You meant that it's exactly that way, right?
This is the reason I for one have long ago given up fetching answers for creationists and other faith-based thinkers, and you seem to be coming over to it as well.
There will be times when you may want to share your considered opinions to serve those who can learn from sound arguments, but hopefully you understand that you can't help these other people learn because you don't have their cooperation. Learning isn't imposed on others the way indoctrination is. For the latter, the person just needs to hear and understand the word, and if he has no defense, his mind will be shaped by that.
But that is not learning in the academic sense, which requires a prepared and apt student who is paying attention and open-mindedly trying to understand. If you don't have that - if all you encounter is resolute faith and a confirmation bias - you already know that you have no hope of getting through.
I will address another poster in a moment in this post at some length to whom, like you, I can teach nothing. I hope that you can see that I'm actually writing to people like you. My words are chosen to be understood by critical thinkers who can learn from language - people who like to ruminate about the ideas of others, people who will read them, consider them open-mindedly, acknowledge them, and either agree or explain where and why they disagree with something.
Unfortunately, as you know, there are many posters with whom that seldom or never happens. Writing only for them would be pointless.
I broached the topic of nonresponsive answers with him recently: "Your reply was nonresponsive, meaning it didn't affirm or attempt to falsify my comment, and in this case, went off on an unrelated tangent."
A few posts later came this more fleshed out discussion of how discussions do and don't make forward progress, which contained this passage:
"I liken it to a game of ping-pong. Responsive answers that either affirm or attempt to falsify, or that attempt to seek clarification, are returns. A long as this process - called dialectic - continues, progress is being made toward resolving differences of opinion. We can call this a volley, and it may be long or short. But as soon a one player fails to return a shot, the discussion (volley) is over. The issue ends with the last, plausible, unrebutted argument and its conclusion, whether that is because one discussant relents and agrees with the other, or because one discussant doesn't know what is expected or for any other reason is unable to cooperate."
Evolution, maybe someone can explain?
Would it surprise you that he never acknowledged seeing any of that much less agree or attempt to refute it. i.e., the volley ended there?
As I just discussed with Dan above, teaching and learning is a cooperative effort. You can't play ping-pong with a player who won't return your shots (answer responsively).
You probably won't get a useful answer to that. You might get "definitions" like "
consciousness is life" or his definition of metaphysics as "
the basis of science," but nothing you can use to understand what he means when he uses the word. Ask for his definition of sudden or science and you'll be as in the dark about what he means when he uses those words as you were before you asked.
Multiple posters have told you what the problem is. You've seen my words to Dimi above. Here's another such comment from this thread:
"
I would point out that the claim is that it is always the fault of the reader for not correctly parsing the words offered or not being able to see the many times evidence, defense or explanation have been provided (none is provided in my experience). Somehow, it is that they are invisible to us that are not anointed and possessed of the sort of omniscience that saying "NO!!!" implies to me"
This is an example of what I mean by somebody being unable to learn from words. People shower you with the answer, but it has no impact on your thinking. Instead, you think that others are transforming your words into metaphors. They're not transforming the words they say aren't clearly defined or the claims insufficiently evidenced into metaphors. They're telling you that the words are unintelligible as written.
I don't know whether you have it in your power to do better, but if you do, it will begin with taking the words others tell you seriously rather than inventing other explanations.
I don't expect any meaningful response from you whatsoever regarding this matter, which behavior is not limited to you, but is inexplicable to me. I'm imagining myself in your position reading words like these. If I'm tolling, which I don't believe you're doing, I engage the collocutor but bring out my troll toolbox, which contains Gish gallops, sea-lioning, deflection, equivocation, weasel words, and the like just to waste the other guys time and tick him off. That's what trolling is.
But if I'm sincere but confused, I still engage him, albeit differently. I want to know why he thinks those things about me and am concerned that he does think them and that he might be correct enough to ask questions to try to sort that out.
But you and the half dozen others I've gone down this road with before don't engage either way. They don't engage at all. The just ignore such comments and leave others to guess why they seem so uninterested in something that ought to interest them.
Dozens.
How many times has that been refuted, which refutations you have consistently ignored?
This is from yesterday:
You: "Have I ever mentioned that without experiment there is no science. Not only did Thales have no experiment he hadn't even thought of it. No science."
Me: "Yet Thales did science. He observed and collated celestial data then generated correct inductions confirmed by other observations. Yes science."
That's an example of science based only in observation with no active experiments. I expect you to ignore that again. Why should it be different this time?
[cont]