Z-Day 2010 - "Be the change we want to see in the world

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I think you are right. Ideas from a different tran of thought and frame of reference are insulting and offensive to those fully indoctrinated into their own society and its own vaues.

And Vexcalibur, You are being blatantly and wantonly insulting.

Earlier Orwell presented his two opinions on how creationist sociologists could account for the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community (intellectual deftness or conspiracism) and asked for a third option. You have yet to provide an alternative explanation and as of this moment I consider the explanation "it's more or less right" and "it works" (at predicting the fossil record, genetics, and the resistance of bacteria to older antibiotics) the best explanation.

No, I'm not letting you get away with that. There is no controversy among intelligent, informed, educated people on the subject. Young Earth Creationism is about as common among serious biologists as Holocaust denial is among serious historians.

False, my view is that truth is independent of consensus and credentials. Doesn't matter whether everybody or nobody accepts or opposes a view, in regard to its soundness, but rather the soundness is based upon the truth value of the premises and validity of the argument's construction.

Um... no. That bears absolutely no resemblance to what I said, and I'd appreciate it if you would stop putting words in my mouth. It is not that thoughts from a different perspective are offensive or that people are too "indoctrinated." It's that the claims you make are beyond insane, and most people don't want to be bothered with it. I mean, sure, I could refute your claims about the banking system, 9/11, or religion, but do I really want to invest the time when conspiracy nuts are usually completely resistant to facts? No matter what evidence I present, you will reject it because it is not in your precious Zeitgeist movie.

Fine, argue by definition and posing as you like.

It's not a tautology but rather an empirical fact that levels of support among research-intensive biologists for creationism is equivalent to support among Historians for New Chronology.

I'm a mathematician. I have a very solid grounding in logical thought. You very consistently abuse the rules of deductive logic in inappropriate manners. Essentially all claims about the real, physical world rely on inductive arguments rather than strict deduction. If using deductive arguments was possible, there would be no disagreement as one side would just clearly be wrong in any argument. The argument you present here is largely a cop-out commonly used by those on the fringe to justify why their views should be taken seriously. Your claim is, strictly speaking, true, but it provides no useful information on which to judge a particular idea. There is no reason why heuristic arguments such as an appeal to the entire scientific community can't be used in an inductive argument.

Yes, it is called personal incredulity and argumentum ad ridiculum.

Elaborate, because right now - using abductive inference - the best explanation seems to be that scientists are more or less agreeing overwhelming with the theory (evolution) because it works best (i.e. makes more reliable predictions).

So, by affirming the consequent,



http://creation.com/loving-god-with-all ... d-creation

Translation: You have no reasonable justification for your claim that everyone better-informed than yourself is wrong.

I asked for an alternative explanation for the overwhelming acceptance of evolutionary theory by biologists. I got none. This isn't an affirmation of the consequent, its an abductive inference.

D is data
H explains D.
No other hypothesis explains D as well as H does.
∴ H is probably correct

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 08 Feb 2010, 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's funny when people accuse others of being ignorant - it usually shows that the accusers are just as ignorant as the accused.

Now where were we? Yes, the inaccurate sources of the BS "Zeitgeist" movies, or rather a complete lack of sources. How do you know that what is said on that film is not complete bollocks? To me, it's a good example of people exercising their expertise of multimedia, which it's very definition is to manipulate the minds and emotions of the people watching. Every film, programme, book, etc. are made to trigger to do this, whether it's to make people believe it's "true" or to simply make them cry during a depressing scene. This is what is happening with Zeitgeist, it exaggerates truths and fabricates outright lies mainly for the purpose of entertainment. The guys who made it probably already knew it's target audience was full of pseudo-intellectual stoners, so they inserted crap laced with conspiracies to kick up a storm. Here are some examples:

- The story of Jesus being based off stories from other religions shows absolutely no sources.
- Typical 9/11 conspiracies. Bad quality photos and videos don't count, might aswell say reptilians exist because badly encoded video prove it.
- The phonecalls could be completely made up. Anyone with some basic knowledge in sound engineering can easily do it. Hell, I've done it for one of my college assignments.
- Again, no sign of sources.

These alone are enough for me to consider it to be a complete and utter PhD in Bolloxology.

Are we being controlled? Yes, we are. Can we get out of it? No, we can't and this film will not help us. Our very social nature is the reason why we can't think for ourselves since everything we do is based off the ideas and actions of others, even subcounciously. Combine that with human nature and we'll always be suspect to manipulation and control. "freedom" and "individuality" are impossible concepts in reality.

And now ad hominem in addition to your other informal fallacies.

If this method is legitimate now, then it would have always been so. In the time of the Greeks they had both notions of heliocentrism, (of Aristarchus) and geocentrism (of Aristotle). During that time, the data was explained better by geocentrism. Though since the time of Kepler geocentrism has be shown to be false, at the time of the Greeks it explained the data well. So during the time of the Greeks it would have seemed that geocentrism was "probably correct". For this reason, I do not consider the criterion of "better explanation" to be legitimate.

Last edited by iamnotaparakeet on 08 Feb 2010, 6:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.