In short, the individuals in question never learned the proper rules of discourse, and have no intention of doing.
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Appeal to the stone , also known as argumentum ad lapidem , is a logical fallacy that dismisses an argument as untrue or absurd. The dismissal is made by stating or reiterating that the argument is absurd, without providing further argumentation. This theory is closely tied to proof by assertion due to the lack of evidence behind the statement and its attempt to persuade without providing any evidence.
So I touched on this earlier and offered an example of me presenting evidence and @sid ignoring it and simply restating his own unevidenced opinion. Here are some more examples of @Sid using this fallacy:
So here is part of the evidence presented by @Calilasseia, and the link will take anyone to where they can read what was presented in full.
Hereās the fallacious response from @Sid , an unevidenced dismissal without any explanation to support it.
Itās ironic he doesnāt see the own goal as well in his assertion, and I am not referring just to the fallacy of course, but the obvious bias in accepting what is written in a book supporting his unevidenced beliefs, without any supporting evidence for the claims, while using this fallacy to dismiss what is written in other books, that has satisfied the rigour of scientific peer review, using experiments to support conclusions that are testable repeatable and falsifiable.
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If they did they would have to recognise the irrationality of their arguments, and this might undermine the beliefs that can produce only such arguments.
Anyway enjoy folks, I am off out for Sunday lunchā¦
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While youāre enjoying your Sunday lunch, Iāll note that a driving force behind his peddling that fallacy, lies in the fact that he thinks his goat herder mythology, instead of being yet another book written by human beings (and badly informed ones at that), is āspecialā and āanointedā because he thinks it emanates from his imaginary cartoon magic man, which, in a classic piece of circular reasoning, has only ever been asserted to exist in the same mythology.
But he dismisses summarily works written by people who exerted the effort to obtain direct observational evidence supporting their postulates, on the utterly fallacious basis that because their results donāt genuflect before the assertions of his favourite mythology, they are āflawedā. The hypocritical level of double standard running through this line of pseudo-reasoning stinks like a blocked drain.
Even when the evidence presented to support various scientific postulates is conclusive, he still seeks to try and twist that evidence to fit his apologetic convenience, or if he canāt do this, dismiss said evidence summarily.
We see variations on this tactic all the time from mythology fanboys, frequently by appealing to a mythical āSatanā purportedly misleading those of us who donāt accept unsupported mythological assertions uncritically as fact. Iāve been dealing with one member of this ilk, who tried peddling the tiresome and boring āevolution is a lieā bullshit on FB, but who wonāt dare read the scientific papers Iāve pointed him to, because he doesnāt want his smug, complacent and ignorant bubble bursting.
Now Iāve already mentioned Ole Seehausen and his experimental test of sexual selection in Cichlid fishes, a test that can be replicated by any tropical fishkeeper with half a dozen fish tanks and the requisite perseverance. Thereās also the Mavarez et al paper on speciation via hybridisation in Heliconius butterflies, which again can be replicated by anyone who knows how to rear these butterflies in captivity and breed them. Then thereās the incipient speciation paper by Diane Dodd, describing an experiment that can be replicated in any modestly equipped high school laboratory.
Indeed, itās been one of those ālight bulb above the headā moments for me, that enough of the scientific work documented in the evolutionary biology literature, can be replicated by determined amateurs, to render any doubt about the veracity of the contents of these papers null and void.
Itās possibly one of the biggest indictments of various education systems, that they donāt replicate these results in the relevant classes. You donāt need hideously expensive laboratory apparatus to replicate these results, as would be the case for the RNA experiments by the team of Japanese scientists I mentioned elsewhere. All you need is basic amenities that are within the reach of anyone who, for example, keeps guinea pigs as pets, or grows tomatoes in a greenhouse.
Mind you, that paper by Seehausen provided me with an exquisite moment of comedy over at FB, when my mentioning this test of sexual selection led to one mythology fanboy calling me a ādickheadā for talking about sex change in fish. The idiot in question didnāt know that the term āsexual selectionā is the label used to encapsulate all of the processes involved in mate choice, and has nothing to do with the mythical ātrans ideologyā so many of these peons whinge and bleat about. Needless to say, the idiot in question quickly deleted his post once I schooled him on the matter, especially when I told him he could see sexual selection in action in any nightclub on the planet, watching horny males trying to get into the knickers of picky females, who have no hesitation in giving the finger to the males they deem inadequate.
