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To: alstewartfan
Most people lack intellectual courage. Therefore, the majority would rather spout approved PC nonsense than stand up and admit doubts about the Darwinist meme.

Ditto for much of the ID crowd: lacking intellectual courage, they spout approved ID nonsense than stand up and admit doubts about the Creationist meme.

And I say that as a tacit ID adherent. I'm inclined toward what is ultimately ID, but irritated at those who espouse "mainstream" ID memes which plainly contradict what actually exists. Faith is in the unseen, not the rejection of the seen.

21 posted on 01/20/2015 6:48:00 AM PST by ctdonath2 (Si vis pacem, para bellum.)
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To: ctdonath2
You do realize that tu quoque is among the classical fallacies. I say that as one who also would categorize myself as a tacit ID adherent, who also finds the argumentation of "mainstream" ID advocates thin and unconvincing. I would rather see the position I suspect we share defended with sound argumentation rather than fallacies.

The main problem with ID as generally proposed is that to be a scientific theory it needs to begin with a scientific general theory of intelligence, which is never posited by the advocates whose main argumentation seems to be based on a priori probability estimates which appear to make the account given by neo-Darwinism wildly improbable. As a firm Popperian, I regard any reliance on a priori probability estimates as unscientific, since by their very nature they are neither falsifiable nor verifiable. (I also think most positions taken in polemical advocacy of neo-Darwinism, along with a great deal evolutionary biology proposed as serious science -- the sort of things Steven Jay Gould dismisses as "just so stories" -- fail to reformulate the random-mutation and natural-selection paradigm in a falsifiable form, and thus Popper's original critique of Darwinism as non-scientific, rather than his "recantation", still applies to them.)

Somewhat amusingly, if one takes as a general theory of intelligence the notion of "intelligent agent" proposed in turn-of-the-21st-century work on AI by among others Marcus Hutter, one can reasonably conclude that neo-Darwinism, far from being contrary to intelligent design, actually implies intelligent design, since the biosphere in the neo-Darwinian account can reasonably be argued to have the properties of an intelligent agent in the sense of Hutter.

28 posted on 01/20/2015 7:26:13 AM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know...)
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To: ctdonath2

I believe he is talking about the Darwinists who have yet to find one transitional animal after 150 years of looking.


38 posted on 01/20/2015 8:56:25 AM PST by bray (Sharpton is a murderer)
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