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Antievolution.org Discussion Board > From the Panda's Thumb > After the Bar Closes... > Dave Heddle's Brief Moment of Clarity

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 21 2006,13:56    http://helives.blogspot.com/2006/04/call-for-maverick-id-bloggers.html It's not totally correct, but at least he gets part of it right. Quote The first strategy I disagree with is proclaiming ID as science. Philosophical discussions aside, I will accept ID as science when I read something like this:    A scientist at (some respected research university) has been awarded a grant to do experiment X. ID predicts the result of the experiment will be Y. Non-ID predicts the result will be Z. And don't tell me this cannot happen because the secular scientific community would never allow it. I was a practicing scientist before I was a believer, and we never had any secret meetings where we discussed our true agenda of destroying Christianity in the guise of science. Predictions such as We will never discover an evolutionary pathway for (whatever) or We will never detect a parallel universe are interesting and important, but they are not examples of predictability arising from a full-fledged scientific theory.

beervolcano Posts: 147 Joined: Dec. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 21 2006,15:04    Wow, this guy believes ID, which is something usually reserved for liars. But this guy is being totally (well, it seems) honest. Amazing. He spells out ID for what it is and what it is not. He even goes so far as to say that it is religiously motivated and an apologetic. He also thinks that it can be part of science. I say good luck. Seriously. If his aim is to do real science that may one day provide some sort of evidence that life had been intelligently tinkered, then I say go for it. It won't be easy, but science rarely is. -------------- ("It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."--Jonathan Swift)

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 21 2006,15:25    yeah, Heddle's really an outlier in the data. It helps that he was a scientist, which Dembski, Davetard, Cordova etc weren't. he still makes scientifically bogus arguments like probability without the faintest idea of a distribution, but he at least recognizes and admits that ID is not science. He doesn't seem to get, though, the whole point and motivation for ID--to pretend that creationism is scientific. If ID is merely religious apologetics then it fails in the purpose of its conception, as a way of getting christianity into science class.

C.J.O'Brien Posts: 395 Joined: Aug. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 21 2006,16:49    I've honestly never minded Heddle that much. About the only thing he's got in common with most of his fellow-travellers is the smug tone of false-superiority. He says he believes in "cosmoloogical ID" and all he really bases it on in argument is the supposedly "fine-tuned" very small but non-zero value of the cosmological constant. He typically backs away from criticizing evolution, and he's honest about his apologetics in so far as he doesn't confuse them with anything scientific. -------------- The is the beauty of being me- anything that any man does I can understand. --Joe G

Arden Chatfield Posts: 6657 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 21 2006,18:46    Heddle is actually one of the more truthful ID types at PT. The thing that's remarkable about him tho, is his ability to rigidly compartmentalize different things in his mind without allowing them to slop over. He truly is a Biblical literalist, and he's trying very hard to reconcile this literalism and science without compromising the bible. We've had a couple arguments with him on PT where he's said, with a straight face, that everything in the Bible can be reconciled with modern scientific understanding with no problem. Then when people jumped on him and said "Oh yeah? What about Methuselah living to be 900 years old? What about the Flood and Noah's ark? You don't believe those things are scientifically possible, do you?", and his response is "yes, I believe those things literally happened, but those things don't contradict science because they're miracles". Then we would respond "Oh, well, all you're doing is taking anything that's scientifically impossible and sequestering it off as a 'miracle'. That's unfair, how can you do that and still say everything in the bible is scientific?" Then he would respond "I'm not taking anything off the table, all I'm doing is saying that Noah's Arc and Methuselah making 900 are just miracles, that's all. That doesn't make them unscientific". Then WE would respond "WAIT A MINUTE! You can't take all the impossible stuff, drape it with a big blanket that says MIRACLE, then claim everything is still scientific! That's cheating!" Then he'd respond with something like "But that's not what I'm doing. I'm just saying those things are miracles. The bible is still totally scientifically accurate". And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on. It's quite remarkable to watch, as anyone who's witnessed this can attest, this trick of simultaneously maintaining several different COMPLETELY CONTRADICTORY ideas in your brain at one time, and working hard to never consciously notice that they're contradictory. There's a battle going on in Heddle's brain between empericism and biblical literalism, and it looks like the literalism is winning. -------------- "Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus

tacitus Posts: 118 Joined: May 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 22 2006,06:46    Arden, you've missed out one important aspect of David Heddle's strategy for reconciling the Bible with science.  As you said, he believes the Bible to be inerrant, but that's not to say he believe's Noah's flood was a global event or that Earth is only thousands of years old. He believes that if you study the original Hebrew text long and hard enough with a mountain of Hebrew linguist text books at your side, you can see how "day" in Genesis could mean "age" and "global" could mean "regional" and so on.  In other words, the Old Testament doesn't always mean what the plain reading appears to mean, (i.e. you can make the Bible say just about anything if only you would work hard enough). The irony of this brand of inerrancy is that supporters earn scorn from both flanks--from those who reject Biblical inerrancy are still unimpressed, and from those who, quite reasonably, think the Bible should mean what it plainly says, i.e. the young-earthers.

