Posted on 03/29/2006 7:53:52 PM PST by SampleMan
It was a rural population. They lived on farms and had poor transportation. But just about everybody knew the Bible.
You're off by a couple thousand years. Christianity wasn't in existance when the Midianites were. So what's the point of that statement?
Observing it in *micro-evolution* is not enough evidence to say that it can happen in *macro*. It can imply it, and people can deduce it, but that's speculation and conjecture.
If you are right, then the Khmer butchers referenced in the article that follows are going to Heaven; and most of their victims are doomed forever to a more horrible place than the Killing Fields:
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Khmer Rouge embraces Jesus
The Khmer Rouge followed a harsh brand of communism, killing nearly two million people in their bid to return Cambodia to Year Zero. Now they have a new faith: evangelical Christianity.
Hundreds of former fighters have been baptised in the past year. The Khmer Rouge's mountain stronghold, the town of Pailin in south-west Cambodia, has four churches, all with pastors and growing congregations. At least 2,000 of those who followed Pol Pot, the guerrillas' former leader who died six years ago, now worship Jesus.
Many new converts were involved in the bloody battles, massacres and forced labour programmes that led to the Killing Fields. Between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge sought to eradicate religion, ripping down the country's biggest cathedral...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1254908/posts
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Does that seem loving and merciful, in your opinion?
It ain't the YOU being 'right' that we have to worry about: but whether GOD is right in saying it.
As has been seen on MANY threads, YOUR idea of a 'just and merciful god' is vastly different than the one the bible describes.
Ebola cure found, but many refuse it for it tastes bitter at first. Many still cling to hope in a sugar-water cure that their friendly witch-doctor makes for them.
"Born....
Well no, because the Christian God you worship had allegedly ordered their extermination.
This is sort of like killing your parents and then asking for clemency because you're an orphan.
No, but you just tried another dishonest argument. Not that that's new.
I don't think you can hold myself or others responsible for the actions of someone you've had a quarrel with in the past.
So you're saying that the moral strictures of the Bible are open to a wide range of intepretations? Too bad Genesis isn't, eh?
Guess what!
Nothing's changed!!!
Sheesh, some people's fantasy lives!
Michael J. Behe was born in 1952 and grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 1974 he graduated from Drexel University in Philadelphia with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry. He did his graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded the Ph.D. in 1978 for his dissertation research on sickle-cell disease. From 1978 to 1982 he was a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health where he investigated DNA structure. From 1982 to 1985 Behe was Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Queens College in New York City, where he was awarded a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health. In 1985 he moved to Lehigh University where he is currently Professor of Biochemistry. Behe has authored over forty technical papers.
So, what are your credentials?
Ok, I'm going to reiterate the point that IDers do make testable predictions. I'm no scientist, but I read the following article and it makes the case that they do indeed advance verifiable, empirical predictions. The case seems compelling. If I'm missing some profound insight that the methodological naturalists can call me on, then please let me know. Here's the article:
Intelligent Design is Empirically Testable and Makes Predictions
By Jay Richards and Jonathan Witt
Among the many, many errors in Judge John Jones’ Dover vs. Kitzmiller opinion is the charge that intelligent design (ID) makes no empirically testable claims (see pp. 66 ff.). Similarly, other ID critics assert that intelligent design makes no testable predictions.1 In fact, intelligent design fulfills both criteria since it makes numerous empirically testable predictions.
It’s true that there’s no way to falsify the bare assertion that a cosmic designer exists. Nevertheless, the specific design arguments currently in play are empirically testable, even falsifiable,2 and involve testable predictions.
Consider the argument that Michael Behe makes in his book Darwin’s Black Box. There he proposes that design is detectable in many “molecular machines,” including the bacterial flagellum. Behe argues that this tiny flagellar motor needs all of its parts to function—is “irreducibly complex.” Such systems in our experience are a hallmark of designed systems, because they require the foresight that is the exclusive jurisdiction of intelligent agents. Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection and random variations, in contrast, requires a functional system at each transition along the way. Natural selection can select for present but not for future function.
