Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Poor spendi doesn't realize how he's exposed himself so often, that we can almost anticipate what he'll say before he says it. Gotta give him credit for changing his verbiage from post to post even though the meaning is static.

I never started bloviating about A designer so I can't think how I would stop. I am bloviating about the social and economic consequences of a belief and not about the belief itself. And I have never been bloviating about anything else from first to last.

Anybody who has read my posts will be aware of that. Francis for example.

But I suspect that few do read my posts and commenting on them without having properly understood them is the true hallmark of ignorance. It is well know that the ignorant project their ignorance onto others.



That statement brays ignorance of modern science. I have not been duped into thinking that atheists think thinking is meaningless. It is a simple fact which will only be denied by atheists who think thinking is not meaningless when it is taking place in what they say is a meaningless universe. It's a form of self flattery.

Take my word for it Joe--you are ignorant. You are the result of a **** with a genetic endowment in which you had no say and a set of Pavlovian conditioned reflexes mainly deriving from infancy. Had you been born a Hindu or a Jain you would think in ways that don't bear thinking about. And rich Hindus and Jains send their sons to be educated in the Christian world.

Once you ignore "consequences" you are out of the loop. You could not even begin to describe a society of 300,000,000 atheists. Going from zero atheists in the Senate and five in the House to 100 in the Senate and 435 in the House. And all US posters on A2K being devout atheists.

You would have to talk about soft furnishings and ovaries all day long.

What's that supposed to mean?

I thought enzymes were a catalytic organic agent which, for example, facilitate the excitation transmissions across the gap between two neurons. As when, following Du Bois Raymond (1877), the presynaptic cell influences the postsynaptic cell, in what is sometimes jokingingly referred to as thinking, or fantasising, either by electrical currents or chemical mediators.

Acetylcholine, a derivative of ergot, aka St Anthony's Fire, is thought to be released in the body on stimulation of the sympathetic ganglia and causes a burning sensation in the members, (Dale, Feldburg and Vogt, 1936), Speculating, one might suggest that it came about when our ancestor infusoria split into two distinct sexes on the division of labour adaptation, to which we all owe a debt of profound gratitude, in the service of the propagation of such a useful, though possibly dangerous, mutation in organic substance.

There's nothing to it effemm. Lingerie is a specific Christian artificial booster to the mechanism I assume judging by its ubiquitous presence in our world.

Was your Nobel Prize idol a bit of a nerd? Calamity Jane said that all the scientists she had met were nerds. And she's an anti-IDer but I suspect for different reasons than you lot are.

I can't imagine why anybody, least of all a man of Thomas's intelligence and general all round brilliance, could imagine that I think I am owed anything at all let alone meaning in the universe. What a very silly idea.

But if pretending that the universe has meaning reduces depression I am all in favour. Depressed people are economically useless. Avoiding that is a very good reason to believe in sacred **** in my opinion. It might be crazy but it's pretty damned effective. I'm a bit concerned that 300,000,000 atheists staring into the abyss of emptiness and futility won't be.

We might have to bring back whips to get the buggers motivated.

Your chances, ci, of anticipating my last three posts was absolute zero which is a state when all motion ceases.

Those who wring their hands over "what it all means," and then top it off with a small poisonous dose of prosyletizing need an awakening. H.L. Mencken has stated it well many time and here's one you might have missed:

"The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church, as an organization, has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings."

-- H L Mencken, Treatise on the Gods

And, if you don't mind my saying so LW , a complete load of facile, easy running, bullshit.

Mr Mencken was an elitist and a racist. His opinions shocked his own editor at Knopf. As a superior WASP one might expect little else. He wrote-



On behalf of A2Kers everywhere I will say that we are all very pleased that you set such a high value on his views. We all hope, I'm sure, that your doing so allows you to set a high value on your own personal "accomplishments" such as the skiddies in your underpants and your ability to extricate a dangling croggie from your nostril whilst waiting patiently for the lights to change to green and filling the void listening to Elton John's Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy album on the in-car entertainment thingy.

I bet you couldn't have predicted that last post either ci.

If it's so easy predicting my static posts let's see you predict the next one. Which might be an acronym or a contribution to the Never Ending Conversation game.

six unanswered posts by the spendi one, he must be really fired up today. He does provide suitable white space between posts.

You never know effemm. What is a white space to a committed evolutionist tree-pollarder and robin feeder might not be seen in quite the same way as more thoughtful, discerning and open-minded readers here might see it.

One really should try to stop oneself from thinking that what one thinks is what everyone thinks. It is not only a grave mistake intellectually but subjectively also when it is applied to the ladies and to other populations of the flora and fauna the essential features of which one is not oneself a party to.

In one's own interests I mean. Not in any absolute sense. In the general scheme of things nobody gives a flying **** for what any of us think.

