Posted on 12/03/2005 5:28:45 PM PST by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I'd like to see it too. I wasn't aware there were Precambrian sharks.
I respectfully suggest that this thread should be moved back to the "News/Activism" forum. It's a current article from the NYT, which is certainly news, and it's about an educational issue with significant political impact. The issue is currently raging in several states, and it's the subject of current litigation as well. If some of the posters are too enthusiastic, perhaps you could warn them about their conduct. But moving the thread away from its proper forum seems the wrong remedy.
"I always love this; creationists can't grap that evolution makes no claims as to the origins of life."
No claims? Well, if Richard Dawkins is a spokesman for evolution, he certainly makes some claims. I read his book, The Blind Watchmaker" several years ago, and I was absolutely amazed by his so-called "reasoning." In one chapter, for example, he speculates wildly about how chemical (inorganic) "natural selection" could have led to the first living cell. Speculation is fine, of course. But then at the end of this chapter of speculation he boldly asserts that, although we don't know exactly how it happened, we know for fact that it happened by purely natural mechanisms with no intelligent design. Baloney.
Another obvious point needs to be made here. If evolutionists "make no claims as to the origins of life," than how can they be so sure that evolution after that point involved no ID? If you recognize that ID may have been required to get the first living cell, how can you categorically reject ID after that point?
Where does the TOE predict this?
I tried the links, but no reference to stochastic processes. ???
What do you mean by that? Stochastic ==> Over time... do you mean discrete events over time?
Just wondering how you apply stochastic processes to evolution?
ID didn't even gain as big a following as the very similar Ancient Astronaut theories of a few decades back and is certainly destined for the same rubbish heap. Still, it amazes me that so many otherwise normal people could fall for such an obvious crock.
Now that is a good one. Sounds like you are talking a about Hillary. LoL
Well, now that you mention it....
;-)
Bravo. You've committed two logical fallacies: Moving the Goal Posts and Appeal to Numbers.
An hypothesis is not made valid by the number of people that accept it, but whether or not it can be tested experimentally. Experiments can and have been designed to test irreducible complexity, which is the observation on which ID is based. Additional experiments can be designed around Dembski's mathematical treatments of specified complexity and information theory.
A little less demagoguery and a little more experimentation would be to the credit of the biological community.
When cold fusion was proposed, scientists expressed their doubts, and went on to demonstrate it in the laboratory. Still waiting for the Darwinist crowd to get off their Aristotalean behinds, roll up their sleeves, and actually do some experiments to support their criticism of ID.
But, no, instead they rant and rave and sidestep the issue by yelling that because ID is non-scientific they don't HAVE to perform any experiments to test or disprove it. THAT is a non-scientific position.
Have you ever considered looking at it the other way around? It makes a whole lot more sense that the magic man in the sky.
This battle is already lost by the Darwinists, the ID arguments, and even creationistic ideas have evoloved like all ideas based in truth do and Darwinism being 99.99999% a canonical belief system can not evolve.
Yet as long as believers believe, like second graders do in Santa Clause, Darwinism still hangs on.
Zero, btw, evolved. Not all number systems included it. Thankfully ideas evovle.
Zero, otoh, was created and never evolved. All number systems include it in some fundamental fashion. Thankfully things like zero and numbers were created.
"No claims?"
Yep. Evolution is not, and has never been about, the origins of life.
"Another obvious point needs to be made here. If evolutionists "make no claims as to the origins of life," than how can they be so sure that evolution after that point involved no ID?"
They can't. We can't say anything about ID because, like the existence of a deity, it lies outside of the realm of science. Anything and everything can be construed as being made by an intelligent designer.
"If you recognize that ID may have been required to get the first living cell, how can you categorically reject ID after that point?"
Again, science cannot say anything for or against ID; it isn't a scientific question.
What is "ridicules" is that you were unable to obtain the intended meaning of that sentence. You anti-Es never cease to amuse.
The persecution of ID scientists by some universities and the mainstream media doesn't look good. The public will eventually turn against anything that looks like totalitarian thought control. The academic world is still trying to recover from loss of credibility because of liberal PC speech controls.
If ID research leads to nothing then evolution theory will have been strengthened. On the other hand, if they come up with some valid discoveries, we all benefit.
Is Darwinism falsifiable?
Teaching kids 3000 year old creation myths under the guise of science is a bad thing to do to them.
But kids usually find their own way eventually, anyway.
If ID research takes place at all, we'll be astonished.
Nope. Nobody believes that.
It's true that they're very different. The difference is that (most form of purportedly scientific) creationism actually made substantive claims; e.g. how, when, where, in what context, etc, creation events occurred. ID, by contrast, makes no substantive claims, and virtually promises never to do so. It makes only the evaluative claims that "design" can be detected here and there, that it has something (unspecified as to what) to do with "intelligence," and that at least sometimes it can't be accounted for by "natural causes".
What this means, however, is that any creationist can comfortably and unreservedly adopt intelligent design, and do so whether he's an old earth creationist or a young earth creationist, whether he's a fiat creationist or a progressive creationist, and so on.
So it's not true to say there's no "resemblance". The resemblance is that between say, "Fascist" and "Nazi," or between "Professional" and "Doctor". Or better yet between and umbrella and those who stand underneath it. This is exactly what ID functions as (I believe by DESIGN): a sufficiently vacuous "umbrella" ideology for antievolutionists who are otherwise notoriously schismatic.
And the ones that don't serve as cautionary examples.
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