EAllusion wrote:So either Kevin is an idiot of disturbing proportions, or he never read this paper and just cut and pasted some obviously dishonest quotemine from an antievolution source.
I am sympathetic to what you are saying here, and imagine that you think the latter is the case, but I also wanted to point out your use of the logical fallacy of "false dilemma."
I believe I offered the entire list of plausible explanations. Have another one? It's not "false dilemma" when you offer the range correctly. Either Kevin was extremely incompetent in his reading, or he didn't read it and merely gleamed the quote out of context. Is it logically possible that he got the quote from a non antievolutionist source? Yes, of course. Is this even remotely likely? No. Can a person be severely incompetent in one area and not be an "idiot." Well, sure, depending on how the term idiot is used. I used it in clear reference to an egreiously terrible reading of the source.
And just to reemphasize, Kevin used this quote to show Orgel is an expert thinks the "belief that life could have originated by complex chemical reactions" who "consider[s] this nothing more than wishful thinking." In the paper itself, this is obviously blatantly false.
If you do a search on the quote on google guess what you find? Religious antievolution/creationism site after site doing the same thing Kevin did with the quote.
Last edited by Guest on Thu May 01, 2008 11:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
EAllusion wrote:I believe I offered the entire list of plausible explanations. Have another one? It's not "false dilemma" when you offer the range correctly. Either Kevin was extremely incompetent in his reading, or he didn't read it and merely gleamed the quote out of context. Is it logically possible that he got the quote from a non antievolutionist source? Yes, of course. Is this even remotely likely? No. Can a person be severely incompetent in one area and not be an "idiot." Well, sure, depending on how the term idiot is used. I used it in clear reference to an egreiously terrible reading of the source.
I don't think calling him an "idiot of disturbing proportions" is very much like saying "Kevin was extremely incompetent in his reading." If you change your statement in your defense, you actually make it look like you didn't "offer the range correctly."
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
Trevor wrote:I don't think calling him an "idiot of disturbing proportions" is very much like saying "Kevin was extremely incompetent in his reading." If you change your statement in your defense, you actually make it look like you didn't "offer the range correctly."
?
You're not familiar with calling someone an idiot for unintelligent things they've done without literally suggesting they have an IQ below 70?
You're not familiar with calling someone an idiot for unintelligent things they've done without literally suggesting they have an IQ below 70?
And you are familiar with the difference between generalizing and making a specific observation?
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
LOL!!! Graceful in defeat, E. That's what you are.
“I was hooked from the start,” Snoop Dogg said. “We talked about the purpose of life, played Mousetrap, and ate brownies. The kids thought it was off the hook, for real.”
Seriously though, are you not familiar with calling a person an idiot because of something unintelligent they've done?
Person A: Did you hear Jim said X?
Person B: Wow. Jim's an idiot.
Trevor: Hey, that's fallacy of hasty generalization!
It's common parlance. I presume you didn't learn English conversation from robots from the future. Perhaps in my rush for a rhetorical flourish I too hastily assumed my audience would give me enough credit to presume I was speaking like this, but there's not really the logical fallacy your pinning on me here.