Stein interview of Dawkins

[spursncowboys]

GlZtEjtlirc
So he believes in intelligent design

[DMC]

But you believe in a god. Don't try the god of the gaps defense, it doesn't work.

[spursncowboys]

Why not?

[admiralsnackbar]

http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.php/background/interview-tactics

[spursncowboys]

I thought you were against logical fallicies

[Th'Pusher]

I thought you were against logical fallicies

To what logical fallacy are you referring?

[admiralsnackbar]

I thought you were against logical fallicies

I don't see how logical consistency has anything to do with what I posted (intentionally editing footage of leading interview questions to support one's thesis is dishonest, not illogical) but considering you continue to refer to logical fallacies when addressing me, I guess I'm also curious to know what you're on about.

I'm obviously guilty of some farcically illogical statement that preceded the last thread (the one you aggressively and persistently refused to admit using a straw man for no apparent reason in) so let's hear it: a concrete correction would be more useful than vague innuendos, and unlike some of the luckier among us, I'm more than happy to admit I'm fallible.

[ElNono]

Lying for Jesus?
By RICHARD DAWKINS

http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/2394-lying-for-jesus

[ElNono]

Never understood why some peeps need to be dishonest about this stuff... you would think that if ID and such would stand on it's own legs, it wouldn't need conning, lying, etc.

[baseline bum]

That line Dawkins read at the beginning was amazing.

[RandomGuy]

GlZtEjtlirc
So he believes in intelligent design

No, not really.

An intellectually dishonest interview from an intellectually dishonest movie.

Stein himself committed several logical fallacies, and the way it was edited strongly suggests some "creative" editing that suggests to me that some rather important bits were left out.

People arguing for this kind of stuff generally do not hestitate to lie when it suits them, and Expelled in total is a very good example of that.

One or two fallacies or mistakes is easy enough to attribute to carelessness, but this movie was a very deliberate attempt to decieve. Convincing only to those who want to reinforce their information bubble.

[RandomGuy]

Lying for Jesus?
By RICHARD DAWKINS

http://old.richarddawkins.net/articles/2394-lying-for-jesus

Pretty much.

What follows is exactly what I suspected happened:

The actual question Stein asked was edited out, and you don't know what Dawkins was asked when he gave his response.


Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may not persuade you. That is not my concern here. My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction movie with some kind of android figure — that may have been used in the service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the partisan audience).

Essentially:

Stein and the film lied.

Spursandcowboys accepted that lie as truth in the OP.

What does it say about someone when they so readily accept such lies?