Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

@Setanta,

I never said that fact and science are separate. Just expressing a viewpoint. But regarding the facts, here is an example.

The sunflower. It comes in many sizes, but the largest ones can reach 12 feet tall with a flower head that is a foot or more in diameter. The head is not really one blossom, but a cluster of hundreds of ray flowers around the edge and disc flowers in the center.
Sunflowers have a capacity known as phototropism or heliotropism, the ability to rotate their head so that they always face the sun as it moves across the sky. In the morning the flowers face east, and at sunset they face west.

This tracking of the sun is accomplished by a hydraulic system built into the stem. Water accumulates on the shady side of the stem, and as the pressure builds it forces the head in a steady arc toward the direction of the light. Because it is a hydraulic system and a fluid is being used, the pressure is distributed uniformly on the back surface of the head so it does no damage to the plant while providing enough force to move a large surface in a 180 degree arc.

Copying this design and putting in to use in various applications has proven very beneficial. Imitating this has allowed us to create hydraulic systems that are used in many mechanical devices such as cars, trucks, airplanes, trains, and earth moving equipment. Engineers carefully design these systems in order for them to work. Intelligence is needed to design a system that will function with great force without damaging the object being steered or stopped

When one takes the time to seriously examine facts such this without a preconceived belief or viewpoint, it does give one, if only briefly, reason to pause consider the possibility that an intelligent mind was behind the design.

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@anthony1312002,

anthony1312002 wrote:

When one takes the time to seriously examine facts such this without a preconceived belief or viewpoint, it does give one, if only briefly, reason to pause consider the possibility that an intelligent mind was behind the design.

This sort of thing is so common, and yet it never fails to amaze me that people are this obtuse. It is precisely because you have a preconceived belief or viewpoint that you are willing to posit that this is evidence of "an intelligent mind." It is a gross, childish and silly anthropomorphism to assume that everything must be created, which essentially is the nature of such a mindset.

I think you're being dishonest. Just what would that "intelligent mind" be? A god?

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@Setanta,

It looks like Setanta can't read properly and has performed a Derrida job on anthony's post.

Eschewing the "pause for thought" entirely does rather render all phenomena banal. It is not easy to gawp in wonder and awe at determined physico-chemical reactions. Salt dissolving in water is just as interesting as the flower's sun worship under such intellectual conditions.

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@anthony1312002,

there are quite a few papaers and books on native plants that had been hybridized by MesoAmericans, sunflowers being one. Many of these "Intelligent design " tropic responses are the result of intensive hybridization that commenced when natives selected the biggest sunflower achenes (the covered seed pods). Several tropic responses became fixed in the genomes of the hybrid species and these you may be reading as a superdesigner .
Darwin had several chapters of hs little book focus upon hybridization since he was puzzling over the differences between NATURAL selection and ARTIFICIAL selection .

Hydraulics , as an observation of sunflower tropism is bullshit and you know it. The science of hydraulics was developed in Asia Minor and the Levant by civilizations who had not even concieved of a plant like the Sunflower . ALL species of sunflower originated in the NEW WORLD , hydraulics was a known and nascent craft during the time of the SUmerian an was developed into a more nature craft by the Hellenic culture

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@farmerman,

Even in your response you cannot but mention items that reveal the indisputable evidence of an intelligent mind at work.

"the result of intensive hybridization that commenced when natives selected the biggest sunflower achenes" This in itself resulted in an intricately engineered variation of the sunflower possessing the same ability to track the sun.

But, I guess no matter how sound the evidence, some choose to dismiss it.

URL: http://able2know.org/reply/post-5143995

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@Setanta,

Setanta, I'm not hiding anything. Yes I do believe in God. If you truly are as objective you say you are, you wouldn't become so offended when someone expresses and idea or belief that differs from yours.

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@anthony1312002,

so, if I get you right, you have absorbed hybridizing of species by humans as an example of "intelligent design"?
What do you do for the original wild species as they were adapted to the several sub seres of Meso and South America? is adaptation an xample of ID in your mind?

