SpaghettiSawUs

Turn it on its head:
"The Genesis account cannot be viewed as an accurate historical record."
translates as
"The Genesis account must be viewed as an inaccurate historical record."

What Dave wants to avoid is CM establishing reasonable doubt as to a few historical claims and therefore calling the whole into question. This is where he thinks the distinction helps him, but again he is hindered by definition blindness and fallacies. His opening gambit shows this only too well: Dave doesn't understand CM's explanation of his approach, or else it makes him uncomfortable.

Hi Louis, yeah I find the fact that Dave cannot post here to be quite refreshing. Nothing more annoying that someone misdirecting a darn good fisking eh.

Cheers
Spags

Occam's Aftershave

And I'm sure Dave has no problem with that. As he explained to us all when asked why he has comments disabled and won't let people respond to the crap he spews at his blog:
So Dave has every opportunity to respond - he can just do it on his own blog.

Louis

OA,

Yup. LOL

Louis

P.S. I should point out to those who are yet unfamiliar with dear sweet Davey, that the peanut gallery being Dave free is a refreshing treat. Normally I would engage anyone, anywhere most happily, but Dave is (and I am sorry to say that there is a rather substantial quantity of evidence to back this up) less than 100% entirely possessed of the ability to remain fully, and without deviation, for want of a better more bowdlerised term: honest. I do not mean to personally attack the poor misguided individual, merely to make people aware that he has a track record in these debates and that track record is...less than fulsome in its integrity. What this says about Dave as a person is moot, I couldn't possibly even comment on Dave personally, never met him. However, for whatever reason, he has yet to participate honestly in a discussion at AtBC or RDF, and it is merely that historical behaviour which I am circumlocutarily relating. I wonder if this circumlocution satisfies the rules?

SpaghettiSawUs

WOW,
all these RD.net/AtBC/PT members suddenly pitching tents....

.... and no mention of circuses.

(until now that is).

Mike PSS

Spags,
I for one am dancing in the center ring in 20 minutes.

Be sure to clean up your dog droppings before I'm on.

hecate

Very thorough CM. Will Afdave address those wonderful calibration curves ?

ericmurphy

It's only fair. Dave believes that if he can find any statement in Genesis that is true, then it all must be true.

But CM isn't pointing out minor inaccuracies. When Genesis misrepresents the age of the earth by six orders of magnitude, that's not a minor inaccuracy. When it talks about submerging the entire surface of the planet in water less than five thousand years ago, that's not a minor discrepancy.

SpaghettiSawUs

Eric,
I think Dave's argument is something like this:
There are two types of information in the Book of Genesis (BoG), "verifiable" and "non-verifiable".
Of the verifiable a great majority if not all of it has been verified: clay tablets used to be concluded with a particular sign-off, and the BoG includes sign-offs in a similar manner, therefore that the BoG was written on clay tablets is "verified". The BoG mentions the names of some places, and these places have been found to have existed, verified.

Now all Dave has to do is show that all the "verifiable" stuff has indeed been verified.

Now as for the "non-verifiable", well as we can't go back and see these things then we can't have an answer one way or the other. So how can we trust the non-verifiable? Well if the verifiable has been verified, then it gives us some confidence in the non-verifiable. It's almost as if God himself has left us the verifiable as a witness, so that we can trust those accounts for which "evidence", and therefore "verification" would be unavailable by definition.

Is there anything wrong with this reasoning? Well it points to why falsification is such an important concept.

Given the hypothesis "life on earth began around 8,000 years ago and took 6 days from the first organisms to the arrival of humans" Dave seeks out to "verify" it. He goes to the source of this hypothesis and asks: "What else can you tell me?". The source gives Dave some "verifiable" statements which he checks. He then believes everythingelse the source says from that point forward, regardless of the "verifiablity" because the source gets some things which can be checked, correct enough.

The scientist looks at it a different way. Given the same hypothesis he must ask "In what ways could I possibly demonstrate that this hypothesis is incorrect?". He looks for a way to falsify it. One avenue of potential falsification would be to find multiple independent methods of determining the age of the earth (and its detritus), and cross reference them against each other to see what agreement, if any, they reach. This is obviously part of CM's approach, so he is generously providing an object lesson in "falsification".

But then you know this of course.
I was really saying it for Dave's benefit.
Though I doubt he reads my posts.
Anymore.
Cheers
Spags

Louis

Dave address calibration curves?

BWAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I reckon we should open a book on this.

Louis

Occam's Aftershave

Nope, but all the new readers at IIDB will get to see first hand the Dave the Tapdancing <edit> Show

(cue the music )

Dave will:

1) Claim that CM doesn't understand C14 cal curves, so therefore the data CM presented doesn't count
2) Repeat AIG tripe about how dozens of varve layers might form in one year
3) Make vague whiny complaints about the assumptions used for C14 dating (which Dave has been given many times, the only assumption necessary is that the laws of physics haven't changed to modify the C14 decay rate.)
4) Totally avoid any discussion of why all the independent calibration methods cross-correlate so beautifully

Sorry to be a spoiler again, but I've seen Dave's act way too many times.