npage85 and circles

npage85, I suggest you go back and watch the latter two videos of my 'comment on a comment' series, or if you've already done so, watch them again. They demonstrate why any explanation of an event must take it as read that the event happened: there can be no explanans without an explicandum.

Therefore, to reiterate what I've said to you many times before: you can't use a lack of decent explanation (mutation and natural selection) to deny the occurrence of an event (evolutionary transitions), because the event must already be given to launch the explanation. As in your fatuous spaceman example, whilst you do not accept the jet-pack hypothesis, still you accept that the man went to the moon, for otherwise there is nothing that the jet-pack explains. So for your analogy to hold (mutatis mutandis) you must either accept that evolution happened not withstanding that we apparently have no good explanation how, or failing that you must deny that your astronaut went to the moon at all - that is, deny that the evidence is in fact evidence of a lunar visitation in the first place.

Which is it to be?

Not that it really matters; those videos also explain why the issue of the causal efficacy of mutation and natural selection is entirely irrelevant to the justifiability of belief in evolutionary transitions - why we don't need an explanation *how* an event happened in order to believe *that* the event happened - and by implication, why your spaceman analogy is a crock of shite, as if it weren't obvious enough already.

npage85's video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbHP2O4P1DU

---------------

Music courtesy of Jason Shaw @ audionautix.com

http://www.audionautix.com/

Category:

Comedy

Tags:

• evolution
• Darwin
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• neo-Darwinism
• fossil
• record
• evidence
• science
• creation
• creationist
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• of
• great
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[ooglebydoogleby]

Presumably an explanation of the underlying motivations of literary characters in a work of fiction must presume that it is not fiction at all and that the events really happened. Npage talks such convoluted crap, I am amazed he has held your attention for so long. He is like Canute commanding the sea incredulous of its refusal to obey. Humanity is like a child waking from a dream of ignorance with a dawning knowledge of enlightenment but npage thinks the dream more likely.

[eddrebrab]

@ooglebydoogleby His gabble is convoluted, and intentionally so too, but for some reason I find him intriguing. More fool me I suppose, but there we are.

[ooglebydoogleby]

@eddrebrab I think I understand. Is it the intelectual contorsions he puts his ideas through in order to discount reality? I find that quite interesting too. You are no fool my friend though!

[eddrebrab]

@ooglebydoogleby Hah, well that's very kind of you to say so! Of course I'm far too modest to agree - I guess time will be the judge...

[timeofwonder2009]

Honestly, you should not waist your time with npage95. He is unwilling to accept the evidence you hand him, or, even more fundamental, he does not accept your (our) definition of physical evidence. Might also be due to him not having been really exposed to how science works.

[eddrebrab]

@timeofwonder2009 Yeah, I know... and yet I feel compelled so to waste my time. Perhaps it's just a childish desire to have the last word. Or perhaps it's because I know he has to misrepresent or suppress or ignore the things I say in order to maintain face, and that amuses me. Or both.

[eddrebrab]

@PostITnoteGUY I have no intention of taking up his offer - for precisely the reason you detail here. That and because my brain works infuriatingly slothfully so it usually takes me a while to formulate my responses properly - hardly conducive to a live debate.

He may interpret that declination however he pleases. We may even be able to pounce on an ad hominem accusation if he makes anything of it. As far as I'm concerned the arguments speak for themselves.

[timeofwonder2009]

@eddrebrab O.k. then, have fun the two of you. ;-)

[SoretaYuki]

Took you long enough! How went the exams?