Though Iām minded to note that the specimens who exhibit instances of the above comedy, are probably going to blow their arteries, when they learn about Seahorses, a clade within which the males are the ones that become pregnant, or the various invertebrates Iām familiar with, whose reproductive antics are truly a voyage into the Twylight Zone in terms of wackiniess.
Indeed, on that note, Iād really like to see what āexplanationā these people have for Acarophenax tribolii, a species of mite whose reproductive cycle is probably every mythology fanboyās worst nightmare come true. Any appeals to the mythical āfallā Iāll simply point and laugh at, given that these mites have been engaging in this behaviour for something like 10 million years before humans arrived on the planet.
For that matter, in relation to another invertebrate that pushes the enveolope of sexual weirdness, namely Xylocoris maculipennis, a species that introduces us to the wonderful world of hypodermic insemination, what Iām waiting for is an announcement in the scientific literature, that a similar Hemipteran species has been āfrozenā in the act of hypodermic insemination in, say, Miocene amber. Iād probably be motivated to buy a train ticket to London specifically to visit the Natural History Museum, and photograph any specimen of this sort that winds up in their collection. That one will be a prize photo if ever I take it!
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Whoever claimed it did? No atheists! Of that I am fairly certain.
Humans create ideas of justice and law ourselves as a way of governing our societies and because it suits us to do so. There is no evidence of any ultimate arbiter and the existence of one would, given the harsh realities of the universe we observe around us, likely create significant moral and scientific problems.
Your remarks imply you believe there is such an arbiter, a godā¦ your beliefs are entirely your concern.
Ultimately however, it is a religious claim. No currently accepted explanation requests or requires the action of deity and, as a result, such a claim is extraordinary. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Itās that simple 
UK Atheist
Hi @UKAtheist, @Sid hung around for a few weeks spewing logical fallacies like the straw man fallacy you have pointed out there. In the end he was banned (if memory serves it was for 3 months?), as despite being cut an enormous amount of slack, he clearly didnāt want to engage in honest debate. From the start he based his religious spiel on argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacies, insisting others disprove his unevidenced beliefs. Nothing we havenāt seen before to be honest.
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Itās the way they always areā¦ the only oneās that stick around are (text removed by mod) theyāre beaten before they start. I wrote about the way theists debate many years ago and Iāve seen no sign that their arguments or methods have changed in any real way.
UK Atheist
*so far.
We have to start with the assumption of intellectual honesty, until demonstrated otherwise.
Otherwise, we are just presuming and not giving everyone a fair shot.
Or dishonest enough to not care, whatever the motivations for this may be.
But yeah, I understand that it is more probable that they arenāt going to be honest, due to prior experience.
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Ok, firstly edit that two to a too, or prepared to be mocked by visiting theists.
I have known some who kept posting on a range of topics for some time, but often it ends in enmity anyway. I can sympathise to a certain extent, as it canāt be easy to see the irreverent way most of us treat their cherished religious beliefs. Iāve known only one who came back and said that after the exchanges here heād had a crisis of faith, and abandoned his beliefs, he was a Muslim, but his username escapes at this minute. I liad into him pretty hard tbh, and felt a little guilty, until he came back and said it had caused him to rethink his beliefs of course.
Itās not easy to go over the same claims again and again, as if itās the first time each time a new apologist shows up though. Maybe some of them read a few threads, and donāt even bother?
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(Text removed by mod)
A recent Facebook encounter is typical.
The x in question started off with the usual one-line bullshit about āatheistic beliefsā. This was quickly followed by an entirely typical strawman caricature of prebiotic chemistry, along the lines of āyou think life came from a rockā. (Duh). Along with the usual snide comments about various other topics, including infantile dismissal of tetrapod ancestry with the cretinous āa fish growing legs and walking is a fantasyā.
So, I inform him about the reality of prebiotic chemistry, and show him video footage of Mudskippers, which are fish that are alive today and which walk on land.
