If Saturday does not suit then no doubt we will have another W & T get together-will keep you informed of any future developments. That is pretty cool btw ontological at 19 months! thats impressive-I had problems pronouncing my surname till I was about 6!

regards

DD/Harvey

S.

Have bookmarked your blog for future reference as had to do a google for it because I thought link was broken.

I see what the problem is now…Initially I used the link in M93 and got the broken link message but the other’s that you put up work fine!

Yep I do remember what it was about! it was something about PB and a certain Titan’s rugby club in Belfast(don’t know if you remember the original story on W & T about this gay club?) and how PB was getting on…:-/ nothing too bad and mild compared to some stuff I have said to him! It must have been PB that complained-strange because he does not seem to mind being called a dishonest, smug hypocrite etc etc but call into question(mildly I might add!) his sexuality(and given we know nowt about him) he takes it very personally and I would say has a rather skewed value system!

Anyway the first person to get a post removed-must be some kudos in that!

Has your links been removed from W & T? has PTL complained?

You are right it would be a bit of a round trip! but…the next time you are over and if you have the time and inclination you would be more that welcome to join us!-let us know on W & T.

Stephen if you are free on Saturday you are of course more than welcome-if not possible this Saturday then perhaps the next time?

Yep good ol PB I do love him really-he took the biscuit and the cake this time…he is now advancing an argument which was never an argument that I never advanced in the first place and using the info that he turned his nose up to continually! UN-bloody-Believable!

Well your blatant self-advertisement worked;-)

I guess my looking at your blog that you live in the States but also pick up that you come from N. Ireland.

So I guess the W & T dinner on Saturday is out! but…a few of us have met up before(we are far nicer in real life!)and had a great time. I was wondering that next time you (and Stephen) are back home if you would be up for joining us?

If not…not to worry but is good to meet people!

Anyway good reply to my new darling PTL!

Cheers

DD
real name: Harvey

———————–

PTL- I’ll break down for you exactly where you’ve gone wrong.

“I can see that you may not be breaking the rules by constantly trying to draw people away from this site onto your own…”

Error #1, “constantly”. I joked about it the other day in a series of comments on another thread for fun, and the only reason you could fail to understand that it was a joke is if your sense of humour is buried too deep by religion or if you’re lacking such a sense completely. Contrary to what you suggest I do not have a track record of incessantly plugging my blog on W&T and if you had been around for any length of time then you’d know that. I don’t make any money from my blog and I don’t get a large amount of traffic from W&T (so that’s not the reason I post links). Where I do provide a link it’s because it’s relevant to the discussion, and I’m just as likely to link somewhere else entirely in that case. (Ironically, of course, I’m having to post this as a link on my own site because of problems posting it here, which is the only time I’ve ever done so.) And maybe you don’t quite understand how the ‘blogosphere’ works? Ever hear of trackbacks, pingbacks? Blogs are supposed to link up to each other on related discussions. Half the point of a blog is the freedom of authors and contributors to link to related content. By the way, are you related to PB?

“I can’t help thinking your behaviour is extremely rude to this site, to William Crawley, and to those posting here.”

It’s extremely rude? What alternate reality do you occupy? I wonder how you would fare on a regular blog like mine where there aren’t the rules you tried to catch me with earlier, or in a free society where people are, umm, free to move around as they please?

“If you have a comment to make, why don’t you add the comment to the threat [sic], as the rest of us are doing, rather than posting it on your own site and expecting us to leave this site to find your words?”

First, the link was to someone else’s words, not to my own. Do pay attention. Stephen Graham wrote an article (above) to which I linked because of its immediate interest to many of the commenters I’ve spent time chatting with about these issues on W&T. Second, I don’t expect anyone to leave W&T to talk to me. You can post your reply on W&T if you like and I’ll try to respond there. And third, the article was supplementary to the discussion (which you yourself don’t seem remotely capable of taking part in), not an attempted replacement for it.

“By constantly adding a link to your own site, you are breaking the thread.”

Have you never used a link before? Let me guess; you are the guy that holds the remote control in your house? Only a control freak wants to stop people visiting related sites and objects that it’s “breaking the thread” when they do. I encourage links to be posted on my own blog. It’s useful and beneficial, and I post many of the links myself, thus *shock horror* inviting people to leave my site to visit others! What age are you, by the way? My guess is that you’re either old enough to suffer a lack of comprehension regarding this technology, or young enough that you think people should put their hand up before speaking.

“If you have something to say (and I am certain you have useful things to say), why not say them here?”

