Raf

Geisha, you have a mistaken definition of the appeal to authority fallacy. Let me try to explain, because Chockfull is citing it correctly. An appeal to authority says proposition A is true because Dr. E, an expert in the field, says it's true. Now, proposition A may in fact be true, but it's not true just because Dr. E says it's true. It's like in medicine. Doctor says you have cancer. First thing he tells you is... Get a second opinion. Why? Because you want the results of the test confirmed by an independent source. You go to 10 doctors and they all tell you the same thing, then you have diminished the likelihood that they are all wrong (you'll never reduce it to zero, but at some point you're getting chemo or some other treatment or you gonna die). In this case, Samarin says in no uncertain terms that SIT does not produce a known language, and that what it does produce is similar to real language only in very limited ways (his words). I agree with you that Samarin's work has withstood the test of peer review. He is cited as an authority on the subject by Christian and non Christian alike. To me, that decreases the odds that he's wrong. But it will, alas, never be reduced to zero. So here we are. Chockfull is challenging Samarin's conclusion here. Responding to that argument by merely saying Samarin's an expert in this field and we are not doesn't actually prove anything, so Chockfull, within every logical right, is not accepting it. Fine. It is incumbent on me to show why Chockfull's dismissal of Samarin's conclusion is unwarranted, and I have to do so without merely relying on Samarin. An efficient use of time? Not in the least. But fair game? Afraid so.

Fallacy just means its presented as proof but doesn't prove anything. It doesn't mean the person employing it is wrong. Chockfull is basically demanding that I retrace Samarin's steps to show that his conclusions are, in fact, consistent with his findings. I have no doubt Samarin's findings are justified. But Chockfull's challenge is valid: if the findings are justified, then it should be possible, if not easy, to prove it. (That last sentence is not universally applicable. The more complicated the subject, the less easy it is to prove, even though it may be right. Like quantum mechanics. Not easy to show at all. But nonetheless true. So the question here is, is linguistics easy enough a subject that retracing Samarin's steps will be easy, or is it complicated enough that it will be tough, though not impossible, to explain? Don't know the answer to that.) Personally, I think it's a huge waste of time because WHEN we show Samarin is correct, it still will be rejected as biased and not proving anything. The opposing side's argument is predetermined by design to conclude that I can't prove my case. Therefore, no amount of offered proof will ever be enough. In my view, that's not faith. It's wishful thinking. I speak here for myself, why I do not accept this on faith.

Rebecca De Mornay The Three Musketeers Oliver Platt

I'm actually ok with that premise. The problem is that tongues recorded in worship settings and submitted for later review account for at least some of the samples we've been discussing. Seems there that God shuts the power off whenever a recorder is turned on... Without telling the speaker. In those cases, the speaker senses nothing different, feels just as strongly about praising God, but is, if God is not involved, faking it. So if God is not cooperating, we learn that real SIT and faked SIT feel exactly the same to the SITter. Hmmm. Feel the same. Produce the same thing linguistically. But my belief that they ARE the same is somehow presumptuous and unwarranted...

Actually, I was thinking of picking up Samarin and having you get Sherrill, which you might find more affirming. Plus, Sherrill's like a third of the price.

Amusing, but cheap shot. At this stage of the discussion, TWI in general and Wierwille in particular have been so discredited that picking on them is the equivalent of employing the straw man fallacy.

Chockfull: how about a deal? You buy Sherrill's book. I'll buy Samarin's. We compare notes here. I'd offer to reverse it, but Samarin is 3x as much $, so I'll volunteer to take the bigger financial hit.

Track record so far: We were quoted an abstract wherein Samarin calls SIT a language. It was in quotes and the assertion was refuted. We were told Samarin's own linguists disputed his conclusion. They didn't. We were then told Poythress was quoting other linguists reviewing Samarin's work. It wasn't Poythress. Then we were told it was Landry citing linguists critiquing Samarin. But the linguists cited were quoted seven years before Samarin's book was published. Then we were told it was other authors disputing Samarin's findings. It was other suthors, but impossible to tell whether they quoted Samarin favorably or unfavorably, considering that their quote of Samarin was in turn quoted by a college kid writing a paper for his religion class. Did they quote Samarin out of context? Did the college kid quote the authors (one of whom is a practicing tongues-speaker - no bias there) out of context? We don't know. Since I do have access to Malony and Lovekin's book, I'll pick it up from the library so we can cut out the middleman and determine what they really were saying about Samarin. Next it's implied that criticism of Samarin is plentiful. Number of works cited in support of this assertion: 0. Seriously, don't you get tired? Now we're told Samarin was so biased we can't take his conclusion seriously, even though everyone who studies the subject, Christian and non Christian alike, cites him favorably. I think I know how this chapter ends...

