Chad Elliott - cheat, thief, liar.

Well; I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I just read through some of the new stuff that Elliott has added to his blog. There was quite a bit of new material on The Elliott Argument, so I started to read it; I soon realised that it was of far too high a standard to be Elliot's own work - even the writing style was significantly different from what he usually posts. So I did some online detecting. There are whole sections that he has lifted virtually word-for-word from other people's work - personal blogs, answers.com, Wikipedia; he hasn't even bothered to paraphrase most of it. He's been smart enough to credit those pieces from well-known or easily verified sources, such as scientific papers or William Lane Craig's page, which he references often; but there are great slabs which are taken directly from uncredited sources which he then passes off as his own work. He's mixed-and-matched the sentences a bit and changed a word here and there, but a random sample of sentences copied into a search engine revealed the extent of his cheating.

I'm honestly disgusted; I knew he did a bit of that - most of us have used a sentence here or there in our work without crediting the original author properly. But the extent of his cheating goes way beyond that. He's passing off a great deal of writing as his own, when it clearly comes from others, and worse, he is using that material to support, not only his fallacious and childish arguments, but the image he is trying to project of himself. He is stealing other people's hard-won success in order to bolster his ego. I sent him what is probably my final message (below); whatever shreds of respect I had for him are now completely destroyed and I simply will not waste my time on him any more.

OK, Elliott; now you've pissed me off. I really don’t mind that you bang on as if the Elliott Argument was anything other than an easily defeated and fallacious piece of nonsense; if your fragile little ego needs such a myth to make it feel better, who am I to disparage that?

But I’ve just read through some of the new pieces you’ve added since my complete deconstruction of it, (the sections on absolute zero research and so forth) and you have very clearly plagiarised almost all of it. You have added in links to SOME of the pages you got your material from, but there are whole sections you have simply lifted lock, stock, and barrel from other people’s work; answers.com, Wikipedia, you’ve even stolen slabs from other Facebook users – word-for-word. You haven’t even displayed the fractionally small level of common sense needed to unify the fonts, or to paraphrase those segments you pilfered from others with better minds than yours.

Well, Elliott; unlike you, I am a REAL academic, and if there is one thing I despise within my field, it is unbridled plagiarism of this sort.  If this were a paper you had submitted as one of my students, I would haul your sorry arse before the Academic Disciplinary Board so fast you’d get friction burns.

You are NOT an academic, Elliott; you’re not even fit to sweep the floors of a University. This kind of behaviour is unacceptable from anyone, even someone with the superficial reflection of intellect you display. I am disgusted with you. I thought you were, on some primitive level, actually attempting to improve yourself and expand your intellectual capacities; but it is now clear to me that your intent is no more than a childish and artificial attempt to make yourself appear greater than you are by stealing other people’s hard-won success and passing it off as your own.

You are not just a failure, Elliott; you are a cheating failure.

Chad and his Homophobia

This is my response to Elliott’s commentary on the supposed Biblical admonitions against homosexuality. I admit, I’m trying to provoke some response, though so far he has only referred to my posts obliquely; perhaps stirring this particular pot will get some action, as I suspect his long and very rambling condemnation of homosexual acts (he even advises no contact with Gay Christians!) indicates a barely concealed fear of latent – or perhaps NOT so latent – homosexual tendencies. No surprises there.

 So, Elliott ….. you claim that the Christian bible condemns homosexuality. For the sake of argument, I will allow that claim, although the latest biblical scholarship has questioned the translation of words such as arsenokoitai  and malakoi in 1 Corinthins 6:9 (http://btb.sagepub.com/content/34/1/17.abstract), along with interpretation of the Levitican texts and all the other “clobber passages” traditionally used to support homophobia (http://www.psa91.com/pdf/whatthebiblesays.pdf). It needs to be noted that these passages are all open to question, especially since the word “homosexual” did not exist at the time the texts were written down (it was first coined in 1892 by psychologist  Karoly Maria Benkert; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/homosexuality/) , and was in fact not used in the bible at all until 1946 (http://carm.org/word-homosexual-english-bible-1946). These verses when correctly translated are a best obscure about their references to homosexual behaviour per se.