I’ve been posting comments regularly on W&T for 3 years, so when someone asks, “Why not say them here?”, I would look at them with a blank expression upon my face utterly confused, before taking a large, wet fish and slapping them up the face with it in order to find out if they are capable of making sense.

“Feel free to stop doing that and/or offer Will and the bloggers here an apology and/or explanation.”

Feel free to post anything even plausibly useful in the thread you claim I’m “breaking”. Feel free to claim that in using a Mac I am being rude to those using PCs, or that in using logic I am being rude to those like yourself who can’t understand it. Feel free to stop attacking others who read W&T.

Finally, you wrote to someone else:

“The issue is John Wright’s tendency to post links to his own site and to commentary there that could be included in the conversation HERE.”

I’m not going to re-type a piece of commentary because you think blue text is rude. Neither am I going to abstain from linking to my colleague Stephen Graham’s articles which are relevant to a discussion on W&T just because you seem to have some strange kind of problem with it.

Well… continue the compelling conversation that you think I disrupted.

thanks for another thoughtful response. I think I’ll try to track down one or both of your recommendations above.

S.

Out of the books I’ve read in the last few months I wholeheartedly recommend “God’s Undertaker” by John Lennox, and “The Design Matrix” by Mike Gene. Both are first-rate intellects bringing new insights to bear on the whole question. I’m also currently enjoying Berlinski’s latest book “The Devil’s Delusion”.

You know, the saddest thing about the whole battle, is that the subject of design/non-design is a fascinating one that intellectuals of all stripes should enjoy discussing in a freewheeling “let’s get to the bottom of this” kind of way. It’s appalling to me that any attempt to do so is so often met with a denunciation based on the word “creationist,” a denunciation which is more or less equivalent to saying “shut up, faggot” and getting away with it.

As a theist, I find it sort of funny that our atheist/materialist friends cling so vehemently to a philosophy that can never be a permanent stance for any individual. It is a stance that will either end with personal extinction or the finding out after death that one was mistaken.

Another irony, of course is that the mere existence of theistic evolutionists or theists who don’t care one way or another whether Darwinism is true refutes the idea that theists “need” it to be false. Atheists “need” it to be true far more than theists “need” it to be false. As such it’s particularly silly for atheists to claim that it is the theists that bring a self-blinding bias to the question. As for myself, I was a technically credentialed, happily and enthusiastically Darwinism-believing theist before I encountered ID arguments. My current rejection of Darwinism is based on scientific and philosophical considerations, not religious ones. And I’ve had it up to here with being told my real motivations are otherwise by those with a necessarily greater worldview- conditioned bias than my own.

Thanks again for your post!

Thanks for the comments. I agree with you that some dogmatic atheists have skewed what science is – which is why so many think science supports atheism when, as I said above, atheism isn’t scientific at all. That’s one of my main beefs: the use of science to support a metaphysical system.

I agree that Intelligent Design theorists have done some good work to remedy this, but too many of them are trying to go another, equally invalid, direction. I’m not against the use of scientific facts as part of the case for God but we need to acknowledge that such efforts amount to philosophy rather than science, which is fine because philosophy and that kind of reflection is as valid and important a way to come to conclusions about many different things, the existence of God included, as science.

In so far as either side talks in terms of “science proves/disproves God” I think “a plague on both their houses is the only sensible path.

You say “I find that the ID side has presented rather compelling scientific/philosophical arguments in their main scholarly works.” I agree with you, and I think some theistic philosophers have done a remarkable job of reflecting on the findings of science. I agree with you also that often intelligent theists get treated as mindless nutters: Dawkins proved that in The God Delusion.

You last paragraph in general makes a very good point, and as a theist I’m very much interested in the battle, but I’ll not be fighting the battle for theism, nor pinning the hopes of theism, on whether or not evolution is true.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond. If youi have any suggestions or recommendations for reading you can let me know.

Cheers,

S.

Great post, Stephen. I disagree some with both of you, but enjoyed reading.

Also, I find that the ID side has presented rather compelling scientific/philosophical arguments in their main scholarly works. For some reason these are very rarely directly addressed by the “brights” who prefer to throw around the “creationist” word in the same way an Alabama cracker would throw around the “nigger” or “faggot” word 50 years ago. It’s nothing but cheap bigotry to prevent one side from being heard and to announce to everyone involved (including the neutral) just what their proper place is. Additionally we have the lazy intellectual tendency on their part to regard any “rebuttal” of an ID argument, no matter how transparently weak (viz Ken Miller) for those who’ve taken the trouble to read up on the ID side, as some sort of decisive “refutation”.

As long as these dynamics hold, I have no compunction with picking sides. Until both sides have equal academic freedom to pursue their investigations, the battle is on.