Over at Uncommon Descent, the bizarre ravings of Gordon E. Mullings (aka "kairosfocus") included this gem:
FSCO/I is routinely intuitively used to identify artifacts of unknown cause, as IIRC, WmAD has pointed out regarding a room in the Smithsonian full of artifacts of unknown purpose but identified to be credibly human.
No, the Smithsonian does not have a "room...full of artifacts" like that. That bogus claim was debunked back in 2002.
5 comments:
Is an untruth a lie if you believe it, whether honestly or carelessly, to be true?
When you persist in a false assertion in the face of being shown repeatedly that it's false, you're either lying or delusional when you deliberately continue to promulgate the falsehood. Duane Gish was well known to exhibit that behavior: corrected at one stop in his speaking itinerary, he'd repeat the false claim at the next.
While your point is an excellent one, I consider it also instructive to ponder the conclusions they would be able to draw, were such a room to exist.
There is probably only one systematic explanation for the existence of man-made artifacts of inscrutable purpose. That explanation is that the designer was incompetent.
It would be very easy for an alien species to determine the purpose of a railway locomotive or a paint-spraying factory robot: they have been so competently designed that they do one thing well, and so their purpose is obvious. It is not so with a prototype machine built by a perpetual motion researcher, or a box with flashing lights and electrodes designed by a quack therapist to "detoxify" the human body: these objects have been designed by people who have a very poor understanding of their purpose, and so it is much harder to deduce the purpose from the object.
I don't get the impression that intelligent design advocates really want to make this point about the naturally occurring objects in which they think they have identified evidence of design!
Indeed, this debunking has been textbook material since 2007. Uh, in my text, anyhow.
And that's certainly not the only thing that gordon elliott mullings (kairosfocus) lies about, even though he regularly preaches that his opponents have a "duty of care" to get their facts straight and tell the truth. The guy is a two-faced lunatic.
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