The Bible is much more clear about the issue of sex outside marriage. The verses listed below make it quite clear that such practices constitute “fornication” or “sexual immorality”, which is specifically condemned, as are the children of those unions. It is my understanding, from those who have followed your exploits of FaceBook, that you are not married to the woman with whom you have produced children. Thus, by your own words, you and your children are condemned to Hell.

Fortunately for you (and them), the Christian bible is nothing more than a book of mythology written by Bronze- and Iron-age goat-herders who believed the earth was flat. It has exactly as much authority as the Chronicles of Narnia and frankly is a far less interesting book to read (and yes, I have read both cover to cover). I’m afraid that, unless you can unequivocally prove the existence of the God you happen to believe in (or any God for that matter) to the exclusion of all others, using the Christian bible to support your contentions is about as useful as spitting into the wind.

Deuteronomy 23:2

A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD. (KJV)

Sorry, Elliott, but it looks like your children (and their children’s children’s children’s etc. children) are going to burn.

1 Corinthians 7:1-2

1 Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: [It is] good for a man not to touch a woman. (KJV)

2 Nevertheless, [to avoid] fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. (KJV)

Fornication is sex outside of marriage.

1 Corinthians 7:9

9 But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn in passion. (KJV)

1 Corinthians 7:28

28 But and if thou marry, thou hast not sinned. (KJV)

Ephesians 5:3

3 But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints (KJV)

Hebrews 13:4

4 Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge. (KJV)

1 Corinthians 6:9

9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind…(KJV)

I repeat; fornication is sex outside of marriage. You are condemned by the very same verse you are using to condemn homosexuals; MAJOR FAIL there, Elliott. Try again.

(On “Proof of God” post)

I've just demolished all that BS you posted about the eeeeevills of homosexuality; I've also shown that your own sexual immorality condemns you AND you children to Hell according to your own "Holy" book.

I just want to add that pretending I don't post here by ignoring my comments doesn't constitute a victory; it just means you're wimping out.

Response to Chad's "Proof of God" argument.

Couldn't resist (and it's a slow day at work); I popped back to see how Chad was doing and found a few new posts that are, if possible, even more ridiculous than the earlier ones. I've responded to the so-called "Proof" of god he has posted and will get around to the (not one, but two) posts about how eeevil-'n'-nasty Homersekshules are. Again, no great challenge here, but I live in hope that one day he will at least manage one coherent, logical argument. Response below:

Hi there, Elliott. I just thought I’d do what I promised and check in on your progress; sad to say, I’m not impressed. You don’t seem to have advanced much at all in your capability to develop and defend a logical argument. I’ve deconstructed this one for you as I see you are still constructing it, so there is a chance of giving it some kind of logical coherence. As it is, if it were a ship it would never make it out of dry-dock. This is only a brief analysis of the most obvious problems; I have broken the lesson into two sections, as it is again too long to post in one hit.

//Everyone (atheists and theists alike) must admit that either something is without beginning, or that something came from pure nothingness.//

Why? This is just a reiteration of your “Golden Question”, which is a classic false dichotomy; there is a plethora of theoretical possibilities as to how the Universe came to be, a fact which effectively discounts this assertion. I myself have presented you with at least one logically consistent, theoretically sound possibility (which you have flatly refused to address) which accounts quite effectively for the existence of the Universe without having to resort to the “God-did-it” theory.

//No reason to believe that pure nothingness have ever existed or could ever be achieved//

There is similarly no reason to believe that “pure nothingness” did NOT exist at some time, unless you have access to some physics research the rest of the world knows nothing about. Besides which, as I have pointed out to you before, there are few if any Atheists who would assert that the Universe came into existence “out of pure nothingness”; a classic Straw-man fallacy there, Elliot.

//Pure nothingness has no creative powers.//

How do you know that? What evidence can you present to support the contention? Also, see above.

