Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Spendius,

You accuse me of evading "debate" but I'm looking for it !

I don't think debate consists of your continuous restating of your case about "anti-IDers and social consequences". Such a position reminds me of the Sci-Fi scenario of the starship several generations on, where the descendents had forgotten the original mission of colonizing another planet. The ship had become "their universe". "Scientists" had evolved into priests. Newton's equation for gravititational attraction between bodies was seen as referring to the attraction between human bodies, and woe betide the reactionary who challenged this view and threatened the social order.

So are you actually saying more than that you are entrenched in such a scenario, and using it as a platform to air your personal hang-ups (e.g. with "paper qualifications" and animal instincts)? I'm looking for evidence.

Fasduhcinduhatduhingduhduhduh.

Hey this is easy.

Yeah--on your terms which are chosen specifically so you can't lose to the jury.

That's the game all the anti-IDers play and they wish to force evolution on the kids in schools in areas where the population don't want it.



I only restate that because anti-IDers refuse to answer it. To their discredit.



I don't do Sci-Fi. It's a cop out as Henry Fielding teaches. It's disengaged from what art is all about. But I will say that only those who dislike the social order would think of threatening it.



When evidence for religion loses its power under the impact of science it can still become-



If you don't accept the primary importance of the social consequences of promoted ideas it is not me you are looking to debate with. It is other islands of Stoical alienation which adhere necessarily to a "sad earnestness and a fatigued endurance of an almost intolerable burden".

The Stoic cannot admit that evil exists. That would be a blasphemy for him. But would he be a Stoic if evil, threatening to reason, did not exist?

I'm a businessman and practical matters are uppermost in my mind. Those who get their living "off" the budget may well think ideas are paramount. I'm a slave to human nature. Consequences are the only game in town.

It is hard to be good as Aristotle said. There is the drive to the sensual urges in all of us. His remedy was to practice virtue from earliest childhood. And evolution in schools cannot but inculcate the practice of the survival of the fittest, the struggle of all against all, red in tooth and claw and the free play of uninhibited animal instincts.

To promote the teaching of evolution with integrity you need to defend those characteristics and show their benefits and, whatismore, show them to a society which has got where it is by the practice of their opposites. Imperfections in the practice being merely proof of the strength of the animal instincts to be overcome and not proof of the inadequacy of Christian love and charity.

.....closing credits....heavenly choir...not a dry eye in the house.

Didn't Bradley Hardaker rest his case on cynical remarks of that sort?

I'm sure anti-IDers can rally their troops around such sentiments.

spendi, You keep using the term "anti-IDers" which is wrong-headed and misses the mark. What we are saying is that there are no gods. ID is an offspring from nothing.

It's an offspring of the human mind. Which is nothing for you as is everything else having no meaning or purpose. You're in a circularity.

Atheism thus also is an offspring of the human mind.

What you fail to understand is the obvious; the human mind is a slave to what we are taught about gods since childhood. That's the reason no matter what religious belief whether Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and all those gods created by the Greeks and Egyptians (and elsewhere), the children usually lockstep in their belief about their god(s).

It is the rare human that determines and understands there are no gods. All we ask is "where's the beef (evidence)?"

We all know ci. that you are a "rare human". That's why we are conservatives. We strive to keep things the way they are.

god knows, unless the BEEF is in B E l i E F

Quote--We all know ci. That you are a "rare human". That's why we are conservatives. We strive to keep things the way they are.--- unquote

And if you wanna be one of us Christians.. all you have to do for starters is - Believe in the bible and fairy's ( can get good money from the tooth one ) and father Xmas ( another good asset giver ) and Ghosts and heaven and hell and spirits in the spirit world and what your priest tells you ( unless he's a priest from another religion ) and of course if there is something you desperately need... Just get down on your knees and pray... So simple.

Not so simple; getting down on my knees at my age is murder. LOL

I do not know which makes a man more conservative"to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.
- John Maynard Keynes

What's the point in quoting a Don't Know?

And there's no point in considering the future when the great socialist said that in the long run we are all dead.

You still have reading comprehension problems. The statement is an either or and is the entire irony of the statement.

Go back to bed or the pub.

I'd paraphrase it that I don't know what's worse, that the conservative is stuck immobile in the present, or that they have learned nothing from the past.

I doesn't mean anything really--irony or not. "more conservative" than who?

And it would be very difficult to know nothing of the past or the present. Scientifically the statement is dross. I would never quyote dross.

And how can anything be immobile in a dynamic world of motion?

And he doesn't know either. It's idiotic. Is that what you've give the kids?

You're hopelessly a sophist.

LW, That's a compliment for spendi. LOL

Well, it has a general classification as a philosophy, but marked by a fallacious reasoning.