Arden Chatfield Posts: 6657 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 22 2006,07:09    Quote (tacitus @ April 22 2006,11:46) Arden, you've missed out one important aspect of David Heddle's strategy for reconciling the Bible with science.  As you said, he believes the Bible to be inerrant, but that's not to say he believe's Noah's flood was a global event or that Earth is only thousands of years old. He believes that if you study the original Hebrew text long and hard enough with a mountain of Hebrew linguist text books at your side, you can see how "day" in Genesis could mean "age" and "global" could mean "regional" and so on.  In other words, the Old Testament doesn't always mean what the plain reading appears to mean, (i.e. you can make the Bible say just about anything if only you would work hard enough). The irony of this brand of inerrancy is that supporters earn scorn from both flanks--from those who reject Biblical inerrancy are still unimpressed, and from those who, quite reasonably, think the Bible should mean what it plainly says, i.e. the young-earthers. Actually, I don't recall Heddle getting into that kind of linguistic hair splitting when I used to bicker with him on PT. That silliness about "but what is the true definition of the Hebrew word for 'day'?" was Carol Clouser's specialty. Carol has turned this into quite a parlor trick, whereby ANYTHING in the Old Testament can be made to mean anything you need it to mean. Maybe Heddle went in for that kind of thing at some point, but last winter when I actually participated in the David Heddle Show, he didn't bother with it. By then, he had arrived at that point of "but this is a miracle, and therefore it doesn't contradict science. So there." The funny thing about when Heddle and Clouser would sort of team up against the Secularists was that it required that they temporarily forget that neither of them had much use for the other's scriptures -- Heddle viewed the Old Testament as definitely secondary to the New Testament, while Clouser doesn't care AT ALL about the New Testament. -------------- "Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus

Stephen Elliott Posts: 1776 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 22 2006,09:33    Quote (Arden Chatfield @ April 22 2006,12:09) Quote (tacitus @ April 22 2006,11:46) Arden, you've missed out one important aspect of David Heddle's strategy for reconciling the Bible with science.  As you said, he believes the Bible to be inerrant, but that's not to say he believe's Noah's flood was a global event or that Earth is only thousands of years old. He believes that if you study the original Hebrew text long and hard enough with a mountain of Hebrew linguist text books at your side, you can see how "day" in Genesis could mean "age" and "global" could mean "regional" and so on.  In other words, the Old Testament doesn't always mean what the plain reading appears to mean, (i.e. you can make the Bible say just about anything if only you would work hard enough). The irony of this brand of inerrancy is that supporters earn scorn from both flanks--from those who reject Biblical inerrancy are still unimpressed, and from those who, quite reasonably, think the Bible should mean what it plainly says, i.e. the young-earthers. Actually, I don't recall Heddle getting into that kind of linguistic hair splitting when I used to bicker with him on PT. That silliness about "but what is the true definition of the Hebrew word for 'day'?" was Carol Clouser's specialty. Carol has turned this into quite a parlor trick, whereby ANYTHING in the Old Testament can be made to mean anything you need it to mean. Maybe Heddle went in for that kind of thing at some point, but last winter when I actually participated in the David Heddle Show, he didn't bother with it. By then, he had arrived at that point of "but this is a miracle, and therefore it doesn't contradict science. So there." The funny thing about when Heddle and Clouser would sort of team up against the Secularists was that it required that they temporarily forget that neither of them had much use for the other's scriptures -- Heddle viewed the Old Testament as definitely secondary to the New Testament, while Clouser doesn't care AT ALL about the New Testament. To be fair. The same could be said about the different versions of string theory.

