Two days ago, this blog was the recipient of a comment by perhaps the most widely known commenter it has seen has (so far) ever seen. While I know Vox Day has stopped by here a couple of times and given me the honor of creating a few threads on his blog Vox Popoli relating to subjects I have raised, (see here and here) he didn't actually leave a comment here.
PZ (Paul Zachary) Myers "is a liberal atheist and evolutionist activist in the creation-evolution controversy, contributing to The Panda's Thumb and Pharyngula blogs. Myers is also an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMM)." Here is a brief video clip of him speaking from when he appeared in the Ben Stein movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I first came to to hear about Myers through the first article I ever read by Day on World Net Daily which detailed the whole, sordid Communion Host Affair. Myers has apparently adopted the Run And Hide Method of Argumentation when called out on his positions and challenged by Day.
The thread that Myers commented on is viewable by clicking here. I'm quite sure this actually was Myers given that he cross-posted his comments on his own blog, Phyrangula.
Setting aside for a moment the dodginess of requiring someone to argue from the arguments raised by a particular person from a particular book (in this case, Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism) it is quite possible that I will take up Myers on his offer. I would first, of course, have to obtain a copy of Godless and peruse it for a relevant starting point, but I'm sure that it's not entirely outside of the realm of possibility.
What do you think of this offer by Myers?
PZ (Paul Zachary) Myers "is a liberal atheist and evolutionist activist in the creation-evolution controversy, contributing to The Panda's Thumb and Pharyngula blogs. Myers is also an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMM)." Here is a brief video clip of him speaking from when he appeared in the Ben Stein movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I first came to to hear about Myers through the first article I ever read by Day on World Net Daily which detailed the whole, sordid Communion Host Affair. Myers has apparently adopted the Run And Hide Method of Argumentation when called out on his positions and challenged by Day.
The thread that Myers commented on is viewable by clicking here. I'm quite sure this actually was Myers given that he cross-posted his comments on his own blog, Phyrangula.
Setting aside for a moment the dodginess of requiring someone to argue from the arguments raised by a particular person from a particular book (in this case, Ann Coulter's Godless: The Church of Liberalism) it is quite possible that I will take up Myers on his offer. I would first, of course, have to obtain a copy of Godless and peruse it for a relevant starting point, but I'm sure that it's not entirely outside of the realm of possibility.
What do you think of this offer by Myers?
22 comments:
Who give a flying 'f what some lib know-nothing prof from a 3rd tier piece of crap university and pseudo-degree's from Pinko State & Enviro U thinks. I know I don't.
I mean anybody who is required to follow the phoney made-up biology taxonomy of KINGDOM- Phylum (Greek tribe) - class - order -etc. has got to be on drugs. What idiot came up with that thing, anyway? And now they've added two NEW categories (Domain/Life). What's next a , "Zeroeth minus 1 Law" for Robotics? and a Phylum - category for the missing evolutionary link? Please....
As Emerson would say, (Conduct of Life, On Beauty)
The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also. Our books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know. What a parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length, it is from its objects! Our botany is all names, not powers: poets and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the botanist know of the virtues of his weeds? The geologist lays bare the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?
We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is Dante or Washington. The naturalist is led from the road by the whole distance of his fancied advance. The boy had juster views when he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow, unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his nomenclature. Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power, — that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side. The tenant is more than the house. Bugs and stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses. The human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.
That's alot to consider. Thanks for posting that.
Mr. Myers "SCIENCE" denies all existence of black swans. But that's okay, the black swans don't believe in him, either.
His taxonomy has also fallen victim to "scientific reasoning's" a posteriori methodological ludic fallacy... as the "symmetrical" Platonic forms he uses as its' basis are not the genes themselves, but their possibly penultimate expression captured by proxy as calcified minerals in an "spatial appearance" frozen in death at a particular moment in time.
In other words, his taxonomy is so far removed from truth as petrified tree rings are actual representatives of evidence of "climate change" driven by modern day anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
In other words, it's a "truth by similarity" that willfully blinds itself to difference, and deems the actual differences "inconsequential" and/or "not significant", thereby a-priori ruling out all black swans.
...be they astonomical, cosmological and/ or Divine in origin.
...but then a max. 70 year historical empirical record has indicated that all radioactive element decay rates are "constant". Of course, if you never test the hypothesis... I suppose you have to "believe" that the decay rate IS a constant.
Of course, who would have guessed that cosmic rays might have such a large influence over cloud formation/global warming on planet earth?
How close is that nuclear fusion reactor to Earth, and just how "constant" is its' output comparared to other similar nuclear furnaces in our "galactic" and "cosmic" neighborhoods"? Given fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field as indicated by solar-seasonal atmospheric height variations of the mesosphere, one has to wonder about so -called "constants" and the absence of here-to-for unseen/ and or unexplained cosmological events affecting them.
