Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

spendius wrote:

Lola wrote-

Quote:
Science is, after all, in direct conflict with fundmentalist religions.

We are not discussing fundamentalist religions Lola. We are discussing Intelligent Design or, as I prefer, intelligent design. That idea, and it is an idea, is in direct conflict with fundamentalist religions of all types.

As I understand it there is a confusion over there which thinks that intelligent design has something to do with fundamentalist religions.

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Science is a way of thinking that requires doubt.

That is the problem when it tries to get involved in social affairs. Doubt produces uncertainty and ultimately catatonia if everybody is imbued with its principles rather that a chosen few. Presumably that is why it only ever is allowed an advisory role to Governments.

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the fact that the Catholic church has taken so many centuries to live with it bears witness to how threatening doubt is to those whose security depends on absolute belief.

What about the security of society? What security could we expect with a society of doubters and non-believers?

I'm afraid that the "voice of God" is a subject on which a number of threads may well prosper.

But it makes a pleasant change, I must say to consider, your posts, Lola, after some of the mush I've been putting up with.

It is always a balancing act. How to get the best out of us without unleashing our true nature in blowtorch mode.

And we run the world.

Had The Church been fully in charge, authority and all, which is necessary to avoid the blowtorch, we might not have allowed the "Now" men to export our technologies so easily. We might have been more patient (slow). The Church has engaged in such restrictions in the past and the Chinese loss of the monopoly of silk production through carelessness in that regard was a severe blow to them and if they could have caught the Faustian rascal who did it he would have come to a very sticky end.

I think our system works quite well and I'm not up for shooting off in the dark blowtorches blasting.

I hardly think that embracing a faith is narcissistic. It seems quite the opposite to me.

Intelligent design as an idea is a fine thing to consider. I have no argument with that. But I believe it's you Spendi who is confused about the ID movement in this country. The Discovery Institute is made up entirely of fundamentalist Christians. I know who they are, I've met many of them in years past (in another life) I know where and with whom they studied and what is their motivation. They are fundamentalists. If you can't take my word for it, research it (with the open mind you defend). I'll be glad to give you a few starting places and tell you about the history of the people involved.

A movement is not an idea. They are, I'm sure you'll agree, quite different. A movement has to do with ideology. And in this case that ideology is fundamentalist Christianity.

You know, don't you, that we're objecting to the use of ID in the classroom as a scientific theory, not as an idea worthy of discussion in a philosophy or religion class.

Nice to see with you again, btw. How are you doing?

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A digression which might be of interest concerning inflation.

In 1927 The T.E. Lawrence book Seven Pillars of Wisdom was published conventionally and 30,000 copies were sold at £1 10 shillings each. (About $2.40 at today's rate and about $6 then). That was expensive at the time. This publishing success transformed the fortunes of Jonathan Cape, the publishers, which, after placing £15,000 in War Loan, built a five room extension to their offices in Bedford Square, raised salaries all round, introduced a profit sharing scheme and restructured their accounting system.

Not that I've read it of course.

But I have read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists which makes more sense in the light of that lot for under £10 grand (Assuming Lawrence got some.)

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spendius wrote:

(Assuming Lawrence got some.)

Which I doubt.

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Lola wrote:

But I believe it's you Spendi who is confused about the ID movement in this country. The Discovery Institute is made up entirely of fundamentalist Christians. I know who they are, I've met many of them in years past (in another life) I know where and with whom they studied and what is their motivation. They are fundamentalists. If you can't take my word for it, research it (with the open mind you defend). I'll be glad to give you a few starting places and tell you about the history of the people involved.

Coal to Newcastle, or perhaps morelike Pearls Before Swine, Glamorgams - that door's been opened to spendi any number of times in this discussion without his having shown any inclination to visit what lies behind it.

BTW - the publishing world treated Col. Lawrence pretty shabbily all around.

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My comment was drawn in disgust at Sapienza for even getting in the fray. I never liked the pompous name and how they confer professori on adjuncts who never even teach.

Im familiar with the geo and geophysics faculty , we just enetertained fellows of the GSA from "la..." at the recent Philly meeting and they were dismayed at the course that is being taken by the church in the last 2 years.

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We are discussing Intelligent Design or, as I prefer, intelligent design. That idea, and it is an idea, is in direct conflict with fundamentalist religions of all types.

This shows ,me that spendi has no idea what hes saying. ID was brought forth by the Fundamentalists Henry Morris's, Phillip Johnsons, and the J R Rushdooneys
Outside of a few notables like Mike Behe, the majority of IDers are "repainted" floodists and "Creation Science roadies".

Your skwawking wont make the facts otherwise spendi.

