Big Bang or a Stretch of God's Imagination?

Ive proudly bashed IDiots and Creationists. SPECIFICALLY for their views on evolution as a process. Ive never ever tried to conflate evolution and cosmology cause its an argument that is favored by the religious to somehow negate all the evidence of evolution/development.
Its your argument that youre chafing at not mine. Even this guys thread herein is actually a shot at evolution via the tortuous path of cosmology. You are a man of science and you know damn well that the two pursuits have nothing to do with each other.
I love to engage in the "warm little pond discussions" and Cosmology. Both are separate distinct areas of inquiry and both are distinct from evolutionary inquiry.

Theists have tried to go many extra miles to try(unsuccessfully I may add) to link the Big Bang and evolution mostly because , I think, they think they have a better chance of confusing the discussions and inserting their primary evidence stream(incredulity) to the mix .

So you are accusing me of using your groups patented argument .

Huh? Was you talking to me?

That was an awful lot of psycho babel.

Do you ever listen to anyone but yourself?

Hey, have you ever thought of running for Congress? I hear the perks are good. And to be honest, the bar's really not set very high. I think you could do it.

must it always be about you?
I was responding to george ob.

Im sure if you could find factual objections youd have brought em up. So your best shot was an ad hominem.
(with an emoticon yet).

I usually listen to everyones points, whether I share em or not. See, Im even responding to you.

You have yet to point out what portion of my theory, starting with the entire universe being very hot, and you can read the rest, hopefully with a little open minded visualization, does not co inside with the observations of science.

nice pic dude how's it hangin'

That is what the proponents of ID say. However, the entire modern "ID Theory" had been initially produced by Phillip Johnston, an attorney who had his minions morph a book entitled, "Of Pandas and People" to serve as the principla scientific tome of the entire movement. Unfortunately, that same book ,in an earlier edition, used the word CREATIONSIM where the phrase INTELLIGENT DESIGN had supplanted it in later editions. (the only evidence they needed was a purchase order to their printer/publisher to remove the word CREATIONSIM and instead add the new phrase INTELLIGENT DESIGN) I think that was pretty slick, one book serves two "unrelated diciplines" (Kinda see why Im not buyin much of your claim that science is the foundation of ID?)
AND , as far as I know, Ive never seen any published scientific work regarding "evidence for Intelligence in the Universe", and I check on the Discovery Institutes web page on the subject almot weekly. The Discovery Institute,through the Amandson and Koch foundations had, in 2001, established an entire organizational mechanism to fund scholarly research on ID and Evidence for Intelligence in the Universe. The Foundation , a sub organization of the Discovery Institute has been chomping at the bit to publish anything even semi scholarly. Thats why Ive been following the arguments about cosmology as a "valid sub discipline" of their search for Intelligence. So far its been pretty much arm waving and nothing that even approaches unique evidence has been produced by these "scholars". SO, in order to divert the eyes of guys like me (who work in, or whose work involves DArwinian evolution and sciences involved therein).
A few workers in molecular biology and information sciences have attempted to produce scholarly papers on "Irreducible complexity" or "Defined Information" as evidencefor Intelligent Design. So far, none of these papers, especially in molecular biology, have been able to stand on their own as irrefutable proof that Intelligence is involved in the development of living systems. So far, evolutionary scientists have been able to show the ID workers that theres always an earlier xchemical system that have been manifest in several living sub systems that have given rise to the IDers own examples. Such examples as the eye system, the enzyme cascades responsible for blood clotting, epigenetic DNA , "fossil DNA" and many many others.

The IDers have, cleverly accepted the sciences that have underpinned Darwinian evolution and merely dismissed them as examples of an "intelligent ohysical system" at work. I find that disengenuous since it omits the factors of catastrophic events and the "shuffling" of ecological niches in deep time . These shufflings have each been responsible for a series of mass extinctions and "fiddlings" of the fossil record that clearly show that, if intelligence was behind all that, it was more correctly called "impaired intelligent design"

Im still looking for all this evidence for ID,I admit I havent recently checked the literature base being cataloged by the Discovery Institutes "Center for SCience and Culture". (Id been in the hospital and have been recuperating since September, so Im only now getting my full schedule back in order). Thi non-religious based evidence youve referred to, I would certainly be interested in seeing from a purely scholarly level.

