Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Unfortunately, Senator John McCain who is seeking the 2008 Republican nomination for President is trying to court the religious fringe. McCain has publicly supported the teaching of intelligent design even though the state he represents (Arizona) has no pending legislation concerning this issue.

That may work for him, but i doubt it. If the days of the fundamentalist ranters are not necessarily numbered, it can be reasonably contended that they are increasingly viewed with suspicion, even by conservatives.

Yup, conservatives ain't a philosophically homogenous mass, and even libruls get some things right.

fm wrote-



Not very far.

You changed the question fm and then provided the obvious answer to it which the change had been made to facilitate. The question related to an electorate which would defy a judge and continually put back a school board he had ruled against and if that didn't have any effect would take other actions of a more dramatic nature.

Events can be viewed from other positions outside of the drawing room.

Most conservatives would view with more than suspicion the "fundamentalist ranters". An obvious practical difference between creationism and intelligent design.

Anyone who tries to render the two terms equal in order to attack ID by then attacking creationism is going to be laughed at.

Spendi, terminally inconvenient to your latest hypothesis is that the schoolboard members responsible for inserting ID-iot twaddle into Dover's curriculum were overwhelmingly voted out of office by the constituent electorate - before the trial even had ended. Do try to keep up.

You really should try to take your own advice occasionally timber. I specifically allowed for a different type of community than the one in Dover. My question had nothing to do with Dover.

I can keep up-you needn't bother your head about that. You're still working on the tenth thing from the top of the list I'm keeping up on. That's why you revisit the same things all the time.

Dover is long gone.

Timber--Ive told spendi that a number of times , maybe he will listen to you.
Set, Im touchy about how the "emboldened" Pa Christain Conservatives actually predated Bush. They were getting their juices up in Pa during the late90's and only thorugh an activist Ed Dept was Pa spared the embarrassment that was Louisiana or Kansas, or even Georgia. However, since the legislature mollified some of the rulings, Dover was going to be a "sure thing"


Spendi, I think youve forgotten your own posts. Such is your way of achieving plausible deniability and stating such crap as "I dont lie". although youll find that most of this group wont defer, unless its for reasons of your mental deficiency.

spendi.


Even if the electorate , in some grand attack of mass-stupidity, had re-elected the schoolboard, that wouldnt have affected anything in the outcome. The judge rules, its law for that case, if schoolboard tries to overreach, they are then in violation and subject to penalties."You have contempt of court" do you not?

Your question made no sense to begin with. Please rephrase your question, spendi.

fm wrote-



You must have been taking unintelligibilty lessons off Mathos.

Setanta wrote this which I spotted trying to find the answer to wande's question-



First off thanks for the compliment.

As I understand it creationism is the literal interpretation of the Bible. Intelligent design is a more refined modification of the use to which a highly abstract deity can be put in an advanced scientific society in which the vast majority have a reticence to abandon old traditions and ways of thinking. In a few hundred years I would anticipate, assuming all goes well, that the abstract deity will be refined out of existence when the majority of the population can deal with that emotionally. The Gothic cathedral spire and perspective in art such as Rembrandt's show the direction and the motion.

But I have explained it all before- it is tiresome repeating myself. It is highly complex and frighteningly intellectual. In my opinion (NB) Spengler's masterpiece is the best explanation and those who have studied that very famous book know what it is and can recognise the signs in others who also know. It is pure contemplation of the ineffable mysteries and the grubby facts of animal life and an attempt to fuse them into a progressive forward march into the future.

Anyone bounded by his own trivial life and personal considerations will never grasp it. We go from the Gods of the hearth and the rivers to the God in the sky with recognisable human characteristics (creationism being one version) to the God in the infinite who is unimaginable and can only be glimpsed through the processes we are able to witness of his works. One might say that it is a last ditch attempt to avoid the utter meaningless and futility of everything which is bound to result if that last God disappears and the effect of that on social organisation in a world where the broad masses are unprepared for it. Nihilism and despair will result as they already are doing in some places. And every birth becomes a tragedy.

I would guess from what I have read on here that if we only judged people on their actions and ignored their self-serving words we would find that anti-IDers are all creationists of the boat-rocking type. Evolution and intelligent design in its pure form have plenty in common.

If creationists hi-jack the phrase for their own use it makes not the slightest difference.


wande-

The question asked your constitutional experts to consider another town or wider area where religious belief is rock solid and which would put back the school board in election after election to teach creationism in schools despite a judge ruling that they couldn't and would if need be declare independence if they judged they could make a go of it. (I'm being a bit cynical there I know.) Another great Schism.

Basically I asked whether a judge could over-rule an electorate in a serious case. Or,if he could, would he dare. Dover looked to be a place where Materialism is getting the upper hand due to city oriented new-comers and thus a borderline case. I'm not absolutely sure about that though. It was my impression which might be wrong.

Even the Romans allowed their dominions to practice their old traditions.

A mistake of course but only because of such things as differential breeding rates in the classes. Augustus tried to get citizens to make more babies. Some of those strange religions out of Africa and S America might seek to make a comeback when demographics empower them and if there's a vacuum where Christianity used to be. Nature abhors a vacuum they say.

Anti-IDers on here seem to be fighting only to be right themselves to themselves. Such things count for nothing in cultural progress over centuries and millenia. They are blurts of ego.

This battle rages here but takes other forms. The amalgamation of police forces into bigger units is being mooted as centralised city-based authority seeks total domination as is the way of all flesh. Such battles have raged since towns and cities appeared. The religious dispute is only one front in the battle.

fm wrote-



Sure you do. Obviously.

