The 10 Logic Commandments ...

No one's saying it doesn't. But it's just doing what humans invented it to do: provide naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena through the testing of hypotheses.Should we be similarly impressed that maps are legible? And what did we expect to put a man on the moon? Buddhism? Swing music? Abstract art?The downside to the amazing power of empirical evidential research is its tendency to work in instances like Hiroshima. Like any human endeavor, it's fraught with personal and cultural bias. Increasingly, it's in hock to a lot of corporate, military, and political sponsors who don't have the biosphere's best interests at heart. There's no reason to take umbrage about someone pointing this out, either, but a lot of science-thumpers aren't as objective as they make themselves out to be.

That's true. But he specifically said a well-established theory, which suggests something more robust than the mere observation that there's been a lack of observations of coelacanths for a long while. By definition, the lack of just such a confirmed sighting is the only thing that made up the "theory."That's like saying that the well-established theory that the Red Sox would never win another World Series was overturned by the Red Sox winning a single World Series in 2004. If they'd only known it was that simple!

It's a facebook meme modeled on the 10 commandments.

Well it seems to me that this is more your problem than anything else, as there are straw man definitions that use exaggeration in them.Let's look at this example He went bankrupt two or three times, so "often" is a bit of an exaggeration, but it isn't a reductio_ad_absurdum argument, it is a straw man that distracts from the argument about qualification for the position of president. When that extrapolation reaches an impossible result it shows that the argument that was extrapolated from is absurd. The Creationist moon orbit calculation to "prove" a young earth comes to mind.Enjoy

Even when your argument is bad, your result may still be correct. If you've taken a high school geometry class, surely you saw some of your fellow students produce bad proofs of things that were known to be true.But if you are on a debate site attempting to be convincing about some point you know in your heart is true, then you should be embarrassed to be using a bad argument. And more to the point, you should not be surprised that you are not being convincing when your argument is wrong.If you are caught using a logical fallacy about something you know to be true, the correct response would be to choose a proper argument and try again. God-of-the-gaps is not a fallacy. It is simply a description for a position that scientists do not think a Christian ought to feel comfortable with. What it means is that you are allowing science to squeeze your concept of God into tinier and tinier places over time. Sounds like some attacks on Darwin we've seen here. 'Hitler was inspired by social Darwinism therefore Darwinian biology is evil' Such a thread is immortalized on the home page of this web page because apparently it is in a group that nobody posts to anymore. How about an example? I don't believe there is any conceivable evidence that would ever convince you.

Hi Mike, I'm doing well, been in remission for 3 years now and going strong, and wish all my friends with cancer could be doing as well. Or applying the wrong one to the situation, saying it is a straw man when it is something else. Off topic, but it seems I just saw something on this -- an early fossil with flattened rib bones. I'll see if I can find it and ping you with it.Enjoy

I can't believe I'm having to do this.Look, Hombre, it matters that Big Bang predicted the CMBR where Steady State could not but that prediction is not an observation. It doesn't matter if additional evidence was necessary to establish BB. It doesn't matter that P&W's observations required verification however many times. The fact remains that with the ONE observation, that the CMBR does exist, everyone (except Hoyle, sadly) knew that Steady State was not what we were looking at.Yes, Hombre, this one observation did, in fact, destroy Steady State regardless of how long it took for that realization to develope.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

I realize that. Just think that there should be an improvement to the whole meme, by calling for Pretty Good Ideas instead of Commandments.

13. Arguments from incredulity shall be dismissed as claptrap.
example: Saying there is no such thing as big foot because the body of one has never been produced.No big foot has ever been *(scientifically verified) observed in nature, hence big foot does not exist.Fallacy: "argument from ignorance". It is impossible to simultaneously search every forest on Earth; therefore the possibility that a big foot exist can not be disproved.Edited by 1.61803, : added *

No, the theory consisted of saying that there weren't any, not that none had been seen.If you want a more theory-ish theory, Arago's spot pretty much dished the particle theory of light. And the magnetic stripes on the seafloor practically overnight turned drifters from a fringe minority in geology to the new consensus. The proof that DNA itself, and not the associated proteins, was the material basis of inheritance came down (IIRC) to one beautiful experiment, contradicting conventional wisdom and indeed the expectations of the people doing the experiment. Sometimes there is an experimentum crucis.