It's already been determined that glossolalia and free vocalization produce the same thing linguistically. If glossolalia produces an unknown language, then linguistically, we are saying that so does faking it. Makes no sense. But somehow we now have to prove what's already been peer reviewed and has stood the tests applied by other linguists. But if it avoids the appeal to authority, then I guess it's worth it. What's frustrating is that when I show again that Samarin has been oversimplified and misrepresented (his repeatedly stated and increasingly blunt conclusions are a good predictor of what we will inevitably find), it still won't be good enough because no amount of proof is ever going to be good enough. Why am I doing this again?

Back on my phone, so if you want me to really examine the ink on the counterfeit $2 bills Samarin studied, it'll have to wait. Possibly for past the weekend. That'll give you time to catch up on Sherrill and offer your thoughts.

Oh for Pete's sake. If he found known human languages, what were they? Really tedious.

It's getting a little tedious to watch facts getting dismissed as my opinion. SIT does not produce known languages. That's a fact, not my opinion. What SIT does produce is linguistically indistinguishable from competent free vocalization with no pretense of divine inspiration. That is a fact, not an opinion. If they produce the same thing, then my point, while not proved to your satisfaction (because you've made it clear that no amount of proof I provide will suffice), is still made as strongly as possible within the limitations of my ability to prove it. But go ahead, dismiss it as my opinion if it makes you happy.

There is a reason I ignored this, and a reason I am not the one who has been bringing up the linguistic qualities of glossalalic utterances in the first place. There's a reason I am not obsessing over just how good an approximation of real language glossolalia is. And that reason is simply stated thus: They are not human languages. We're not dealing with xenoglossy. If we were, there'd be no need to argue or discuss anything. I'd be proved wrong and we'd be done. The fact that SIT does not produce human languages is enough for me to make my point. You can try to pry all you want out of what it does produce, but you can't argue that it produces a known, human language. The best you can do is reach for a "tongues of angels" type of argument, and the best Samarin can do, on a good day, is rule that out (and I think pointing out that the tongues of angels -- that is, the glossolalia he actually studied and catalogued -- is far less sophisticated than a human language argues against the tongues of angels theory anyway). So you can revel in the linguistic qualities that DO exist, you can chide him for how he dismisses the qualities that don't exist, but what you are left with remains an utterance that is indistinguishable from uninspired, Godless free vocalization. And (I hesitate to repeat myself) if what you're producing in glossolalia is indistinguishable from what an uninspired free vocalization can produce, then the only difference is the setting in which it is produced! That's not a difference. If you're not obligated to articulate and prove the difference between free vocalization and SIT, then I'm not obligated to believe that there is one. I know, repetitious, right? But unrefuted.

I just wanted to say hello to Rosalie and congratulate her on her ascension to the top of The Way International hierarchy. Well done. As any good president knows, you would not be where you are today if not for the shoulders of the giants on which you stand, so let's give a hand to all those giants, shall we? Craig Martindale! John Lynn! Chris Geer! Vince Finnegan! Mike Tracy! Walter Cummins! Johnny Townsend! Earl Burton! Ralph Dubofsky! Let's give them all a BIG hand! Tough room.

Hey, we finally got a CES-sympathetic vote in the poll. I was wondering where those guys all disappeared to. Chockfull's latest post illustrates in a way I probably never could what I said earlier on this thread: I cannot prove my case because you won't let me, or God won't let me. I cannot prove my point because I don't have a 100 percent sample size. I cannot prove my point because even if I had a 100 percent sample size and showed every single case of SIT to produce "linguistic nonsense," you still have the "God won't let it be tested" fallback. It is your fallback position, not merely the evidence, that makes my case impossible to prove. Fine. But don't get on me for not proving my point. That would be like judging a fish on its ability to climb a tree.

Even if we were to assume the communication is to God and that man could not pick up on it, the bottom line that it is never a case of actual xenoglossia has been given short shrift on this thread. We've been poring over what the experts say about the counterfeit to determine how closely it resembles the genuine precisely because no cases of the genuine exist to study. Oh, except 40 years ago, in Alaska. Or California, sorry. And it involved Arabs. Or Asians. I keep getting it mixed up. But it's proof I tell you! Right, skyrider? I mean socks?

