Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

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And in both cases I agree that the fact that ID cannot be proved nor disproved via scientific principles is in fact relevent.

. Go on, convince someone that your " relevance" = understanding of how things work.

Admit it, you started this with a comment posted reflecting on your granddaughters observation (which is a very familiar empty argument employed by Creationists). Its also One that most of us have heard so many times before by persons who frequented this and an earlier related thread.Its such a shallow observation that I have little patience regarding it. From that post on , I haveobserved that youve managed to not take a firm stand on anything, youre saying now that you are merely trying to make the point that ID exists. Noone has denied that ID, as a philosophical construct, does exist. As a factual testable theory, however it brings nothing and is being sapped of its " hybrid vigor" each successive day . You can be as combative and passive-aggressive as you wish but facts are facts, ID is pretty much a sham.

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farmerman wrote:

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And in both cases I agree that the fact that ID cannot be proved nor disproved via scientific principles is in fact relevent.
. Go on, convince someone that your " relevance" = understanding of how things work.

Admit it, you started this with a comment posted reflecting on your granddaughters observation (which is a very familiar empty argument employed by Creationists). Its also One that most of us have heard so many times before by persons who frequented this and an earlier related thread.Its such a shallow observation that I have little patience regarding it. From that post on , I haveobserved that youve managed to not take a firm stand on anything, youre saying now that you are merely trying to make the point that ID exists. Noone has denied that ID, as a philosophical construct, does exist. As a factual testable theory, however it brings nothing and is being sapped of its " hybrid vigor" each successive day . You can be as combative and passive-aggressive as you wish but facts are facts, ID is pretty much a sham.

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"A cloud of believers". I like that. But one wonders what sort of cloud is referred to here...nimbus, stratus, cirro-cumulus?

And what sort of sky witnesses all of this hovering? Would it be the sky over, say, Asia? An overcast of Buddhists? Or coursing in from off the South Pacific...a thunderhead of Animists? And in the high valles around K2...a morning mist of Hindus?

Nothing like being in the middle of a cloud to make reality really pop out and present itself.

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I just got back from the pub and this was the first thing I read-

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Nothing like being in the middle of a cloud to make reality really pop out and present itself.

I thought to myself " never a truer word spoken in jest".

Speaking of walking home from the pub reminds me that as I did so a few minutes ago I figured out the difference between "drunk", "pissed" and "completely bladdered".

Drunk is when you can walk straight as long as you don't think about about anything else other than walking straight. Pissed is when you can't walk straight even though you are concentrating on doing so. Completely bladdered is when you have no view on whether walking straight is a good thing or not.

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Foxy wrote-

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Spendi, I know who Wilhelm Reich is, but that's about it. He didn't get into the fields that most interested me.

Are you a nun Foxy.

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ros wrote-

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Gnomes and Fairies can't be proved or disproved by scientific principles either, do you think that is also a relevant fact worth telling everyone about?

The kindergarten went home at 3 o'clock ros. The rock and rollers have hired the school hall for a gig. It helps to pay for the boiler maintenance.

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spendius wrote:

Foxy wrote-

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Spendi, I know who Wilhelm Reich is, but that's about it. He didn't get into the fields that most interested me.

Are you a nun Foxy.

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Foxy wrote-

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The one thing that you Chumly, Farmerman, Wandel et al can't seem to get through your head is that NOBODY is arguing that ID is relevant science.

Oh! I am. We've done matter and radiation and whatnot to the point of pointlessness. We are on higher things now. Scientifically. Anti-IDers are fighting in the last ditch against the psychological and sociological sciences. They know that politicians are only interested in one thing and that turning Asia, say, into glass has few advantages over turning it into molten glass. It's a bureaucratic battle in the institutions of the "higher learning". The losing side commonly gets indignancy coefficient meters banging up on the red marker.

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spendius wrote:

Foxy wrote-

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The one thing that you Chumly, Farmerman, Wandel et al can't seem to get through your head is that NOBODY is arguing that ID is relevant science.

