to find a single -- not one -- quote about my faith that he can use to prove his point, even though there were literally hundreds of posts on the topics in question. Not one. Not a single one. Zero. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Don't you wonder why that is?
Faith is a personal journey, and I can no more tell another person how to find their path than anyone can tell me, which makes discussion of faith rather irrelevant and pointless, hence my declining of moose's invitation.
Nor will I be party to any more of Straggler's silly games about "but you said" to my "no I didn't" - as he has demonstrated to me a level of dishonesty in those debates that is pointless to try to continually refute. He will continue to post false statements about things I've said in spite of challenges - and his failure - to substantiate them. Until the day he can, or acknowledges that he can't and apologizes, he will be a dishonest debater and a liar in my book.
But this is not the thread to air dirty laundry, it is a topic to discuss debates on other topics.
Every single time that you assert that atheism equates to "absence of evidence is evidence of absence" you are denying the mass of objective evidence that many atheists, myself included, would cite in favour of the possibility that gods may just be human inventions.
It is presented as evidence to justify the atheist belief.
But I think the quoted statement does come up short of saying "there is objective evidence that God/gods do not exist", which is what I was looking for.
Not that what I said was (from your quote):
People keep telling me there is objective evidence for atheism, but so far none has been presented.
quote:My "probably a product of human invention" atheism is thus not based on "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". Rather it is based on the objective evidence available.
I honestly have no idea what might work. Though it makes no sense, to me his behavior is consistent with someone who is working hard to misunderstand what we're saying, sometimes so clumsily as to be beyond belief.
I think what you are seeing are the effects of a firmly held belief that evolution is wrong, so therefore it cannot make sense. From this vantage point the purpose of reading texts and explanations is to find problems with them, chinks in the armor.
Because this is the focus, learning what evolution really says is not important. Instead arguments are read only to find their weak points.
Cognitive Dissonance can also make reading comments from people presenting contradictory information difficult, as the perception is that it must be wrong and attention wanders. Evidence of this situation is when people make mistakes in reference to the contrary posts: they get the information wrong, not because they are stupid or trying to be difficult, but because the information is having trouble getting past the barriers people erect to protect their beliefs.
This behavior is not restricted to FUNDIEs (Fundamentalists under numerous delusions involving evolution), but to anyone with strongly held beliefs and having to deal with contrary information.
I've likened a world view to a single cell organism, where some ideas get through the cell membrane easily and others are kept out by defense mechanism/s.
There are "trigger" words and phrases that turn on the defense mechanisms (evolution and abortion are two), while rephrasing the concept in neutral words can promote discussion.
YECs generally accept variation, adaptation and descent, seemingly unaware that this is evolution.
Information is another topic where the creationist\idist preconception (doesn't matter where it originates) interferes with discussion about mutations and variations in populations.
Actually I think what is seen as willful ignorance is the result of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance and the strength of belief, such that it is the inability of concepts to pierce the worldview wall rather than a conscious choice for ignorance.
If it wasn't so funny it'd be laughable!
I've seen similar behavior in non-YECs. To me it is a failure of education to promote open-minded skepticism and logic as necessary tools of education and critical thinking.
I've been reading Schiller lately in the original German. Every sentence is like a saying. True wisdom in every word. This is similar to your (RAZD's) posts actually, each is a POTM.
Thanks. Wish I knew more about it. Makes me wonder if we couldn't have one of our resident experts provide a seminar on the topic of these issues. All I know is what I read and what I observe.
Hi Percy, just when you thought it couldn't get worse ...
Though it makes no sense, to me his behavior is consistent with someone who is working hard to misunderstand what we're saying, sometimes so clumsily as to be beyond belief. If it's true that he's willfully misunderstanding us, then how would we get him to stop?
One can always use him as a bad example, and a foil for talking past him to the larger audience.
quote:It may seem unusual to include Leonardo da Vinci in a list of paleontologists and evolutionary biologists. Leonardo was and is best known as an artist, the creator of such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa, Madonna of the Rocks, and The Last Supper. Yet Leonardo was far more than a great artist: he had one of the best scientific minds of his time. He made painstaking observations and carried out research in fields ranging from architecture and civil engineering to astronomy to anatomy and zoology to geography, geology and paleontology.
Leonardo's scientific and technical observations are found in his handwritten manuscripts, of which over 4000 pages survive, including the one pictured on the right, showing some rock formations (click on it to view an enlargement).