I especially like the types of papers that have been recently published by the evolutionary scientists (and deep time sciences) wherein the initial thesis of the papers are almost presentations that begin with predictions that are based upon the concept of falsification. (For example, when Shubin and Daeschler produced the now famous Tiktaliik rosacea fossil, they did it by initially stating that

"If evolution is even testable, we should sometime be finding an intemediate fossil that spans the gap between fish and amphibians somewhere in the mid terrestrial Devonian sediments of the world"

So, Shubin and Daeschler took a world geologic map and looked at all the mid Devonian terrestrial outcrop areas (areas that were older yet conformable to the CAtskill Formations of the mid and upper Devonian, where amphibian fossils were already present). They layed out these areas and started to canvass them in the field in order (PURE GRUNT WORK involving almost a decade of dirty field work). They did find one auditory ossicle fossil of a fossil that could have been a later form of a transitional fish (cum) tetrapod but they rally couldnt be sure. It was only a small teaser. They found this in the mid terrestrial Devonian Formations of Pennsylvania near the town of Hiner Pa. It took em maybe 4 years for this teeny find. SO, running low on NSF grant money, they scheduled an expedition to Mid Devonian sedimentary rock banks ofEllsmere Island in Nunivit Territory of Canada.(It was either that or start hunting in the really bleak mountains of East Greenland) Three years pass and SHubin et al are in their last field years after which the money would be gone. Making a long story short,three weeks before they hadda pack it in,They found an almost complete specimen of a fossil that was slightly younger and (from initial inspections) was more "Tetrapody looking" than what was the earlier transitional form Eustanoptheron . THis fossil filled a niche of sedimentaological position, was suitably advanced of a "fish to amphibian" , and was at the critical 365 million year timeline where scientists were concluding (mostly using deductiver reasoning) that something " transitional should be happening" because tectonically the Iapetan Oxcean basin was moving apart and these intial warm terrestrial streams and estuaries, would, in a few tens of millions of years, evidence the major splitting of the proto ATlantic.
Tiktaliik filled the bill for an evolutionary specimen. An intermediate so clearly advanced beyond earlier bony fish that the paleontological community began calling it a "Fishapod".
If your "evidence" that you claim can stand the test of being borne of a "aflsification prediction" Id especially be interested. If, however, its the same old tripe based upon incredulity ,

"The universe is too complex to be just based upon chance". If thats all ya got, Im really not interested cause theres nothing scientific that we could even discuss. It all would boil down to faith and belief in your thesis.

Theories and beliefs in intelligent design of the universe have been around as long as recorded human thought. They are present in the creation myths of people all over the world, in the musings of Greek and Medieval philosophers and many others. The "Modern ID Theory" you so energetically criticize is something I'm not familiar with and for which I frankly have little interest.

As I stated earlier, I'm with Thomas Aquinas' uncaused cause, and the observation that origins are themselves outside the domain of science based on observation and synthesis of verifiable facts.

Here, it appears to me you are faulting "IDers" for failings you attribute to god, science or whatever it might have been that ordered things as they are. This is a nice and compact version of Ivan Karamazov's argument to his brother Alyosha in Dostoyevski's great novel. However it doesn't provide an answer to how it all came about.

I think we can agree that there is lots of evidence out there to suggest it might be a possibility, but no complete proof of it either. However, neither is there an alternate provable explanation from science or materialism.

I quite agree, but note that you are merely asserting a self reflexive tautology. God - if he exists - is outside the domain of science based on observation. So is the question of the origin of existence. Your act of faith in denying the scientific validity of the question is as great as that of a theist who believes he has found one.

You are occasionally a surly grouch, but I see no meanness in you at all. That's why I like you.

Happy Thanksgiving

It wasnt supposed to. HAd you been paying attention and scanned the poster's contribution to whom I was responding, you would have seen that it is a discussion of the type of evidence that ID IS TOTALLLY FREE OF. An intelligence that seems decoupled from its creation is really an airhead in my opinion. You lose the right to even use the phrase IMHO