Oh! I am. We've done matter and radiation and whatnot to the point of pointlessness. We are on higher things now. Scientifically. Anti-IDers are fighting in the last ditch against the psychological and sociological sciences. They know that politicians are only interested in one thing and that turning Asia, say, into glass has few advantages over turning it into molten glass. It's a bureaucratic battle in the institutions of the "higher learning". The losing side commonly gets indignancy coefficient meters banging up on the red marker.

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Foxy wrote-

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A very liberated one with hubby, kids, and a granddaughter, Spendi

Sheesh. Why do I always end up with the grannies? Maybe I'm only appreciated by ladies of experience and condition. It comforts me to think so. I never did go for gauche virgins. It was too easy and everybody knows that anything easy is not worth doing.

That's probably why I picked The Lives of Gallant Ladies by the Abbe Brantome off the shelves in preference to Computers Made Easy by Larry Stethascopisky.

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Chum wrote-

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Both my text and Foxfyre's text are bizarre, the difference being my text is more plausible.

That might well be the case in the estimation of your friends but it isn't in mine.

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fm wrote-

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The above clip is not even a sentence. As for your present fascination with bee communication, Id witnessed that "dance" but never could decode it. Nor have I the slightest idea about its means of development of this trait.

It's not an irreducible complexity by any chance is it? I thought anti-IDers could explain a simple thing like that. The voice over was explaining it. After a fashion.

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Foxfyre wrote:

The one thing that you Chumly, Farmerman, Wandel et al can't seem to get through your head is that NOBODY is arguing that ID is relevant science.

The reason we are responding the way we are is because your comments are making it sound as though you ARE arguing that ID is relevant science... and I now see why.

Your comment said this:

Foxfyre wrote:

It depends. We have what the Bible describes as a "cloud of witnesses" who have experienced God who will testify to certainties based on that experience.

When we have a similar cloud of witnesses who can testify to experience with gnomes and fairies, then we would have to think about that wouldn't we?

To you, your first comment is a statement of reason and truth, and your second statement is a counter point of unreason, so as an analogy, your whole point was that Gnomes and Fairies are unreasonable just like ID.

HOWEVER, to us, your first statement is as unreasonable as your second, so from our point of view, your entire point would be that ID is reasonable.

This is a clear case of two points of view (yours and ours) being so different that the context of the intended analogy are not only lost, but inverted.

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ros, you should have been a trial lawyer. However I guess your deep sense of morality intervened.
Spendi, I suppose that if you wish to call a bees dance an "irreducible complexity" you are allowed. However, The way I see it, all irreducible complexities are announced by merely claiming that something cannot be traced to an earlier trait , and they do it without any supportive evidence. SO, youre in the right company if you do.

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fm-

That wasn't the point I made. I can imagine, if I stretch it a bit, that elaborate and careful study could possibly explain how the wiggle dance works. Not that I think that the expenditure of attempting it is justified but I can see that those who are appointed to do the job would naturally think otherwise.

The point was to explain the reversal in humans of that trust which members of a species have for each other. The bees trust the communication.

Norman Mailer said something like- if you see someone offering to do you good, run. Humans, when they inform other humans where the juice is are usually casting a fancy bait. Not always of course. Some mothers might be genuine in this respect but I see a lot of encouragement from mothers that seems to be designed to reflect the superior nature of the mother's genetic make-up. But you know what I mean I trust.

Now- if we simply evolved from out of the animal world how is this reversal explained. One only has to read Fielding or even Homer to see that it is no modern thing. Even your own ideas contain the shaman and the priests tricking the population using mumbo-jumbo and what right do you have to try to give the impression that scientists are trustworthy?

But that's a secondary question. How does that natural trait get reversed in humans and is it the source of our success when modified by Christianity?

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farmerman wrote:

ros, you should have been a trial lawyer. However I guess your deep sense of morality intervened.

A few years ago a professor was running a study, and he was using lawyers as test subjects instead of rats. This caught the attention of a local newspaper, and a reporter asked the professor why they were using laywers instead of rats, and the professor said, "Young man, we would like to use rats, but there are some things a rat just won't do". Smile

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Gustave Flaubert undertook a massive amount of research in the composition of Salammbo.

