Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker

The New York Times ^ | December 4, 2005 | LAURIE GOODSTEIN

[Right Wing Professor]

TO read the headlines, intelligent design as a challenge to evolution seems to be building momentum.

...

Behind the headlines, however, intelligent design as a field of inquiry is failing to gain the traction its supporters had hoped for. It has gained little support among the academics who should have been its natural allies. And if the intelligent design proponents lose the case in Dover, there could be serious consequences for the movement's credibility.

On college campuses, the movement's theorists are academic pariahs, publicly denounced by their own colleagues. Design proponents have published few papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

[JudgemAll]

My point is to only testify to what I know: Darwinism is a cult and has nothing to do with science.

[phantomworker]

That makes no sense at all.

[reasonisfaith]

Take a look at the phrase “depriving prospective career scientists of their education.” Can you detect the exaggeration?

The curriculum of contemporary public schools is loaded with junk and nonsense. To displace some of that baggage with ID would in fact be an enormous improvement. Those interested in becoming scientists would simply have spent less hours studying “social” topics or things like gluing scraps of paper to scraps of cardboard. Their prospective careers would be intact.

[JudgemAll]

They make sense to other people, so don't judge for others...let them decide, they do not need your authority in this.

[Cicero]

Exactly. Rationality has no meaning unless there is some ultimate source of rationality in the universe, which Christians refer to as the Logos (John 1:1).

Thomas Nagel argues this case, against his will, in "The Last Word" (Oxford, 1997). Nagel is a brilliant philosopher, considered one of the dozen most prominent philosophers living in the world today. He is by inclination an atheist, but the problem he frankly confronts in this book is that if you want to have anything like a "strong" version of rationality--something that is really there, not just an illusion, something that allows us to have a common language when talking about the nature of things--then it is very, very difficult to account for it without turning to religion, which he refuses to do.

Thus, if we are all incidental products of a purely materialistic evolution, then we are incapable of true rational thought. Rationality is merely a delusion.

A study of the history of science reveals very clearly that science and technology rose in the West as a byproduct of the rise of Christendom. Lynn Thorndyke has done some excellent work on science in the middle ages, which are far from the dark, superstitious times that people since the Renaissance have depicted. Alfred North Whitehead makes the persuasive argument that science in the Renaissance also is only explicable as a product of Christian assumptions--in particular the assumption that the universe is real and that it is rational.

Modern agnostic scientists are, in a very real sense, still parasitic on these earlier Christian assumptions, of a rational universe and of human free will that can understand things by means of rational thinking and investigation.

[Dimensio]

My point is to only testify to what I know: Darwinism is a cult and has nothing to do with science.

Yet you don't actually attempt to demonstrate that your bizarre assertion has any basis in fact.

[Louis Foxwell]

I've never met a scientist who couldn't read.

I have met science teachers who could not think.

[phantomworker]

OK. LOL!

[JudgemAll]

Your sense of self entitlement in this is disturbing.

[Louis Foxwell]

Describe for me, with clinical precision, an experiment in ID. Describe an experiment wherein the outcome of "G-d did it" is not known before the results are in.

Any mathematical formula is an experiment in ID.

[rootkidslim]

The irony is that "Timmy" deserves the Darwin Award for homeschooling his own children. What do you think being locked in a room all day with him and his crackpot ideas will do to their reproductive fitness?

[Dimensio]

"evolution isn't science, it is a wish." (in this case, that God *doesn't* exist)

How do you expect anyone to take you seriously when you tell such brazen lies?

[Senator Bedfellow]

Anne Dambricourt is a crackpot, pretty much like de Chardin, whose crackpot footsteps she is following in.

That is all.

[Dimensio]

So your point is that we can't be rational unless we assume, without evidence, that there is a source of rationality in the universe. I don't quite see the logic that goes behind it. Maybe if you supported your claim with evidence rather than just asserted it you might make more sense.

[phantomworker]

Sorry, didn't want to disturb you. ;)

[RunningWolf]

I agree with JudgemAll, Darwinism is a cult and it has corrupted science.

Just what demented assertions are you making Dimensio?

Don't claim any fact BTW, you gave that up a long time ago. Even your theories are never proven.

Wolf

[reasonisfaith]

In fact, atheism is a wish. I truly feel sorry saying this to atheists because it makes visible their greatest weakness. But the pain is potentially short lived.

[Dimensio]

In fact, atheism is a wish.

What has this false statemented to do with a discussion on evolution vs. Intelligent Design?

[ARCADIA]

"Describe for me, with clinical precision, an experiment in evolution. Describe an experiment wherein the outcome of "G-d didn't do it" is not known before the results are in."

Evolution doesn't argue that god didn't do it. It limits itself to the observable facts. If ID did the same, there would be no ID.

[Louis Foxwell]

Anne Dambricourt is a crackpot....

As a great man once said, "There he goes again."