What then? Lock them all up in a rock solid religious area.

You are thinking in a vacuum of your own making far away from social reality. The plaintiffs in Dover were like manna to religious fundamentalist leaders. It is as if you think organised humans are incapable of thinking up obstruction strategies until the cows come home.

Had there been no plaintiffs, as there wouldn't be in a rock solid religious area by logical definition, the kids would be getting the five paragraphs would they not? And, as far as I can tell, would be being taught evolution in some form geared to where they were up to. Which would be progress if not as fast as you would like.

You have asserted that you understand it, that is, the difference between creationism and ID. I asked you to demonstrate the difference, not to just puke up some more of your typical bullshit.



No, you have not. And as this is the titular subject of this thread, you continually demonstrate that you have no business entering this disucssion.



You should have stopped right there, and not have written another word. You have simply jumped into this discussion, demonstrated that you know nothing about "intelligent design," nothing about local school boards in the United States, nothing abou the court system in the United States, and nothing about politics in the United States. Guesses are as close as you ever come, and you are almost invariably wrong when you guess.



You demonstrate the profundity of your ignorance of the topic of this discussion right there. "Intelligent design" was cobbled together by the creationists immediately after the Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that creationism could not be taught in schools.

You did not cite a single "intelligent design" text to support your drivel, so, as i said, you get no points for more dipsomaniacal babbling.

I believe Spendius is correct and Setanta wrong on these points. While "Intelligent Design" or ID has come to have a certain specific reference to specific lawsuits and cant in both the contemporary public disputes over the matter and some of the discussions here, it is simply a fact that the idea of intelligent design and the term itself have a history that goes back to the Middle ages and beyond. As Setanta surely knows Thomas Aquinas' proofs by "The Uncaused cause" and "The proof by design" both relate directly to the proposition, and both are consistent with the distinction Spendius made between ID and creationism.

I do agree with Setanta that this argument has gone on long past the point at which we can expect any resolution or common understanding. Both sides are arguing past each other, and with little reference to what is being said.

George-

First of all welcome back and thank you but you do realise that by stating the obvious,which I know can be wearisome, you have aligned yourself with the "the profundity of my ignorance of the topic of this discussion" as asserted by the champion asserter of this amazing thread.If ever they have an Assertion competition at the Olympic Games you should get this lot on here on the short list.

So I thought it might be worthwhile to clarify my position.

I can trace my intellectual DNA as far back as Patriarch Peter 111 who,as you possibly know, rose to become the Grand Skevophylax of the Church of Saint Sophia, a right little raver and no mistake, who had been appointed by the Emperor Constantine 1X in 1052.

Like his,as you might expect, my letters contain the usual professions of faith and fraternal greetings. I wonder about all this disharmony and the explanation for it and find the disruptions in divine fellowship which result in the breakdown of fraternal discussions a matter of profound regret.

With such an example in my family tree it is only natural that I will seek to avoid ruffling too many feathers and will pass over as tactfully as I can the doctrine of the Procession of the Holy Ghost and only ever refer to it in the vaguest possible terms despite its importance in this discussion.

I have always found scientific methodologist to be profoundly confused and I think it must be because they themselves, and all the people they know, are irrational beings and any attempt to apply rational logical thinking to their activities is thus doomed to end in profound confusion.

spendi, when you up your proof, you up your importance.


Georgeob. You know the difference between the modern movement of Intelligent Design and Thomasian snippets. ID comes with an entire syllabus of "Proofs and propositions of design". Thomasian snippets didnt parade as science.. In fact the scholastics were proving Gods power. I recall the "potentias" and then I lose the flash.

Phil Johnson credits PAley as a scientific center and the origin of it all, althougn Even Avicenna had some stuff to say about a God who played with our heads by placing all these visplastica "fossils" out there.

The modern ID movement does parade as science. ID proponents seem determined to "wedge" religion into public school science classes.

I agree, but note sadly that both sides in the public dispute have misrepresented their cases. In practice one side wants ONLY science and the implication that there can be nothing beyond it; while the other wants (at worst) literal biblical creationism represented as science (or at least an alternative to it.) and the implication that nothing else is possible. It is currrently fashionable to bash the IDers (so defined) and they certainly deserve it. It is less fashionable to bash their secularist opponents, though they deserve it equally.

Hey, George - great to see ya again.

Now, as to wanting "Only Science" taught, that's not the deal at all. The deal is only science should be taught in science classes, only science should be taught as science. The current ID-iot buzzphraseology _ "critical thinking", "higher order thought", and what have you, amuses me - given precisely that set of conditions, the ID-iot proposition that ID-iocy be scientific falls flat on its face.

Now, if ID-iocy, or Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, or Voodoo are to be taught, and I don't argue that they not be taught, their place is not in the sciences (unless considered as examples of abberation), but rather in the humanities. Philosophy, comparative religion, history, lotsa disciplines offer appropriate venue for teaching, discussing, and exploring such stuff, but none of it belongs anywhere near science.

Well, I find less that is stimulating or interesting in A2K these days so I spend a good deal less time here. Not much new stuff and everything else has been said several times.

Your liberal use of epithets, (IDiocy, IDiots, etc.) doesn't do a lot to encourage balance, restraint or wisdom in these debates. Ordinarily I wouldn't make an issue of such, otherwise innocent, sarcasm, but on this topic, which has been so filled with unnecessary vitriol, and in which the truth is so thoroughly displaced by highly selective argumentation, talking past the supposed interlocutor, and sometimes offensive charicatures on both sides I believe there should be little room for it from otherwise thoughtful posters.