> > At the same time, Jim, it should be clear that if you do take the > > article at face value, then it's neither desperate nor prejudicial to > > suggest something like dementia as the cause of the change. > > To suggest it as a possibility is not prejudicial. To leap to it so > quickly IS. > > If you look at the percentage of mentally active octogenarians, the > percentage of Alzheimer's would put those afflicted in a small subgroup. > > So if we wish to posit a change in someone's ideology, other factors would > be more plausible than dementia.
Such as? I did think that "dementia" was too strong (which was why I wrote "something like dementia"), but without a specific stronger contender as explanation, it's reasonable to suggest the possibility - which is all that Stephen did (take a look at his post again). > Further, to posit dementia as a cause for a change from atheism to theism > requires more than just suggesting it, it requires demonstrating why this > would be so. I can't make any sense of that statement. Can you reword it? > What little I picked up from Flew's comments I found nothing of the > typical irrational religious (and non-religious) ideation. Well, again, there's the "argument from ignorance". > > (1) Some kind of mental decline, so that arguments he already correctly > > rejected (i.e., those in the article) now convince him. > > Who says he correctly rejected them? > > An ex-racist can say he correctly rejected another race as equal, but now > sees that previous position as unfounded. That's not analogous, unless you're suggesting that the races are not equal, or that the argument from ignorance is a valid argument. It's not: it IS correct to reject that argument. > You're assuming his original thinking was correct -- how would you go > about proving this? See above. I think you're asking this because you've missed what I'm saying. If we take the article as the entire story (something I've said I don't think we should do), then we have a man who has come to accept an invalid argument that he (presumably) did not accept earlier. I'm not just assuming that his original stance re. that argument was correct: it WAS correct. The argument from ignorance is a bad argument. I think you're taking my statements about that argument as though I were instead saying that the conclusion of that argument - the theism - is obviously wrong. Again, if we take the article as the entire story, then the man used to recognize the invalidity of that argument, and now fails to recognize its invalidity, and that is the change of mind that needs explanation. This all may be moot, if when the book comes out, it turns out that the man does have a new argument. The piece that Paul Brandon posted today refers to an "apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species", but doesn't provide the argument for that claim of impossibility (which is, remember, NOT the same thing as simple failure to currently have such a naturalistic theory). If there's an argument that such a theory is impossible, then it's not simply the argument from ignorance, but it doesn't seem to me that we can tell yet. Paul
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