Aww. Michael Egnor Notices Me

Egnor claims that I called Bethell "a liar"

Oh, dear, another troll with reading comprehension problems.

Did you even bother to read my piece?

"What I said was, "Bethell then goes on to repeat a common lie of the intelligent design movement..." Repeating a lie doesn't necessarily make one a liar; it is possible to repeat a lie from sheer ignorance."

Repeating a lie doesn’t necessarily make one a liar; it is possible to repeat a lie from sheer ignorance.

Well, you do say “Bethell then goes on to repeat a common lie”, which is pretty close to “a liar”.

What are you babbling about?

Egnor didn't exaggerate; he attributed to me something I did not say.

I didn't exaggerate about anything; I quoted from my own piece, which you evidently haven't read in its entirety. Troll hint: read the link that says "Read more of the silly saga...".

So don’t blame anyone for not understanding what you wrote.

Michael Egnor has noticed me.
Hmm. He must be selective. He never noticed this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK1GQ9POBBL83YO

;)

attributed to me something I did not say.

More troll babbling.

I never called Egnor a liar, nor implied that he was. You can't even keep the players straight. Egnor is not Bethell. Bethell is not Egnor.

If you use quotes, you had damn well better be quoting what the person actually said, unless you make it clear you are paraphrasing.

What I wrote was clear as crystal and you understood it.

The use of double quotes indicates a verbatim quotation, troll.

Egnor has some justification for thinking Shallit called him “a liar”, regardless of whether or not a rigorous textual analysis would come to that conclusion.

What you said is a matter of opinion

Aw, come on, the point is that Egnor likely suspects that Bethell is a liar, at least through laziness, ignorance, and carelessness. If you're reading Shallit's "Bethell then goes on to repeat a common lie," and you're an IDist, you project your suspicions onto Shallit.

People like Nathan and Egnor (and apparently Bethell) have difficulty with the distinctions made by careful writers like Shallit, hence they exchange a falsehood for Shallit's well-chosen non-committal statement ("pretty close" is simply not true). Perhaps Nathan can't quite grasp the significance of writing "repeat a common lie" without adding that Bethell is a liar, for the one is readily demonstrable (like evolution is), and the other would require much data and argumentation, well outside of the scope of a blog, to properly (and legally) demonstrate, if one wished to do so.

If IDists and creationists could grasp what is required to properly make an assertion, like "repeat a common lie," vs. the hypothetical "Bethell is a liar," no doubt we'd not have the problems from them that we do. "It looks like Shallit is calling Bethell a liar" is the linguistic equivalent of "It looks like design," and only buffoons think that these are sufficient to produce solid conclusions. But we have buffoons in large quantities.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

If the scientific discovery of a ‘blueprint’ would justify the design inference, then why is it unreasonable to infer that the genetic code was designed?

Dr. Shallit criticizes Mr. Bethell on another point. After calling Mr. Bethell “gullible” and “a liar,” Professor Shallit ridicules Bethell’s observation that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (S.E.T.I.) research demonstrates that, under appropriate circumstances, the scientific inference to intelligent design in nature can be a legitimate interpretation of data.

— Egnor

In my view, Shallit implicitly calls Bethell a liar

Shallit calls Bethell "a liar"

After calling Mr. Bethell “gullible” and “a liar

I don’t know if the DI practices the disappearing posts that ID does

BTW, why do so many people like you have knee-jerk reaction to criticism as “trolling”? Shouldn’t we expect a higher level of integrity on the pro-science side?

— Nathan Parker

Give me a break. I am no fan of the ID movement and no fan of the DI, but there is not a dime's worth of substantive difference between what you wrote and the claim that you called Bethell a liar.

You wrote, in your rather hideously written post, that he repeats a lie.

You wrote "It goes without saying that Bethell gets the details wrong"

Yes, you are correct on a slight technicality. But it is not worth the pixels you are using to crow about it.

Sometimes PT posts legitimate critiques of things that come out of the DI. This ain't one of them. This is Bush League. This, by its petty, trivial nature, dilutes those legitimate critiques.

Will you be reporting when they mix metaphors or dangle participles?

Heddle wrote: "there is not a dime’s worth of substantive difference between what you wrote and the claim that you called Bethell a liar."

Well, then, Heddle, I'll be sure not to call upon you the next time I need a dime.

Heddle also wrote: "You wrote, in your rather hideously written post, that he repeats a lie."

It seems to me that someone who trots out the clause "in your rather hideously written post" in a sentence chiding me for my writing style is beyond help. And irony.

Oh come now, heddle. Shallit called Bethell a "buffoon". According to the free dictionary, a buffoon is "a ludicrous or bumbling person; a fool". Such a person could eaily repeat a lie without knowing it is a lie. The tone of Shallit's piece clearly takes Bethell to task for not knowing what he is talking about rather than for being a liar. It is quite obvious that there is substantial difference between what Shallit wrote and what Egnor said he wrote.

Shouldn’t we expect a higher level of integrity on the pro-science side?

