In a hilarious posting, William Dembski presents most likely an email from a colleague who argues that
I encourage you to take a look at the Panda’s Thumb and follow the entire thread devoted to the optimality of the genetic code. It is simply priceless. Someone styling himself Chunkdz dominates the discussion and by virtue of a very considerable gift for profane abuse, succeeds in doing what I never thought possible, and that is reducing the entire PT crowd to sputtering, dim-witted incoherence. You must link to it.
Let’s link to this as well as to the response by us dim-wits.
PS: I wonder if Bill even bothered to look at the threads in question. Yes, they are full of profane abuses while ignoring the science involved. What is even more fascinating is how Bill points to a thread in which ChunkDZ’s profanity has been minimized in order to focus on his ‘arguments’ to show how they lack support and a thread in which ChunkDZ has not participated. Given Bill’s somewhat juvenile pleasures in making a judge pass gas, I am wondering in what other unexplored pleasures he indulges. Funny how so few ID proponents are willing nay able to defend ChunkDZ, other than marvel at his gift of profanity. Needless to say, ID may be scientifically vacuous but it does attracts people with remarkable gifts. Well, at least it’s more entertaining that Denyse O’Leary’s continued whining and DaveScot’s denial of the fact of global warming and the large human component of global warming. Ignorance does love company.
William Dembski must not be terribly bright to mistake “getting bored/frustrated with a person with poor social and reading comprehension skills who uses profanity and invectives as substitutes for punctuation” with “sputtering silence.”
Then again, Mr Dembski is a man who applies his motto of “it’s not my task to match your pathetic level of detail” to all aspects of his life, it seems.
“gift for profane abuse” .…..
I have read about the holy spirit giving the gift of prophesy and healing to the faithful, but “profane abuse”?
I will look at Gordan Ramsey in whole different light, he has been truly blessed.
”…Chunkdz dominates the discussion and by virtue of a very considerable gift for profane abuse, succeeds in doing what I never thought possible, and that is reducing the entire PT crowd to sputtering, dim-witted incoherence. You must link to it.”
First of all that’s Chunkdz’s version, even at that it was what psychologists call projection.
Secondly, my impression was that chunkdz, in the vivid words of Hunter Thompson, got stomped like a nark at a biker rally.
Who says that reality matters to ID proponents, it’s all about apologetics anyway. :-)
so, ID has finally settled upon the measure of intellectual victory that creationists like Hovind discovered decades ago … saying stuff so blitheringly stupid that opponents silently wonder how to even parse it into some sort of grammatical structure, then chortling at how all these fancy types with their book learning were unable to respond
Well, Dr. Dembski should know something about “sputtering, dim-witted incoherence.” He’s done plenty of it himself. To see for yourself, let’s go back to April 2002, to that temple of evolution, the American Museum of Natural History. There, at the ID Forum, several of the top ID advocates were given a chance to explain their glorious theory of ID. (And you thought they were always silenced!) See especially this section where Dr. Robert Pennock questions Dr. Dembski. Who’s sputtering?
I am getting reluctant to post but … Dembski of course has tuned out the fact that anyone who behaved like that posting to UNCOMMON DESCENT would have been banned after a few entries, while our visitor is tolerated and engaged (if, to no surprise, with little good humor) on PT.
I am not surprised that Dembski would endorse a thrower of foul-mouthed tantrums, it’s what I would expect of him, or maybe less. Indeed … how do we know that our guest isn’t a sock puppet for Dembski himself?
I must admit that this new “segregation” approach is very satisfactory. For whatever reasons, there are those here who like to fight with malicious visitors – who knows, maybe they just like to fight? But they can corner the visitor in the store-room and fight away as long as they please, no problem. The real beauty is that the visitors are no longer disrupting the operation of the site, just sitting there being a convenient punching bag. It must take a lot of the fun out of it. And they can’t cry “censorship” any more.
White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html
Always a crowd pleaser. It underlines however how vague and ill defined the concepts of ID really are and how it is easy to switch between definitions without the reader or listener realizing this. It’s this bait and switch which causes so much confusion. And once again Dembski shows that ID explains nothing but at best can attempt to place boundaries around science, even though said boundaries seldomly seem to be as solid as once hoped. The bacterial flagellum comes to mind, whose status as an Icon of ID has been demolished by the hard work of scientists.
It is indeed funny how there can be such a level of contradiction to the extent that others but the person directly affected can clearly observe the problems. Sure, Dembski’s blog is infamous for blocking and banning dissent, especially when it is well supported. Other detractors are quickly removed, but not at PT where we show compassion and patience, basic Christian features btw, to deal with those who come to the site with insults.
In the end it perhaps all comes down to a simple question WWJD. Funny how well intentional Christians can apparently disagree to quite an extent as to how to implement the teachings.
It’s exactly as I once observed; Intelligent Design proponents never had any interest in actual debate, unless by “actual debate,” one refers to malicious misinformation, lying, quotemining, or underhanded political manipulation.
They are also attacking PvM’s moderation style directly as well:
Beware, PvM! Next they will start bashing for for censorship!
Uncommon Descent engaging in gross hypocrisy? Who would have ever thought they would stoop so low? [/sarcasm]
How funny, from our let’s deny global warming friend.. And yet these comments are never removed just moved.
But I doubt that such complex concepts can be fully understood at the bastion of scientific vacuity called UcD.
DaveScot made an absolute fool of himself here:
http://www.uncommondescent.com/inte[…]nce-because/
Can you beleive that?! If I had been Dembski, I would have said to DaveScot: “You idiot! You just blew away our whole legal and scientific case! YOU’RE FIRED!!!”