Seems that you cant possibly lose, whatever the mechanism and morphological change, you just toss it off to "Intelligent Design" and then you dont have to think any farther

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@farmerman,

Farmerman the fall back position that it is god or gods doings is a magic wand that mean once invoked that you do not need to do any further thinkings but it answer no questions and never had done so.

Lightening bolts out of the sky was just the gods playing war games and beyond that there was nothing going on that need investigation by mankind.

Lot of waving of magic wands on this thread and you are likely will wear yourself out dealing with the wavers of the wands.

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@farmerman,

I wouldn't be too unfriendly with anthony fm. He's helping you avoid my posts and allowing you to think you are a serious player in this debate. You're not.

You're a yickle lamb mate and you think we are too.

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@BillRM,

It was a waving of a magic wand good-style Bill.

Are you opposed to magic wands as good as Christianity.

What would you have instead? And no starting from Christianity's base. Start without it.

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@spendius,

Magic wands waving did not start with Christians but they are more then willing to wave the wands.

Going back to lighting bolts as a weapons of gods or god there was resistant to placing Franklin lightening rods on churches due to that connection and in that by so placing a lightening rod on a church you was in some way not trusting in god to protected his own houses of worships.

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@anthony1312002,

At no time did i say that i am objective. This--" . . . if you truly are as objective as you say your are . . ."--is a straw man. You have absolutely no reason to assume that i am offended by your belief. I am bemused by you speaking about preconceived belief, when it is patent that you are the one espressing a preconceived belief in your summation about the heliotrophism of sunflowers.

Intelligent design is by its very nature intellectually dishonest. In an Arkansas case in the 1970s and a Louisiana case in the 1980s, the Supreme Court struck down laws which required the teaching of creationism as being an establishment of religion, and therefore a violation of the first amendment. The creationist have come up with so-called intelligent design in an attempt (failed attempt) to do an end-run around the Court's strictures. The people who peddle "intelligent design" are offering creationism tarted up, an intellectual wolf in sheep's clothing.

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so what higher office was John XXIII angling for when he affirmed evolution, spendius?

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@MontereyJack,

Monterey Jack... Knowing spendiousus, it'll take forever and give me a bloody headace reading half a dozen or more lines of his blabbering, trying to make sense of what he says.

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@BillRM,

But all the churches, cathedrals and basilicas have lightning rods Bill.

Surely you don't trust the Highway Code to protect you from accidents but you probably obey it most of the time.

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@Setanta,

It is not the case that "intellectual dishonesty" is proved by a court decision.

The intellectual dishonesty is plain to see in the posts of anti-IDers. Look at tf's intellectual post for example. And Bill's. And the one I'm replying to here which relies on ad hominems.

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@anthony1312002,

Quote:

Sunflowers have a capacity known as phototropism or heliotropism, the ability to rotate their head so that they always face the sun as it moves across the sky. In the morning the flowers face east, and at sunset they face west.

This tracking of the sun is accomplished by a hydraulic system built into the stem.

BTW, this is incorrect. The leaves have a unique heliotropic mechanism that has only recently been adapted for uses in passive tracking solar energy receivers.
The mechanism for the leaves isnt hydraulic at all. Its based upon induced turgor in the leaves based upon a chemical in the vascular system that actually changes phase. The interesting thing is that this chemical is a precursor to a type pf chlorophyl and so , has a clear "history" of eveolution in the plant.
Many other plants have similar heliotropic responses in their leaves and these too are based upon a phase changing "wax" that adds turgor to the side of the stem that isnt facing the sun.
Did ya ever notice how a poplar tree or a maple will sit there with droopy leafmass during cloudy or rainy days?

Whenever we can trace a chemical or a structure to an organisms previous use of it, thats not "ID's footprint" at all.

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Veblen wrote in Absentee Ownership (1923) regarding the US farm population-

Quote:

The abiding and pervasive factors of habituation for the husbandman and his folks are still the homely movements of human nature working in collusion with the animate forces of plant and animal life, settled habits of thought that have to do with breeding and nurture. With the result, among other things, that the rural community is still shot through with prehistoric animism in a degree that passes the comprehension of any person whose habits of thought have been shaped by the technology of physics and chemistry. So it has come about that the rural community is still the repository of timeworn superstitions, magical, religious, and political, such as would do credit to the best credulity of neolithic man.