Does he describe a society in which that reversal of the natural trait already spoken of is unmodified by Christianity. And the same may be said of The Old Testament. I can't recall one action in Salammbo that wasn't motivated by either an instinctual drive or an ulterior motive. The book is devoid of morality as we know it. There is nothing his hero does that is not motivated by the knowledge that his only way back to his previous existence as a dealer in women is through Carthage and in defeating it.

Salammbo seems to me to be the work of a serious intellectual. I think that when Flaubert later said about it that-"the pedestal was too big for the statue" he meant that what was sweet about his Carthaginian girl, nature itself almost, was fundamentally uninteresting to a modern mind.

Christianity is an imperfect system because it is managed by human beings and what it is attempting to manage is a virtually intractable problem. These two obvious facts make it an easy target for attacks but that is no reason to argue for its demise. It is defeatist. Anti-IDers seem to me to be attacking the imperfections of an imperfect system as someone might criticise a meal in a restaurant forgetting that we once ate raw meat when we could get it and uncooked vegetables. Which is to say they are self indulgent spoiled brats.

They need to show us what life without Christian values would look like as Huxley nearly managed to do in Brave New World. and maybe Burroughs does in Naked Lunch. Until anti-IDers do that I am not following them no matter how scientific and truthful are their propositions. Without it they are superficial as was obvious at Dover.

I prefer the real authors to these jumped up, narrow minded, book of the month self publicists.

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Nice joke ros. Makes my point better than I did.

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INTELLIGENT DESIGN CONFERENCE UPDATE

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Freedom of Speech vs. License
(By Ronald K. Wetherington, SMU Daily, 04/11/07)

It is noted that Aeschylus, in the 5th century B.C., wrote that truth is the first victim of war. As the conflict between science and religion once again heats up, truth is again in danger of being the victim. An academic campus is logically the appropriate setting for the science-religion debate, but it ought not to become a battlefield, lest truth be sacrificed by emotion and freedom become license.

It is for this reason that academics must be very careful not to tread heavily on either freedom of speech or its unreasoned license. Just as truth itself grows and changes with experience, so the pursuit of it without open debate has always the possibility of leading to falsehood.

It is understandable, then, that many of us in the sciences were taken by surprise and reacted strongly to the announcement that Seattle's Discovery Institute had scheduled a conference on "Darwin vs. Design" this semester in McFarlin Auditorium. This is not to be a debate or balanced discussion, but rather a partisan promotion of the assertion that design in nature constitutes scientific evidence for a creator, the so-called theory of Intelligent Design (ID).

Our protest (initially, a call for disallowing the conference until its legal scheduling was confirmed) immediately drew claims that we are trying to "censor scientists and scholars advocating Intelligent Design." The Institute further claimed that we are "trying to intimidate people who are in some way associated with researching Intelligent Design into being quiet, rather than engaging in a civil debate about the scientific merits of their arguments."

This is patently untrue, and is but one reason for our objection to the venue. The conference will promote this and other false statements designed to discredit science and scientists. In fact, some of us have actively engaged in debate with creationists and ID supporters both in our own science classrooms and at public forums on campus. In 1992, the university hosted a three-day symposium on "Darwinism: Scientific Inference or Philosophical Preference?" Five evolutionists and five anti-evolutionists gave presentations and engaged in friendly debate. No intimidation. No censorship.

We continue to encourage casting light on these issues and reducing the heat of passion. The coming ID conference is more likely to generate heat. We should not misunderstand the avowed intent of these conferences (an identical one was held this March in Knoxville). They are carefully planned to further the Institute's goal to "encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence's [sic] that support the faith, as well as to 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture." This evangelical motive is carefully disguised in their promotional material.

It is hardly censorship to demand both intellectual honesty and forthrightness in any public program on a university campus. The program purports, by its title, to be a scientific examination of "Darwin v. Design." Truth has already become victim, alas. The university erred in scheduling this.

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wande quoted-

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It is hardly censorship to demand both intellectual honesty and forthrightness in any public program on a university campus.

He means intellectual honesty and forthrightness as he understands it. There are plenty of matters involving intellectual honesty and forthrightness that the university wouldn't go near with a bargepole.

Is the university not just hiring out its facilities. Is it not as simple as that.
Wethers seems to have little confidence in his position if he's frightened of an itsy-bitsy conference. We all know what conferences are for.

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Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

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