5 ms·

Upon reflection, it’s interesting that you leapt to describing my “flaw” as a burning desire to identify a “flaw”, when of course I did no such thing. But you d

Upon reflection, it’s interesting that you leapt to describing my “flaw” as a burning desire to identify a “flaw”, when of course I did no such thing. But you did. That’s a common trope amongst evolutionists: “when I make unfounded assumptions based on my belief about X, it’s correct; when you do, it’s a flaw”. Of course you think it’s correct – it was your assumption in the first place! Enlightenment comes when you can count your assumptions.

gjm11 2y ago
Yeah, sure, you don't regard "evolutionism" as a flaw, dear me no, that's why you said it ought to be called scientology "to caricaturise the belief", because that's what people always do with things they don't regard as flaws. And, sure, claiming that a group of people assume axiomatically that something's true that you think is false, that definitely isn't imputing any sort of flaw to them. Riiiight. In any case, I specifically didn't say that you regard evolutionism as a flaw. What I actually said differs from that in two ways. 1. I said I was making a conjecture about what you might be doing rather than a claim about what you are doing. "I fear you're engaging in ..." were my actual words. 2. The "flaws" I'm suggesting you may think you've identified are not evolutionism itself (at least, not as pretty much everyone uses the word) but other ideas: believing that science is always right, "axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws", etc.
- explaininjs 2y ago
  People caricaturize to being attention to noteworthy attributes, that does not imply a value judgment. But I could see how you might come to that conclusion if you were of the opinion that everything different from you is worse. I however am not of that opinion. And I believe people are free to pick any axioms that suit them, it is incorrect to say that “I believe they are false”, rather I accept they are axiomatic assumptions equivalent but distinct from those I have made. And I preach so that the folks making them might accept the same. You’re reaching for a lot that quite simply isn’t there. Also, I don’t have an issue with “believing science is always right”, I happen to think the scientific process science produces correct results myself. What I contest is the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow “scientific”, as the folks who believe it like to claim. There is quite simply no evidence of it that doesn’t require first axiomatically assuming the conclusion. But that axiom is so fundamental to many evolutionist’s world views that they do not fully consider its ramifications.
  - gjm11 2y ago
    I am not, in fact, of the opinion that everything different from me is worse. (I do think it's curious that you're simultaneously (1) complaining at how I'm jumping to unjustified conclusions about your opinions and (2) jumping to unjustified conclusions about my opinions. But I suppose from your perspective it looks like I'm doing the same, so whatever.) There's a difference (at least for me) between "the scientific process generally produces correct results" (which I would vigorously affirm, though if I were going to be facing some sort of cross-examination I would want to be more nuanced about it) and "science is always right" (which I would vigorously deny). Science produces (merely) hopefully-increasingly-accurate approximations to truth; even excellent theories (e.g., Newton's theory of gravitation) often turn out to be wrong or incomplete or applicable only in restricted domains; sometimes the scientific consensus is just flatly wrong about something for a while. What distinguishes science from every other popular way of trying to arrive at the truth is that it has pretty effective ways of eventually finding out when something's wrong, and pretty effective ways of finding good theories even when that's difficult, with the result that it makes progress in ways that other ways of trying to get at the truth are much worse at. I'm not sure whether what you say has no non-circular evidence is "evolutionism" or "the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow scientific", nor what idiosyncratic meaning you're giving to "evolutionism" in this particular instance. So I can't really comment on your claims about that. But, if what you're saying is what might be more conventionally expressed as "there is no non-circular evidence for uniformitarianism" ... well, actually I think I still can't really comment because it's still too vague. I think the right way of looking at this is that uniformitarian theories are simpler and we should prefer simpler theories, that we have uniformitarian theories that seem to do a good job of describing (present evidence concerning) the past and the future, that these theories have done better at predicting subsequent observations than their "creationist" counterparts, that you can jury-rig a non-uniformitarian theory to fit with whatever evidence you please but only at the cost of making it more complicated in a way that makes the overall probabilities at least as much lower as not jury-rigging it would have made them (cf. "the woman next door is a witch; she did it" which in some sense can "explain" any observations but all you're really doing is hiding improbability in parts of your theory that you aren't making explicit); etc. I haven't seen anything that really looks to me as if it's sufficiently better explained by a "deeply non-uniformitarian" theory to outweigh the extra complexity required by any such theory that "predicts" things better. You may of course evaluate things differently, but I'm pretty sure what's going on here is very much not that I am unable to conceive of the possibility that uniformitarianism is wrong.