Well, Davescot is not the smartest cookie around and his flawed logic can be easily exposed. Perhaps in a future posting, but I hate to spend too much time on people who are such scientific lightweights that they reject the facts of global warming and the well established human component. What else can I say but to congratulate Davescot on a ‘job well done’. As to Dembski, he must wonder how hard it is to soar like an eagle when surrounded by turkeys. On the other hand, in the land of the blind, one eye is king.
Besides ID, he has supported The Bible Code and faith healing. You be the judge.
(At least he’s not as repellently homophobic as Salvador:
http://www.youngcosmos.com/blog/
)
While I certainly see the connection between global warming denialism and evolution denialism, I was not aware that DaveScot was an advocate of the former.
DaveScot’s claim was already blown to bits here, actually: DaveScot Admits that ID = Creationism http://debunkingcreationism.blogspo[…]tionism.html
this is what you get for “debating” morons like FL and ChunkyZ, Pim.
I guess you think it’s working for you?
I am having a blast.
Wow, somehow I am not surprised. Pretty boy Sal… Oh the content of our closets.
For more insanity from Dembski’s blog, look here again: http://www.uncommondescent.com/inte[…]nce-because/
Gee, what a shameless liar that BarryA is!
Later, DaveScot chimes in with:
An example of someone talking out of both sides of his mouth. ID is essentially a meaningless concept, if we allow its promoters to define it as they wish, rather than according to consistent definitions regardless of their audience.
Still later.…
At which point I would ask, “If life on Earth was the product of non-supernatural agents, what is the evidence for it? If you say there is none, then why did you even bring it up? You cannot form a scientific hypothesis without physical evidence that the hypothesis can explain.”
Therefore, ID is a completely useless concept.
And yes, matter could have created itself, just as life creates itself constantly on this earth from preexisting life. Assuming otherwise is incredibly ignorant. The Big Bang could have resulted as a rebound from a previous Big Crunch. At present, of course, there is no way to know. No one should claim that this hypothesis is scientific until there is a way to test it. But it is a possibility, just as much as the existence of an Intelligent Designer.
I think this conclusion wonderfully demonstrates the difference in ethos between pseudo-science and science. A scientist is aware of her own ignorance, because she has a rigorous epistemology which makes it clear whether something is known. So we see an admission that several explanations are possible and then an emphasis that we don’t know which one is right.
Where as a pseudo-scientist would have concluded more like this: Based on the unarticulated, indescribable, and irrefutable implications of the “No Pie For Me” theory we can be quite certain that I’m right! (I suppose a good pseudo-scientist would dress that up with more verbage, but you get the point.)
I can easily see the appeal of Uncommon Descent. It’s like never leaving home so you can keep that feeling of being the smartest kid in town forever.
When your biggest yardstick for comparison is Dembski, you can spend most of your time feeling like an articulate genius.
Of course, people who crave absolute answers will never be satisfied with that approach, which is why pseudo-science remains so popular. Especially the pseudo-sciences that happen to support or be derived from religious dogmas. The Big Crunch/Big Bang hypothesis is derived from Hindu cosmology, not anything remotely scientific. We can infer the Big Bang from the evidence, but not the Big Crunch that may have come before it.
There is no evidence that alien intelligences played a role on the origin of life on Earth. If they did, that would still leave the mystery of how those aliens arose. Such a concept is, as PvM would rightly say, scientifically vacous.
Just a hypothesis : could it be possible that “Chunkdz” was Mr Dembski himself?
Wow! Even in print I can “see” Dembski falling apart and desperately trying to change the subject when Pennock mentioned common descent and the age of the earth.
Here are some gems from Dembski:
(note: later he was more explicit in denying that humans and other apes evolved from common ancestors, but he has never denied the “biological continuity” that Behe concedes)
Conservative???? What can be more liberal than allowing the teaching of baseless and long-refuted rhetoric from armchair “theorists” who have never taken step one to actually earn the right to have their “theory” taught? What can be more liberal than allowing students to conclude that common descent may or may not be true, or that the earth (and life, and the universe) can be how ever old they want it to be??
It’s no coincidence that the DI’s most notable rube, former Senator Rick Santorum, whined about teaching “evolution only” in an editorial titled “Illiberal Education.”
We have threads for discussing UD on the PT forumses, but I’d like to reiterate iml8’s note about censorship at UD; for anyone who doesn’t believe it, just try joining in a discussion over there. I’m currently under moderation, and my last post a week ago was deleted because it criticised a comment by DaveScot, and after THAT Davescot quietly edited his offending comment anyway.
But hey, it’s all for Jes… I mean, er, the designer, isn’t it?
Bible Codes (& Shakespeare Codes) have a long and quirky history:
http://www.vectorsite.net/ttcode_13.html
It is possible to obtain pretty much the same sort of secret messages from any arbitrary book – porn if you’re into that.
White Rabbit (Greg Goebel) http://www.vectorsite.net/tadarwin.html
Using the techniques of the Bible Code, I have proven that intelligent design is bogus: http://www.paulburnett.com/idbogus.htm
I must disagree with you snax. They haven’t just finally settled - they’ve always measured success in terms of volume of public statements. ID never accepted mainstream scientific metrics, such as published peer reviewed papers, citations, patents, etc… Not for its entire two decade history.
Are you sure the atom lost an electon? ;-)
I’ve read the books by Miller, Collins, and Kaufmann – all good reads with clear expositions of the key technical points. It might be a little more humane to start with Kaufmann’s “At Home In The Universe.”
Well, that would depend on how reliable the test method is, but it did test positive for the condition.
Henry
groan. Where are the rotten tomatoes when you need them? :)
I’m getting them. Or should I say - Ion it.
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