Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

What a prophet.

Yes, i'm sure you're impressed with yourself--it shows. I have no idea why my signature line did not appear, because "Attach signature" is the default selection when posting--you'll need to ask the site administrators. That is not, however, relevant to my post, nor to the topic at hand--which was the point, after all. None of the horseshit which Spurious posts here has any relevance, and he has long ago demonstrated his ignorance of evolution, of science in general, of the political process in the United States, of the judicial sysem in the United States, and of the educational system in the United States. Don't despair, though, all you fans of the pointless Spurious drivel, that never has, and never will, stop him from puking more ot it up in this thread.

All I'm asking is how Eliot's line fits in with Burgess's take on Joyce and 15-18 year old mixed sex classes doing "naturalism" in biology with repressed teachers? (repressed being my very last choice of adjective).

After all it was your signature and so much care is required for those that I have so far refrained from risking it.

It isn't a difficult question? I could answer it myself. One sentence. A short one.

It doesn't call for all that bluster and bombast most of which we have heard many times before.

We are talking about what to give the kids aren't we?

timber,

Is science done by majority vote?

(And speaking of 'qualified' scientists, what were Darwin's 'qualifications' to address biological processes?

Was he a trained biologist?

Had he a degree of any kind in any science? Other than reading his grandfather's published evolutionary musings, I mean.)

Your appeal to authority is all well and good, and nobody (at least not I) disputes that most scientists are evolutionists (although a fairly large percentage, about 40%, seem to be theistic evolutionists, as we discussed previously, since these 40% do NOT believe that ONLY naturalistic processes are responsible for life on Earth as we know it).

However, the point is that you simply cannot conceive of anyone schooled in science holding a view contrary to yours; but there are hundreds (if not more) who do so.

Has the 'overwhelming consensus' of scientists ever been wrong?

Shall we take a few moments to go down thru history detailing some of the major discoveries that were made by men ignoring the 'overwhelming consensus' of their peers in the sciences?

No, it is done by preponderance of evidence.


Another straw man - your non sequiturial implication to the contrary, when he undertook his voyages and set about his works, Darwin was BY THE STANDARDS OF HIS TIME a studied, trained, practiced, competent Naturalist.


Irrelevant, non sequitur; a meaningless observation.


Straw man as well as assumption not merely unwarranted but demonstrably erroneous; I have acknowledged and expressed disagreement with legitimate experts in a variety of disciplines, citing published scientific/academic support for my positions relevant thereto.


Straw man. The point and purpose of science is to question, challenge, refine and revise itself. Darwin, for instance, in his time, was instrumental in effecting a paradigm shift in natural science, establishing a framework for the continued further refinement and revision of science; the same may be said of Newton - or of the likes of Pythagorus, Euclid, Aristotle, and Pliny.

It has been the principle heresy of the Christian (Faustian) project, to which we all owe more that we can say, that the object of science is the discovery of truth by the methods so tirelessly described in vague outline by anti-IDers on this thread and elsewhere: namely by the exclusive use of observed evidence and experiment in the service of a hypothesis.

The heresy was notoriously promulgated in the 18th century by the now almost forgotten philosopher Julien Offroy de La Mettrie; Galileo being something of a sideshow having been really only a clever businessman with a keen eye to the main chance.

By the age of 19 La Mettrie had become disgusted with theology and turned his attention to medicine. He was somewhat precocious like Rimbaud.

As a result of a delerium from a fever at the siege of Fribourg, where he was doctor to the Army Corps, he wrote The Natural History of the Soul.

This was attacked by the Church and others and he was forced to resign his position and, in compensation, appointed inspector of hospitals.

In that capacity he wrote some plays poking fun at the medical profession which resulted in his books being burned, in 1746, by the public executioner and him having to flee for his life.

In Leyden he wrote, following Descartes, Man a Machine and was chased for his pains all the way to Prussia where Frederick the Great gave him asylum and made him Reader to the King and provided him with a pension.

Under Frederick's protection he wrote numerous works including La Volupte and L'Art de Jouir which are delicate lucubrations on love and gallantry.

He died in 1751 supposedly from eating poisoned food. Frederick delivered a discourse in his praise to the Berlin Academy in 1752.

His principle heresy was the one referred to above--that the object of science is the discovery of truth by observation and experiment. He also said that man is an animal and if, as Descartes claimed, animals were machines then so was man and that if man was more than a machine then so were animals.

It is said that he invented psychology, as well as modern science and biology, with the idea that the "soul" deprived of the senses is inconceivable which is the fundamental tenet of Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind and that it developed and decayed along with the body and was subject to modification by intoxicants, deleriums, neuroses and madness.

