Are there actually creationists who are scientists?

[Meadmaker]

Some people ask why I do it. Why defend creationists?

I'm sure a competent therapist could answer that question, but until one comes along, here's my answer.

I'm disturbed by the unnecessary hostility toward religion that I see. I don't think it makes the world a better place. There's no need to demonize people who disagree with you. You don't have to pretend their ideas are correct, or even valid, but there's no need to assume that they are nefarious liars. They have opinions and ideas, some of which are demonstrably wrong, but they haven't seen why they're wrong. That's enough. They aren't bad people, and hearing the venom cast at them gives me a really uneasy feeling.

Also, I think, to the extent that it's important to defeat their ideas, the best way to do it is to accurately describe their ideas, and leave the personal attacks out. "He's lying" is an ad hominem attack. It fails to address the argument, and actually gives the creationist, or whoever you are calling a liar, a shield. No one will notice the argument because of the mudslinging.

It's easy enough to dismiss Behe's arguments on scientific grounds. You don't need to add personal attacks, and doing so actually diverts attention.

 

[Jimbo07]

They have opinions and ideas, some of which are demonstrably wrong, but they haven't seen why they're wrong. That's enough. They aren't bad people, and hearing the venom cast at them gives me a really uneasy feeling.

It may, in fact, be that God created the world. It may not be, and people may be honestly mistaken. The statement, "God created the world," is not a lie, per se.

"He's lying" is an ad hominem attack.

It's not, when the person is actually lying.

It fails to address the argument, and actually gives the creationist, or whoever you are calling a liar, a shield. No one will notice the argument because of the mudslinging.

Similarly, they could compound the lie by casting it as mudslinging.

It's easy enough to dismiss Behe's arguments on scientific grounds. You don't need to add personal attacks, and doing so actually diverts attention.

The K vs. D case was not used to determine science. A court of law can't do that. It works on the social level. It, more than others, is a place where we try to determine who is lying and who is not (or, if you're cynical, who is the least skilled liar ). If someone has essentially been called a liar in the courts, it moves beyond an ad hom. It speaks directly to the validity of their case.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

At the time of the trial, no one could point to the components of any of the supposedly irreducibly complex systems and say how those components provided a survival advantage before the total system was assembled. To do so, you would have to trace a plausible evolutionary path from one system to the other. At the time, no one had done so.

Surely you're joking, Mr. Meadmaker. One of the supposedly irreducible systems is the flagellum. People have all sorts of ideas about what purpose the individual components of the flagellum might serve, especially since some of those components still serve those purposes today.

And what about the eye? You got no idea what the individual components of the eye might be useful for?

Regarding blood clotting, not only do dolphins do without the Hagemann factor, but puffer fish and others don't have the contact initiation pathway. How far are we going to reduce this until we find the core? Probably right down to polymerization.

By the way, which definition of irreducibly complex are we using?

A single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning". (Behe, Darwin's Black Box)

An irreducibly complex evolutionary pathway is one that contains one or more unselected steps (that is, one or more necessary-but-unselected mutations). The degree of irreducible complexity is the number of unselected steps in the pathway. (Behe)

A system performing a given basic function is irreducibly complex if it includes a set of well-matched, mutually interacting, nonarbitrarily individuated parts such that each part in the set is indispensable to maintaining the system's basic, and therefore original, function. The set of these indispensable parts is known as the irreducible core of the system. (Dembski, No Free Lunch)

~~ Paul

 

[CFLarsen]

Let's not forget "slow design"......

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Here's a paragraph from Dembski's "Irreducible Complexity Revisited":

Along the same lines, consider an outboard motor whose basic
function is to propel a small fishing boat around a lake by means of a
gasoline- or electric-powered engine that turns a propeller. The outboard
motor is irreducibly complex and its irreducible core includes, among
other things, a propeller, an engine, and a drive shaft connecting engine to
propeller. Now, we can imagine simplifying this arrangement by replacing
the engine and drive shaft with a rubber band that, when wound up, turns
the propeller. But it’s unlikely that the level of performance attainable
from such an arrangement will propel a boat around a lake. In other words,
minimum function is unlikely to be preserved with the rubber band. Yet
even if it was, this new arrangement would not perform the primary
function in the same way as the original outboard motor: the original
outboard motor depended on the turning of rotors and not the torsion of an
elastic medium.

So now the reduced system has to have the same level of performance and the same mode of operation as the original system. It appears to me that the new definition of irreducible complexity is:

A system is irreducibly complex if, after you remove a component, the new system is not identical to the original system.

~~ Paul

 

[Meadmaker]

Surely you're joking, Mr. Meadmaker. One of the supposedly irreducible systems is the flagellum. People have all sorts of ideas about what purpose the individual components of the flagellum might serve, especially since some of those components still serve those purposes today.

People do indeed have all sorts of ideas about all sorts of things, including about what non-flagellar purpose might have been served by various flagellar components.

So all you have to do, to show that Behe is wrong, is show how one could have evolved from the other. Show a plausible scenario by which components could have been added or modified to change the function.

