Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

spendius wrote:

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.

Now explain to me Spendi.........why would this be a negative consequence of teaching evolution? Not that it would be the outcome of course, but your example doesn't seem to illustrate the dangerous consequence you warn us all against. Pink ribbons on my fluffy bunny rabbit ears.......and yellow suspenders........what fun! And what late stage you mention is this? Are you asking me for a date? You know I go with the Mountie, otherwise I'd be charmed. And how did you know my number?......my privacy should have been protected under the National Security Act.

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spendius wrote:

... I got it off those movies ...

We understandably may be justified in suspecting like academic rigor be the font and foundation of the philosophies you've been forwarding.

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I didn't say that it would be a negative consequence. Nor dangerous. The Office of Fair Trading and the Prevention of Price Gouging seems to me to be a fruitful aspect of progress after what I have seen.

Does it not seem logical with a pure scientific ethic. It is already underway. There are elite sperm banks in California I have heard. They said that Linus Pauling was very marketable.

And the Brahmins of old used to cure infertility in women with some secret ceremonials in the temple involving religious rituals like purification ablutions, incense, chantings and some shagging to finish off with. A week of that did the trick for about half of them.

I once wrote a song about it called Doctor Rifleman to the Highway 61 melody and beat. It was quite funny really.

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Great discussion, everyone. Thanks!

I posted a brief item this morning and tonight I read all of your posts debating religion and science. I am jealous that I was not part of that.

My position is very "middle of the road". I simply feel that science and religion ask and answer different sets of questions. I am a little concerned that the Vatican is looking for a new way to reconcile science and faith. In my opinion, issues of faith should be kept separate from science.

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timber wrote-

Quote:

We understandably may be justified in suspecting like academic rigor be the font and foundation of the philosophies you've been forwarding.

Was W.C. Fields not a qualified scientist then?

Great to see Lola back though but I must go to bed. There's some beasts to muck and fodder in the morning.

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wandel, I have also observed the Vatican move from literal to symbolic too, and agree with you that religion should remain philosophical rather than trying to adapt to science.

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Hi Wande,

I was wondering where you'd made off to. Good to see you. I also agree that science and religion are entirely different animals. What do you suppose the Vatican is up to?

Spendi.........you are very funny, almost sensible and more relaxed after a thorough soaking.

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Lola wrote:

I also agree that science and religion are entirely different animals. What do you suppose the Vatican is up to?

Lola,

It is also nice to see you back. It seems that only you and Timber have the patience to attempt communication with Spendi. Smile

I am worried that the Vatican will attempt a synthesis of science and religion. The Vatican's synthesis will probably differ from "creation science". Nevertheless, in my opinion, any synthesis would be inappropriate.

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A bit of wood spliting yesterday was All I needed to remind me of the list of muscles that have atrophied in disuse. Im tallying them up so I can have the EMT's precisely map the source of my condition when the ambulance gets here.

Spendi--Youre correct that I display the US and North America as the "center of gravity" on this issue. For the most part, England and the rest of Europe fought the battle with the Wilberforces and the Huxleys deriving the headline coverage in the 1870's.
The US has been the seat of the movement since the 1920's and (if you consider C T Russell's "Watchtower gang") much before.

The fight against modernism coincides nicely with the Arts and Crafts movement and their influence in the rise of the system of public schools and the original hunt for meaningful curricula. "Flood Geology", the "Institutes of Day-Age" George Macready-Price and the "AMerican Scientific Affiliation", Henry Morris and Rouas Rushdooney and their "Christian Reconstructionism" were all US movements and were intrusively present within our legal system for over 60 years. States passed " Creationism Only" laws, and "equal treatment laws" and finally "alternate theory laws" into the 1980's. SO , in the absence of anything controversial happening elsewhere, we would naturally feel that we were the only ones so inflicted.
When the Creationists "morphed" into Intelligent Designers, you really dont think that there was an accompanying scientific foundational basis for that movement , do you? The "science" came later, just as the ID movement gained momentum as a way to skirt the 1987 US SUpreme Court decision. Dont you think it coincidental that modern ID was largely a post "Aguillard" phenomenon? Prior to that , the implied concept of design by an intelligent being ws merely an underpinning of YEC, and OEC, and "Scientific Creationism"

I dont think we need to be convinced that there exists a "true ID" that somehow brings it all together into one satisfying theory. Youd just be talking out your ass on that (not to mention that youd be engaging in some "Cultural reconstructionist revisionism" of your own). Trying to lean far back into the philosophy of the obvious to root your interpretation of ID may be a nice intellectual diversion but it has no place in the history of the movement at all.
So yes, I feel very comforted to know that ID has been a sorry assed product of the socio-genetic diversity of the US. I, for the life of me, dont understand why any other country would even wish to share in the implied ignominia on this.

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Here is an interesting excerpt from the current issue of National Geographic Magazine ("From Fins to Wings," by Carl Zimmer, National Geographic Magazine, November 2006):

Quote:

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I'm sorry to say wande that I don't find that in the least bit interesting.

And I don't think Dr D.J. Aidley would either or any of the colleagues of his who he thanks in the Preface of his famous book for their help in preparing his text.

It is written for an illiterate audience regarding these matters with the intention of flattering them into thinking they know something about the subject with the minimum of effort on their part and empowering them to pontificate at coffee mornings and cocktail parties and thus encouraging them to continue subscribing to NGM.

I have Aidley's The Physiology of Exitable Cells in my hand here and it is easy to turn to any one of its 475 pages, or to the titles of the 700 or so references to other research in the field which are given at the end,to see just how utterly elementary is the article.