I believe that numerous scientists do not fully realize how much they presuppose as William Lane Craig makes achingly clear to Peter Adkins in this brief, three minute video.
When you measure all modern time against a "time standard" that is based upon a predicted nuclear decay rate, I would hope that someone would have proved that its' decay rate is in FACT a constant, but evidently this is NOT the actual case as the current measured empirical data is "seasonally" at odds with the theoretical.
But then starting from validated true "premises" is perhaps too much to ask of the scientific community.
....especially as certain so-called members of the scientific community would deny that self-same right to all others who might question THEIR methods, especially in the fields of the so-called "social sciences".
Nietzsche, "On the Future of Our Educational Institutions"
"On the other hand, it seemed to me that there was yet another tendency, not so clamorous, perhaps, but quite as forcible, which, hailing from various quarters, was animated by a different desire,--the desire to minimise and weaken education.
"In all cultivated circles people are in the habit of whispering to one another words something after this style: that it is a general fact that, owing to the present frantic exploitation of the scholar in the service of his science, his education becomes every day more accidental and more uncertain. For the study of science has been extended to such interminable lengths that he who, though not exceptionally gifted, yet possesses fair abilities, will need to devote himself exclusively to one branch and ignore all others if he ever wish to achieve anything in his work. Should he then elevate himself above the herd by means of his specialty, he still remains one of them in regard to all else,--that is to say, in regard to all the most important things in life. Thus, a specialist in science gets to resemble nothing so much as a factory workman who spends his whole life in turning one particular screw or handle on a certain instrument or machine, at which occupation he acquires the most consummate skill. In Germany, where we know how to drape such painful facts with the glorious garments of fancy, this narrow specialisation on the part of our learned men is even admired, and their ever greater deviation from the path of true culture is regarded as a moral phenomenon. `Fidelity in small things,' `dogged faithfulness,' become expressions of highest eulogy, and the lack of culture outside the specialty is flaunted abroad as a sign of noble sufficiency.
"For centuries it has been an understood thing that one alluded to scholars alone when one spoke of cultured men; but experience tells us that it would be difficult to find any necessary relation between the two classes to-day. For at present the exploitation of a man for the purpose of science is accepted everywhere without the slightest scruple. Who still ventures to ask, What may be the value of a science which consumes its minions in this vampire fashion? The division of labour in science is practically struggling towards the same goal which religions in certain parts of the world are consciously striving after,--that is to say, towards the decrease and even the destruction of learning. That, however, which, in the case of certain religions, is a perfectly justifiable aim, both in regard to their origin and their history, can only amount to self-immolation when transferred to the realm of science. In all matters of a general and serious nature, and above all, in regard to the highest philosophical problems, we have now already reached a point at which the scientific man, as such, is no longer allowed to speak. On the other hand, that adhesive and tenacious stratum which has now filled up the interstices between the sciences--Journalism--believes it has a mission to fulfil here, and this it does, according to its own particular lights--that is to say, as its name implies, after the fashion of a day-labourer.
...and yet the day-labourer of the sciences has the chutzpah to criticize the religious for THEIR role in diminishing learning... as if the increasingly narrow realms of scientific "learning" and "technics" were somehow "more valuable".
Perhaps to a worshipper of Aristophanes "Plutus" it is more valuable, but to few others.
btw - You can't win the Myers challenge for the same reason you can't disprove Darwin's Theory of Evolution. The proof would have to be experimentally observable, and therefore falsefiable.
And you don't have five billion years to wait for a variety of life forms to randomly grow out of a testube to prove Darwin's theory, nor will you have successfully "disproven" his theory should the single (or even multiple) experiment(s) prove unsuccessful. And since you can't "disprove" (demonstrate it to be false) the theory, it isn't science.
And as far as the Myers challenge goes, I doubt he'll accept as evidence anything less than a Divine miracle or the spontaeous emergence of life from a vacuum. So don't waste your time.
Even a veritable Piltdown Man type discovery would not dissuade the scientifically inclined from claiming the remains were planted by time-travelling aliens from the future... or evidence of a sophisticated modern day hoaxster.
Because who could ever "empiracally prove" that the fossilized remains actually WERE deposited in the stratum at the radiologically determined and agreed upon time period?
On THAT note, let me queue Erik von Danikken....
Ciao.
Nietzsche to the Darwinians...
Songs Never Sung by Evolutionists...
Siren Songs of Scientific Progress from deep within Nietzsche's abyss...
Salvador Dali's "scientific" paranoiac critical method attacks the evolutionary puzzleboard with the zeal of Alexander untying a modern Gordian Knot...
Evolution in a nutshell... literally.
But it gets better!
What about scienceblogs.com listing 26 definitions for the term 'species'?
Are they sure that it's not 27?
Are they sure that macroevolution isn't, as one writer put it, 'the tautological fairy-tale for adults that it increasingly appears to be'?
That's not nearly as funny as their actual theory on the Origin of the Species...
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