At the time of the trial, no one had done that. Someone had said that the TTSS had a bunch of the same proteins that the flagellum had. I suspect, although this wasn't quoted in Miller's statement, that other people might have speculated on various functions that might have been played by other parts, but that isn't the same thing as showing how one might have evolved from the other.

In principle, what Behe was asking for was fairly straightforward. In practice, that's a lot of time with a microscope and chromatographs or sequencers or whatever gizmos you use to figure out what proteins are in a flagellum, which explains why no one had done it, but in principle, it's easy.

Now, someone claims to have done it, and a journal is publishing it as if it were new, valuable, research. Why would they bother if everyone already knew that stuff?

By the way, which definition of irreducibly complex are we using?

I think that's one of the problems with this debate. Behe has managed to take a very old argument (What good is half an eye?), dress it up in a fancy suit (irreducible complexity), and get everyone talking about the quality of the tailoring. All the definitions are slightly incomplete, and none is much better than the other. They all say, basically the same thing, and raise the same problem.

A system can't evolve by natural selection unless it provides some sort of selection advantage to the organism. Behe et. al. contend that incomplete systems don't provide the selection advantage, and thus couldn't evolved.

In at least one of his papers that I read, Dembski noted that it could evolve if the components served some other purpose. He called such a system an "indirect Darwinian path", but then claimed that no such path had ever been observed.

So, prove him wrong. To do so, provide a plausible path.

By the way, it isn't hard to spot the fallacy in the argument. It's an argument from ignorance. I'm just saying that you can't defeat an argument from ignorance by claiming that you aren't really ignorant. You are. We really don't know. As I've been saying, some people claim to have provided such a case for the flagellum, but they did it recently, not at the time of K v. D.

 

[articulett]

It's easy enough to dismiss Behe's arguments on scientific grounds. You don't need to add personal attacks, and doing so actually diverts attention.

Diverts attention from what?-- the fact that he's lying in the name of god and obfuscating understanding for who knows how many people under the guise of "academic rigor" and science?

 

[Questioninggeller]

From the webpage of Behe's department:

Department Position on Evolution and "Intelligent Design"
...

The department faculty, then, are unequivocal in their support of evolutionary theory, which has its roots in the seminal work of Charles Darwin and has been supported by findings accumulated over 140 years. The sole dissenter from this position, Prof. Michael Behe, is a well-known proponent of "intelligent design." While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally, and should not be regarded as scientific.

http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm

 

[articulett]

Meadmaker,
they had reams of data showing Behe was wrong... that what he said was irreducibly complex wasn't. His argument wasn't real. It's like saying you can't grow a head without a body--therefore a head is irreducibly complex. He simply refused to look at or acknowledge the info. that refutes his claims.

He is often refuted--he just doesn't read anything that conflicts with his views... he doesn't keep abreast of current knowledge. No creationist does. They are incurious because they they have the answer they want, and they don't want that answer disrupted. Dishonesty is still dishonesty no matter how you dress it up or what sort of spin you put on it. And this deference you have for religious dishonesty--the way you defend it while vilifying those who speak out about it, bothers me. There is no evidence that this overarching apologetics does anything to change any creationists mind or to keep them from inflicting their "breathtaking inanity" (Judge Jones term) on trusting naive others.

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/08/erv_hiv_versus.html

 

[Meadmaker]

From the webpage of Behe's department:



http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm

If you want to say that Behe is a lousy scientist and ID is a bunch of hooey, you'll get no argument from me. I just don't think there's any reason to doubt that he is telling the truth, as he sees it. There's a difference between being wrong, and lying.


There would be a very easy way to show that he is lying and that I've been duped. Find that paper, published prior to the Dover trial, which shows a plausible evolutionary path between two dissimilar systems. (For example, a type three secretory system and a bacterial flagellum.) That's what it would take to disprove what he was saying. I think that if such a paper existed, Behe (and I for that matter) would have known about it. What's more, if it existed and he claimed not to have known about it, I'd go so far as to say that he was lying. It would be a very important paper to his work, and it seems totally implausible that such a paper would exist and he wouldn't be aware of it.

I'm going on vacation, but good luck finding it. I don't think you can.

 

[hgc]

If you want to say that Behe is a lousy scientist and ID is a bunch of hooey, you'll get no argument from me. I just don't think there's any reason to doubt that he is telling the truth, as he sees it. There's a difference between being wrong, and lying.


There would be a very easy way to show that he is lying and that I've been duped. Find that paper, published prior to the Dover trial, which shows a plausible evolutionary path between two dissimilar systems. (For example, a type three secretory system and a bacterial flagellum.) That's what it would take to disprove what he was saying. I think that if such a paper existed, Behe (and I for that matter) would have known about it. What's more, if it existed and he claimed not to have known about it, I'd go so far as to say that he was lying. It would be a very important paper to his work, and it seems totally implausible that such a paper would exist and he wouldn't be aware of it.

