Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

wande quoted



I explained all that recently. They default on the infinite and the infinitesimal.

And I have often told you this-

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It's the only competition materialism has left. It's the last ditch. It's about stopping materialism or, at least, slowing it down a bit. The march of the Materialist Party with stock market prices for guidance.

Obviously money talks. Bob Dylan says it swears. Andy Warhol said it's the only art left.

Science is jealous because it has delivered wonderful stuff and it can't get its hands on power. It still has to lobby instead of being lobbied. Anti-ID, and anti-Creationism is still working overtime, is a recruiting tool for the Materialist Party and its Commissars.

It can't campaign like a proper party because all its spokespersons are goofballs. Calamity Jane said that the scientists she knew were nerds and we don't want nerds in No 10 or The Oval Office. (No tasteless jokes please.)

Think of the jokes about Pidcock and Dawkins.

I think Materialism is beginning to flounder under the law of diminishing returns. Doesn't all progress?

Excellent read wandeljw. It cuts to the main issues of this debate in my opinion.


This has been proven. The evidence is exstensive.
I concede that I may be out of my depth here however, does not this statement assume that new genetic code has been produced? is it not possible that the genes required to resist the drugs existed in the bacteria already and that this bacteria has simply "naturally selected" the gene required,with no loss or gain in the genetic code?



I agree with this statement. I think the controversy surrounds the education of children K-12 primarily. I for one not being a proponent of ID, but one who accepts Creation, consider the teaching of natural selection an important part of good education. However, in teaching these children that macroevolution is fact, without showing them the holes that are so much a part of the theory and its study is to deliberately shunt their objectivity. In defense of ID'ers I agree that a person, much less a child, has to first make a philosophical decision before they can embrace Darwinian Evolutionary theory.

fisherman wrote-



And that the materialism gene in the human race is likewise ever present and king gene and that society doesn't work without it being deliberately restrained through the Christian religion giving the more graceful genes an artificial boost.

Watching a materialist get all soppy at Christmas or his anniversary is a very funny prospect.

Could this be another way of describing virtue?

There you have it; all the rest is smoke and mirrors, just sideshow put on by the Creationist/ID-iot movement to distract the gullible from the terminally embarrassing fact they have nothing to offer beyond purely subjective - and illegitimate - philosophic objection. The root of the matter is twofold: misperception on the part of Creationists/ID-iots that "Science" promotes the ascendence of "Materialism" over "Core Moral Precepts", and, at the very heart of the matter from the Creationist/ID-iot POV, challenges Genesis, the very foundation of the Abrahamic Mythopaeia; no "Miraculous Creation", of course, but even more specifically, ever so much more dangerously important to them and ther proposition, no "Adam and Eve", no "Fall of mankind", no "Original Sin", hence, no basis for "Resurection through Christ's sacrifice".

Get right down to it, and whatchya got here is nothing other than echo of the Copernicus Crisis. The difference this time is that the reactionary, luddite forces of darkness and ignorance lack the authority and respect commanded by The Church of the 16th Century, while since then, "Science" more than adequately has established its own credentials. The ultimate result for the Creationists/ID-iots cannot but be their own destruction and consequent to that also must be further marginalization of all that proceeds from the Abrahamic Mythopaeia. The Creationist/ID-iocy movement itself, half a millenium behnd the times, has propelled itself, kicking and screaming all the way, to the precipice of The Age of Reason, realizing despite itself it inevitably will be going over the edge.

You're the luddite timber still banging on about the Abrahamic Mythopaeia and Genesis.



And, as I have explained, neither have the scientific materialists.

And that quote is assertion city.

No 1-I'm not trying to distract anybody.

No 2- People are not gullible in the mass.

No 3- It is not terminal.

No 4- It is not embarrassing.

No 5- Thus not a fact.

No 6- They have something to offer.

No 7- It is not illegitimate.

That's high density assertion. They are all subjective opinions from inside your box.

Science, excluding the science of social consequences, can do no other that promote the ascendence of "Materialism" over "Core Moral Precepts". Science cannot even recognise Core Moral Precepts.

