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Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

 
 
spendius
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 09:31 am
Why is everybody steering well clear of Business Principles and that other I mentioned earlier?

It is as if you seek obscurity and the concomitant confusion on purpose.

You are taking too much notice of words and not enough of actions.The advantage being that you can argue forever and never get to a conclusion.

No doubt you'll all ignore this as well but it will be on the record as will the disregard,which speaks volumes.
0 Replies
 
georgeob1
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 11:36 am
blatham wrote:

.

I think thomas' question points us in the wrong direction. It's probably more helpful to think of American schools not as causal in American religiosity and polarization but rather that American schools simply reflect that particular national religiosity and polarization. There are historical reasons for this (and for differences with Canada) and you might turn to Hofstadter for thorough explication, but I'm betting you won't. Protestant evangelical activism (of a relatively poorly educated and theologically unsophisticated sort) has played a role in US history of far greater significance and consequence than in Canada (or England or Europe).


So I guess that your answer to the question posed by Thomas and elaborated by me is that you will not answer it. Instead, you will answer another question. OK, but I believe the original question still has merit - it involves the absence of a correct intellectual grounding of science in philosophy in school curricula; it appears to be a potential central element in the ongoing public debate; and it involves the resistance of a significant segment of the American population to the intrusive demands placed on it by government authorities.

Thomas has noted that it was those same Protestant Evangelicals who founded Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the largest fraction of our original University system. While many (or most) of their visible spokesmen in the current political debate may appear (and, in some cases, be) unsophisticated and poorly educated, it is demonstrably false to imply that they either resist intellectual inquiry or are unintelligent themselves. Indeed if they truly have developed and operated this vast insidious conspiracy that poses such a threat to the established secular order and the apparatus of public agencies, they cannot be mere fools.

Quote:
A proponent of some theistic element in the universe does NOT have to be stupid, unthoughtful, or unlettered. There's a lot of sophisticated thought on this question going back even further than christian history. But very little of it has emerged from out of the American protestant tradition. Who here can even name an American protestant theologian of any stature? And if someone names, say, Plantinga, then what following can one point to? The reality of American religious thought sits us down in the company of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and others of the same sort, some better, such as Grapham, but many even less agreeable than those named.

The tradition has been anti-school/education in the main. The cliches and dichotomies we see in modern rhetoric (universities are elitist, feminine, non-practical, and probably destructive to the social good; the simple man is closer to god; etc) are found in American religious writing, ubiquitously, from the very beginning of the nation's history. Can any of us see a phenomenon like the "End Days" theology as popular or ascendant as it is in modern America happening in any other western country?


I don't deny the foolish excess you correctly cite. However you shouldn't ignore the central historical role these same Evangelicals played in the American Revolution and he creation of our democracy. The chief resulting difference between Americans and Anglo Canadians in those days was that the Americans preferred freedom over order and the Canadians order over freedom. Not a bad choice in my view. (I suspect the Tories who fled to Canada regarded their oppressors as an unsophisticated, unlettered mob. History has revealed the opposite was true.) We later got beneficial infusions of Irish, Polish, and Italian Catholics, German & Scandanavian Lutherans, and Jews from Eastern Europe, but that did not fully displace the original culture.

I can't think of any particularly prominent Episcopal or Anglican theologians either, and note that the most prominent of them, John Henry Newman was a convert to Catholicism.

The cliches which you ascribe to these Evangelicals are fully mached by those you and other of their critics cast (with much complacent confidence) on them. Frankly I don't see much difference in the cant of the polar extremes of "Blue State" and "Red State" America today. Both involve roughly equal measures of oversimplification and unthinking accceptance of doctrine. Only the doctrinal details are different - Biblical & fundamentalist on the one hand and secular materialist on the other. Not a particularly attractive menu in my view.

By the way - I have made a commitment to read Hofstadter's book - but only after Lola confirms certain conditions have been met. I mean to do it promptly when that happy outcome occurs.
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rosborne979
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 11:49 am
adele_g wrote:
goodfielder wrote:
Doesn't that suggest something to you adele? I'm not being rude or unkind (I hope) but it strikes me (as a non-theist) that ID'ers with their religious leaning must step away from the scientific approach and seek sympathetic sources.


I don't think that those who pursue the Intelligent Design theory must step away from the scientific approach.


Intelligent Desgn is not a scientific theory by definition; it fails the requirement of naturalism. No debate or peer review on this is required. It's a non-scientific theory, it's dead before it even starts. It's like that parrot on Monty Python who has passed away, deceased, demised... It's a non-starter from the beginning.
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spendius
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 12:17 pm
That's daft Ros.