There are Old Earth Creationsits whove tried to make their beliefs conveniently coincident with all the scientific evidence that they can no longer ignore. Theyve embraced IDas a welcome "pseudo scientific" wholly religious based
alter-ego to natural selection

Howard Ahmanson the money pot for the"Center for Science and Culture" is a Christian Reconstructionist. He wants civil law to follow a path similar to the Muslim countries.
Ahmanson has heavily fundedmany anti-evolution groups.
You can follow the money trail through the Fieldstead Foundation (Ahmansons middle name) the money goes to such diverse groups as the Discovery Institute and the Floodists and payed for reprinting the book used as a text in Dover "Of Pandas and People" (This is the book that shamelessly merely substituted the words Intelligent Design for Creationism.
To deny the facts of history and the connections that spendi wishes to ignore, means that spendi either
1 doesnt at all understand the historical ties of the Fundamentalists with ID
or
2Hes merely part of the "Kool aid gang" Thats trying to create a place in science for ID.

Either way it wont hunt and the movement is taking some major hits in the US .
Maybe this time theyll stay dead.

Id asked spendi to define "True ID" (its a statement that, like Anti -ID, hes created and left the world hanging with no definitions. SO far his discourse with Lola were the closest approach to some point of his "belief system"

If it quacks, looks like , shits like , and hangs around with other ducks, good bet that its still a duck.

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Lola-

I'm okay. I have missed your contributions. Didn't we have some fun in my A2K formative infancy? I'm scratching around in the Joyce industry at the moment which I gather is quite extensive in the US. I am determined to master Finnegans Wake if it's the last thing I do which it may well turn out to be.

Yes- I'm aware of the problem over intelligent design relating to the DI but it is a WWW and I'm not that keen on the DI blundering around discrediting intelligent design.

I certainly have no brief to restrict scientific progress. It simply needs a theology to prevent its possibilities impinging too rapidly on social cohesion and intelligent design looks to be the only possibility because religious fundamentalism has no hope.

Anti-ID would take us, I fear, into BIG government. Huxley or Orwell style, although I quite fancy the former despite its fancifullness. A new bit of tail every night all popped up on Soma seems pretty good as a legacy to the future but I can't imagine all these happily marrieds going for anything like that so it will probably be Orwell who eschewed the bottle babies conceit in the interest of scientific exactness. I wouldn't want to be a gamma though.

I see no necessity to teach evolution in schools. It is a simple enough idea which needs no groundwork for those chosen in maturity to look into it. Thus I am forced to side with the DI to some extent on the "my enemy's enemy is my friend" principle.

Nobody has seen fit to discuss my religion/psychology/ immune system connection and if one follows Illich's thought one can see one reason why the medical profession might be anti-ID. The creation of sub-lethal illness is a boon to the medical profession and what better way than to weaken immune systems. Sperm counts are supposed to be declining as well.

I have a new theory stemming from that about how evolution self destructs unfortunate mutations but it is still a bit inchoate and will have to await the flowering phase.

When would you say that "reason" became a dominating force, if it has, in the hundreds of millions years of evolution?

Anyway- don't you find sex more exciting when it is shameful and utterly disgraceful? I fear it would become boring were it to be simply a matter of relieving a tension which is all it can be to a scientist surely?

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farmerman wrote:

Either way it wont hunt and the movement is taking some major hits in the US . Maybe this time theyll stay dead.

The movement has taken some very well directed sharp blows to the cranium of late. And I'm delighted about that. But the creationists (fundamentalists) are like cock roaches. It will take a major climate change to render them extinct.

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"...like cockroaches" is right! Kill some off, and thousands more spring out of nowhere where we thought was disinfected.

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spendius wrote:

Lola-

I'm okay. I have missed your contributions. Didn't we have some fun in my A2K formative infancy? I'm scratching around in the Joyce industry at the moment which I gather is quite extensive in the US. I am determined to master Finnegans Wake if it's the last thing I do which it may well turn out to be.

Yes we did. Good luck on the Joyce.

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Nobody has seen fit to discuss my religion/psychology/ immune system connection and if one follows Illich's thought one can see one reason why the medical profession might be anti-ID. The creation of sub-lethal illness is a boon to the medical profession and what better way than to weaken immune systems. Sperm counts are supposed to be declining as well.

Give me a page number and I'll read it and make comments if I can.

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Anyway- don't you find sex more exciting when it is shameful and utterly disgraceful? I fear it would become boring were it to be simply a matter of relieving a tension which is all it can be to a scientist surely?