//Discriminatory//

Meaning? I know this probably means something to you, but it is totally meaningless to everyone else. Why would the contention that pure nothingness is possible be “discriminatory”?

//You cannot disprove or undermine mathematical absolutes//

Again, meaning? What does this have to do with the argument? Mathematical absolutes are the very things that have successfully been used by (for example) Dr Stephen Hawking to support his contention that a god is unnecessary as an explanation for the Universe’s existence. In what way do they support your contentions? I tried to tell you before, Elliot; making these bald assertions without anything to back them up makes no sense and does NOT constitute a rational argument.

//There is no evidence to support the claim that something can come from pure nothingness.//

Again, see above; there is similarly no evidence to support the claim that a god exists or ever has.

//…whatever existed in the past without beginning must be timeless. Present our infinite regress argument and remind them that we are using all standard and formal definitions of 'Time', and that all eternal cycles such as string theory and multi-universe theory, big bang, big bounce, etc. are also covered.//

and

//…we can prove that events were happening prior to the expansion. Thus, the concept of time certainly was in play!!//

I really shouldn’t have to point this out, Elliott, but the two statements above are contradictory; if something “existed in the past” then it cannot be timeless, as the past IS A MEASUREMENT of time. The statement is ontologically meaningless. Furthermore, in the very next paragraph, you make the claim that you “…can prove that events were happening prior to the expansion”. Quite aside from the fact that, if this is the case, you are up for the Nobel Prize in Physics, the contention that events were happening prior to the expansion means that time, and therefore space, were already existent; that is elementary relativity any high-school student could figure out. If that is the case, then whatever it was that caused the expansion was a temporal agent and subject to (ergo, not the cause of) time and space per se. I know you have already tried to wiggle out of this one by inventing a kind of “meta-space-time” in which you claim your god exists, but that is just a furphy; the fact is, if you are claiming that space-time existed before the big bang, then you are admitting that your god is subject to temporality and therefore MUST have had a beginning also.

//…we know the event (the creation of the universe) must have been beyond space and time. Therefore it cannot be physical or material.//

As pointed out above, you contend earlier in your exegesis that space and time must have existed prior to the expansion, so you have just contradicted one of the key premises of your argument; in common parlance, you have just shot yourself in the foot.

//There are only two types of things that fit this description. Either abstract objects (like numbers), or some sort of intelligent mind…//

Why? Even if we ignore the glaring contradictions in your argument that I have already pointed out, there is no logical reason why something existing in such a “timeless, spaceless” state could not be some kind of natural force that is neither abstract nor sentient. If you have the mathematical and scientific research that shows otherwise, feel free to present it.

//…only a free agent can account for the origin of a temporal effect from a timeless cause. If the cause of the universe were an non-personal, mechanically operating cause, then the cause could never exist without its effect. For if the sufficient condition of the effect is given, then the effect must be given as well.//

Again, why “only a free agent”? You have already stated that space-time MUST have existed prior to the expansion in order for “something” to be able to cause the Universe to begin. If that is the case, there is no logical reason to assume that there was only one element existent in that state. It is just as logical, given the conditions you are basing your contentions on, that there were two or more – perhaps an infinite number – of non-sentient, concrete elements existent prior to the expansion that could have reacted with each other in an entirely random manner. In the natural world, we have countless examples of non-sentient elements causing reactions of all kinds; physics is based on the study of just such phenomena.

//…if the cause were a non-personal set of necessary and sufficient conditions, then the cause could never exist without its effect...//

As pointed out above, postulating an entity that exists outside our space-time continuum necessarily permits the postulation of any number of elements existing in the same state. There is absolutely no logical reason why the cause of the Universe could not be the interaction of two or more such elements.

As you see, Elliott, this argument is simply not strong enough to withstand even a brief assault. You really MUST try to learn more about formal logical argument, physics, scientific method, and philosophy. I will do my best to educate you on such matters, but I simply do not have the time to do more than expose the basic flaws, as I have done here. I suggest attending a community college or some other such institution where you can get in some serious study time on these subjects; otherwise, you will continue to be the butt of the jokes about you that are currently flooding the internet.