Gemli explains...

[Marcus]

I think Gemli would not mix the imaginings of religion with the imaginings of science.

Lol. That's a sure thing if ever there was one.

[Marcus]

Just doing my due diligence, as per the thread title...

10 hours ago
When you say "evidence" I'm surprised you don't burst into flames.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Seriously though, here is gemli's post:

10 hours ago
When you say "evidence" I'm surprised you don't burst into flames. There are standards of evidence that must be met in order to bring a case for or against a claim. No religion passes the test, but every one claims to be the true truth, even though they might disagree on fundamental tenets of faith. Stories are not evidence. They're what require evidence.
http://disq.us/p/2xzuinc

[gemli's key and oft repeated point bolded.]

[Tom]

I noticed that the Proprietor is now attributing the comments of others (Charles Dike, in this instance) to Gemli. I believe it’s time for the Proprietor to take a break.

DanielPeterson—>Charles Dike
a day ago
gemli:. "Gemli has posted over 13,000 comments in 10 1/2 years. As best I can tell, you have responded to every post (I missed the first 5 or so years). That means that 35.27 percent of your comments are directed toward gemli. I suspect the time involved on your part would amount to 40 days and 40 nights without a break."

You're right, of course.

I've long since given up on persuading poor gemli. He is, I think, a hopeless case.

But I've wanted to illustrate to others how hollow his position is, and how evidence- and logic-free it is.

That mission has probably been accomplished, and long ago.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 6409150852

[drumdude]

I noticed that the Proprietor is now attributing the comments of others (Charles Dike, in this instance) to Gemli. I believe it’s time for the Proprietor to take a break.

DanielPeterson—>Charles Dike
a day ago
gemli:. "Gemli has posted over 13,000 comments in 10 1/2 years. As best I can tell, you have responded to every post (I missed the first 5 or so years). That means that 35.27 percent of your comments are directed toward gemli. I suspect the time involved on your part would amount to 40 days and 40 nights without a break."

You're right, of course.

I've long since given up on persuading poor gemli. He is, I think, a hopeless case.

But I've wanted to illustrate to others how hollow his position is, and how evidence- and logic-free it is.

That mission has probably been accomplished, and long ago.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 6409150852

Oof.

[Marcus]

Lol. Not sure what things the proprietor thinks they have accomplished, but stifling gemli is not one of them. The evidence:

gemli >DanielPeterson
41 minutes ago

Incoherent responses are the first sign of Gemli Derangement Syndrome.

----
gemli >DanielPeterson
an hour ago

Futile dead ends? You wish.

You must get some advantage when your posts get hundreds of replies. Which reminds me, I haven't received payment for last month's comments. No rush, but God is watching.

----
gemli > DanielPeterson
7 hours ago

If defending reality is equivalent to misbehaving, well, I'm a bad widdle boy.

---
gemli > DanielPeterson
7 hours ago

Atheism isn't dogma. It's merely the position one takes when he realizes that all the discrepant gods, miracles, heavens, hells, afterlives and other theological claims are illogical. Maybe "theillogical" would be the mot juste.

---
gemli > DanielPeterson
a day ago

Here's another claim: There are oysters on Pluto.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 6409186956

[Marcus]

Oy vey.

DCP's most coherent post:

DanielPeterson Mod gemli
an hour ago

SpongeBob SquarePants is an American animated television series created by marine science educator and animator Stephen Hillenburg that premiered on Nickelodeon as a sneak peek after the 1999 Kids' Choice Awards on May 1, 1999, and officially premiered on July 17, 1999. It chronicles the adventures of the title character and his aquatic friends in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom.

http://disq.us/p/2y075t3

After quoting gemli saying 'god is watching,' that's his response. His whole response.

[Everybody Wang Chung]

I noticed that the Proprietor is now attributing the comments of others (Charles Dike, in this instance) to Gemli. I believe it’s time for the Proprietor to take a break.

DanielPeterson—>Charles Dike
a day ago
gemli:. "Gemli has posted over 13,000 comments in 10 1/2 years. As best I can tell, you have responded to every post (I missed the first 5 or so years). That means that 35.27 percent of your comments are directed toward gemli. I suspect the time involved on your part would amount to 40 days and 40 nights without a break."

You're right, of course.

I've long since given up on persuading poor gemli. He is, I think, a hopeless case.

But I've wanted to illustrate to others how hollow his position is, and how evidence- and logic-free it is.
That mission has probably been accomplished, and long ago.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 6409150852

I noticed that the Proprietor is now attributing the comments of others (Charles Dike, in this instance) to Gemli. I believe it’s time for the Proprietor to take a break.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeters ... 6409150852

Oof.

DCP, what an impressive legacy you are leaving.

[Rivendale]

What does DCP mean by objective public proof? Happiness surveys? Lifespan? I missed something here.