If it's a dead parrot then it must have been alive sometime which it can't have been because it would then have passed the requirement of naturalism and be able to come under a scientific theory which you say is impossible.

I refer you to my earlier remark which has again been disregarded as if it is an incoherent heckle-

Quote:
It is as if you seek obscurity and the concomitant confusion on purpose.


I would be very interested in poster's reaction to a question asked of a leading public figure which was just blandly ignored and talked over as if it hadn't happened.There is a famous book written by a famous American which exposes the business principle in American colleges and universities.And it isn't Hofstadter,which I have read as well.And there are many,many works of art and critiques which deal with the power of the feminine principle in terms which may be designated intelligent design.

And once again that disregard is on the record.
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spendius
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 12:24 pm
Thomas-

Your signature reads-

Quote:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

-- H.L. Mencken


I have been watching Fox News for the last couple of hours and I got to wondering how Mr Mencken would propose to deal with the situation on the southern coast of the US in view of the tenor of his remark.

Don't you think his mindset is a little out of date.
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rosborne979
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 12:37 pm
spendius wrote:
That's daft Ros.

If it's a dead parrot then it must have been alive sometime which it can't have been because it would then have passed the requirement of naturalism and be able to come under a scientific theory which you say is impossible.


Ok, my attempt at humor was obviously unappreciated.

Here, I'll make it a bit more succinct: Intelligent Desgn is not a scientific theory by definition; it fails the requirement of naturalism. No debate or peer review on this is required. The standard definition of science prevails. (sorry for any previous confusion)
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Thomas
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 12:38 pm
spendius wrote:
Don't you think his mindset is a little out of date.

No I don't. The situation in New Orleans is terrible, and it will take huge investments in new dikes to prevent it from happening again. But flooding of New Orleans was not one of the hobgoblins American politicians have been menacing the populace with. Indeed, as I recall, the Army Corps of Engineers has cut its budget for maintaining the levee system over the last few years. Also, I predict that everyone is so overwhelmed right now that they overestimate the reconstruction effort. Please tell me how long Fox thinks it will take the city to be up and running again. I will bet you even odds that the actual time span will be smaller.
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spendius
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 01:07 pm
Thomas-

I'll bet it's longer.A month some say-they must be kidding.

The problem with Mencken is that these politicians can't just appear from nowhere when a disaster happens.They have to practice and if it's on hobgoblins so be it.They need structures and procedures to deal with many,many things not least money exchanges.They have already waived some clean air legislation without reference to the legislature or the Supreme Court.They are also prepared for a nuclear attack.And other "hobgoblins" which Mencken never heard of.
It is out of date I'm afraid.Maybe I would wish otherwise but that's the size of it in these types of systems.There are some signs of panic.The word "overwhelmed" was used once by an official.
The damage extends much further than New Orleans.

BTW-Have you read the Malleus Malificarum?
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spendius
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 01:15 pm
Ros-It wasn't unappreciated.The Monte Python sketch on the parrot was copied out of Roget.It's a technique.

I go with you all the way providing you use the definition of science I gave.(Not mine-it's old stuff).

I wasn't in the least confused.I'm sticking with human nature.I'll admit that metaphysics can be good fun though as this thread has proved.
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farmerman
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 01:20 pm
No matter how many times evidence from credible sources is shown to ElsieT, she will repeatedly make the same tiresome and silly posts about Miller,Urey; and Java Man(now including other suspect specimens)

Millers experiment has been repeated in labs numbers of times with varying atmospheric components and the same thing comes up each time. Roughly 15 to 25 % of the chemicals produced are nucleotides or simple amino acids. (The point about "formaldehyde being present", is exactly what chemists would predict. For the direct oxidation of hydrocarbons yields formalin(and chlorine is a better oxidizer than is oxygen itself). Animals called extremophiles can thrive in toxic solutions and compounds that would croak a horse. We know so much about surface chemistry now that the "modified atmosphere" sampled from gas inclusions in Isua Rocks 3.5 Billion years old, have given us plenty of information about how to run the same experiment. Todays labs recover and id about 25% amino precursors because we know the early atmosphere WAS containing excess H2. One of the uses of formalin is to introduce organic aliphatics to amine groups to thus create (under specific catalysis with iron) a {TADAAA} amino acid.How bout them dimwited chemicals in a iron rich claay substrate. DAYUM.
Now Im certain that Elsie will keep reintroducing her silly point because thats what Creationists do, they beat and flog a point to death and then try to revive it by further beating and flogging

