Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

No, rl, your criticism blows up; gravity is not observable, no one ever has seen gravity. However, the effects of gravity are observable, which permits us to deduce and confirm the properties and attributes of gravity, just the effects of evolution are observable, permitting us to deduce and confirm the properties and attributes of the evolutionary process.

No no matter how much hot air you pump into your proposition, it floats like a lead balloon.

real life,

Like timber said, only the effects of gravity are observable. Modern physicists have still been unable to demonstrate the material particles responsible for gravitational force.

Thanks Spendy. Needed a good laugh. Just broke off from the cleaning to read on page 1 today William Hill are offering 10/1 the pope with sanctify Judas within 5 years. If I was a religious man, I'd have some of that Meanwhile in other religious news Allah sent a ferry to the bottom of the Red Sea carrying passengers to a religious festival in praise of Allah. "At least 69 drowned". One would have thought He would have waited until the return journey.

There is none so blind as he who will not see.

Gravity sucks.

Abstract from the University of Oregon study regarding natural selection versus irreducible complexity:

"ancestral gene ressurection" is a speculative technique that, while it appears a reasonable jump from the use of a substance called osteocalcin, its nopt fully vetted as of yet.

I see while I was away , Ted Deschler et al (Philly Academy of Science, Univ of Penn, Canadian Ministry, Mcgill, and Harvard team) had their work on their late Devonian "fish with a movable neck and armpits" got published in NAture. Ted had been screwing around with these fossils from Ellsmere Island and Heiner Pa for at least 8 years. This work is as much a testimony to the detailed dogged unsung work that many scientists are involved in for years without any recognition. Ted and his group have pretty much closed the gap of "bony fish to land dwelling proto amphibians" information. Their finds in Canada have come from the early mid Devonian , while their later upper continental Devonian of the Catskill Formation in Pa have shown fossils from a period about 20 million years later. All these, taken together , are derivative of the earlier Ellsmere fossils and show fairly clearly, the early development of the morphology of fish as they began to occupy land. (Now they need to work out the environmental relationships, > MY pet theory has been that the meandering streams from which these fossils all came, were subject to anastamozing and periodic "ox bowing" so the fish , like "Mud skippers" had to move about in shallows in order to go from meander to meander..
Science keeps slamming the door on Creationist "reasoning" with pure, non subjective data.

I hope evreyone , who is unburdened by dogmatic thinking , will take the opportunity to scarf up a copy of Aprils Nature and read the article. 4 Years ago , Teds research was in danger of being terminated by vast (and some hal vast) funding cuts at the Philly Academy of NAt Science). He and some other colleagues at Penn were certain that the meandering stream deposits of the upper Devonian were the right place and time to see a major evolutionary innovation, and the discoveries of all these "fish with armpits and flat rib cages, and reduced bony plates in their heads" were a key to something in mosaic evolution.

Im sure the ICR is going to be spitting out some gibberish about how these fossils are remnants of the flood and arent anything special.
The guy who is an unsung hero in these discoveries is the specimen preparator at the Academy. He spent years with teeny pressure washers and high speed "Dremmel-like" dentist tools to clean all the matrix from these incredibly complex fossils. I saw them last year at a presentation of the Philly Geological Society and was impressed at how complex these teeny fossil parts were.

Anything happening? I see over at the "evo-how?" thread, were now debating the existence of the EAster Bunny.

Yeah fm-there's plenty happening.There always is.
If your reading Time Of Our Time your head is spinning off everywhichway if you forget the Harlot's Ghost bits.And I'm reading it.

But it's Grand National day and I still haven't spent the dough I won last year with Hedgehunter.I probably never will.I'm a very sluggish spender.

But I'm nothing if not disloyal so this year it's Sixtysevenvallverde or something.I'm not sure how to spell it but I'm on it.It's a horse not a name just like irreducible complexity is a principle not something fenced off by certain parties for private use and has tied to it stuff about the flood a union made in heaven,or hell or somewhere in between.

But the flood might be like the Prometheus myth except not quite so far-fetched.

He surpassed all mankind in cunning and fraud,they say. He took the piss out of the Gods.He did a trick with two bulls that beats walking on water out of sight.
(Joke-One of my own-What did Pontius Pilate say when he was told Jesus had walked on the water?

Can anybody else do it?)

It appeals to my sense of humour anyway.

He climbed the heavens by the assistance of Minerva (who hasn't eh) and stole fire from the chariot of the sun and brought it down to earth on the end of a ferula.And he knew not to trust to opening Pandora's box.And he got fastened to a rock with a vulture consuming his irreducible liver for 30,000 years and that's a load of bull-splatter ain't it?

And yet!

Is there some deep truth buried in that too. When we have looted the knowledge of the Gods all the way up the asymptote to reduced complexity will we be punished.