All dualism was thus false because unverifiable and only materialism is scientific, and undilutable by sentiment or convention as a matter of course. Nothing has validity unless it can be measured or counted or weighed and be peer reviewed by colleagues using the same instruments and methods.

La Mettrie held that philosophy is contrary to morality and religion but that it cannot harm them and that it stands in the same relation to nature as morality does to religion and that it cannot affect the masses because it is based on reason to which the masses are blind, whereas religion is based on emotion and thus heap big medicine. (Judge Jones demonstrating his superiority and indifference to the masses in his now celebrated 139 page judgement which I could have written in my sleep.)

Julien, who was a bit of a sensualist, called himself an agnostic as he considered the existence of God and some form of life after death "probable" but unverifiable and thus of no concern to philosophy. He held that we have no way of knowing which cult pleases God but that all cults are objectionable due to the antagonisms they create. Obviously he knew nothing of economics, sociology or anthropology which do provide other explanations for those disputes.

Incidentally, he held that there need be no correspondence between an author and his works because an author writes for truth and speaks and acts for convenience. Very few anti-Iders seem to be aware of such an obvious possibility. The extent that a writer's convenience creeps into his works measures his incapacity to write properly.

It is a great pity that the principle founding father of the anti-ID movement and a martyr to the cause of uninhibited objectivity should be left unsung and despised by the modern anti-ID canon. This is probably explained by the lax, simplistic and timorous approach the spokespersons for anti-ID habitually adopt.

However, all is not lost. His ideas and outlook have been carried to some extent into modern times by his faithful apostle the Marquis de Sade who said, in a veritable welter of other articles of faith, that--"philosophy is not the art of consoling fools; its only aim is to teach truth and destroy prejudices.

Perhaps the scientific education of American adolescents should begin with a thourough grounding in the works of these two philosophers which would at least answer the charge that anti-ID isn't half-baked.

Swinburne famously said that one day a statue would be erected in every city of the world to honour the memory of the "Divine Marquis" as he is sometimes called by those who have benefitted from perusing his Philosophy of the Boudoir which, whatever one might say about it, would solve the problem of inattention in class which a pile of old bones never will.

Intelligent Design is definitely not science. But I don't think it's religion either.

It's definitely fueled by a religions agenda, but I wouldn't call it a religion.

(I think this has been said before, maybe back on page 45 or something).

Intelligent design is a stratagem.

Well, it would stand on its own, it's a simply hypothesis which isn't based on science. Not much different from the magic elf hypothesis in that sense.

It also just happens to be the chosen tool of certain religions fundamentalist propaganda, but that's just because its pseudo scientific fascade sounds more "scientific" than Magic Elf Poofism. A rose by any other name...

UK UPDATE

What does this guy mean by: "written to combat fatalistic Ancient Near East cosmogonies by stressing the underlying goodness of the world as a gift of God"?

What Ancient East Cosmologies is he talking about?

rosborne,

The article I quoted came from a London website that features news about religion. I am not sure which "Near East cosmogonies" they are talking about. However, I agree with their point that Genesis was never intended to be used for making assertions about scientific issues.

That much is for sure.

The "Ancient Near East cosmogonies " might be presumed to mean, in our context, those world views which lead to passive acceptance and resignation and are completely at odds with the Christian (Faustian) project which goes where no man ever went before.

Hence the "fatalistic". Anti-ID is basically fatalistic. It accepts the hegemony of matter.

Anti-ID and Creationism are similar in that they provide a story of the world which is rigid and controlled by agencies outside man. They both belittle human intelligence and limit it.

Anti-ID is a heresy as I explained yesterday. I'm quite surprised that no-one has seen fit to comment on the post which I took a bit of trouble over.

I suppose that is because the Ekklesia Website has more cachet because it has the authority of the printed word behind it.

A heresy, by the way, is not something thought. It is something preached.

First of all, a cosmogony is an explanation of the origin in the cosmos, and not its constituent parts and functioning, which is what a cosmology is.