Are you shittin me? Whereve you been last 20+ years. After the USSC destroyed "scientific Creationism' in the Edward v Aguillard case in Louisiana in 1987, the "Creationists" need to repackage their little religious scam. SO they created the "Center for the Renewal of SCience and Culture (logo had a pic of the hand of God (ala Sistene Chapel painting) touching a DNA molecule. Then Phil Johnson (author of Darwin on Trial) started the use of "Intelligent Design as a SUDDENLY secular, non sectarian "Theory" to compete with DArwin. They quickly evolved a textbook and started all the plannings (under the famous "Wedge Document of 2001") of how they would supplant non Christian "Godless Science" with a "TRUE SCIENCE about how the world was populated with life.
The entire Creationist arguments of the Aguillard case and the later the ID arguments of the Kitzmiller v Dover case both centered around the precept that Creationism and ID were valid sciences. ID went the extra mile to divorce itself from Religious doctrine (except in private when they were fund raising).
Both cases were found NOT in favor of the Creationist or ID defendents. The judges (the US Supreme Court in Aguillard, and the 3rd Fed District in Dover) found that in both cases Creationism and ID were clearly religions and nor subject to the scientific method or the boundaries of discovery or experiment.


Id have to disagree with you. I keep a fairly close read of the "evidence" for ID and have found nothing . There were a few attempts at Doing some research on blood clotting enzymes,blood pressure regulostatins and retrogenes and retropseudogenes. None of these pieces of evidence were even close to being a minimally distinct compound or gene structure (what Behe called irreducible complexities). Behes "DARWINS BLACK BOX was an attempt at shilling these ireeducible complexities . He defined them as chemicals, genes, or other bio activants that, by their structure, could not be broken down further to a previous compound that would support Darwinism. NO SUCCESS , Behe was(and continues) on the hunt for evidence of Irreducible complexities, and hes always been shown that the feature hes supporting "du jour" has a precursor in the natural world.

As far as Darwin, evidence abounds and grows daily. The best that the IDesr can come up with is "Theistic evolution" This then, vcreataes a schism among the more urbane Christian scientists (like Catholics and Lutherans) and the smaller "Hard liners" who claim inerrancy of the Bible(Like Baptists, Witnesses, mennonites, etc)

The evidence in Evolution drives where evolution theory goes. In the theistic evolutionists and IDers, the religion dictates the direction their science goes. Thats unfair to both religion and science

You are beating a dead horse.

I continue to celebrate these myths. I, however do not pass them off as science(And, I think, neither do you) Your craft takes up the use of radionuclides as detectors and monitors of environmental conditions (JUST as an example). The methodology of radionuclide chemsitry and physics, is the very same (no of disintegrations per second and "LAmbda function") that is used in nuclear age determination. Cant have one without the other. The many Creationists doubt the age of earth and the IDers doubt the sheer mindlessness of it.

YOU were the one who claimed unfamiliarity with "Modern ID " and a ;lack of interest in it even if it did exist. SO what do we discuss Captain? Permission to speak freely

That argument can be made, certainly. However, it is not FM who keeps dragging the putrescent equine corpse onto the site, while proclaiming what a fine, lovely horse it is.

I believe George is covering for "LaVoz" in this. I dont expect "Voice..." to comment, he skips on and jumps over topics while never responding to a response to one of his "ideas"

I think the early Scottish and British geologists never got over the stubborn opposition they got from Lords Raileigh, Kelvin and other physicsts of the day concerning the age of the earth. This attitude appears to infect you as well. Perhaps we can join forces in opposition to the physicists.

We agree for the most part about the value, content, and (I believe) limits of science. At the same time humans have always been aware of other apparently unanswerable questions .... at least as far as reason and observation can take them. How did it all get here? Given the apparent wanton, indifferent destructivness of nature, can there be any comprehaensible answers to both questions? Declaring the questions out of bounds is a suitable, indeed necessary, boundary condition for observational science, but it is not an answer.

Very nice use of the metaphor. However I think you pointing at the wrong guy. it is FM who keeps bringing that one back, not me.

Are you a little slow today, O'George? Haven't had your coffee yet? I didn't say it was you. As ought to have been obvious, it's Voice who dragged the corpse in. You know, the guy who seriously claims to be Jesus?

My apoligies Setanta. Only one cup of coffee so far and it usually takes two. Perhaps I just assumed you were after me. Why do I do that ????

I usually read a few posts before the one Im respoinding to, AND, I dont think Ive ever jumped into a converstaion without knowing whats been going on before, unless I was trying to be a wise ass or I was trying to draw attention to myself (like spendi). Which one are you up to today