Here we part ways. I cannot recommend UD. Dembski’s blog is beyond annoying.
Well, one of the few good things I can say about UD is that Dembski is never there anymore. UD, though, is an accidental host to many of the moust thought debates on ID to be found anywhere on the internet. As someone banned from there long ago (my entry is in there in the Bannination thread on After the Bar Closes), I’m well aware of the cowardice and caprice that rules UD editorial policy, but they regularly have enough guilt pangs to allow thoughtful critics to engage for a while before they lapse back into victory-by-censorship mode (and this is particularly disgusting at UD, where they don’t even have the decency to note for the record that a commenter has been banned, and just let his opponents carry on as if the banned person has fled in realization of their defeat).
If you go read threads where “Diffaxial”, “Nakashima”, “R0b”, “markf” and others (typically posters who hang out at After the Bar Closes) participate, many of them are tours de force in the deconstruction of ID in its various forms, not to mention solid positive defenses of mainstream science and scientific epistemology (and assorted philosophical issues, like Diffaxial’s discussion of compatibilism).
It’s an intellectual cesspool on the editorial side, and many of the posters (cf. bornagain777, kairosfocus, etc. are self-caricaturing creationists), but UD I see as a rare (if toxic) foil for some really brilliant work in clearly and thoroughly demonstrating the sophistry of ID, as well as showing how dispciplined reasoning and evidence-based thinking work in practice.
Those great posters eventually get banned. Even Nakashima, who was agonizingly polite and deferential (to the point of making me gag at points, to suck up to the like of Clive and crew), eventually was just too much horsepower for the management to tolerate.
But it was quality stuff while they let him cut them to ribbons with his mind.
I can’t throw a rock without hitting a fellow former Infidel who’s been banned from there. They don’t allow disagreement, no matter how thoughtfully or politely posed.
Lizzie Liddle’s experience was especially cautionary. Unsatisfied with merely banning her, Dave felt it necessary to lash out at her muted remains
in a continuation. What’s linked here isn’t the original continuation, either, as another of UD’s common foils is to simply replace or disappear any post or portion that proves too personally embarrassing. (The original links painting her as a radical due to her participation in a radical board … from which she was banned for dissent … reached a level of irony that not even Dave could miss.)
Yes, agree, and am part of the banninated in the story, and have been a regular reader for many years, a “student of tard” like many others at AtBC. Uncommon Descent is “meta-instructive”, though; it’s useful to see how UD management and the pro-ID cabal proceed in terms of ethics, fairness, intellectual honesty, tolerance, and more than anything, focus on the merits of the science (“All science so far!”).
There’s no way to condemn the ID movement more strongly than to point an investigator at that blog and have them read it. UD really is useful (unwittingly) that way.
I should also say that while I disagree with so much of what is proposed here, CAF deserves recognition for its principles in tolerance and freedom of expression (within the bounds of civility) here. It speaks to the integrity and strength of the management and membership here that they
don’t behave as the UD guys do.
There’s no point in reading Torley’s broadside critically, as there’s no forum open to discussion of its lapses.
A good point, I agree, and a point of frustration for me, too. vjtorley is deeply confused, and it’s too bad he is impossible to engage that way. But nevertheless, whatever vjtorley’s errors are, they are thoughtful errors, something wholly apart from the knuckle-dragging simple-mindedness of Clive Hayden or Barry Arrington or Gil Dodgen (never mind even bothering with O’Leary!).
Which is just as well, as his response betrays all the signs of having been put together hurriedly. It’s disorganized to the point of unreadability, with the train of thought wandering aimlessly between his two, separate drafts. I suspect Torley has confused his own personal pique with persuasive prose. His smoking guns visibly misrepresent Tkacz, leading me to suspect he’s likely to have done the same with Aquinas, though I’d have to rely on an Aquinas scholar to verify this. We do, of course, have reason to expect this, as he is, after all, directing his accusations of Thomist heterodoxy at a Thomist, while freely and admirably admitting his own lack of preparation to do so.
OK, you nailed me. I haven’t read but just the first page of the part one summary! Sorry, you may wellbe right. Having read (in frustration) many of vjtorley’s past treatises, though, critiquing them does take some work. He’s a fideistic fundy at the core, but it’s buried deep in a lot of careful argument that obscures that.
At the same time, I appreciate his attempt, if for no other reason than to introduce me to the flaws in Aquinas occasioned by the poor scientific environment of his time. It strikes me as inappropriate at best, however, to use those flaws as a measure of modern day Thomism. I’m nearly certain that Tkacz and his fellows have long since come to terms with scientific demonstrations that flies do not generate spontaneously from dungheaps.
Thanks for the comments.
-TS
