Anonymous: So much for the notion that ID supporters like Mr. Reppert do not wish to establish a theocracy in this country.
Some confusions.
1) I do not consider myself an ID supporter, or rather, my support for ID is very limited. I don't know how many times I have to say this, but I do not think that the previous Dover school board was justified in the way in which they attempted to bring ID into their curriculum. Criticizing arguments against ID is not sufficient to make one an ID supporter.
2) Saying that an argument along a certain line might be made is different from saying that I think the argument is a good one. The doctrine of "original intent" is a very tricky one. It is the doctrine by which political conservatives hope to reverse a number of judicial precedents, such are Roe v. Wade, but it's highly controversial and I have doubts about it. Further, I would vehemently oppose an official state religion in the state of Arizona or anywhere else for that matter. I do think that questions about the Lemon test might be made from the standpoint of original intent; I wonder whether jurists who are operating by that prinicple would endorse it. However the Lemon test is a currently accepted judicial interpretation of the doctrine of the separation of church and state, not the doctrine itself.
I'm reasonably sure that the founders intended were concerned about the establishment of a revealed religion, like the established Church of England or the Congregationalists in Massachusetts Bay Colony, who horsewhipped someone in the town square for advocating believer's baptism and hanged a few Quakers. A theocracy, I take it, would require revelation as the foundation for law. In the 18th century there was typically a distinction made between natural religion and revealed religion. A good deal of the argumentation in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, for example is designed to show that the "natural religion" established by the design argument doesn't establish much of God even if it does establish the existence of one. So one could argue, on that basis, that the attempt to defend "natural religion" through intelligent design does not in any way establish the kind of religion the founders didn't want established.
I'm not at all sure about the above line of thought.
The comment above reflects a "Whose side are you on, you're either for us or against us, anyone who criticizes criticisms of ID must be trying to establish religion" attitude which is a mirror image of the attitudes of Christian fundamentalists.
7 comments:
"The comment above reflects a "Whose side are you on, you're either for us or against us, anyone who criticizes criticisms of ID must be trying to establish religion" attitude which is a mirror image of the attitudes of Christian fundamentalists."
"We are taught in introductory logic classes to distinguish between claims about propositions from claims about people who hold those propositions. Failure to do that is called the ad hominem fallacy. "
But I do think that statements really do reflect attitudes. I was not denying that. I thought that I effectively pointed out the errors involved in claiming that I support theocracy. The AH fallacy purports to address claims by making claims about people who hold those claims. I responded to the claim, and then I responded to the attitude that I thought the claim reflected. However, what I said about the attitude was not an attempt to refute the claim; that had been done already.
Oh, I get it now. As long as you accompany them with some non ad hominem claims, its okay to toss in an occasional ad hominem now and then.
That's not what I said. What I said was that the ad hominem fallacy is the attempt to discredit a claim by saying something about the people who hold that the claim is true. You said that I was advocating theocracy. I am not attempting to refute that claim by my comments about what lies behind it. I printed a letter I received from someone who said that I had misinterpreted the establishment clause, and I said that I wondered if someone could challenge the Lemon test on the grounds that it was not in accordance with the original intent of the founders, and then pointed out that the idea that you can appeal to original intent to support the striking down of a well-established precedent was a highly controversial issue. This makes me an advocate of theocracy????? I didn't even say whether or not I thought that David, the letter writer, was correct in his interpretation of the establishment clause.
I don't mean to be rude, but inm y opinion someone who draws the sorts of conclusions that you drew from my statements is either very bad at drawing inferences and seeing what follows from what someone has said, or has a powerful ideological bias. However, I do not offer these speculation as a refutation of the claim that I am an advocate of theocracy. which is what I would have to be doing if I were to be committing the ad hominem fallacy.
"Anonymous" certainly sounds angry.
You are, of course, correct in making the distinctions you made. It looks to me some Freudian transferrence bubbles in "anonymous's" subconscious. (He appears to be guilty of what he accuses others of.)
H.L. Mencken famously said "The world is divided into two kinds of people; those who do the dividing and everybody else."
I am hopeful that "everybody else" is beginning to realize how harmful the either/or against/with us thinking has become.
Keep up the good work.
""Anonymous" certainly sounds angry.
You are, of course, correct in making the distinctions you made. It looks to me some Freudian transferrence bubbles in "anonymous's" subconscious. (He appears to be guilty of what he accuses others of.)"
Then, following your logic, you must be angry. You are simply projecting your own feelings onto me.
But, believe it or not, I'm not angry. I'm simply skeptical of someone like Mr. Reppert who keeps preaching on the evils of ad hominem, but then seems unable to resist sticking them onto the end of most of his otherwise fairly decent posts.
He tosses out the word "fundamentalist" a lot.
Why do you think he does this? Is he, too, having transferrence issues?
I do not "toss out" the term fundamentalist; I offer three definitions of it that might be used. One is simply as an epithet, one is a set of doctrines defended by those who published "The Fundamentals" in the early part of this century, and one is a particular intellectual vice, that of viewing everything one doesn't like intellectually as all of the same sort, and of being so caught in one's own ideology that you can't hear what anyone is saying on the other side. I believe this vice can be found in advocates of many positions who seem far removed from Christian biblical fundamentalism.
Let me repeat myself. The ad hominem fallacy is different from just criticizing a person reaching a wrong conclusion and suggesting a possible explanation for how that conclusion might have been reached. To commit the AH fallacy I have to be using claims about a person to attack a claim made by a person.
I was accused of advocating theocracy, and it was even claimed that ID supporters all want theocracy. This struck me as a wild accusation, and one that I was offended by because I find theocracy abhorrent. (My voting history, for example, is really weird if I really am a supporter of theocracy, though I suppose anonymous couldn't have known about that). In an earlier comment I outline the ostensible foundations for this remark, and have shown that it takes a giant logical leap to go from my comments to advocating theocracy. What anonymous has not done is shown how in bloody blazes it follows from anything that I have said that I believe in theocracy.
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