Scientists understand the pleasure centers of the brain. Understanding doesn't preclude pleasurable sensations and feelings. And yes, disgrace is delicious in private and measured doses. I agree that frontal lobe activity during sexual activity is destructive to the fun of it all. Too much frontal lobe stuff and a person ends up having to fake peak experiences. It is possible though Spendi to let go of understanding for a while so that primative pleasure is allowed. That's the problem with the heavy hand of fundamentalism. There's no room to do anything but think think think all the time. If one allows feeling while frantically trying to maintain control over everything human, the whole thing pops and what do we have then? A huge destructive mess. That's what.

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Nervousness can be reflected in a post.

Unless the teacher is prepared to remove the curtain of self-imposed egotistical inner vision and projects his own faults and misdemeanours with candour, he naturally becomes suspicious of everybody.

Paranoid.

Homicidal even in a self defensive mode, simply because it is tolerated by the law.

Most teachers are light-weight would be contendors for every government position, tycoon, Chairman of Shell and general leader of all the packs: Purely in a mist of thinking of course, which is not thinking at all, they are merely daydreaming.

For instance, if you were to ask what they thought of a jungle trek, they would express a vague undefined attitude, whilst at the same time conjuring up an adventure of sorts from the comfort and safety of their arm chair. No doubt obtaining personal satisfaction of themselves playing a role one would associate with Harrison Ford, and the endless list of heroic feats which attach themselves to the mode.

In real life, they would be unsettled, again they would not wish to visit any dimension where the protective laws they take for granted in normal life are not applicable.

Riding the cyclone is an acquired taste. The more time he acts out the position of God, the more likely he is to become God.

The deliverance of the extended personal lesson is always carried out with stealth and cautious craft . He will also be aware that it is only a short jump between psychology and zoology. Assuming he makes a distinction between them at present.

I have no difficulty in expressing my view that education is the first step on the road to corruption: The loss of innocence.

It amused me some years since to read that advances in DNA research would eventually lead to 'man' being able to remove or isolate the 'Killer genes' which create cold blooded killers. They are of course automatically inferring that they can differentiate between cold blooded criminal killers
and duly elected legal cold blooded killers!

I wonder what species of a Godless Nation could evolve with tutorial experimental intervention by man?

The laws applicable to science alone may well have to be re-written one day. The basic and most fundamental characters of our being are not understood at all, they are like grains of sand from the minds of day-dreamers and they base reality with the same, to comfort and spread their teachings with a common purpose.

Take a common bond of interest like the theatre, those who watch, those who act. Yet the watchers if they had the inclination could very well be capable of donning the stage attire and imitating accordingly.

Chimpanzees do it.

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fm-

Your last post does hinge on the US being the centre of gravity of the universe. What you lot do is just what you lot do in the here and now. Some people expropriated the beautiful poetic word "gay" and transformed it by repetition and propaganda into a whole other meaning. I did my bit to fight that and lost.

Intelligent design is another phrase that is being expropriated.

And I have explained before that it is a feeling not something you set out to teach. And evolution theory undermines it and too fast.

Intellectuals are not bothered about the Discovery Institute. It's a minor matter. If that. We don't depend upon what a few rich cranks get up to. We bother about what we all get up to.

HCE. Here Comes Everybody. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. (Chimp eh? A bloke like Joyce would have plenty of choice with a "C" I think.)

Are you suggesting that if those guys you mention had never been born we wouldn't be having this debate? It isn't the guys you clunker. It's the force. This debate was raging when Sitting Bull ran Wisconsin and neighbouring territories (poetic licence claimed).

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It's my soakie-soakie time bur afore I go

Why choose cockroaches and link them to disinfectant. That Goebells type stuff isn't it. A scientific mind would have done that. Commodes maybe.

I'll be back, I hope, to re-read Lola's interesting post.

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spendius wrote:

fm-

Your last post does hinge on the US being the centre of gravity of the universe. What you lot do is just what you lot do in the here and now.

The U.S. doesn't have to be the center of the universe for our concerns regarding the ID fundamentalists to be important. The U.S. is a big place, regardless of it not being everywhere. And the decline of scientific progress in the U.S. will impact the entire world in a negative way. Just the same if it happened in any country.

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Are you suggesting that if those guys you mention had never been born we wouldn't be having this debate? It isn't the guys you clunker. It's the force. This debate was raging when Sitting Bull ran Wisconsin and neighbouring territories (poetic licence claimed).

The guys at the DI are the ones you have to thank for the expropriation of theh phrase "intellilgent design". They're the ones who have transformed it from a philosophical concept into junk science.

Enjoy your soakie.

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Lola wrote-

Quote:

And the decline of scientific progress in the U.S. will impact the entire world in a negative way.

That's an assumption I not only do not share but take the opposite view entirely. I think evolution theory will stop science dead in its tracks. It already is doing.

Mathos wrote-

Quote:

Chimpanzees do it.

Yeah, that's right. About once a month I think. Oestrus time.