Read Time Of Our Time and see what your Big Boss writer thinks.

How about that fm?

Giving you the John Smith's Grand National winner in plenty of time.I know I got the spelling all wrong but who cares about that.I tipped Hedgehunter on the Trivia threads last year and a Derby Winner.3 out of 3 and all above 10-1.What an asset I am to A2Kers.

spendi. Im sure theres a deep thought in there somewhere, I just dont have the time or interest to excavate. Somehow your now into Mailer, good fer you. Im sure were going to be reading a ton of phrenetic "cluster posts" with ole Norm as the center.

Crand National Day eh/ thats another excuse(like our Kentucky Deby Day) to get hammered? I hope you won a few Euros to keep you in panther piss.

UK UPDATE

fm-wrote-



No no fm.The Naked and the Dead was my second big read.Frank Harris comes first.I was only a sap riser at the time. Mailer is a Proust fan as I later became and it shows.Proust slips the stiletto in under the ribs and twists it ever so gently but Mailer is like a head-butting machine.But it's the prose itself.

Nothing new to me about Mailer.It's just that somebody saw Time of our Time for £2 on a market stall and brought it back from the wastelands for me.I have most of his books.Two copies of some.He's a big deal if you ignore his soft spot.Veblen hadn't any soft spots.

But have no illusions about who is the centre here.

"I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea,/Sometimes I turn,there's someone there,other times it's only me."

But Mailer would stick up for ID I feel certain.

It was a great day yesterday.I'm sorry I got the name a bit scrambled.

It would be like fossil hunting in a junk yard.

Well at least that would be more interesting than poking middle C with the forefinger of the favoured feeler again and again.

fm wrote-



That's not the sort of thing you'll ever find me saying.I couldn't see the point of the forum if I thought that.

A quote from TooT-

"Ehrlichmann was unendurable.He acted as if he were proud to be on the side he was on;his pride was what could not be suffered.For it spoke of a world whose real complexity could savage a liberal brain."

The liberal cannot stand the thought that there are complexities beyond his reach-such a thought trumpets that he is one "to whom it is done".So he works the simple themes of insult and assertion as reassurance.It saves excavating.

wandel, thanks for finding and posting these many articles. Ive been impressed at your span of the various source material . This post would be quite appropriate over on the thread "ID is so not Creationism" that a new member, "Teleologist" had begun.

Thanks, farmerman.

I found the new ID thread and posted today's article over there.

wande wrote-



For sure wande-and sociological and psychological.

It's an ordinary,everyday sign of a totalitarian mind-set that it goes hot-foot into hysterical abuse and shut-out if it's asked to consider anything more complex that a single idea.

The social function of belief systems is of a much higher order of complexity than the single and simple premise that ID is not a science.

The emphasis you have brought back on the biology in service of proving that ID is not science is neither interesting nor relevant to the debate about education which is what has given this thread its long life. It has been conceded on a few occasions that ID is not science but that concession does not mean that the influence of a belief on a social system in which it carries some weight cannot be of interest to science or that it does not lend itself to scientific study.



The use of the word "complex" there suggests that aldosterone cannot be dealt with in the manner your quote offers as any sort of proof that there is no irreducible complexity in our world.And the use of the word "cronies" is ample evidence that Mr Peterson is propagandising.

I'll quote from Mr Aidley's introduction to The Physiology of Excitable Cells.

"The study of excitable cells is,for a number of reasons,a fascinating one.These are the cells which are primarily involved in the behavioural activities of animals:these are the cells with which we move and think.Yet just because their functioning must be examined at the cellular and sub cellular levels of organization,the complexities that emerge from investigating them are not too great for adequate comprehension;it is frequently possible to pose specific questions as to their properties,and to elicit some of the answers to these questions by suitable experiments.It is perhaps for this reason that the subject has attracted some of the foremost physiologists of this century.As a consequence,the experimental evidence on which our knowledge of the physiology of excitable cells is based is often elegant,clearcut and intellectually exciting,and frequently provides an object lesson in the way a scientific investigation should be carried out.Nevertheless,there are very many investigations still to be done in this field,many questions which have yet to be answered,and undoubtedly very many which have not yet been asked."

That is very careful language.Read properly one cannot but think that Mr Aidley,who can be looked up on Google for those familar with the rather refined terms he commonly uses,hardly closes the door on irreducible complexity.I presume he uses the word "adequate" either ironically,which I doubt,or to signify a project limited in its scope to finding new methods of treatment for disabilties or for mass persuasion.

As he says,there are "very many" questions which haven't even been asked and I have no doubt that there are a much larger number that haven't even been thought of.

This is not a simple subject which can be dealt with by amateurs gleaning what little they know from articles such as the one above.Not by a very long shot.

okay