Barry Arrington

The Straw Man tactic is especially reprehensible, because it is fundamentally dishonest. Wikipedia describes the tactic as follows A straw man is a common type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on the misrepresentation of an opponent’s argument. To be successful, a straw man argument requires that the audience be ignorant or uninformed of the original argument. The so-called typical “attacking a straw man” argument creates the illusion of having completely refuted or defeated an opponent’s proposition by covertly replacing it with a different proposition (i.e., “stand up a straw man”) and then to refute or defeat that false argument (“knock down a straw man”) instead of the original proposition In this post we took down a straw Read More ›

In this post Dr. Torley engages in a philosophical discussion about the nature of God. In the comment thread we have Graham2 saying: This site lost any claim to the practice of impartial science long long ago. And william spearshake says: UD, which purports to be in support of the “science” of ID, supposedly not religiously based, loses what little credibility it has when it’s moderator continues to allow articles that are purely religious. It should be noted for the record that Dr. Torley did not start this discussion. He was responding to a post by one of the world’s most prominent materialist atheists, Jerry Coyne. I did a quick check through the comment thread to Dr. Coyne’s post, and Read More ›

Thank you to all who contributed to my recent request for comments. There were many excellent comments, and I have attempted to synthesize them into a WAC. (BTW, I like WJM’s name for the syndrome better than my own and have switched to it). Here is the WAC: Definition Deficit Disorder Definition Deficit Disorder (“DDD”), also known as the “me no speaka the English distraction” and “definition derby” is a form of sophistry by obfuscation that demands that one’s opponent fulfil unreasonable or even impossible definitional criteria, not to advance the debate but to avoid the debate by claiming one’s opponent cannot adequately define their terms. An example: ID advocate: Intelligent design theory asserts chance causes cannot account for the Read More ›

In this post Dr. Hunter shows us professor of English Terry Scambray completely destroying three Ph.D Darwinists on basic logic and reasoning.    Jeffrey Shallit takes to his website to rebut Professor Scambray’s arguments and falls flat on his face.  First Shallit takes Scambray to task for asserting that  “Animals and plants appear in the fossil record fully formed and remain unchanged through millions of years.”  Shallit dismisses the claim as “pure creationist babble.”  Eminent Darwinist Stephen Jay Gould wrote the following:    The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: (1) Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they Read More ›

One of the Darwinists’ favorite tactics is the “False Quote Mining Charge.” For those who do not know what “quote mining” is: Quote mining is the deceitful tactic of taking quotes out of context in order to make them seemingly agree with the quote miner’s viewpoint or to make the comments of an opponent seem more extreme or hold positions they don’t in order to make their positions easier to refute or demonize. It’s a way of lying. In summary, to accuse someone of quote mining is to accuse them of lying. It is a serious charge. Let us examine a recent example of the charge to illustrate. In Origin of Species Darwin wrote this about the lack of transitional Read More ›

Darwinists frequently employ the debating device that I call “Desperate Distractions.” This occurs when the Darwinist has lost the debate beyond any hope, and instead of admitting they have lost, the Darwinist continues to throw mud at the wall to see if anything will stick. Apparently, their determination never to cede a micro-millimeter impels them to continue to post even the most outrageous foolishness rather than be seen as ceding the field. I suppose they believe that as long as they continue to respond nobody will notice they have lost. Our example of this debating device is drawn from a comment posted by a Darwinist defending Jeffrey Shallit, who ran a string of gibberish through a compression program and then Read More ›

Over at The “Skeptical” Zone they continue to be skeptical about literally everything; everything that is except the unquestioned verities of the scientific and cultural establishment. As I periodically do, I made a run though their last few months’ of postings. The denizens of the Zone are if nothing else impressive in their consistency. As usual, I was unable to find a single word in a single post that would make the occupants of the average faculty lounge mildly uncomfortable. Far less did I find anything even remotely “skeptical” of or a challenge to conventional wisdom or established ideas. Could it be that the folks over at the Zone don’t know what the word “skeptical” actually means? A perusal of Read More ›

One of the Darwinists’ favorite tricks is known as “moving the goalpost.” The essence of this trick is deflecting away from having been defeated in a debate by pretending the debate was about something else. Thus, if the ID proponent meets a Darwinist’s challenge with respect to issue X, the Darwinist will pretend the issue was something else and say “Ah hah, you utterly failed to address issue Y,” thereby deflecting from the fact that the Darwinist has just lost with respect to issue X. In the following example, a Darwinist insisted that “survival of the fittest” was not central to Darwinian theory. The ID proponent cited a prominent Darwinist (Stephen Jay Gould) for the proposition that “survival of the Read More ›