Now- Lola-

Your post about frontal lobes and pleasure centres conveniently forgets that you are at an age you are.

You had the advantage of sex being presented to you as naughty, shocking etc etc by a religious society in your formative years and just as you were coming on stream, to continue with Mathos's metaphor, it was suddenly freely available. What could be better.

But what about the future kids getting the obvious results of 100 years of evolution theory.

Dear Miss 4765/92b/439765/LOLA,

You are hereby instructed in the name of (fill in what you want) to present yourself at the reception of the Office of Fair Trading and the Prevention of Price Gouging to be inseminated by Mr 8561/69c/875021/SPENDIT who has been identified by scientific investigation as a perfect biological fit to your profile and who we are very confident will assist you in producing etc etc-

I'm short of time.

Seems logical not far down the line. This doesn't stop when we cark it.

I have heard of sex lessons been given with a cucumber and a milk bottle to 10 year olds and sex lessons are a plank of the anti-IDer agenda.

I'm for the leering, snickering and running around in the bushes myself. I enjoyed it and it should go on forever. Otherwise no art. No more jokes. A boot stamping on your face for ever and ever.

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spendius wrote:

... This debate was raging when Sitting Bull ran Wisconsin and neighbouring territories (poetic licence claimed).

That gem of spendignorance calls for a bit of historical nitpicking ... Stitting Bull (in Sioux, "Tatanka-Iyotanka": the name references a buffalo which chooses to not be moved) was not a "Chief" per se, in the accepted sense of the word, but rather was a revered shaman, or "Medicine Man", though as such he was an immensely influential leader within his society, a primary driver of the movement which in the 1870s effectively united the Northern Plains Indians (essentially the Sioux and the Cheyenne), his teachings shifting them from casually, intermittently warring among one another between periods of relative peace and open trade to organized mutual opposition directed against The White Man's Westward expansion. A member of the Hunkpapa band of the Lakota (or Teton) Sioux, he was born sometime around 1830 in a village on the banks of the Grand river, in present-day South Dakota, never venturing much Eastward of there other than later in life as a performer in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He died (in 1890 if I recall correctly - too lazy to look it up) in tragic, senseless circumstance at the Fort Randal Indian Reservation in South Dakota, not far from his birthplace. He had nothing to do with Wisconsin or its Indians, which primarily were/are of the Ojibwe ("Chippewa", in Anglo-French) Federation, with many Oneida, Menominee, Fox, Pottawatame, and some Cree - all Algonquian "Nations" or "Tribes"/"Peoples", traditional enemies to the tribes of the Iroquoian Nations, from whence derive the Sioux.

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spendius wrote:

Lola wrote-

Quote:
And the decline of scientific progress in the U.S. will impact the entire world in a negative way.

That's an assumption I not only do not share but take the opposite view entirely. I think evolution theory will stop science dead in its tracks. It already is doing.

Obviously there has been no new science since Darwin wrote his treatise. These steam powered computers are a bitch though... I sure wish someone would come up with something like electricity to power them.

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I think spendi just ignores the computer he's attached to and posting messages that are being read around the world almost instantaneously. That's not science at all...it's all part of ID.

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Dear Spendi,

Quote:

But what about the future kids getting the obvious results of 100 years of evolution theory.

Dear Miss 4765/92b/439765/LOLA,

You are hereby instructed in the name of (fill in what you want) to present yourself at the reception of the Office of Fair Trading and the Prevention of Price Gouging to be inseminated by Mr 8561/69c/875021/SPENDIT who has been identified by scientific investigation as a perfect biological fit to your profile and who we are very confident will assist you in producing etc etc-

Seems logical not far down the line.

This is a rather humongous leap and has nothing to do with logic. I fear Spendi, sweetie your talents lie in art, not logic.

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timber-

I did claim poetic licence but I am glad you ignored it.

I got it off those movies. I hadn't intended it to be an academically verifiable piece of history. It's a cliche in England. "Me Chief Sitting Bull-white man speak with forked tongue.

Is it really only 1870? Royal Ascot was going then.

A PS to the official letter from the Office of Fair Trading and the Prevention of Price Gouging to Miss 4765/92b/439765/LOLA.

In order to qualify for the SPECIAL BONUS, a FREE holiday, with all expenses paid, in the tropical paradise of your choice, and the opportunity to appear on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, you are
advised to wear a pair of black leather boots with little laces up the front and pointy heels, a loosely strung purple basque, yellow suspenders, pink ribbons in your hair and fluffy bunny rabbits ears as Mr 8561/69c/875021/SPENDIT is a bit pernickety at this late stage.

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spendi wrote: I did claim poetic licence but I am glad you ignored it.

See! You are a "poet."

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