I'm going on vacation, but good luck finding it. I don't think you can.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/100/6/3027

 

[Meadmaker]

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/100/6/3027

It's curious that a paper showing how one system could have evolved into a different system strangely omitted the word "evolved", although it did include the word "evolution", once, as the last word in the paper.

Here's a whole section of flagellum evolution stuff.

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/irreducible_complexity/flagellum_evolution/

There might be some info there: Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I will when I get back from vacation. It certainly seems that there is a lot of interesting stuff still going on in 2006 and 2007.

Again, for emphasis, I'm not saying Behe is right. I'm just saying he's not lying.

 

[Jaggy Bunnet]

There would be a very easy way to show that he is lying and that I've been duped.

Yeah - find a paper published before the trial that shows a system he claimed was irreducibly complex wasn't.

And that has been done (blood clotting).

So he can't tell what an irreducibly complex system is, which means he has no theory. Yet he continues to promote it and his cheerleaders refuse to acknowledge how dishonest that is.

 

[articulett]

Again, for emphasis, I'm not saying Behe is right. I'm just saying he's not lying.

You have interesting criteria as to who is and isn't lying...

Oddly enough, it seems amazingly in line with your own views. When someone uses semantics in weasely ways like you do... they aren't lying... but, boy do you pull out a different set of criteria when the semantics don't coincide with your viewpoints.

 

[Meadmaker]

When someone uses semantics in weasely ways like you do... they aren't lying... but, boy do you pull out a different set of criteria when the semantics don't coincide with your viewpoints.

Hmmm... perhaps we could compare cases where I said people were lying to cases where I said they were not lying.

Good luck finding a place where I said someone was lying. It's not something I do very often. Especially when it comes to their own beliefs, I think people almost always tell the truth. If someone says, "I believe X..." I almost always think he's telling the truth. He might be an idiot, but he's probably an honest idiot.

 

[hgc]

It's curious that a paper showing how one system could have evolved into a different system strangely omitted the word "evolved", although it did include the word "evolution", once, as the last word in the paper.

Would you believe that I knew you would answer with that? Sure the paper doesn't talk about how the flagellum may have evolved from TTSS, but then it's good science therefore doesn't make claims it can't support. What it does do is show how parts of the "IC" system are in use elsewhere for another purpose. That makes the "IC" system not irreducable.

This is just one example, which I found in 2 minutes with teh Google. If I was someone who writes books and testifies in trials as an expert in regards to the irreducability of bacterial flagellum, I would of course have read this and many more papers about the topic as a matter of course -- that is, if I wasn't lying about my credentials.

Here's a whole section of flagellum evolution stuff.

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/irreducible_complexity/flagellum_evolution/

There might be some info there: Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I will when I get back from vacation. It certainly seems that there is a lot of interesting stuff still going on in 2006 and 2007.

No doubt there is. Perhaps at the next trial, Behe will testify for the side of science and rationality, having been overwhelmed with what even you might call another "IC" system down the tubes.

Again, for emphasis, I'm not saying Behe is right. I'm just saying he's not lying.

It's been 4 pages of this thread. I don't think anyone doesn't get that. What I don't get is why you're so heavily invested in the point. For my part, I know why the distinction between lies and ignorance, though secondary, still matters a lot.

Have a nice vacation!

 

[articulett]

Hmmm... perhaps we could compare cases where I said people were lying to cases where I said they were not lying.

Good luck finding a place where I said someone was lying. It's not something I do very often. Especially when it comes to their own beliefs, I think people almost always tell the truth. If someone says, "I believe X..." I almost always think he's telling the truth. He might be an idiot, but he's probably an honest idiot.

You're right; I apologize... had you confused with somebody else.

 

[mijopaalmc]

You know, articulett, you spend accusing people of lying one would think that you would be more careful about what about what you say about other people. Instead, you consistently misrepresent what other people say about various topics (e.g., the randomness of evolution ¹ and the claim that religion is child abuse ^{2, 3, 4} in order to discredit their arguments.*

*If people wish to discuss the merits of the actual argument, they can feel free to discuss them in the respective thread, but I think it is fairly obvious how the people who most loudly and consistently accuse others of lying lie themselves. (I'm open to criticism of what I have written in those threads also, feel that I have misrepresented anyone, but I think there needs to be honest and open discussion about how debates are conducted on this board.)

 

[ponderingturtle]

If you want to say that Behe is a lousy scientist and ID is a bunch of hooey, you'll get no argument from me. I just don't think there's any reason to doubt that he is telling the truth, as he sees it. There's a difference between being wrong, and lying.

Yes and that is the willful part of willfully ignorant.

 

[ponderingturtle]

Hmmm... perhaps we could compare cases where I said people were lying to cases where I said they were not lying.

Good luck finding a place where I said someone was lying. It's not something I do very often. Especially when it comes to their own beliefs, I think people almost always tell the truth. If someone says, "I believe X..." I almost always think he's telling the truth. He might be an idiot, but he's probably an honest idiot.

But that is not his lie, his lie is that "System X is irreducibly complex" he is not claiming belief, he is claiming knowledge. Belief can't be dishonest, but when you start to claim facts and support for a belief, then he is lying.