Ok. You forget the point of citing linguistic studies on this thread in the first place. I only alluded to them. You are the one who asked for them and then started posting snippet quotes outside of their contexts to prove they were reaching conclusions 180 degrees removed from what they were actually saying. I do understand and always have said that if God won't cooperate with the studies, we have nothing to discuss. What you cannot do is have it both ways: mine the material for proof of linguistic content in SIT, then dismiss the capacity for linguistics to even study the issue because of the non-cooperation of God. I don't care which side you pick, but you gotta pick one! If, for the sake of argument, you are going to allow for the idea that glossolalia can be studied by a linguist, then you have to allow also for the fact that the linguist may know a little more about his subject matter than you do. You don't have to accept Samarin's findings. I'm fine with that. But citing his report and disagreeing with his conclusion is rather disingenuous: you are not better qualified to interpret his findings than he was. And the fact that every named linguist who has studied the same thing has reached the same conclusion is a testament to that fact. Now, we do have unnamed linguists provided by Sherrill. But accepting their word is problematic on a number of fronts. 1. We don't know who they are. 2. We don't know that their findings are accurately reported. 3. Assuming they are credible and the reports accurate, we obliterate the notion that God won't cooperate with a study. This is a problem, because their findings appear impossible to duplicate, often a clear indication that their conclusions are flawed. [unless, of course, they studied the only known genuine samples of the real thing]. You keep getting on me for repeating myself, and I suppose that's ok. But how different is it from the opposite position, which demands acceptance on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, distorts the clear meaning of scripture to make a testable premise untestable, and retreats to "you gotta take it on faith" whenever its back is against the wall? You can repeat THAT litany as many times as you like, and it doesn't validate SIT one whit. I don't believe Socks' story. I don't believe Tom's story in doctrinal. I invite them both to prove it. But if you want me to accept that this miracle took place, you're going to have to do a little better than unnamed speakers and unnamed hearers removed from the present by 40 years and a continent or two. "I heard someone speak, who wasn't me. Someone else, who wasn't me, says they understood what was spoken. We were all amazed. I can't name any of them and couldn't find them with a detective kit and a Yahoo map." That would NOT be accepted in a court of law to establish the truth of what happened, and if we can't agree on that, then you don't know the slightest thing about the court system. The evidence for UFO abduction is just as reliable and a heck of a lot more widespread. Apologies to Socks: you didn't present your story as proof, did not ask me to accept it or judge it. I am only doing so now because someone else is faulting me for not accepting it as proof.

You and I acknowledge that, but others do not. And regardless of how we describe or define modern SIT, our concern in THIS thread is with Biblical SIT. Was Paul or was he not acknowledging and accepting the use of SIT in private prayer. I'm talking about THEN, not now. I'm talking about Corinthians, not Azuza Street. And while I could very well be wrong, I think Paul at the very least allows for SIT in private prayer. (oops: you really kind of addressed what I'm saying here. Sowwy).

One more point on Samarin and the idea of "faking it." I've been quite judgmental on the matter, but Samarin has been less so, and I think the difference ought to be clarified. Samarin finds nothing in glossolalia that cannot be attributed to human creativity, and he makes that point several times in several ways. But he never comes right out and says people who claim to SIT are faking it. The question doesn't concern him. It does concern Poythress, who goes on to say that Samarin's findings don't prove SIT is faked. Poythress allows for the genuine nature of SIT based not on the analyses, but by the possibilities that the analyses could not cover. In other words, Poythress tells us that you cannot rule out the genuine nature of SIT on purely scientific grounds because the theological grounds for continuing to believe in it may, in fact, confound the ability of science to investigate it properly and reach a conclusion. Poythress chides Samarin (not by name, but by implication) for exceeding his expertise in this regard (by attributing to human creativity that which Poythress feels may also be attributable to God). It should be abundantly clear that I don't agree with Poythress on this matter. He relies on an extra-biblical hypothesis of SIT as some kind of undecipherable code that only God can break. In my view, Poythress takes the Biblical presentation of SIT, which as described is quite testable and falsifiable, and distorts the possibilities to make the end result neither testable nor falsifiable. That distortion, he claims, is within God's prerogative, and we go too far when we seek to put Him in a box, as it were. Me, I don't believe I'm putting God in a box. I am holding Him to His Word, and if what I do does not produce that which His Word promises, then I have to question what I'm doing. (Questioning His Word is another approach, but not one that is necessary and not one I am promoting).

Fortunately, the Hartford Quarterly article contains LOTS for us to chew on. Unfortunately, it's not as complete as his books presumably would be, and we may find more of use in those books, which appear at a glance to have been written later, after considerably more research. One thing I like about Samarin is the effectiveness with which he challenges and ultimately rejects key findings of Felicitas Goodman, whose psychological conclusions prevent me from taking her work seriously. Goodman basically makes the case that tongues speakers are nuts or in a trance/euphoric/hypnotic state, all of which we know firsthand to be untrue. It makes the rest of her findings difficult to swallow. By the way, the article you posted was one of the three original links I provided back on the SIT thread (the other two were Samarin and Poythress). For some reason, we ignored the Religious Tolerance article and instead elevated Landry (which I did not cite: Waysider did).