Russell Posts: 1082 Joined: April 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 22 2006,11:57    I think you'll find Heddle has been reasonably consistent on "ID is not science". But then he goes off on this "fine tuning" argument, seeming to say that ID is the only viable explanation for it. The other insufferably annoying assertion that he makes is that evolution is no more science than ID is. -------------- Must... not... scratch... mosquito bite.

beervolcano Posts: 147 Joined: Dec. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 22 2006,12:05    Quote (C.J.O'Brien @ April 21 2006,21:49) I've honestly never minded Heddle that much. About the only thing he's got in common with most of his fellow-travellers is the smug tone of false-superiority. He says he believes in "cosmoloogical ID" and all he really bases it on in argument is the supposedly "fine-tuned" very small but non-zero value of the cosmological constant. He typically backs away from criticizing evolution, and he's honest about his apologetics in so far as he doesn't confuse them with anything scientific. There are a lot of people who immediately clung to the strong anthropic principle once it was devised/realized/discovered. And many cling to it immediately when they hear of it. It is some sort of evidence to them of their faith. It's like the stories they heard as a child have some sort of backup, and it came from the ivory tower of science, no less. And it is of course very philosophical and not very scientific to just rename the strong anthropic principle as cosmological ID. O well. People need their mental crutches sometimes. -------------- ("It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into."--Jonathan Swift)

Dante Posts: 61 Joined: Mar. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 22 2006,13:04    [Sorry, I was reading two threads at once and posted the reply to the wrong one. Best ignore this post.] -------------- Dembski said it, I laughed at it, that settles it!

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 22 2006,13:11    Oh, yeah, I know Heddle's been consistent with that. I remember him saying it in 2005. I meant that considering 99% of what he says is bible-worshipping gibberish, when he strings together multiple sentences like... Quote The first strategy I disagree with is proclaiming ID as science. Philosophical discussions aside, I will accept ID as science when I read something like this:   A scientist at (some respected research university) has been awarded a grant to do experiment X. ID predicts the result of the experiment will be Y. Non-ID predicts the result will be Z. And don't tell me this cannot happen because the secular scientific community would never allow it. I was a practicing scientist before I was a believer, and we never had any secret meetings where we discussed our true agenda of destroying Christianity in the guise of science. Predictions such as We will never discover an evolutionary pathway for (whatever) or We will never detect a parallel universe are interesting and important, but they are not examples of predictability arising from a full-fledged scientific theory. ...it's remarkable.

Arden Chatfield Posts: 6657 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: April 22 2006,14:05    Quote (stevestory @ April 22 2006,18:11) Oh, yeah, I know Heddle's been consistent with that. I remember him saying it in 2005. I meant that considering 99% of what he says is bible-worshipping gibberish, when he strings together multiple sentences like... Quote The first strategy I disagree with is proclaiming ID as science. Philosophical discussions aside, I will accept ID as science when I read something like this:   A scientist at (some respected research university) has been awarded a grant to do experiment X. ID predicts the result of the experiment will be Y. Non-ID predicts the result will be Z. And don't tell me this cannot happen because the secular scientific community would never allow it. I was a practicing scientist before I was a believer, and we never had any secret meetings where we discussed our true agenda of destroying Christianity in the guise of science. Predictions such as We will never discover an evolutionary pathway for (whatever) or We will never detect a parallel universe are interesting and important, but they are not examples of predictability arising from a full-fledged scientific theory. ...it's remarkable. Ultimately Heddle's whole stance is quite schizophrenic. He may have 'once' been a scientist, but now he's a fundie apologist who's decided that when the Bible and science disagree, science must be wrong. What's odd about him is that he's actually sharp enough to realize that ID does not pass muster as science at any level (and, remarkably, honest enough to admit it) and yet it just has to be true anyway, because that's what the Bible demands. He's smart enough to realize that ID will never do anything better than evolutionary biology, but still dumb enough to think that Methuselah really did live to be 900 years. There's really nothing much you can tell somone like that. -------------- "Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus

Russell Posts: 1082 Joined: April 2005 (Permalink) Posted: April 22 2006,15:19    What he really seems to make no serious effort to defend is his assertion that evolution is no more scientific than ID. You may have to do some digging to even find it. Hey, if someone operates in the real world by the rules of the real world, but has private conversations with his invisible friend, I have no reason to get involved, upset, or even interested. And the cosmo-ID stuff - I don't really care all that much about that either. It's too far removed from anything accessible to actual experimentation or seriously credible theorizing for me to worry about. Sort of like Darwin conceding - at least for the sake of argument - the concept of "the Creator breathing life" into the original life form. But the "evolution is no more scientific than ID" shtick... No. Just, no. -------------- Must... not... scratch... mosquito bite.

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