When Nietzsche declared God is dead at an early stage in scientific progress he was only forseeing C.S.Lewis declaring that Man is dead when science had progressed further and into other disciplines besides collecting old bones and reading meaning into them like the Roman priesthoods read meaning into the entrails of beasts and fowl.

As a bag of electrical currents and chemical mediators it is obvious that no original thought is possible. Only novel rearrangements of the known masquerading as original thoughts using technical flummeries to baffle the audience are possible. Thus those who necessarily think of themselves as a bag of electrical currents and chemical mediators can have no original thoughts themselves. I'm using "themselves" colloquially rather than scientifically there for reasons of clarity and delicacy.

Which spells the end of science of course.

Your post is evidence should any be needed. On a scale of 1 to 1000 for originality it reads off at 0.0000rec.

Prose can be scientific without any reference to objects. I submit my post here to peer-review though I know I will not get a fair hearing and thus prove that peer-reviewing is a mutual ego massaging game not that much different dynamically than cruising on Clapham Common.

spendi, Your wet dream expectations to the "end of science" will never happen, but will further the disintegration of the christian churches. It's already happening in the US where at one time over 90% declared to be christians. That number continues to decrease every year with every generation, and losses of ten percent every decade means by the end of this century, very few christian adherents will exist - or disappear entirely. Scary isn't it? LOL

Their demise is guaranteed much sooner, because of the christians push for ID in our schools. Their extremism is what will kill them.

It's the white spaces where he makes the most sense.

Well ci. anybody born today is going to have to get to 91 to make it to the end of the century. All A2Kers will be gone and a majority long gone and forgotten.

The problem will arise when you get your act together and an even split comes to exist. You always assume there will be no reaction.

The Senate doesn't seem to be going anywhere in this regard and the House 5, probably shunned, atheists out of 435 is a bit derisory. And those people decide what happens. At ground level all sorts of things come into play. Certain things wouldn't be "sins" if we didn't want to get at them very badly. And it's easy for those with no responsibilities to have a flutter.

I have said "**** Saint Francis and his purity" myself on more occasions that I like to remember. These days my subjectivity is not so strong.

Mencken's diaries revealed some commentary that is politically incorrect but despite the allegations of racism and elitism, Mencken sometimes acted in a manner which tended to upset such views about his character. For example, the most published author during his tenure as editor of The Smart Set was a woman; he helped Jews escape from Nazi Germany during World War II; and on several occasions, Mencken referred to African-Americans as being the equal of whites, in stark contrast to his other overtly racist comments.

-Gore Vidal

He was probably shagging the woman he edited and in Harlem or Synanon when he said the other things. Assuming they are true.

Have you got the quote LW. I gave a quote. As things stand we only have your word for it.

You started putting your faith in the guy. Are you getting wobbly? That about husbands was shocking. Male chauvinist pig fundamentalism of the worst sort.

A snob actually. Nothing more.

Despite his fearsome reputation, Mencken in private life was a kind, gentle, considerate person who enjoyed playing music with a bunch of cronies every Saturday night for forty-four years and working in his backyard garden. In 1948 a massive stroke left him unable to read and write, and his career ended. The publication in 1989 of his Diary, with its anti-Semitic and racist comments, focused attention on him again. It has to be remembered, though, that such remarks were all too typical of the era in which he lived; he himself numbered scores of Jewish publishers, writers, physicians, and musicians among his good friends, and no man did more than he to encourage black writers and publish their work.

From Encyclopedia Britannica (end of quote)

At the time one could rarely tell if Mencken was dead serious or was in his Swiftian satirical irony mode and I'm certain that you still can't tell.

From Capitalist Magazine:


"Intelligent Design": Religion Masquerading as Science
by Keith Lockitch (September 27, 2005)

Eighty years after the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial, the anti-evolution forces have regrouped. Today, the battle in Dover, Pennsylvania, is over the teaching of "intelligent design," the view that life is so complex it must be the product of a "higher intelligence." The central issue under debate is whether "intelligent design" is, in fact, a genuine scientific theory or merely a disguised form of religious advocacy--creationism in camouflage.

Proponents of "intelligent design" aggressively market their viewpoint as real science, insisting it is not religiously based. Writes one leading advocate, Michael Behe: "The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself--not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs."

Proponents of "intelligent design" claim that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally flawed theory--that there are certain complex features of living organisms evolution simply cannot explain, but which can be explained as the handiwork of an "intelligent designer."

Cartoon by Cox and Forkum.

Their viewpoint is not religiously based, they insist, because it does not require that the "intelligent designer" be God. "Design," writes another leading proponent, William Dembski, "requires neither magic nor miracles nor a creator."

Indeed, "design" apparently requires surprisingly little of the "designer's" identity: "Inferences to design," contends Behe, "do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer." According to its advocates, the "designer" responsible for "intelligent design" in biology could be any sort of "creative intelligence" capable of engineering the basic elements of life. Some have even seriously nominated advanced space aliens for the role.