This resulted in bluster and summary dismissal. No surprises there. Then he tried engaging in playground taunts, to the effect that because I didnāt supply him instantly with a raft of photos of tetrapod fossils, I had ānothingā to establish my claims.
So, after asking him why didnāt he do his own homework, given that it takes all of ten seconds to type āTiktaalikā into Google and be presented with a link to the scientific paper describing the fossil, he then engaged in more bluster (and the usual ad hominem). So, I presented him with the scientific paper in question (which, of course, includes detailed photos of the fossil in question).
Cue more summary dismissal, and a lame complaint to the effect that the explanatory drawings accompanying the photos somehow didnāt count. Apparently this individual hasnāt heard of the concept of schematic diagrams.
Then, came the typical creationist bullshit about Tiktaalik being ādeformedā. Yes, he dredged the barrel to that extent. Comparative anatomy being another subject he is apparently totally ignorant of (oh wait, there are Sarcopterygian fishes alive today with recognisably similar fin morphology to early Tetrapodomorphs).
An Illustrative scientific paper covering said fin morphology is this one:
Characteristic Tetrapod Musculoskeletal Limb Phenotype Emerged More Than 400 MYA In Basal Lobe-Finned Fishes by Rui Diogo, Peter Johnson, Julia L. Molnar and Borja Esteve-Altava, Scientific Reports, 6: Article no. 37592 (2016) [Full paper downloadable from here]
Though I suspect the moment I drop that in his lap, heāll hand-wave it away again with āLalalalala I canāt hear youā.
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Rats! Normally gets picked up by PWA but everyone makes mistakes and grammar checkers aināt perfect. Anyway, thanks for the heads-up
Everyone makes mistakes. I have known some who kept posting on a range of topics for some time, but often it ends in enmity anyway. I can sympathise to a certain extent, as it canāt be easy to see the irreverent way most of us treat their cherished religious beliefs. Iāve known only one who came back and said that after the exchanges here heād had a crisis of faith, and abandoned his beliefs, he was a Muslim, but his username escapes at this minute. I liad into him pretty hard tbh, and felt a little guilty, until he came back and said it had caused him to rethink his beliefs of course.[/quote]
Yeah, I had one success ā¦ a young scientologist. Long time ago. My view is that we donāt (or shouldnāt) do it to persuade them, we do it (or should) for the lurkers.
Thatās why places like Talk Origins was so useful because theists only ever had some twenty or so questions (the so called FABNAQs: āFrequently Asked But Never Answered Questionsā that we actually āfrequently asked and repeatedly answered questionsā) and every other question was some variation on one of those. I always meant to write a book on them but Iām lazy so I never got round to it
UK Atheist
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I have linked the talkorigins site a few times, as well as a massive database of evidence for evolution, it has a section dedicated to creationist propaganda lies, and debunking them. Itās very good reference tool.
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Trouble being that the individuals most in need of reading that resource and its contents, are the ones most likely to engage in wilful refusal to do so.
When you have people who summarily dismiss peer reviewed scientific papers, and engage in infantile stonewalling on the matter, the only reason for engaging them in any capacity consists of the duty to demonstrate that lies and bullshit do not pass unchallenged. Thereās certainly no point in trying to educate these specimens.
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Just keep battering on their gates, and eventually the gate might collapse and in can charge the peaceful parade of reason and rationality, weād only need to reach one of them for it all to be worth it.
Thereās also those on the side lines reading, you never know?
Donāt forget, some are potentially just trolls, and get off on talking us in circles.
Iāve been saying for some time that I donāt post for the benefit of the irredeemable ideological stormtroopers for creationist lies. I post precisely so that the wider audience knows that bullshit does not pass here unchallenged. In short, to vaccinate the lurkers.
In my experience, Itās usually the ones who are experiencing doubts of their own that are likely to be responsive to the facts, ones who are already thinking that their religion is leaving a bad taste in the mouth or a bad smell in the nostrils.
The hardcore, on the other hand, are only useful for pedagogical purposes - namely, to bring into sharp relief how bad the smell and taste in question really are, to those whose senses havenāt been terminally warped by doctrinal poison.
Indeed, one of the lingering bad smells that should be making any honest person retch, is the routine, wilful and duplicitous deployment of blatant strawman caricatures of scientific postulates, a tactic that isnāt in my view even forgivable on the basis of ignorance.