[/quote]Get right down to it, and whatchya got here is nothing other than echo of the Copernicus Crisis.[/quote]

Another empty assertion. The two situations are not comparable although I recognise how convenient it is to assume so.

[/quote] "Science" more than adequately has established its own credentials.[/quote]

Well it would say that wouldn't it. Actually Science doesn't say that which you tacitly admit by using the wooly phrase "more than adequately".



Another assertion. Scientific materialism, uninhibited, has far more chance of disappearing up its own fundament than anything like that happening in the foreseeable future.

If you wan't to argue for either Huxley's or Orwell's predictions, which are based on the sort of thinking you offer perhaps you might serve your side's purposes better if you could justify them in action rather than in fantasy instead of continually reverting to the easy targets you do.

I can stick up for Huxley but I would have to go way past the point that A2K readers would find acceptable.

We don't prepare a world for our progeny with abstractions larded with the most specious and obvious assertions.

But why would a materialist care about the fate of those. And any that do can be soon straightened out with a head cage full of starving rats. Big Brother brooks no other love than of Himself.

You seem to me timber to be incapable of moving on to where the argument has now got on here.

Can you not see a motive for mass media to promote materialism? Nobody even attempted to answer my questions about the ownership of the organs wande quotes all the time.

A2K is not mass media. IDers cannot ever prove the existence of a designer and neither can Science ever prove the non-existence of the same.

Try to address the social consequences because they are the only game in town. All the rest is lucrative posturing.

Anyone can just as easily say that Science tries-



And I think fresco would agree with that along with Wittgenstein, Ryle, D.M.Armstrong and many others although they, being gents, would miss out "illegitimate".

Only one problem, ID has no legitimate argument in order to substantiate a sensible debate.

spendi, your oft-demonstrated immunity to embarrassment renders improbable your personally ever finding it inconvenient, let alone terminal. Your most recent diatribe unambiguously, though not particularly succinctly, makes my case.

Blather timber. Pure unadulterated blather of the most vulgar type.

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I will try to make a complex argument simple.

It may not work.

The usual basis for self-esteem is the respect accorded to people by the neighbours.

Only people with aberrant temperments can maintain their self-esteem in the face of disesteem from others.

It is natural, and healthy, to have self-esteem.

Those whose self-esteem is dependent on others are easily identified by their actions and are, on the evidence of the sales of self-esteem boosting products, by far the bulk of the population.

In a materialistic world the only avenue for boosting self-esteem is pecuniary success and the conspicuous display of it.

Religious observances provide another avenue for people from the poorer classes to gain the esteem of others and thus maintain their own self-esteem by displays of piety and respectability and co-operation. Respectability being an unknown concept to materialists as one can see in any zoo.

These observances may well be cynically acted or they may seek a putative supernatural witness. Either way self-esteem can be maintained by recourse to them. Of course drugs may be employed or cringing obedience to wordly authority.

Take away religious observancies and the result could only be a "keeping up with the Jones" rat race on a much larger scale than already exists.

And the competition that would go with it. In every field of life.

Without religious observances only pecuniary success and the display of it, ignoring intellectual prowess because it only exists in this regard in rareified fields, and like in the zoo not a pretty sight, for I have seen it, can enter the service of self-esteem and there is a hypothesis that such a condition will run out of control and self destruct.

The losers, the majority, would end up with low self-esteem and no avenue to remedy it except within the bosom of the Holy Church of Materialism. Like signing up for science courses organised by the High Priests and carried forth by their minions lower down who are not mimions if they are not obedient.

Thus this majority would have low self-esteem. They may even have to support a football or base-ball team and that's pretty desperate considering the amount of materialist imagery exists around either of those. More minions.

Having low self-esteem causes sickness. It may even be that it is the major cause of sickness as the immune system is damaged by it. Sickness and chronic sub-lethal sickness, caused by low self-esteem is attended by social malfunction generally, misery and vast expense.

And a respect for religious observances cannot be maintained in a school teaching evolutionary theory and materialism generally because the latter undermines the former and especially so where teachers of it take a similar line as that often seen on this thread and there would be bound to be a good few of them.