I very much doubt that the word "marvellous" appears anywhere in the book. The Oxford Dictionary does record the form "marvelous" but says that it is not recorded in any known documents. It is something of a "pop" science word however it is spelt. Is it an American form?

There are a number of other words in your quoted text which would never find their way into a proper scientific paper which leads me to see it as pure entertainment and, like Stephen Hawkins and Vladimir Horowitz, I prefer to watch girls dancing when I seek entertainment.

The article says nothing worthwhile about anything in particular and least of all about intelligent design, science or religion although it may have to do with the status symbolisms in posh American academic circles if Veblen's The Higher Learning is anything to go by.

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spendi,

The excerpt I quoted is relevant to intelligent design. ID proponents have used the bacteria flagellum as an example of an organ or organism whose evolution can not be explained by natural selection. The research described in National Geographic Magazine refutes the assertion of ID proponents.

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wandel, I was just reading that National Geographic magazine last night before bedtime, and that same issue also has an article on the discovery of a transitional monkey-head baby girl humanoid that was found in eastern Africa that's 3.3 million years old. They're still doing research on it, but this remain shows what most scientists have been claiming, that we have the same ancestry as the other primates. I'm sure spendi and IDers will refute this finding.

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Thanks, C.I.! (I would hate to have spendi be the only one responding to my post. Smile

)

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wande wrote-

Quote:

spendi,

The excerpt I quoted is relevant to intelligent design. ID proponents have used the bacteria flagellum as an example of an organ or organism whose evolution can not be explained by natural selection. The research described in National Geographic Magazine refutes the assertion of ID proponents.

Now, now wande. You are addressing spendi not the grandchildren.

I feel sure that "ID proponents" in your country (thanks fm) have their wives engineer creases in their courtroom trousers which can only be explained by natural selection by a very devious route.

The article, and I didn't comment on the research, refutes nothing and I hope, very sincerely, that it wasn't intended to.

c.i. I recommend that you change your bedtime reading. I don't think that transitional monkey-head baby girl humanoids is a suitable subject on which to engage your mind at that time of day.

Try Paddy Dingam's funeral in Ulysses or the Pass of the Hatchet in Salammbo for something a little more light-hearted.

3.3 is an approximation of 3.25-3.34 (say) which is a span of 0.9 million years (900,000) which is, assuming the figure is correct and not a blind guess, 90 times the span, we are told, of the history of writing. At the least.

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spendi, You still don't realize it, but that 3.3 million years is more accurate than anything you've said on a2k. Relevance, spendi, relevance.

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The Sunday Times TV critic, A.A. Gill, had this to say in yesterday's edition.

Quote:

The first of this autumn's harvest of big nature series, Planet Earth (Sunday, BBC1), took a glossy, elegiac, meltingly haunting look at penguins and polar bears. The BBC has become so practised at these vast, soft-centred uber-nature films that there's a sort of vain swagger to them. The beautiful images come on with the flourish of Italian opera, confident and patronising in their ability to astonish. After 10 minutes of all this wonder and skill and sublime bloody panoramic beauty, I simply couldn't take any more. I'd come to the end of the godlike, hyper-real, grand-production nature series. I've had the box set, the tea-tray books, the repeats. That's it. The genre has collapsed under its own self-regard and become a parody of itself.

Let me just tell you a few of the things that choked me last Sunday. First it was poor old David Attenborough, who's become the Laurence Olivier of voice-overs, the stand-in voice of God. You could hear the resignation, the swallowed disgust at the copious streams of fruity, clichéd, sentimental bilge he had to intone like Christmas-card greetings over the film. The factual content is now virtually nil, just scene-setting and needless telling you what you're seeing. There was barely any attempt to differentiate between North and South Poles. Who cared? And the observation becomes ever more disengaged from a human-sized reality. The camera angles get higher and wider, giving an omnipotent view, and the sentimentally grandiose music is beyond bearing, like the overblown accompaniment to a silent movie or Tchaikovsky orchestrating cartoons. The wildlife itself is sentimentalised, anthropomorphised and edited into a cute narrative in a way I thought we'd all grown out of with Disney in the 1950s.

But mostly what I mind is the hidden hand of American culture and scientific social censorship. Like most big BBC nature series, this was a co-production with the Discovery channel, which has a long and weird set of requirements for its products: very little violence, no blood, hardly any sex and very, very hazy, noncommittal science, especially where it may contentiously upset fundamental Christians. Essentially what it wants is pretty, unnatural nature for 10-year-old, conservative Midwestern creationists. Now, I understand that this sort of programme is eye-wateringly expensive, and getting other broadcasters to share the expense makes bottom-line sense. But the BBC is not a commercial company: your licence fee is being used to subsidise American commercial television, and it's being made to their specifications.

It had me wondering, among other things, whether the Discovery channel is in anyway connected to the Discovery Institute.

Perhaps fm will comment.

BTW fm-

Any scientist knows that the strenuous use of muscles which have been allowed to lie fallow for even fairly short periods inevitably results in a crippling effect which leads the sufferer to be easily picked off by predators and thus to eventual extinction. Rescue and treatment centres are not at the end of a phone in evolution theory. Those facilities only appeared on earth with the application of intelligent design in its western Christian form.

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c.i.

I don't know how many times you need to be told but I leave it to our valued readers to decide what is relevant. I don't assert it myself.

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Quote:

Any scientist knows that the strenuous use of muscles which have been allowed to lie fallow for even fairly short periods inevitably results in a crippling effect which leads the sufferer to be easily picked off by predators and thus to eventual extinction.

Thats why Sam Colt was born.

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spendi, I only respond to your claims that are irrelevant. If you stop doing so, I won't have any response to it. Simple, isn't it?

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Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

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