Their premise seems to be that as long as they don't explicitly name the "designer"--as long as they allow that the "designer" could be a naturally existing being, a being accessible to scientific study--that this somehow saves their viewpoint from the charge of being inherently religious in character.

But does it?

Imagine we discovered an alien on Mars with a penchant for bio-engineering. Could such a natural being fulfill the requirements of an "intelligent designer"?

It could not. Such a being would not actually account for the complexity that "design" proponents seek to explain. Any natural being capable of "designing" the complex features of earthly life would, on their premises, require its own "designer." If "design" can be inferred merely from observed complexity, then our purported Martian "designer" would be just another complex being in nature that supposedly cannot be explained without positing another "designer." One does not explain complexity by dreaming up a new complexity as its cause.

By the very nature of its approach, "intelligent design" cannot be satisfied with a "designer" who is part of the natural world. Such a "designer" would not answer the basic question its advocates raise: it would not explain biological complexity as such. The only "designer" that would stop their quest for a "design" explanation of complexity is a "designer" about whom one cannot ask any questions or who cannot be subjected to any kind of scientific study--a "designer" that "transcends" nature and its laws--a "designer" not susceptible of rational explanation--in short: a supernatural "designer."

Its advertising to the contrary notwithstanding, "intelligent design" is inherently a quest for the supernatural. Only one "candidate for the role of designer" need apply. Dembski himself--even while trying to deny this implication--concedes that "if there is design in biology and cosmology, then that design could not be the work of an evolved intelligence." It must, he admits, be that of a "transcendent intelligence" to whom he euphemistically refers as "the big G."

The supposedly nonreligious theory of "intelligent design" is nothing more than a crusade to peddle religion by giving it the veneer of science--to pretend, as one commentator put it, that "faith in God is something that holds up under the microscope."

The insistence of "intelligent design" advocates that they are "agnostic regarding the source of design" is a bait-and-switch. They dangle out the groundless possibility of a "designer" who is susceptible of scientific study--in order to hide their real agenda of promoting faith in the supernatural. Their scientifically accessible "designer" is nothing more than a gateway god--metaphysical marijuana intended to draw students away from natural, scientific explanations and get them hooked on the supernatural.

No matter how fervently its salesmen wish "intelligent design" to be viewed as cutting-edge science, there is no disguising its true character. It is nothing more than a religiously motivated attack on science, and should be rejected as such.

Copyright © 2005 Ayn Rand® Institute. All rights reserved.

It didn't enter my head that he was in Swiftian mode in the quote you put up LW but it did cross my mind in relation to the one I responded with. It also struck me that Germaine Greer might have derived her world famous statement--"All men are rapists" from his hangman/husband comparison.

I suppose he must be ironic when we want him to be.

One might not be able to ask the designer questions but it is possible to interpret the designer's mind from the characteristics of the product of the design.

How long would it have taken Aristotle confronted with an electric drill and an on/off switch to try to drill a hole in something? Finding a car with the key in the ignition I feel sure he would, within a week or two at most, have been racing all around the Parthenon giving the priestesses the V-sign.

Admittedly, the product "life on earth" would take a lot longer to interpret empirically and especially the variant "mankind" with which we are here exclusively concerned. But as a known need for such interpretations exists, indeed is demanded with some force, as this debate proves, it is obvious there will be a wide selection of unempirical interpretations until such time as an empirical one shows up, which, it is bootless to add, is a luxury for which we might have to wait some considerable time.

Indications are that the mind is a mathematical one. Professor Skinner used to ask students to bring a hungry pigeon to the lecture theatre. One that hadn't dined for 10 minutes. As he lectured he trained it to walk, if you can call what pigeons do walking, in a figure of 8. The pigeon was led to "believe" that if it walked in a particular direction there would be a parched-pea there. Which there might not have been. One might assume it was working on probabilities.

Thus, and it is obvious, from the premisses I have chosen, that it is a question of selection from a boatload of unempirical interpretations. And we would be as foolish as a man who chose a grain shovel to wipe his arse when a roll of Charmin was conveniently placed near to hand in an aesthetic porcelain dispenser with a twining red roses pattern, kiln-fired for preference, if we chose an interpretation which was illadapted to our circumstances. Human sacrifice say. Although a mild and survivable form of that has recently been observed in the higher echelons of the Pennsylvania judiciary.

Even if our man tried the grain shovel he would be unlikely to persist but we have had a long time to choose which unempirical interpretion of a designer's mind is best adapted for our use and, for better or for worse, we chose Christianity. Or at least our high-minded elites have done. And we are continually refining our choice.

And we are not doing so bad really. A few ups and downs with the latter being milked for all they are worth by the awkward squad who one might presume don't like parched-peas for one reason or another and prefer to strut about at random, puffed out chest, shitting all over the table as they go.

Do you think that's ironic LW?

The feminist polemicist Marilyn French wrote The Women's Room, in which she stated, "All men are rapists"