Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

spendi just said something that makes everything a bit more clear. He wrote, "...Pure abstract thought ..." That explains much of his babble, and why many can't understand his posts.

Now, if he could only write in improved English grammar, he might be understood by more people.

That's as maybe but you won't find a solecism like "more clear" in any of my posts or,at least,I profoundly hope not.Or an "everything" used without qualification.

Pure abstract thought is the extreme position of the evolutionists set against intuition,feeling and action of the religious extreme.It is science.And c.i. called it "babble".

That's a turn up for the book which is easy to understand.

I make my share of English grammar mistakes, but at the very least most people understand what they are reading when they read mine. Your's is a toss up between babble, sentence construction, and logic.

How do you toss up between three alternatives?

Abstraction without attachment to a foundation of reality is whimsy.

apparently youve never played platoon dodgeball.

I agree with talk's last remark and I've played every ball game from marbles to mumps.

I think I get accused of being incoherent for a very simple reason.It is that some people think this subject,Science v Religion, is easy to understand.
This is,of course,self preening.

It is an immensly complex field of human activity in which reality plays much the most dominant part and maybe the only part.

Take this sentence of Spengler's for example-

"Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment for ever,but not so the Faustian symbol of the MACHINE,which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the twelfth century and made " perpetuum mobile" the Prometheus-idea of the Western intellect."

This is in a passage discussing Luther and his City way of seeing things and the separation of the Western soul from the soil.Hence your agricultural states are more religious than your vast city states
because they are closer to fecundity and the mystery of renewed life and thus life itself.A survey done a few years ago had a surprising number of urban children didn't know milk came from a cow.They thought it came from a shop.I can't remember the figure but it was surprising.

No, it's probably because country people are simpler and less prone to question.

spendi, Nobody here claimed that science or religion were easy to understand. Your illusions about human perceptions concerning these two subjects and calling everybody that doesn't see it your way "self-preening" is a big problem for the readers. You express yourself as the ultimate authority on coherence. Get a life and get a grip on yourself. You're not that smart.

"less liable or apt to question" would have been better, in my earlier post.

And just in time Mac.

It also matters what is questioned and what is simple besides how much " less liable or apt to question."

c.i.I know I'm not smart.I'm not even average by my standards.

I didn't call people "self preening".I simply said that there are well known modes of expression which readily serve that purpose and hinted that those who use such expressions,as Mac did before he realised his error,are suspected of doing so for such a purpose, although possibly unconsciously.

Is that difficult to understand.It seems a stroll across a well manicured lawn after dinner to me.

The reason is even simpler Spendi. The problem is not us.

I also assume you have no truck with those that invented language either. Also fossils of the mind since language is only used to think and not act.

The point was meaningless since it was an hypothetical that can never exist. Dawkins can't be a "thinking person" but must be a man that includes action according to your own analysis.


Impossible since there is no such thing as a "thinking man" in your universe.

In reality a person examines a problem and finds the solution before acting. Some people act without examining and some might examine without acting but it doesn't make the person that acts any more correct than the person that doesn't act. In some cases the best solution IS to not act.

I know that ros.How could such gentle souls be a problem?

You contradict yourself. The "God of the Abrahamic Mythopaeia" (ponderous phrase, that) was certainly not an example of the "All Perfect" entity to which you referred in your earlier post, and to which my comment was addressed. It seems to me that, instead of responding, you merely changed the subject. You certainly have not presented a refutation of the logic of creation with this.

You should also consider that we have "no forensically valid case" for the origin of the universe either. Physics can (partly) model much of its growth and development, but offers nothing whatever to explain its origin.

Don't you think that a good communicator could find a way to discuss complex things without losing his audience.

ros-

There are 39,748 readers of this thread and it hasn't been going all that long.It has gone past the "weather" thread as if it was running out of gas after giving it two years start.The rest of them have fallen over as they strode out of the starting stalls.

Get your head together.

Rover's on Mars got to the 2 furlong pole.

parados wrote-



That's a really wild,not to say ridiculous,assumption to make and no mistake.



We are not concerned with being "correct".We are concerned with Destiny.The succesful men of action decide what is correct and what is error.Somebody has to act.You can't proceed with thinking.

Sorry to come in with the over-riding argument again. If we were talking to rational beings, it would be sufficient. We are still talking about the fanciful idea of teaching ID as science, as opposed to religion, or comparative religion I suppose.

Over the holidays I engaged in some fun and exciting debate with my ex-husband who is normally a very rational man.......but he did spend many months in Switzerland in the sixties at L'Abri with Francis Schaeffer and later worked with him to complete his first book, Escape from Reason.

My sweet ex-husband (we'll call him Fred) argued that nothing could be proven since absolute objectivity was impossible. With this point I obviously agreed. However I pointed out that science is not about proof. Science is about doubt and probability. Without doubt, there would be no science, only dogma. The essence of science is the search for the exception to the rule. Once found, the exception will lead to a search for a refinement of our current understanding of what the rule may be.

To quote Richard Feynman, "So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty. Some of them are most unsure, some of them are nearly sure, but none is certain." (The Meaning of It All, p. 27.)

Science is not a method of finding absolute proof, it is a method of finding things out and it is based on observation and repetition. The more exceptions that are found to a given rule, the more specific the rule becomes. The method or test is like a sieve with finer and finer holes.

For a theory to be scientific, it must be observable and therefore testable. What about religion, or intelligent design can be observed? At best, it's an idea that might be true but without any method for testing. That's not to say that science is better than religion. It is simply to say that religion is not science. The theory of intelligent design cannot be tested by observation. And for this reason, it is not a scientific theory, it is a religious theory.

The theory of evolution has not been proven. It will never be proven. But that does not mean it is wrong or unscientific. It simply means that the theory or the rule is incomplete. But the theory is based on observation. Any exception to the rule would prove the theory wrong in some way and would require creative ideas that could be tested by observation. While there are gaps in the chain of observable facts in the theory of evolution, there are no instances in which an observed part of the theory are found in the wrong place, suggesting so far that the theory is valid.

There you go..........I've again restated the obvious. Not that I want the discussions to stop........I just can't take the time to read them all for now.