The early Israelites were not all monotheistic--in fact, the evidence of the Pentateuch is that originally, none of them were. Jehovah is simply one of several deities. We know of two origins for monotheism which predate that of the Jawist tradition (the tradition of Jehovah), one Egyptian and the other Medean/Persian. The former is the more likely source for Israelite monotheism, because the Jews were not exposed to Persian influences until the time of the Babylonian captivity. However, the "story" of monotheism among the Jews most likely comes from the latter source, because the Mithraic version of monotheism begins with one god among many, that god becomes the supreme god, that god becomes the "true" god while all others are "false gods," and finally, that god is the one god. The "story" of god in the Old Testament mirrors this sequence--and significantly, the earliest complete copies of the Pentateuch come from the period after the Babylonian captivity, and the Pentateuch was heavily edited after that period--about a century later. It is very likely that the notion of monotheism, at least in the concept of a "superior" god--Jehovah--derives from the Egyptian notion of monotheism. One of the Egyptian pharaohs, Amenhotep IV, renamed himself Akhenaten, and claimed that Aten (originally an expression of the visible disk of the sun) was one and the same as Amon-Ra, the "sun god" (it's actually more complex than that, but that will suffice for this explanation), and the one and unique god. He set about effacing other references to other, older gods, and caused quite an uproar with the priestly caste, who saw their livelihood impaired. His son was Tut-ankh-amen, King Tut, and as he succeeded to the throne as an adolescent, and did not live into adulthood, it was a simple matter for the priesthood to have re-established the supremecy of Amon-Ra, and to re-introduced the old gods.

It is likely that a knowledge of the worship of a superior god accompanied the Jewish tribes into Palestine at the time of the Exodus. But one thing is certain, the Jawist faction was not only not dominant, they appear not to have originally even been a majority. Most Israelites were idolators, and worships Moloch or Baal. Moloch required the human sacrifice of children, or so claimed the priests, and Solomon is said to have erected a temple to Moloch on a hill by the city of Jerusalem, which hill was known as Tophet. Although there were attempts to suppress the worship of Moloch, it appears that it likely continued until at least the period of the Babylonian Captivity. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on Moloch.

Baal was a less centrally important deity, the name being derived from the Semitic word for a lord or owner of a place, and there were more than one god named Baal. Some biblical scholars contend that Jawists derived monotheism from the concept of Ba'al, claiming that Jehovah was the ba'al of ba'als, the supreme god. That doesn't explain, however, where they came up with the idea of a supreme deity, and the chronology of events suggests to me that they got the idea from the Egyptians, came up with their own home-grown "ba'al" in the form of Jehovah, and that the strong monotheism of the Medes and Persians which they encountered at the time of their release from the Babylonian Captivity gave the Jawists the opportuntity to finally quash the Moloch cult and Baal cults which could not be subsumed into the Jehovah worship. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on Baal.

Therefore, this author seems to contend that origin stories in the bible were cobbled together by Jawists to compete with the cosmic origin stories of the popular Moloch and Baal cults.

Likely a lot more than mere coincidental happenstance goin'on there, don'tchya think

Thanks Set, nice to see a meaningful answer to the question.

That's a distinct possibility, and worthy of a separate discussion. Amenhotep (whose name was dynastic, and meant favored by Amen, more literally "Amen is pleased), decided upon the change to a monotheistic cult of a god blended from Aten and Amen (or Amon). He changed his name to Akhenaten, meaning servant of Aten. His son was originally named Thutakhenaten, combining the dynastic name Thutmose, grandfather of Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten, with "servant of Aten." Upon the death of Akhenaten, he was renamed Tut- or Thutakhenamen--Thutmose servant of Amen. So yes, there is a strong possibility that he became a cat's paw of the priestly caste, and if, as he neared adulthood, he showed an inclination to renew his father's experiment, i think it likely that his diet would have rapidly proven to be fatal.

Can't say for sure, but it is an interesting speculation.

Just checked some sources online, and it appears that Tut did not die of foul-play as was often thought, especially after x-rays showed evidence of a subdural hematoma from a scull fracture at the back of the head. In 2005, the remains were subjected to a CT scan. If the injury to the back of the head was from violent means, it did not kill him, as it was heavily calcified, and would have occured at least months before his death, if not actually years. His leg, however, had been badly fractured, and the consensus of the team which examined the remains in 2005 is that the leg became gangrenous, and he died of sepsis within days of the fracture.

Whether or not it were foul play, however, he was succeeded by his "vizier," Ay, which conveniently ended any further possibility of "Atenism," and assured the firm re-establishment of pantheistic "Amenism."

ros wrote-



Tittertittertitter.

No Occam for our ros. Set's post was nonsensical. How many thousand years did he wave his arm over? How many millions passed through the gate of his understanding.

Dig this-



That's not even English. That's flannel.

There are other authors. He only "seems". And it he did he only "contended" anyway. Therefore is hardly the word.

It's all done by mirrors ros.

You're simply in denial of our religious world view for reasons of your own and latch onto snowstorms with gratitude.