[Philo Sofee]

I've long since given up on persuading poor gemli. He is, I think, a hopeless case.

Amusing how mockery and name calling is thought to be a persuading tool to DCP, and no actual engagement of topics or analysis of evidence. DCP is pouting that no one accepts his "testimony" so he pouts about it and holds his breath and stomps his feet until he turns blue thinking that would be convincing or something - and when that fails, he turns to the Midgley for back up..... CHORTLE!

[Physics Guy]

The current XKCD comic is a keeper for me; I plan to show it in talks for years to come because it makes a point that is part of the motivation for my research. It also happens to express my issue in this thread.

Suppose that Mormons who believe in plate-bearing angels, or any other religious believers, are in fact wrong. Then just why are they wrong? Are they wrong because they made about as reasonable a bet as anyone else but their numbers just failed to come up? Did they perhaps make a somewhat risky choice, betting on a long shot, but with attractive enough odds that the bet wasn't crazy? Or did they make a demonstrably unwise move at some point, following a strategy that was objectively unsound?

If I'm sure that these people are wrong, but they're only wrong for the first or second kind of reason, then keeping on telling these folks that they're wrong is just being a jerk. I might as well hang out for years making comments on a blog about basketball, as someone who prefers soccer to basketball, saying over and over again to these basketball fans that basketball sucks. That's just being an asshole. There's only any point in criticising people if you can objectively point out a flaw in their thinking.

This is harder than pumping out zingers that sound good to people who happen to share your own opinion. I don't mean that it's impossible, though. In the case of Mormon apologetics, at least, I strongly expect that the hard work can in fact be done. I bet one can indeed articulate objectively unwise or unsound steps in conservative Mormon thinking. It's harder than one might think, though—not because Mormonism is any more solid than one might think, but just because thinking in general is hard. And Mormonism has survived long enough as a movement that it's unlikely to be completely trivial to discredit it. One should be prepared to find that even seemingly great arguments against it turn out, on second or third thought, to be problematic.

Arguments that seem to put a finger on where Mormons go wrong can be like the first panels of the XKCD comic, which seem to have hit on an excellent criterion for distinguishing science and magic. Science shows you how things happen, explaining each successive link in the chain of cause and effect; magic simply postulates end results without saying anything about how they are supposed to occur. That seems to have a ring of truth; it's a general rule for which one can immediately find many specific examples. And it seems to be a good point in that it doesn't just say that magical thinking is wrong because it turns out to be wrong. It points out a methodological issue in magical thinking, independent of particular conclusions. This point about mechanisms versus results may not be enough all by itself to convert people from magical thinking to scientific thinking, but it seems as though it has to be on the right track towards that.

The last XKCD panel calmly points out, though, that by this criterion thermodynamics is magic. And that's not just a silly joke by the comic's author. It's funny because it is true: thermodynamics is not and never has been about how things happen. It's just a set of empirical rules that say that some things will never happen, no matter what, without explaining anything at all about why. We are all simply cursed to be unable to build perpetual motion machines.

So now we have to admit that that stuff about mechanism versus conclusion isn't the silver bullet against magical thinking, after all, because thermodynamics is about conclusions rather than mechanisms and yet it is certainly science. Maybe the mechanism versus conclusion thing really is a part of why magical thinking is bad, but it can't be the whole story. We gotta delete all those zingers we were going to post about conclusion-based magical thinking and go back to the drawing board.

(The stuff in the comic about Lagrangians is also on the mark, and funny, but it's an inside joke for people who know some technicalities.)

There were some good reasons to think that the Higgs mechanism for particle mass should be real, even decades before we could find empirical evidence. People like Martin Harris probably thought they had good reasons to think that angels were real, though, as well. If Harris wasn't just wrong by bad luck, but really messed up his thinking, then I think we have to say more about why his reasons were not actually good.

Gemli keeps repeating that stories aren't evidence. I like the sound of that, I really do; but only for about three panels. Then it occurs to me that I've never personally seen any hard evidence for Higgs bosons. I've never even worked through the calculations to show that the Higgs mechanism keeps the Standard Model renormalizable. Renormalization is nasty, mind-bending stuff and few physicists ever work through it in detail themselves. We mostly just accept what we're told. We hear stories.

I don't believe it's the same. I think I'm being more reasonable when I accept my physics stories than Mormons are when they believe their witness accounts. I'm just not happy with how well I can articulate how my stories are better than theirs.

I want to fill in the steps in the logical chain and identify the weak links, and say why they are weak, and not just declare that the Mormons are cursed in the end to be wrong. At least I want that a bit. I don't want it enough to commit myself to working it all out carefully. There are more useful things I can do with my time than straighten out a few overconfident Mormons. If I don't put in that work, though, then I'm also not going to harass any Mormon blogs with zingers that don't make the actual points.