I think at the very least that Corinthians strongly implies the use of SIT for private prayer. That's not to say it suddenly becomes non-language, a private code that no one on the planet would be able to decipher. That explanation seems to me to be a convenient way to explain precisely why SIT today is NOT producing a language. I believe it is inconsistent with the text. Honest Christians disagree.

"We'd better get back, because it'll be dark soon, and they mostly come at night. Mostly." Hope that's easy enough.

Long, boring post alert. You've been warned. As I was re-reading yesterday’s flurry of posts, I noticed a few items that slipped past me the first time. I’d like to take a moment to address them. I wrote: To which Chockfull responded: I think we’re confusing terms here, because my reasoning is certainly not circular. I believe Biblical tongues are always human languages. If that is what you disagree with, fine. But you seem to be defining “real” language in a technical sense that’s different from what I mean. If I were to speak in English in the middle of a city in Zaire, there’s a better than even chance that no one will have the slightest idea what I’m saying. That doesn’t mean it’s not a language on the basis that it is not successfully understood and therefore not useful for communication. This is what Paul describes: if you speak in tongues (a real human language, albeit one understood by no one present), you are a barbarian to them. He’s not saying what you’re speaking is not a language. He’s criticizing its uselessness in a worship setting without interpretation. But the underlying implication is that it is still a real human language being spoken. I see nothing in I Corinthians 14 that suggests SIT produces anything other than a human language, unless one retroactively imposes that meaning on the verses to account for the fact that modern SIT isn’t producing any. It’s a convenient rationalization, not an interpretation of the plain meaning of the text. My opinion. Again, if we disagree, there’s really not a whole lot else to discuss. *** On a different front, I think I have more than adequately defended my use of the $2 bill analogy, which Chockfull challenged early on but appears to have grasped better as the dialogue continued. *** What Samarin says about xenoglossia: If someone speaking in tongues were to speak an actual language, the linguist has nothing to study. At that point, we would have something real for someone else to look at. I think it’s sufficient to say that if I suddenly started speaking in the language of the indigenous peoples of South America, that would qualify to Samarin as a demonstration of knowledge of that language (even though I myself would not have any understanding of what I’m saying). The linguist would stop at identifying the language and pass it off to experts in other fields to determine what the bejeezus just happened (that’s my word, not Samarin’s). Here’s how Samarin puts it: Let’s take a step back and look at what he’s really saying there, because he leaves out a lot. If I spoke in tongues in front of Samarin, and I produced Turkish (is Turkish a language? Let’s assume it is for this discussion), Samarin may be fascinated, but not as a linguist. He’d say, “That’s Turkish. Have you been exposed to Turkish?” I’d say no. He’d say, “Then how did you learn Turkish?” I’d say “God. I’m producing a language in accordance with the Word of God. I don't know what I'm saying. I only know it's Turkish because you're telling me. By the way, do you have James Randi's number? He owes me $1 million.” And Samarin, as a linguist, would say, “Cool. We’re done here. My expertise as a linguist can contribute no further to determining what's going on here. There’s some people I’d like for you to talk to. And who's Randi?” And he’d introduce me to the psychologist who might probe to make sure I had no prior exposure to Turkish that might be resurfacing in what I allege is genuine SIT. Once he suggests paranormal research, he has left the realm of science and ventured into the realm of faith. I submit at this point you would have already won, assuming all natural explanations to be exhausted. Neither Samarin nor any other named linguist has been presented with or reported a single such case. I would consider it a refutation of my position that it’s ALL fake if Samarin had just one case that could not be explained by natural means. He didn’t. That doesn’t prove my case. It merely fails to disprove it. (By extension, it fails to prove the proposition that any SIT is genuine). But one thing has been disproved: Every sample of SIT he reviewed has failed to pass muster as an existing, real, human language. It’s not a known language. It’s not a previously undiscovered language. It’s not a language in any real sense of the term. It bears some similarity to language, attributable to the motivation of the speaker to produce a language. But [let’s bring Poythress in right here] it bears no linguistic difference from a case of someone free vocalizing in a non-religious context, faking it on purpose, as it were. Which is my point. If SIT produces the exact same thing, linguistically, as free vocalization uninspired by God… What’s the blooming difference? You may not feel obliged to articulate or express or even find the difference. And that’s fine. Go in peace. But understand that if you’re not obliged to find a difference between what you do and free vocalization uninspired by God, then I’m not obliged to believe that there is one. That examines SIT on the merits, in my opinion. I am not drawing a theological or doctrinal conclusion. That's a related but different discussion. I hope I haven’t used a strawman fallacy in presenting this, but I’m sure I’ll hear it if I did (and possibly be accused of it even if I didn’t. ;)

WordWolf is indeed correct.

A lone juror tries to convince the rest that Agents J and K are really protecting us from aliens.