mung bean

My kind of girl. Form a queue,lads.



Good, honest, church-goin' folk. Gotta love'em.

mung bean

Well CM's latest is up and it nails Davey very nicely, as we would expect.
Presumably in his next post Dave will not be able to avoid actually dealing with cal curves. I'd say at this point he has to make a serious effort or forfeit the debate.

Steviepinhead

At one point, CM (correctly) suggests that metrics which have no absolute date correlation--are "unanchored"--can still be cross-correlated to validate their mutual results and overall accuracy. This is certainly true.

However, several of the dating methods are NOT unanchored in terms of absolute dating. CM notes this himself with regard to the turbidities in the lake varve that can be correlated with a historical earthquake.

Similarly, individual volcanoes have erupted at known historical times, some of which have strewn ash over wide swaths of the world, ash which can be chemically pinpointed to the individual eruption of the individual volcano. When this "finger-printed" ash is found in given layers of ice-cores, for example, or taken into the substance of carbon-dated trees (or perhaps a given piece of wood furnishing a given radiocarbon date is found buried in a given layer of ash, and the eruption and radiocarbon dates correlate), then we are able to tie the various cross-correlating and consilient metrics to known and dated historical events.

...Events which are in turn often recorded in multiple, cross-correlating written historical documents--dave's very favoritest, most accuratest kind of record (except when he unaccountably rejects certain written records in favor of others, without ever offering any indepent-of-the-record basis for doing so)...

Finally, certain of the dating metrics proceed from the immediate or near-present and can be counted backwards with high accuracy. (While this may not be the case with the particular lake varve count cited by CM--but where the count is anchored in time via another method, the earthquake of known date--it is the case for various other methods, including some dendrochronological and ice-core sequences, and probably others.)

Thus, there are excellent reasons, even apart from the consilience and cross-correlation of the metrics, to rely on their validity. Of course, CM knows all this (and it is implicit in his tree-height analogy), but I wanted to spell the point out in case dave might otherwise be tempted to miss it.

BWE

CM, your poise is a model for internet behavior.

When your whole post involves remedial education for your opponent, Dave ends up with a pretty deep hole do get out of. Creationism mucks minds.

rfmwinnie

Maybe Dave should talk to my 7 year old. When he was 3 my son declared that the flood could never have happened. His reasoning was that the oceans wouldn't be salty anymore and all the fish that lived in salty water would die. I've since told that story to many YEC (or old earth people who believe in a global flood) and all of them go ....hmmmm I'm sure there is an answer to that. Then they quickly change the subject.

So simple a 3 year old can figure it out (yes he is smart but he was still 3!)

I think dave realizes he is on a sinking ship. I could barely understand his logic and I was struck by one thing in particular. He says that it has to be demonstarted that all of Gensis was false. But he only has to prove part of it was true? He says that the most logical explanation for the zircon is Genesis. Isn't that skipping a lot of steps? His logic wasn't the best to begin with but now it is far beyond what I can comprehend.

Calilasseia

I hope you gave him a LARGE bar of chocolate for that. He earned it.

ericmurphy

Well, Dave is going to have a hard time avoiding calibration curves in his response to CM's most recent post, but I'm sure he'll do it anyway. He appears to have completely abandoned his debate with BWE over on rd.net. He hasn't posted a single message on Dawkins' site, as far as I can tell, since his last post in the debate, which was over a week ago.

BWE

Cognitive dissonance in the extreme. Dave knows by now. Nothing works. The only thing that he can do is the Gish gallop. CM handed him his walking papers with that last post. Between the embarrassment of his last post at RD and the corner CM put him in here, he can only escape through avoidance.

CM asked point blank: "That is what needs to be done, Dave: Explain the synchronization."

And dave ignored.

Then CM pointed out: "Dave's refusal to deal with my direct question, "Explain the correspondence and synchronization of the metrics used to date the varves at Lake Suigetsu", appears to be a violation of the rules of this debate. Certainly his silence does nothing to counter my argument."

Which sums up the whole affair. Dave disturbs me. His urge to force not only misinformation but blind acceptance of misinformation from an authority which he feels he is a part of on children reflects the reasons a loud and vocal opposition to fundies is needed.

SpaghettiSawUs

I personally think his little sojourn here has been the biggest helping of cognitive dissonance Dave has yet had to face. A combination of the intellectual rigour pervading the site, together with a tough and fair moderation policy focused so well on preservation of topic and highlighting of relevant issues pertinent to the OP has prevented Dave from resorting to his usual tactics.
This is important in my view: those tactics are a part of Dave's own dissonance resolution mechanisms. Without them he is unable to pull his usual trick of supporting this assertion with that, which leans on the other, all under the other, easily seen when one abandons the old earth evil-knievel-utionist deep time assumptions. Preventing Dave from meandering in his reasoning and keeping him pressed on one point has had a good impact.

Dave's first response has been to open numerous threads, but this isn't helping as well as he'd hoped: it is now obvious that Dave has avoided direct questions, whereas in his usual style many questions get lost in the thread.

I really think the forced focus here is having some results, so I think Dave will run from IIDB as soon as the debate with CM is over.

I'm smiling at the way Dave has fallen into a cognitive trap of his own making. He argued for soooo long over at RD that historical hypotheses (retrodictions if you like) are unfalsifiable (being non-nomological and all) and now he's coming face to face with proof that what Karl Popper meant was not what Dave thought he meant. Dave is now being slapped silly with a clear cut falsification of his precious "historical hypothesis" called Genesis (that which he so wanted to protect from that nasty falsification concept through rhetorical mumbo-jumbo and obtuse word-games).

I'd be off to mexico too... (well over here the place they send you to is called Coventry but the sentiment is the same )

deadman_932

Spags: I agree with everything you just said.

I like what I'm seeing here. Dave's arguments in the formal debate and in other threads are being stripped to their bare cognitive-dissonance essentials.