The Java man comments from Dubois were simpe data "Mining" by AIG predecessors.When Elsie brought it up last time I went looking through U Az archives and found WAlter Browns "In the Beginning" from which the Dubois "admission was published in 1937"
Back then, quote mining was a clear approach for the Creation geologists to make hay. Henry Morris used to do it all the time so why not Walter?. What Brown claimed that Dubois said was

"...Eugene Dubois , 40 years after he found Java man< conceded that Java"man" was just a large gibbon..." (In the Beginning)
What Dubois actually said was

"pithecanthropus was not a man but a giant genus related to gibbons, however, superior to gibbons on account of its exceedingly large brain volume and further distinguished by its FACULTY OF ASSUMING AN ERECT ATTITUDE AND GAIT..."
Now this was at a time when the "upright posture" was not considered as important as evidence of a "BIG BRAIN"

As far as Nebraska Man and Piltdown man, perhaps you should study more about how these fakes were first presented and how they were discredited within the sciences. Fraud is certainly to be sought out anywhere.Scientists love this ****. They love to extract mistakes and topple the greats, AND, No one uses Piltdown and Nebraska as anything more than interesting stories of competitive fossil hunters and overzealous town lawyers and museum directors who liked to be looked at with deep respect and awe.The same stories of the old German fossil hunters and reconstrucors led to the "Old man who witnessed the Flood" (which was really a pleisiosaur). SAmuel Marsh and E D Cope were famous fossil hunters and scientists after the Civil war who actually hired bands of Stand Wadies Indian soldiers to ride down and attack each others expeditions, with the idea that a sizable fortune would be payed to whoever shot Cope or marsh. These are the "Cartoon stories of science, not the main feature"
Im still in shock about how the Creationists have erected a museum in the Paluxy shales to celebrate a fake human footprint that was an "enhanced" dinosaur print , just so we could be told that men and dinosaurs lived together in the Cretaceous.
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Setanta
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 01:29 pm
Thomas wrote:
No I don't. The situation in New Orleans is terrible, and it will take huge investments in new dikes to prevent it from happening again. But flooding of New Orleans was not one of the hobgoblins American politicians have been menacing the populace with. Indeed, as I recall, the Army Corps of Engineers has cut its budget for maintaining the levee system over the last few years. Also, I predict that everyone is so overwhelmed right now that they overestimate the reconstruction effort. Please tell me how long Fox thinks it will take the city to be up and running again. I will bet you even odds that the actual time span will be smaller.


Just a note on the issue of flooding in southern Louisiana. What you refer to as "levees" are not in fact at issue. There is, to the northwest of Baton Rouge, a bayou and river known as the Achafalaya. This was previously a bed of the Mississippi River. In the roughly 15,000 years since the "birth" of the Mississippi river, it has carved out many river beds which are now the beds of other rivers, or are bayous, or are lakes. Examples include Reelfoot lake (15,000 acres) in northwest Tennessee and the Big Muddy River in southern Illinois. At the extent of the Wisconsonian glaciation, the area which is now the Ohio River valley was drained by a feature geologists refer to as the Michigan River. The lower reaches of the Michigan River provided the bed of the lower Mississippi after the retreat of the glaciers. However, the Mississippi drains a much larger area than did the Michigan River, and it is fed by many major rivers: the Ohio, which is fed by the Scioto and Wabash Rivers to the north and the confluence of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers to the south; the Illinois River; the Wisconsin and Chippewah Rivers; the Missouri River system; and the Arkansas River system--and that only lists the major river and river systems which feed the Mississippi.

At some point in the 17th century (or so the Corps of Engineers believes) the Achafalaya basin was formed when a huge windfall of trees--possibly the result of another hurricane--formed a massive log jam in the Mississippi. As the river found a new path to the sea, the waters in the Achafalaya basin subsided, and no longer drained to the south, but rather formed a small river which drained the bayou into the Mississippi. It was at this time that the river took its present course. The present bed of the Mississippi River below the Achafalaya basin is insufficient to handle the volume of water which drains to that point, so that levees have been erected over time. At what was the point of the 17th century log jam, the Corps of Engineers erected the "Old River Control Structure" which was designed to prevent the Mississippi from returning to its older bed--the Achafalaya--which is where the river "wants" to go.

