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To: Heartlander

What is the use of designing something that doesn’t work all that well? Intelligent design is not a falsifiable argument as I can’t disprove that the designer doesn’t exist and Dr. Behe cannot prove that he does. He can bring up instances which he feels (cannot prove however) shows a designer. By the same token, I can demonstrate evolution but cannot prove or disprove a supernatural designer.


12 posted on 10/21/2014 8:48:36 AM PDT by JimSEA
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To: JimSEA
What is the use of designing something that doesn’t work all that well?

You presume you know the purpose of the design. How very god-like of you.

13 posted on 10/21/2014 8:55:15 AM PDT by kosciusko51 (Enough of "Who is John Galt?" Who is Patrick Henry?)
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To: JimSEA

My take is ID is not the focus or intent; perhaps the motive but it is irrelevant to possible utility of the perspective.

What is useful perhaps is disregarding mechanics and focusing on interactions or as referred to in this as ‘a set of relations’. How much farther can science be advanced by this approach? I think a lot.

Other questions beg, can a set of relations be mapped independent of the organism’s anatomy (mechanics)? I think in some cases yes. What relations are ‘introduced by’ or more correctly ‘created by’ distinctions in anatomy? Etc.

There is one tautology to all of science:

“All models are false, some are useful.”


16 posted on 10/21/2014 9:04:35 AM PDT by Hostage (ARTICLE V)
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To: JimSEA
You told me you are a Christian – you obviously believe in a Designer – yet you engage in these threads religiously, denying any design – I don’t get it…

The premise of theistic evolution is incoherent. The “theistic” part connotes a creator God who knows what he wants to do and does it. The “evolution” part connotes a process that is random and in no need of supervision by any conscious agent because it is sufficient unto itself. So theistic evolution might be rephrased as “a system whereby God creates using a process that he cannot influence in any way and which has no need of him.” Huh?

If the theistic evolutionist responds, “Oh I don’t mean that kind of evolution. I mean the kind of evolution which is guided by God to fulfill his purposes,” then the true evolutionist will reply, “Well, that’s no kind of evolution. That’s some sort of creation scenario and you have no right to use the evolution word.”

“But!,” protests the theistic evolutionist, “I want you to know that I have nothing to do with those Intelligent Design idiots. I’m one of you! I’m one of the smart guys who is up on science, not some primitive religious fanatic. I truly do believe that Darwin got it right and random mutation coupled with natural selection is all there is. All I’m saying is that God uses that process to create all the living things on Earth.”

“Oh brother,” says the true evolutionist, “You just don’t get it do you? As soon as you toss God into the equation you blow evolution to smithereens and reveal yourself as exactly what you say you aren’t—a religious nut case. Evolution doesn’t need god, or goals, or interference by any intelligent agent. All evolution needs is a steady supply of random mistakes and the process of elimination called natural selection. That will get you to any form of life no matter how complex. It’s beautiful and you’re just too stupid to understand that its self sufficiency IS its beauty. Now get lost. You bore me.”

As I’ve played out this imaginary dialogue, I hope I’ve made clear that the last thing a theistic evolutionist wants is to be invited into the ID camp. The whole point of being a theistic evolutionist is to be good buddies with the smart guys of the world, the evolutionists; yet, to keep a toe in the belief system they grew up with and towards which they retain warm and fuzzy feelings. In any showdown, whether it be abortion, euthanasia, or school textbooks, staying in harmony with evolution will trump warm and fuzzy feelings about religious heritage.
-Laszlo Bencze

Now, as to your claim that ID is not falsifiable – I’ll let Behe respond:

The National Academy of Sciences has objected that intelligent design is not falsifiable, and I think that’s just the opposite of the truth. Intelligent design is very open to falsification. I claim, for example, that the bacterial flagellum could not be produced by natural selection; it needed to be deliberately intelligently designed. Well, all a scientist has to do to prove me wrong is to take a bacterium without a flagellum, or knock out the genes for the flagellum in a bacterium, go into his lab and grow that bug for a long time and see if it produces anything resembling a flagellum. If that happened, intelligent design, as I understand it, would be knocked out of the water. I certainly don’t expect it to happen, but it’s easily falsified by a series of such experiments.

Now let’s turn that around and ask, How do we falsify the contention that natural selection produced the bacterial flagellum? If that same scientist went into the lab and knocked out the bacterial flagellum genes, grew the bacterium for a long time, and nothing much happened, well, he’d say maybe we didn’t start with the right bacterium, maybe we didn’t wait long enough, maybe we need a bigger population, and it would be very much more difficult to falsify the Darwinian hypothesis.

I think the very opposite is true. I think intelligent design is easily testable, easily falsifiable, although it has not been falsified, and Darwinism is very resistant to being falsified. They can always claim something was not right.


18 posted on 10/21/2014 9:19:42 AM PDT by Heartlander (Prediction: Increasingly, logic will be seen as a covert form of theism. - Denyse OÂ’Leary)
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