No, but I'd be similarly surprised at someone questioning why a single inconsistant observation doesn't cause someone to throw their whole map away.I was responding to you questioning the rarity of a single verifiable counter-observation undermining a well established theory:

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AZPaul3 writes:

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The problem I'm having is that in the hard sciences a single verifiable counter-observation can undermine a well established theory.

In reality, has a single verifiable counter-observation ever done any such thing, ever?

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It is possible for it to happen, but it's no wonder that it hardly ever does. That's because science works, sometimes even when it's technically wrong about something. Its that utility that keeps things around.As was saying in the portion of my message that you didn't respond to:

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So, single verifiable counter-observation? Sure, it can happen. But does it? Not so much, because well established theories can continue to work despite the single verifiable counter-observations. It's like it's too well established for the single observation to matter that much, especially as long as it still works.

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That doesn't mean that it isn't technically wrong, but as long as it's still useful then it doesn't really matter that much yet.

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Yes. Yes, we should be impressed that maps are legible --- and accurate.What more were you expecting cartographers to do?

Perhaps, but, there does seem to be somewhat sympathetic posts by NoNukes and Omni. Also, your knee-jerk reaction to distance yourself from your original posting of the "Ten Commandments" by writing "Well I didn't write the thing," makes me believe it's not entirely my problem. I know, I know. If you feel the definitions are perfect and our discussion is finished, then disregard the following . . . Erm, I don't think that's a good example of a straw-man. The point raised was: "Trump would make a good president because he was a good businessman." Imperfect evidence was then introduced to support/disprove the argument? That's a strawman argument?Let me try a more literal example of 'reductio_ad_absurdum:' I want to print out a perfect replica of a logo, only one quadrillion times bigger than the original (luckily Office Depot is having a sale on printer ink). If I use an EPS file, it will reproduce nearly perfectly, the edges will stay nice and sharp. The EPS image has been recreated 'extrapolatedly' form the original design. If I use a 72 dpi GIF file, the greatly enlarged image will appear pretty crappily, one would say it was created 'exaggeratedly.' Though based on the original design, the GIF file would be horribly distorted. The GIF file example would be an example of 'reductio_ad_absurdum.' Comment? Boy, I think this is a bad example too. There was no science/math extrapolated from real science to 'prove' a young earth. If anything, this is a type of strawman argument. A person uses a completely different set of imaginary principles to support his argument. Evidence via non sequitur. A strawman argument. Comment?

I agree 100%.Some of the other folks here are pointing out, and rightly so, that long-established theories have been undone when evidence comes from unanticipated research. But it's part of the protocols of empirical inquiry that one anomalous observation can only form the basis of further research, not destroy an established construct in one fell swoop. As I tried to explain before, science is a for-us-by-us construct that just does what we developed it to do. And a lot of times things stick around because nothing's more useful than that which appeals to our biases.

Not so much perfect as subject to gray areas. Basically it seems to me that you are trying to make the definition more narrow, while some definitions are more general.If you are arguing against a caricature of the argument -- an exaggerated caricature -- you are using a misrepresentation, a distortion, a false representative of the argument, not the real argument. Yes, because the straw man is that he was not a good businessman and has nothing to do (logic wise) with whether or not he would be a good president -- that would be a logically false conclusion. My recollection is that they took the rate at which the moon is currently receding from the earth and extrapolated that back to where they would have to be joined in the near past. Curiously, I call that a scientific and mathematical extrapolation (one that ignores significant parts of the problem, like the change in gravity, but still scientific and mathematical) -- so I certainly think you can't say there was no math and no science in that argument.What it does do is reach a ridiculous conclusion, and that shows that the assumptions of the calculation is erroneous. Hoist on their own petard as it were.Enjoy