— Nathan Parker

There are different meanings possible for the hypothetical "Bethell is a liar", unsurprisingly. In the broadest sense of "liar," it probably would not be unfair to suppose "Bethell repeats a common lie" at least implies that he is a liar, because in that sense, telling a single lie could be construed as defining the person as a liar. As in, during a heated argument, if one catches the other out in a lie, one might feel justified by that one instance to say that the other is a liar.

Even that broad definition it is entirely inappropriate to say that Shallit called Bethell "a liar" in quotes like Egnor did, because by no means is that a quote from Shallit, as the punctuation and context indicate that it is.

More importantly, the sense that a single lie makes a person into "a liar" is more appropriate for a heated argument than for reasoned discussions, or even a blog (well, the two aren't mutually exclusive, but blogs aren't exactly the same as writing something for a journal). That is to say, one is justified in saying that a certain statement is a "common lie" on a blog, it is far more questionable ethically to call someone "a liar" on the same blog (without additional instances of "lying"), because the context would imply that the person not infrequently lies. The broadest definition of "a liar," as one who has told or repeated "a common lie", doesn't work there, for in published works the word "liar" is typically taken in a more narrow meaning, that the person is characterizable by lying, rather than having been caught out in an error, or even a falsehood.

It seems likely that Shallit wrote what he did precisely because he didn't want to say that Bethell may be characterized by "lying," even if it were true. Heddle is a well-known Calvinist, so it isn't surprising that he understands the charge of Bethell's having repeated a "common lie" as being very similar to saying that Bethell is "a liar," for in his theology one sin makes one into a sinner, and one lie makes one into a liar.

But that isn't how the world understands those words. The rest of us understand Shallit as avoiding the charge that Bethell is "a liar", through the expedient of merely stating that Bethell repeated "a common lie". Of course the modifier "common" itself tends to suggest a possible unwitting uptake of that "lie," rather than its necessarily being a deliberate falsehood. I'm not sure why we shouldn't call Bethell a liar, considering that he's been answered well and he repeats the same mindless drivel (he can't be that dumb), the point is that Shallit didn't do so.

We're fighting to keep religionists such as Heddle from determining the meaning of words and science, and I think this demonstrates the necessity for keeping up the fight. The theology that one lie makes a person "a liar" is far too restrictive for normal discourse and for the distinctions that we wish to be able to make. And even within that theological standard, the problem of the quote marks just hasn't been answered by any of the apologists for Egnor.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

The rest of us understand Shallit as avoiding the charge that Bethell is “a liar”, through the expedient of merely stating that Bethell repeated “a common lie”. Of course the modifier “common” itself tends to suggest a possible unwitting uptake of that “lie,” rather than its necessarily being a deliberate falsehood.

If the scientific discovery of a ‘blueprint’ would justify the design inference, then why is it unreasonable to infer that the genetic code was designed?

If the scientific discovery of a ‘blueprint’ would justify the design inference, then why is it unreasonable to infer that the genetic code was designed?

... IF we discovered a fossil rabbit in pre-cambrian rocks...

If the scientific discovery of a ‘blueprint’ would justify the design inference, then why is it unreasonable to infer that the genetic code was designed?

If the scientific discovery of a ‘blueprint’ would justify the design inference, then why is it unreasonable to infer that the genetic code was designed?

This thread is kind of fascinating. I've seen someone go to great lengths to defend a quote mine, but I don't think I've ever seen such effort being put into such a defense directly in the face of the person being inaccurately quoted.

See, I started to thinking about "the genome as a learning machine" metaphor.

First, a minor point. The above is another analogy to why we can't read out the internal symbolic (semantic) states of a genome/phenome. Would we expect to read out another's brain thusly?

Second, a pun point, brought on by too little coffee no doubt. If asexual populations learn by something analogous to trial and error, how does sexual populations learn faster, more efficiently?

Sex is "shake and bake". Mix good ingredients well and then multiply from the dough. The former doesn't translate easily into the learning metaphor. (Um, trial and error creativity, perhaps.) But the later looks kind of like learning by positive reinforcement.

Ah, so sex is a reward! Who would have thought it? :-P

“the genome as a learning machine”.

Now I'm making the creationistic fallacy too. Obviously I meant “the population as a learning machine”.

Egnor asks in effect, since we can use forensic evidence (motive, means and opportunity) to detect natural independent agents in criminology and SETI, why can’t we detect other natural processes (which also makes up agents)?

Maybe Professor Plum did it with the lead pipe. Or maybe it was Col. Mustard with the wrench. Or...

“I’m not sure what they did, but somebody had to have done something.”

ID has never explicitly told us what is the immediate product of a design - only, at best, that somewhere in the history of life that something-or-other had to be designed. Which would be like a forensic expert telling the district attorney, “I’m not sure what they did, but somebody had to have done something.”

— Tom S

Well, I see that physician and Discovery Institute shill Michael Egnor has noticed me.

— Jeffrey Shallit

Oleg,

It looks like Egnor has permanently stolen the title of The Ted McGinley of Intelligent Design away from Dembski. In his latest article there is no need to read past the very first word, other than for entertainment value.

Jeffrey, it looks like you have been Egnored again.