This was done because Baton Rouge and New Orleans were by then cities which depended upon the river, and they would have been left "high and dry" had the river returned to its ancient bed. The lower Mississippi is always just below flood stage. Lake Ponchartrain is insufficient to take more than a slight increase in the volume of water. The levee system assures that the river cannot leave its banks in times of "normal" flow, but cannot realistically handle dramatic increase in the volume of water. The general flooding in the Mississippi basin in 1997, from Minnesota to the Red River in Louisiana dramatically demonstrated the effect of unwisely seeking to keep the "Father of Waters" in a course to which it does not naturally flow. Nevertheless, the reality of existing communities obliges the Corps of Engineers to constantly attempt to "tame" the river, and keep it in the bed which human activity has selected for it. Even had the budget of the Corps been sufficient to spend extravagently on the levee system, even had no levees failed, the river would have overflowed the levee system given the sudden and dramatic increase in the volume of water occassioned by the storm.

Unless, of course, intelligent design dictates otherwise.
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farmerman
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 01:35 pm
Thomas, ok, just dont go tryin to float up in any clouds.

Ive lived in NAwlins and worked on the oil platforms from Morgan City. The platforms will take longer to re "boot" becasue they contain so much ductile iron and shearable pipe fittings.(I just ound out that the spot market has gas up about 80 cents a gallon)
If this were just a Mississippi event, we could divert the entire river by the Atchafalaya Cuttoff and Nawlins would be dry in a week. However since the Lake has dropped the levees, thats gonna take some major engineering thinking. New Orleans should not even be there any more. Its a town that will keep suffereing catastrophic hits until, finally, the erosion that is taking the wetlands out of Barataria will reach the town and theyll have to stem the entire Gulf of Mexico.
God I feel for those people.
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spendius
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 01:38 pm
Thomas-

It was remiss of me not to say that the structures and procedures are part of intelligent design.We are designing it but how we do it is so fiendish that it has to be explained by other methods.We don't actually know ourselves.Yet(?)Maybe the explanations are part of the design.Money and women most certainly are.That's why priests have to be skint and go more than short.And not bother about prehistoric whatnot.Don't Look Back the man said.

It's a mystery.It might even be God.Thinking it through so to speak.
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farmerman
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 01:56 pm
pronounced
CHA" Fa LIE' Yeh
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spendius
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 02:26 pm
I sure did start something by mentioning I had been watching Fox News.

Worth it though.Interesting.One poster wants to bet me at evens when I can't lose,another gives a fast description of how ID works and another an on the spot account from near the sharp end with a policy suggestion which we might have to look into at some point.

Pretty good.
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wandeljw
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 02:42 pm
I am jealous, spendius. (No one paid attention to my post.)
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spendius
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 03:19 pm
This one you mean wandi

Quote:
In order for biological intelligent design theory to be considered science, there must first be an objective method that can significantly differentiate a designed organism from an organism that evolved through natural processes.


By "significantly" do you mean by a margin big enough for you to see it?

It does make a significant difference.

I think the point these other guys are making is that a natural process is designed.A beer can can be seen as a natural thing looked at with Warholian eyes.So can science itself.Is a honeycomb natural or the honey or both.A honeycomb is a bit like a beer can.

And I'm not sure we have worked out what objective means yet.
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wandeljw
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 03:22 pm
thanks, spendius!

best response i've had so far!
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Thomas
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 03:29 pm
wandeljw wrote:
In order for biological intelligent design theory to be considered science, there must first be an objective method that can significantly differentiate a designed organism from an organism that evolved through natural processes.

Testing whether the theory can predict if something was designed or evolved, as evaluated with some objects for which we know the answer, would be a good thing. But I'd settle for a demonstration that ID can predict anything we don't know already.
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georgeob1
 
  1  
Wed 31 Aug, 2005 03:32 pm
wandeljw wrote:
Adele gave an honest answer to the definition of designer question. I would also appreciate positive or negative comments (from anyone) on the following statement:
In order for biological intelligent design theory to be considered science, there must first be an objective method that can significantly differentiate a designed organism from an organism that evolved through natural processes.


OK, I'll give it a try (I believe this is the "ignored" post.)

I believe your proposition is demonstrably false on two points. First Intelligent Design is, in its essence, outside of science. If science is ever to demonstrate existence opf ID, it can happen only by the elimination of all other possibilities. Second, and on a very practical level, we already have objective evidence of the failure of universal differentiation between "natural" organisms and those developed through some form of intelligent design. Humans, through crop cultivation and amimal husbandry, have been intervening in natural selection to 'intelligently' design certain traits into plants and animals they use for millenia. While it may be a simple matter to differentiate (say) between the DNA of a wolf and that of a chocolate Labrador, based on the ample comparative data available, there is no universal objective characteristic of the DNA that would identify the human role in selecting breeding pairs and thus designing the progeny. Same goes for hybrid plants, both those developed by traditional means and others resulting from modern GM methods.
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