On this argument, and it is only one among many, (I could easily make a materialist case for religious observances- indeed have partially done so above), anti-IDers (AIDs for short seeing as how witty abbreviations are all the rage on here) are mounting an assault on the poor, the weak, the disadvantaged as well as both the social and physical environment. A flat-out, unremitting competition in the display of pecuniary success, for health reasons, would be a boon for mass media and the losers would be a boon to those services designed to manage them.

And, as one would expect, Science would wash its hands of it within its guarded walls whilst it inspects at great length a 600 million year-old bat toe-bone and writes long screeds of gigbberish about it which are resd reverently by the minions.

Meanwhile life outside goes on all around the.

And the most arrogant assumption of all is that the purveyors of materialism will refrain from behaving badly when their project succeeds as if they are a new breed of superior mankind.

Stand 'em up in their underpants the silly egotistical dopes. And that's the real them leaving aside the modesty veil.

I oght to have said that the process is easy to describe because it is already underway and quite well developed and that's with the current level of religious observence.


I know the materialist can say- "Well-they'll have to shape up." That's when the morning parades begin that I mentioned earlier. Then obedience passes exams.

timber wrote, in quite a stylish post-



If your case rests upon your assertion that I am immune to embarrassment I'll have you know that I have been embrrassed on many an occasion during my long and eventful journey through this cornucopia of goodies.

Jennifer Whiteside was the cause of my most embarrassed moment but it would take more space than I fear my readers have patience for to tell of it. The most embarrassed moment I mean. Not the only one. Just the worst. They still take the piss out of me now about it. But many others of a declining embarrassment gradation of some length with the least worst being the one I have just about learned to laugh over.

So there's no case to make so no point in proving it with an assertion unless you just enjoy making up daft sentences.

I do.

spendi, I must say I find your posts by and large quite stylish as well - leaving aside any qualitative assessment of substance.

We had better not get into "substance" timber. Modern physics reckons that it's a concept that no sooner do you think you have a hold on it it vanishes. A bit like the ladies.

What's happening on the highways and by-ways is what matters. No highways and by-ways, no moden physics of any kind.

Style is paramount.

Allow me to attempt a strike between you's.

Spendius says, "What's happening on the highways and by-ways is what matters". I would agree enthusiastically.

Unless, as Timber asserts at least as it appears to me, that all that matters is materialism and all things material. For in my view, if materialistic "stuff" is all there is, then I see no practical application for religion. Values , style, art, and government, religion, the environment etc are not much more than curious occurences of a random universe. Whats all the fuss about?

Spendius refers to "self esteem". I would call it value. So Timber, sparing us another sermon, what is the impetus for your position? Since you make such a fuss against religion, why?

Fair enough, fisherman, there's no reason to expect that in the week or so you've been here, you'd have had occasion to research the likely thousands of posts defining my position on religion - in short, it is that from the days of red ochre burials and fertility cults to contemporary militant Islamofascists and Christian TV evangelists, religion has been about what folks wish to believe as opposed to what folks know. Hope is not a plan of action.

WHo needs a plan of action, more too the point, why a plan of action?

And thank you for your deference as regards my ignorance of your point of view.

If you wish to counter with that type of sophistic rhetoric, you might just as well ask who "needs" anything & why "do" anything.

spendi,

You talk a lot about materialism. Materialism can be a worldview or simply a methodology. In science, materialism is merely a methodology.

Chum wrote-



I wouldn't agree with that on the grounds that we are here and we have to do something. We need to eat, drink and make merry.

It's a question of where the line is drawn between need and want. One might want to eat, drink and make merry in Gay Paree during "the season" but one doesn't need to. The want is psychological and the need is biological only in the animal kingdom assuming you think that the self-consciousness of man is not a biological phenomena which is not an assumption a materialist will make.

That the mind which composed that sentence is just a vibrating pile of neurons, photons, cratchons, zinglezingies, wizzicks and whatnot which somehow arranged its components just so is what a materialist will say. Tautologically.

So "why 'do' anything" depends on your "needs". Which are of course subject to alteration in regard to those derived from self-consciousness.

In The Garden of Eden on the other hand.......!

wande wrote-



Pull the other one wande.

That's article 53 sub-section V11/H of the Materialist catechism which the minions learn off by heart.