Technologically speaking, and seen in the light of the latterday industrial arts, agriculture is grounded in a system of holdovers that have come down from remote antiquity and embody habits of thought that are suited to the institutional structure of those good old days; days which antedate not only the machine industry and Big Business, but the era of handicraft as well. By technical necessity the farming industry is still conducted on a plan of dispersion, discontinuous parcelment, and individual responsibility, so far as regards the day's work. But in point of business relations the farmer is caught in the net of the system at large; which is a system of absentee ownership and works out in a network of credit, markets, organised salesmanship, corporate capitalisation, and Big Business managed on the principle of what the traffic will bear. To the farmer and his folks all these things are external circumstances over which he has no control, but to which he and his folks are required to conform on pain of "getting left". He is within the system but not of it. He and the work of his hands are in it as a bone of contention; something for adroit salesmen to buy cheap and sell dear, and something to which absentee title is to be acquired by a tactical use of credit.

So you see my friends, you are on the side of Big Business. Which explains why wande has so often quoted the mouthpieces of Big Business slanting propaganda in the direction of your wandering desires using selective and emotionally charged information and assuming you are all mugs. Which is fair enough scientifically.

I know what conditions your habits of though even if you don't. It is being caught in the toils of the cogs of the mechanisms which represent the usufruct of Big Business: its nutrient bed.

If you have any complaints about the economy you should address them to the Captains of Business who run your minds

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@spendius,

I saw an ad for Tropicana orange juice which stressed the bucolic nature of the operation in a very touching manner no doubt appealing to our nostalgic atavism.

Quote:

Tropicana Products is an American multinational company which primarily makes soft drinks. It was founded in 1947 by Anthony T. Rossi in Bradenton, Florida. Since 1998 it has been owned by PepsiCo, Inc. Tropicana's headquarters are in Chicago, Illinois. The company specialises in the production of Orange juice.

I imagine that Big Business controls the lot from Wall Street. There was no plant, machinery and tools in sight.

And it looked so cute in the ad.

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@spendius,

Quote:

Orange juice is acidic by nature, so it is necessary to rinse your mouth well with water, after drinking the juice. Drinking too much of the juice can result in vitamin C overdose. Moreover, unwanted intake of sugar, sweeteners, other additives and preservatives can lead to certain health problems. Here is a list of side effects that can be experienced after consumption of excessive vitamin C.

Side Effects of Too Much Orange Juice
Although oranges have low glycemic index, excessive consumption of orange juice can raise your blood sugar level significantly and can result in a serious condition called 'hyperglycemia'. Those diagnosed with diabetes or prediabetes should consume the juice in moderation. Neglecting or ignoring the symptoms of high blood sugar levels can destroy the health of important organs like heart, kidneys, eyes, skin, teeth and gums. Hyperglycemia can also lead to damaged blood vessels, nerves, bones and joints.

Minor Side Effects

Indigestion, diarrhea
Heartburn
Mouth ulcers
Upset stomach
Nausea, vomiting, dizziness
Reddened face, Skin rashes
Increased stress level
Abdominal cramps
Foot cramps
Strong smelling urine
Headache, Fever
Bloating, gases

Major Side Effects
More than 6000 mg of vitamin C per day may result in:

Insomnia
Severe back pain
Copper deficiency
Jaundice infection
Vitamin B12 depletion
Dental cavities
An increased need for oxygen, leading to additional pressure on heart.
Vitamin C is responsible for more iron absorption, hence there is an increased risk of iron poisoning.
Due to vitamin C, an increased absorption of calcium is possible but extra calcium can result in the formation of kidney stones.

It is difficult for your body to handle 'too much vitamin C' and so gastrointestinal stress can be generated, giving rise to various health complications. Too much of vitamin C can even activate a cancer causing element named hexavalent chromium. Pregnant women should also take care regarding intake of vitamin C.

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Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

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