Quote:If your goal is as stated, simply to convince people who are liable to be persuaded by unsound arguments, well have at it. I'm interested in something more substantial.
Then go some place else and spew your blather...
As a simple matter of logic, if you exclude them for any other reason than their being unsound and untrue explanations of the facts, then you have constructed an argument that is logically invalid, and its conclusions are therefore of necessity a non sequitur. If you fail to demonstrate their implausibility or otherwise account for these hypotheses on substantive and material grounds, your conclusions are worthless.
Quote:Allow an analogy. Let's say that you have an amateur athlete, a runner, who you claim is a serious competitor in the 100 metre dash. I as the manager of our country's Olympic team, have never seen any convincing demonstration that your boy is fit to compete at the level required to be given a slot on the team. So you suggest a tryout. You'll run your boy against runners on my team to determine if even considering him is reasonable. So I call everybody out of the clubhouse, and ask my top 6 runners to line up at the starting line alongside your boy, to see if he's got game. You immediately start in with the whining and pleading and complain that you should only have to prove your runner's mettle against Johnson over there. Whether he is anywhere close to being able to compete against the others is irrelevant, according to you. Why you picked Johnson, I don't know; perhaps you know something specific about Johnson that I don't know (like that he has the stomach flu, or just lost custody of his daughter recently and is suicidally depressed). I don't know the specific reasons for your insisting on running only against Johnson, nor do I particularly care. If you're not willing to prove your boy against a representative sample of runners with demonstrated track records, you're not getting a place on my team, no matter how long and loudly you complain about how unfair it is.
I'm glad you did dummy this down to an analogy so I can see for myself how self serving it is. A more accurate analogy would be that you or others want to run 'my boy' against hypothetical boys that you claim can run at the speed of light, not real competitiors just hypothetical ones you made up for the sake or argumentation. Then because I refuse to run my boy against hypothetical boys you claim my argument is logically invalid.
Quote:I'm going to reiterate something you've already been told more than once. I am not an atheist, I'm not committed to a specific theory of origins, and matter of fact, I'm not even committed to metaphysical naturalism. Moreover, if I can be allowed a little lack of humility, I have a fairly sharp mind, am somewhat knowledgeable about these arguments, and am fairly scientifically literate. By all accounts, I am your ideal "uncommitted" and impartial witness. Yet you seem to discount my opinion with prejudice. Why? I suspect because what you mean by "uncommitted" and impartial is not someone who, given appropriate arguments, might agree to either position. No, your idea of uncommitted and impartial is defined as "someone whom you can get to agree with you." Anyone who actually disagrees with you has their opinion discounted by you with appeal to unfounded accusations of bias and prejudice. I may not always think as highly of my peers as perhaps I should, but I would hope that anyone whom you hope to convince has sufficient common sense to see through such sophistry.
You're perfectly entitled to disagree with the case I am making regardless of what point of view or position you hold. Just because I have disagreed with some of the things you have written is hardly reason to say I am either discounting your opinion or acting with prejudice. Is that your opinion of anyone who challenges what you say? The problem might be thin skin. I hope anyone reading our respective arguments sees through the sophistry of raising hypothetical objections and then acting as if there as valid are real objections as well as see through self serving analogies...
There is an article I have read many times that has had an enormous influence on me its called:
Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism
There is, to be sure, a lot of misinformation about, and that is, certainly, a problem. But what concerns me is a deeper and more disturbing development: a rising tide of irrationalism, a widespread and increasingly articulate loss of confidence in the very possibility of honest inquiry, scientific or otherwise.
A hundred years or so ago, C. S. Peirce, a working scientist as well as the greatest of American philosophers, distinguished genuine inquiry from “sham reasoning,” pseudo-inquiry aimed not at finding the truth but at making a case for some conclusion immovably believed in advance; and predicted that, when sham reasoning becomes commonplace, people will come “to look on reasoning as merely decorative,” and will "lose their conceptions of truth and of reason.”2
This is the very debacle taking place before our eyes: genuine inquiry is so complex and difficult, and advocacy “research” and politically-motivated “scholarship” have become so commonplace, that our grip on the concepts of truth, evidence, objectivity, inquiry has been loosened. I want to talk about how this disaster came about, and the role played by the phenomenon Barzun calls “preposterism” in encouraging it.
Pseudo-Inquiry; and the Real Thing
A genuine inquirer aims to find out the truth of some question, whatever the color of that truth. This is a tautology (Webster’s: “inquiry: search for truth . . .”). A pseudo-inquirer seeks to make a case for the truth of some proposition(s) determined in advance. There are two kinds of pseudo-inquirer, the sham and the fake. A sham reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to make a case for some immovably-held preconceived conviction. A fake reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to advance himself by making a case for some proposition to the truth-value of which he is indifferent.
Neither sham nor fake inquiry is really inquiry; but we need to get beyond this tautology to understand what is wrong with sham and fake reasoning. The sham inquirer tries to make a case for the truth of a proposition his commitment to which is already evidence- and argument-proof. The fake inquirer tries to make a case for some proposition advancing which he thinks will enhance his own reputation, but to the truth-value of which he is indifferent. (Such indifference is, as Harry Frankfurt once shrewdly observed, the characteristic attitude of the bullshitter.)3 Both the sham and the fake inquirer, but especially the sham, are motivated to avoid examining any apparently contrary evidence or argument too closely, to play down its importance or impugn its relevance, to contort themselves explaining it away. And, since people often mistake the impressively obscure for the profound, both, but especially the fake reasoner, are motivated to obfuscate.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/science_sc...posterism/
As for the rest of your diatribe...I don't care if you like me, I don't know you nor do I wish to.