Leonardo knew well the rocks and fossils (mostly Cenozoic mollusks) found in his native north Italy. No doubt he had ample opportunity to observe them during his service as an engineer and artist at the court of Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, from 1482 to 1499: Vasari wrote that "Leonardo was frequently occupied in the preparation of plans to remove mountains or to pierce them with tunnels from plain to plain." He made many observations on mountains and rivers, and he grasped the principle that rocks can be formed by deposition of sediments by water, while at the same time the rivers erode rocks and carry their sediments to the sea, in a continuous grand cycle. He wrote: "The stratified stones of the mountains are all layers of clay, deposited one above the other by the various floods of the rivers. . . In every concavity at the summit of the mountains we shall always find the divisions of strata in the rocks." Leonardo appear to have grasped the law of superposition, which would later be articulated fully by the Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno in 1669: in any sequence of sedimentary rocks, the oldest rocks are those at the base. He also appears to have noticed that distinct layers of rocks and fossils could be traced over long distances, and that these layers were formed at different times: ". . . the shells in Lombardy are at four levels, and thus it is everywhere, having been made at various times." Nearly three hundred years later, the rediscovery and elaboration of these principles would make possible modern stratigraphy and geological mapping.
In Leonardo's day there were several hypotheses of how it was that shells and other living creatures were found in rocks on the tops of mountans. Some believed the shells to have been carried there by the Biblical Flood; others thought that these shells had grown in the rocks. Leonardo had no patience with either hypothesis, and refuted both using his careful observations. Concerning the second hypothesis, he wrote that "such an opinion cannot exist in a brain of much reason; because here are the years of their growth, numbered on their shells, and there are large and small ones to be seen which could not have grown without food, and could not have fed without motion -- and here they could not move." There was every sign that these shells had once been living organisms. What about the Great Flood mentioned in the Bible? Leonardo doubted the existence of a single worldwide flood, noting that there would have been no place for the water to go when it receded. He also noted that "if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and separated from each other amidst the mud, and not in regular steps and layers -- as we see them now in our time." He noted that rain falling on mountains rushed downhill, not uphill, and suggested that any Great Flood would have carried fossils away from the land, not towards it. He described sessile fossils such as oysters and corals, and considered it impossible that one flood could have carried them 300 miles inland, or that they could have crawled 300 miles in the forty days and nights of the Biblical flood.
How did those shells come to lie at the tops of mountains? Leonardo's answer was remarkably close to the modern one: fossils were once-living organisms that had been buried at a time before the mountains were raised: "it must be presumed that in those places there were sea coasts, where all the shells were thrown up, broken, and divided. . ." Where there is now land, there was once ocean. It was possible, Leonardo thought, that some fossils were buried by floods -- this idea probably came from his observations of the floods of the Arno River and other rivers of north Italy -- but these floods had been repeated, local catastrophes, not a single Great Flood. To Leonardo da Vinci, as to modern paleontologists, fossils indicated the history of the Earth, which extends far beyond human records.
Pity he did not publish these comments in a peer reviewed journal ....
This very same kind of evidence is what convince the early "hobby" geologists in the 1800's, many of whom were clerical people, that (a) the earth was in fact very old, and (b) that a global flood had not occurred in the natural history of the earth.
Comment on the "Has natural selection really been tested and verified? " thread
In the OP Bolder-dash states:
I read recently where an editor of Discovery Magazine stated that Darwin provided a testable mechanism for evolutionary change, and as such it has stood up to the rigors of such testing.
I am not so sure that this is true. Can people point to tests that have verified that natural selection causes evolutionary change? What tests have they conducted? Do these tests accurately mimic the real world?
First you need to define what you mean by "evolutionary change" - so we can see if your meaning is similar to what is used in the science of biology in general and evolution in particular.
In science "evolutionary change" means that the frequency distribution of hereditary traits is different from one generation to the next. I expect you are thinking of something more dramatic than variations on a theme changes. ... Natural selection is only part of the process of evolution, ...
So, what you mean by "evolutionary change"? What do you expect to see?
The supposition made by the magazine editor (not by me)was that Darwin's idea of natural selection has been tested to be the driving force of evolutionary change (including of course changes in body structures, and living systems, etc).
Since then he has devolved into a complaining troll, repeating and repeating that (Message 203 is one example):
I had ABSOLUTELY NO desire to talk of natural selection as it relates to some generic concept that means nothing in terms of evolution-I had every intention to discuss NS as it relates to EVOLUTION! ... ... I wrote very specifically what it was I was asking for three times? NS as it relates to EVOLUTION. Please read that sentence again-Natural Selection as it relates to Evolution. Please address why you continue to fail to see the connection between NS and EVOLUTIONARY Change, as opposed to whatever the heck you want to call NS which does not involve evolutionary change.
What Bolder-dash fails to comprehend is that his total failure to define what he means by "EVOLUTIONARY Change" necessarily leaves us with only the scientific definition and usage, of evolutionary change to mean the change in the frequency distribution of hereditary traits in breeding populations from generation to generation.
Continuing to repeat his complaint, without attempting to further explain what he means, is obviously futile wasted bandwidth. Trying to shout (caps) it doesn't add to the definition of what he means.
Simply put, the problem is his lack of communication for what he means by "EVOLUTIONARY Change" and this needs to be resolved before any progress can be made.
I suggest that this be the top priority when the thread re-opens.
I also think that other sub-topics from Peg and herebedragons should be diverted to new topics in the interim to leave Bolder-dash with his thread to answer his topic.
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