dheddle
Posts: 545
Joined: Sep. 2007
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GCT,
| Quote | 1) Your advocacy of teaching ID in classrooms, although you swear that you don't advocate it. Like, when you've bragged about how you discussed it in your classroom, but then claimed you don't advocate it. That still stinks in my mind.
2) Your talk that you give to churches, where you present scientific evidence that supposedly supports your idea of god creating the cosmos. Yet, how does that square with what you wrote above? It doesn't.
3) Your insistence that atheists hate god, and then the way you backed off from it when confronted only to claim that Xians claims atheists hate god, etc. etc. etc. |
Oh, the pinning down is quite easy:
1) I have repeatedly said that ID does not belong in the science curriculum and should never be taught as science and that it is in fact not science but Christian apologetics.
2) And I have repeatedly said the ID discussions are fine, and that rabbit trail discussions make classes (including science classes) interesting, and that the most boring science classes in the world are pure science-only science classes.
So what exactly are you claiming? Have I ever advocated teaching ID as science? No. Have I ever argued that it should be part of a science curriculum? No. Have I stated that it is a reasonable topic that might come up, rabbit-trail like? Yes I did. Furthermore, Dover did not render the mere discussion of ID illegal. Did I use to offer an optional cosmological ID lecture in my classes? Yes I did, and it was very popular among believers and unbelievers. (I won’t by the way, offer it anymore now that I have returned to the university—times have indeed changed.)
If you can’t see that my saying, definitively and repeatedly, that ID must not be taught as science and yet it can be discussed as a metaphysical viewpoint as “not being pinned down,” that is, if you can’t see the distinction, then I don’t know what to say.
Regarding my talk I give to churches—here is the most recent iteration, which was actually given at a public high school:
http://fbyg.org/ID/Nashua_High_2006_No_Backup.pdf
You will note that it presents the fine-tuning evidence and three possible explanations—luck, multiverse, and design. Of course as a theist, given that there is as of yet no experimental evidence that other universes exist, I favor the design interpretation. Shocking; film at 11. Nevertheless, I think a reasonable person would say that the presentation was balanced.
On my insistence that atheists hate God. What does that have to do with not being able to be pinned down? Isn’t taking a controversial stand sort of antithetical to not being pinned down? (You also know that I clarified that—admitting I was sloppy in not pointing out that hate doesn’t mean viscerally hate, but means, biblically speaking, the absence of worship—or maybe you mean that an admission that one’s choice of words was clumsy means said person can’t be pinned down—in which case I’m in good company with a lot of people who, on occasion, are not as clear as they could have been.) Or take what you said as factual, that I didn't clarify but backed down--Is admitting error the equivalent of "not being able to be pinned down?" If so, the you got me.
| Quote | | Why How would finding an alternate universe falsify Heddle ID? Of course, you will come back with your stock answer that doesn't really make sense (I forget what it is right now, but I remember it spawning multiple people to say that it didn't make sense). |
I have said many times how finding another universe would falsify (in the non-Popperian sense I described earlier) CID for me. If there are many universes each with different constants, then from a pure Occam’s razor argument or from an anthropic argument that’s a simpler explanation for the habitability of our universe than cosmological ID. That’s it. That is how (for the nth time) it would falsify it for me. Plain and simple. What doesn’t make sense about that? All you really mean is that you don’t believe I’d actually abandon CID, but you cannot rationally claim that I never said how it (multiple universes) would falsify it for me.
| Quote | | Why do you claim that a unified theory would strengthen ID? |
Because that would falsify at least some multiverse theories (such as the superstring landscape), which claim there is no fundamental theory; that the constants are essentially from a random draw. If the constants popped out of a theory, given that habitability would still be sensitive to their values (that not being much in dispute), then to me it is a win-win—it falsifies some multiverse theories and it puts habitability smack dab in the fabric of spacetime. In my mind, that makes the ID case stronger. Have I not said this many times? About what aspect am I slippery? Where can you not pin me down?
| Quote | | Don't you realize that other ID regulars say the opposite, so it's looking more and more like ID can mean anything and explain anything we find, therefore it is worthless as an explanation for anything |
Do I realize it (that they say the opposite)? Do I realize it? Did I not make the distinction myself in my previous post?
| Quote | | F off Heddle. You have no standing to call me full of crap. The fact is that you criticize Dembski for some of the same crap that you yourself do, and hypocrisy is not pretty. I also love how you get your craw all out of whack for Dawkins and PZ and go on your irrational benders just to attack them. You've got some issues that you should work out, you know that? |
I don’t know how to respond to that.
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Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion. The mystic has reason for what he believes, and these reasons are empirical. --Sam Harris
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