We now live in an age where genuine information on this matter is available within ten seconds, to anyone who performs a competent Google search. Failure to do so before posting the canards in question is not merely indolent in this age, but wilfully dishonest.
Then of course, thereās that other tactic deployed by the sleazier specimens, namely demanding that they be spoon fed with a centuryās worth of scientific research in a 2 minute Facebook soundbite, or a similar mendacious demand. Usually to be followed by summary dismissal of whatever is presented if it doesnāt meet this impossible and egregiously dishonest āspecificationā.
I gather Hovind fanboys are particularly fond of this discoursive outrage, given that itās a documented part of his modus operandi. Though itās wise to be prepared for this nefarious piece of legerdemain from other quarters as well.
This shell game is frequently accompanied by that brand of hypocrisy and double standard, whereby extensive expositions in detail of relevant concepts and data honestly by ourselves, is snidely and summarily rejected, but the whingeing and bleating begins on a grand scale, if we donāt roll over and treat unsupported assertions, no matter how banal, as purportedly constituting ineffable wisdom. Doubly so if the assertions in question are copy-pasted from their favourite choice of pre-scientific mythology.
Of course, I wonāt be citing appropriate countermeasures in public, on the elementary basis that you keep your enemy guessing wherever possible, though relevant ideas should make themselves apparent from first principles to the astute and experienced.
I suggest others here keep a copy of this for future reference, because you will almost certainly encounter the malfeasance Iāve described above frequently.
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This is exactly why I on selected platforms have bothered arguing with people spreading their lies about creationism/anti-evolution, flat earth, alternative medicine, anti-vaccination, conspicary theories idiocies, and other science denial and fact resistence. It is mainly to demonstrate to the silent reader that those ideas should not be taken at face value, for good reasons. Also, the above mentioned idiocy will not disappear after the idiot left his/her keyboard, and itās not a good idea to let said crap shine like a lighthouse through search engines.
Another reason is that I find it mildly amusing to argue with them.
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How the heck did you cross out like that? Iāve been trying to figure that one out!
I was praying it would happen, and my prayers were answered? 
Seriously, it seems that a selected few HTML tags are allowed by the forum software, and one of them is the strikethrough element. What you do is surround the text you want to strikethrough with <s> and </s>, like this: āIāll <s>pray for</s>think about youā, which gives you āIāll pray forthink about youā.
Edit: on further experimentation, it seems that the forum software supports it natively, just use square brackets ([ and ]) instead of < and >. Like this: [ s]strikethrough[ /s] => strikethrough (had to add a space after the opening square brackets to prevent the forum software to interpret the tags).
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To explain forum code tags, you can use the HTML code tag:
[s]strikethrough[/s]
Everything encoded in <code> ā¦ </code> tags will be rendered āas isā without interpretation by the forum software.
Oh, and if you use HTML entities to render the āless thanā and āgreater thanā characters when writing an HTML tag, this also prevents the tag being interpreted. The entities in question are written as follows:
& lt; is the "less than" character
& gt; is the āgreater thanā character
Omit the space after the ampersand to generate the entity.
Indeed, you can render all manner of characters this way, so that the following set of HTML entities:
& alpha; & beta; & gamma;
& Alpha; & Beta; & Gamma;
renders the Greek characters as follows:
Ī± Ī² Ī³
Ī Ī Ī
Thereās a vast list of HTML entities understood within HTML (works for HTML 4 and 5), which have both numerical code designation and named designations. For example, this lot:
& planck; & int; & part;
Renders the following symbols:
ā ā« ā
The full list can be found here, but that list is rendered in a stupidly small font, and you need to use an accessibility magnifier to view it properly (sigh). A more readable set is this one.
Enjoy!
Or you can just use Unicode characters. I have set up my computer so I can alternate my keyboard setup between Norwegian (for regular use), US (for programming), and Greek (for greek letters):
Ī±Ī²Ī³ ĪĪĪ Ī“Ī
You can find almost any symbol represented by Unicode through Unicode charts, like this one. A more accessible chart may be this one.
ā« ā¬ ā ā® āÆ ā ā ā ā