Notice that Behe’s argument, contra the assertions of Judge Jones and the ACLU’s expert witnesses, rests not on ignorance or on a purely negative argument against Neo-Darwinism, but on what we know about designed systems, the causal powers of intelligent agents, and on our growing knowledge of the cellular world and its many mechanisms.
Behe predicts that scientists will not uncover a continuously functional Darwinian pathway from a simple precursor to the bacterial flagellum and, moreover, any detailed evolutionary pathway that is articulated will presuppose other irreducibly complex systems. How does one test and discredit Behe’s claims? Describe a realistic, continuously functional Darwinian pathway from simple ancestor to present motor. The flagellum might still be designed, but Behe’s means of detecting such design would have been falsified.
Darwinists like Kenneth Miller point to the hope of future discoveries, and to the type III secretory system as a machine possibly co-opted on the evolutionary path to the flagellum. The argument is riddled with problems, but it shows that Miller, at least, understands perfectly well that Behe’s argument is testable.
Miller tried to sidestep this obvious point in his expert testimony at the Dover trial by conceding that Behe’s argument was testable but insisting that it was a purely negative argument against Neo-Darwinism, not a positive case for intelligent design. This is mere wishful thinking on Miller’s part. Behe’s argument is also based on positive evidence for design. Behe points to strongly positive grounds for inferring design from the presence of irreducibly complex machines and circuits. This testable evidence is so powerful, so nearly ubiquitous, that it is often overlooked. Go out and find irreducibly complex machines, then find out, where possible, their causal history. Again and again one will find that the irreducibly complex machines (mousetraps, motors, etc.) were designed by intelligent agents. Indeed, every time we know the causal history of an irreducibly complex system, it always turns out to have been the product of an intelligent cause.
Miller has conceded that Behe's irreducible complexity argument is testable. And we see that Miller's assertion that scientists have tested and falsified Behe's argument is itself false. Finally, Behe and other design theorists like Scott Minnich and Stephen Meyer have offered positive evidence for the design of the flagellum based on standard uniformitarian reasoning, reasoning well established in science.
To move from biology to astronomy and cosmology, in The Privileged Planet, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards describe how to falsify their design argument. They suggest that there is a correlation between the conditions needed for life and the conditions needed for diverse types of scientific discovery, and suggest that such a correlation, if true, points to intelligent design. They write:
The most decisive way to falsify our argument as a whole would be to find a distant and very different environment, which, while quite hostile to life, nevertheless offers a superior platform for making as many diverse scientific discoveries as does our local environment. The opposite of this would have the same effect—finding an extremely habitable and inhabited place that was a lousy platform for observation.
Less devastating but still relevant would be discoveries that contradict individual parts of our argument. Most such discoveries would also show that the conditions for habitability of complex life are much wider and more diverse than we claim. For instance, discovering intelligent life inside a gas giant with an opaque atmosphere, near an X-ray emitting star in the Galactic center, or on a planet without a dark night would do it serious damage. Or take a less extreme example. We suggested in Chapter 1 that conditions that produce perfect solar eclipses also contribute to the habitability of a planetary environment. Thus, if intelligent extraterrestrial beings exist, they probably enjoy good to perfect solar eclipses. However, if we find complex, intelligent, indigenous life on a planet without a largish natural satellite, this plank in our argument would collapse.
Our argument presupposes that all complex life, at least in this universe, will almost certainly be based on carbon. Find a non-carbon based life form, and one of our presuppositions collapses. It’s clear that a number of discoveries would either directly or indirectly contradict our argument.
Similarly, there are future discoveries that would count in favor of it. Virtually any discovery in astrobiology is likely to bear on our argument one way or the other. If we find still more strict conditions that are important for habitability, this will strengthen our case.