gjm11 2y ago

Yeah, sure, you don't regard "evolutionism" as a flaw, dear me no, that's why you said it ought to be called scientology "to caricaturise the belief", because that's what people always do with things they don't regard as flaws. And, sure, claiming that a group of people assume axiomatically that something's true that you think is false, that definitely isn't imputing any sort of flaw to them. Riiiight. In any case, I specifically didn't say that you regard evolutionism as a flaw. What I actually said differs from that in two ways. 1. I said I was making a conjecture about what you might be doing rather than a claim about what you are doing. "I fear you're engaging in ..." were my actual words. 2. The "flaws" I'm suggesting you may think you've identified are not evolutionism itself (at least, not as pretty much everyone uses the word) but other ideas: believing that science is always right, "axiomatic belief in the time invariance of physical laws", etc.

explaininjs 2y ago
People caricaturize to being attention to noteworthy attributes, that does not imply a value judgment. But I could see how you might come to that conclusion if you were of the opinion that everything different from you is worse. I however am not of that opinion. And I believe people are free to pick any axioms that suit them, it is incorrect to say that “I believe they are false”, rather I accept they are axiomatic assumptions equivalent but distinct from those I have made. And I preach so that the folks making them might accept the same. You’re reaching for a lot that quite simply isn’t there. Also, I don’t have an issue with “believing science is always right”, I happen to think the scientific process science produces correct results myself. What I contest is the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow “scientific”, as the folks who believe it like to claim. There is quite simply no evidence of it that doesn’t require first axiomatically assuming the conclusion. But that axiom is so fundamental to many evolutionist’s world views that they do not fully consider its ramifications.
- gjm11 2y ago
  I am not, in fact, of the opinion that everything different from me is worse. (I do think it's curious that you're simultaneously (1) complaining at how I'm jumping to unjustified conclusions about your opinions and (2) jumping to unjustified conclusions about my opinions. But I suppose from your perspective it looks like I'm doing the same, so whatever.) There's a difference (at least for me) between "the scientific process generally produces correct results" (which I would vigorously affirm, though if I were going to be facing some sort of cross-examination I would want to be more nuanced about it) and "science is always right" (which I would vigorously deny). Science produces (merely) hopefully-increasingly-accurate approximations to truth; even excellent theories (e.g., Newton's theory of gravitation) often turn out to be wrong or incomplete or applicable only in restricted domains; sometimes the scientific consensus is just flatly wrong about something for a while. What distinguishes science from every other popular way of trying to arrive at the truth is that it has pretty effective ways of eventually finding out when something's wrong, and pretty effective ways of finding good theories even when that's difficult, with the result that it makes progress in ways that other ways of trying to get at the truth are much worse at. I'm not sure whether what you say has no non-circular evidence is "evolutionism" or "the idea that evolutionism itself is somehow scientific", nor what idiosyncratic meaning you're giving to "evolutionism" in this particular instance. So I can't really comment on your claims about that. But, if what you're saying is what might be more conventionally expressed as "there is no non-circular evidence for uniformitarianism" ... well, actually I think I still can't really comment because it's still too vague. I think the right way of looking at this is that uniformitarian theories are simpler and we should prefer simpler theories, that we have uniformitarian theories that seem to do a good job of describing (present evidence concerning) the past and the future, that these theories have done better at predicting subsequent observations than their "creationist" counterparts, that you can jury-rig a non-uniformitarian theory to fit with whatever evidence you please but only at the cost of making it more complicated in a way that makes the overall probabilities at least as much lower as not jury-rigging it would have made them (cf. "the woman next door is a witch; she did it" which in some sense can "explain" any observations but all you're really doing is hiding improbability in parts of your theory that you aren't making explicit); etc. I haven't seen anything that really looks to me as if it's sufficiently better explained by a "deeply non-uniformitarian" theory to outweigh the extra complexity required by any such theory that "predicts" things better. You may of course evaluate things differently, but I'm pretty sure what's going on here is very much not that I am unable to conceive of the possibility that uniformitarianism is wrong.