As so often is the case, one of Eric Anderson’s comments got me to thinking. Here it is: in those extremely rare cases when we know what actually caused the differential survival, we can point to the actual cause without ever invoking a label of “natural selection” to help explain the process. And in those cases in which we don’t know what actually caused the differential survival, attaching a label of “natural selection” does not help us get any closer to an explanation. Indeed, more often than not it obscures. I decided to test this. As Michael Behe discussed extensively in The Edge of Evolution, we know what causes Plasmodium to develop antibiotic resistance. Chloroquine resistance in Plasmodium is due Read More ›

We’ve all laughed at the naive “turtles all the way down” story. What follows is all Eric Anderson’s “randomness all the way down” story: [WD writes:] I’m saying the non-random survival . . . It is pretty much randomness all the way down. How did the particular particle interact with the copying mechanism to cause a mutation? How did that particular mutation end up interacting in the organism to produce an effect? What result did that have in that particular organism, as opposed to another? How did that particular mutation get spread in the population? What environmental factor happened to come along after the mutation that resulted in it making a difference? Which organism happened to be on a high Read More ›

Over at The New Atlantis Stephen L. Talbott has a great discussion of the vacuity of the idea of “fitness” as used in Darwinian theory. As we all know, Darwinian theory “predicts” that the “fittest” organisms will survive and leave more offspring. And what makes an organism “fit” under the theory? Why, the fact that it survived and left offspring. There is an obvious circularity here: This is the long-running and much-debated claim that natural selection, as an explanation of the evolutionary origin of species, is tautological — it cannot be falsified because it attempts no real explanation. It tells us: the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce are the kinds of organisms that survive and reproduce. Darwinists counter Read More ›

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953, aphorism 109 My recent exchanges with Jeffrey Shallit illustrate this aphorism. Our disagreement is not over the substance of the matter. Instead, our disagreement hinges on Shallit’s abuse of language to make a trivial point. Shallit and I disagreed over whether an excerpt from Hamlet’s soliloquy could be considered “random” in any meaningful sense of that word. In the course of that exchange Shallit said this: Barry, and all ID advocates, need to understand one basic point. It’s one that Wesley Elsberry and I have been harping about for years. Here it is: the opposite of ‘random’ is not ‘designed’. The problem with Read More ›

My last post elicited some extremely interesting responses. As a reminder, we are considering the following two strings of text, the first of which resulted from haphazard banging on a keyboard and the second of which is the first 12 lines of Hamlet’s soliloquy: #1: OipaFJPSDIOVJN;XDLVMK:DOIFHw;ZD VZX;Vxsd;ijdgiojadoidfaf;asdfj;asdj[ije888 Sdf;dj;Zsjvo;ai;divn;vkn;dfasdo;gfijSd;fiojsa dfviojasdgviojao’gijSd’gvijsdsd;ja;dfksdasd XKLZVsda2398R3495687OipaFJPSDIOVJN ;XDLVMK:DOIFHw;ZDVZX;Vxsd;ijdgiojadoi Sdf;dj;Zsjvo;ai;divn;vkn;dfasdo;gfijSd;fiojsadfvi ojasdgviojao’gijSd’gvijssdv.kasd994834234908u XKLZVsda2398R34956873ACKLVJD;asdkjad Sd;fjwepuJWEPFIhfasd;asdjf;asdfj;adfjasd;ifj ;asdjaiojaijeriJADOAJSD;FLVJASD;FJASDF; DOAD;ADFJAdkdkas;489468503-202395ui34 #2: To be, or not to be, that is the question— Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep— No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh Read More ›

Mark Frank writes in a comment to a prior post: When reconstructing an evolutionary past I would say that scientists are doing two things which correspond to my Bayesian analysis: They are proposing explanations that 1) might well have happened – the prior probability is acceptable 2) would have a good chance of producing what we observe – the likelihood is acceptable When reconstructing a biological past I would say that ID scientists are doing two things which correspond to Mark Frank’s Bayesian analysis: They are proposing explanations that 1) might well have happened – the prior probability is acceptable 2) would have a good chance of producing what we observe – the likelihood is acceptable Mark Frank, do you Read More ›