So contemporary arguments for intelligent design in both biology and the physical sciences are not only testable; they make predictions and are falsifiable in principle. Of course, if the arguments are true, then they are falsifiable only in principle, but not in fact (hardly a weakness in a scientific theory). We have given only two examples here. There are many other design arguments in biology, origin-of-life studies, and paleontology that are also empirically testable and that make predictions. Therefore, honest commentators should stop claiming that ID is empirically untestable, or that it makes no predictions. The claim itself has been tested and falsified. It’s time to move on to other and more pertinent aspects of the debate over intelligent design.
NOTES:
1. Philosophers of science now know that "prediction" is too narrow a criterion to describe all scientific theorizing. Empirical testability is the more appropriate criterion.
2. "Empirical testability," "falsifiability," and "confirmability" aren't synonyms. "Empirical testability" is the genus, of which falsification and confirmation are species. Something is empirically testable when it is either falsifiable, confirmable, or both. Moreover, something can be confirmable but not falsifiable, as with the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) or the existence of a cosmic designer. Both of these claims are still empirically testable. Further, recent work in the philosophy of science has revealed the degree to which high level scientific theories tend to resist simple refutation. As a result, Karl Popper’s criterion of “falsifiability,” which most commentators seem to presuppose, was rejected by most philosophers of science decades ago as a litmus test for science. Nevertheless, it’s certainly a virtue of scientific proposals to be able to say what evidence would count against it.
Hello again. I really am enjoying this. By the way, I appreciate your input and assessment of these articles. I hope that I'm not inconveniencing you by asking you to read these brief articles. I do have a very brief article that seems to refute the claim that ID is "purely negative". I'd like to post them here (instead of starting a whole new thread), because they seem relevant to specific objections raised here. Here is the link:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=546
Please take a quick look (I'd enjoy your feedback).
With regards to the information in http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=546 There isn't much not easily refuted there.
The bottom line is that the author has worked backwards to prove his points by taking easily proved, observable facts and manipulating them to support his argument.
It's akin to saying "If the sun is hot then ID is correct" - hmm, the sun is hot! Great!
Evolution has simpler and more logical explanations for most or all of what he's using to support his ID opinions and none of what he proposed is actually testable in a real way.
Thank you for reading it. Sometimes I hate it when other posters give me a mound of material to read instead of explaining something briefly themselves.
I want to mention one last point, and then I'll drop the whole discussion (It's almost bedtime). What I want to focus on here is not the testing of Darwinism and design against the broad body of biological data, but the related question of which theory can accommodate the greater range of biological possibilities. Think of it this way: Are there things that might occur in biology for which a design-theoretic framework could give a better, more accurate account than a purely Darwinian and therefore non-teleological framework? I think the answer is "yes". But that's just my humble opinion.
Last but not least, let's be clear that design can accommodate all the results of Darwinism. Intelligent design does not repudiate the Darwinian mechanism. It merely assigns it a lower status than Darwinism does. The Darwinian mechanism does operate in nature and insofar as it does, design can live with its deliverances. Even if the Darwinian mechanism could be shown to do all the design work for which design theorists want to invoke design (say for the bacterial flagellum), a design-theoretic framework would not destroy any valid findings of science. To be sure, design would then become superfluous, but it would not become contradictory or self-refuting. ID may turn out to be a flash-in-the-pan. But I'd like to see where ID scientists take their arguments in the future. Below is a list (which I hear is growing) of scientists/researchers who are quite skeptical of methodological naturalism/Neo-Darwinism:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=660
Again, thanks for the feedback. G'night.
So-called "micro-evolution" is EVOLUTION. The observed changes of an organism, as a result of better suitability for survival due to a specific trait, IS THE VERY MECHANISM postulated by Darwin, and since confirmed by generations of scientists.
You can see it happening, folks. It isn't speculation and conjecture; it's observed fact. It is happening in the very short terms in the case of bacteria; drug-resistant strains have evolved in response to the use of antibiotics, as an example.
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