Posted on 10/31/2009 6:48:08 PM PDT by Coleus
“Believers in Intelligent Design have often been scorned as being opposed to science, but science itself is showing that it is the evolutionists who are opposed to rational inquiry.”
Who’s the designer?
Here we go again...
Obviously no one you’d know.
The legion of doom shows up uninvited on way too many occasions.
Its minions have again appeared, but on this Halloween night...
NO ONE IS SAFE!!!
Scripture is far too vague on the subject to form any hard opinion. To me, the greatest act of creation would be for God to have designed the whole of creation at the moment of the big bang. Intelligent design is a lesser design option in that God had to periodically intervene.
Good article.
The following are a few of my favorite quotes on Intelligent Design, dedicated to the geniuses who cannot find any “evidence” of it in nature.
“This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.” —Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), The Principia
“The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation ... His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.” —Albert Einstein
“Overwhelmingly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie around us. ...the atheistic idea is so nonsensical that I cannot put it into words.” —Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)
“The more I study nature, the more I am amazed at the work of the Creator.” —Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
“One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose behind it all. ... The better we understand the universe and all it harbors, the more reason we have found to marvel at the inherent design upon which it is based. ... I endorse the presentation of alternative theories for the origin of the universe, life, and man in the science classroom.” —Wernher von Braun, father of the American space program
“I have said for years that speculations about the origin of life lead to no useful purpose as even the simplest living system is far too complex to be understood in terms of the extremely primitive chemistry scientists have used in their attempts to explain the unexplainable that happened billions of years ago. God cannot be explained away by such naive thoughts.” —Ernst Chain, Nobel-laureate biochemist
“So if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design. ... The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.” —Sir Fred Hoyle, British astonomer (and self-professed atheist), from a lecture in 1982
“A superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.” —Sir Fred Hoyle
“The Darwinian theory has become an all-purpose obstacle to thought rather than an enabler of scientific advance.” —Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel-laureate physicist
“Much of present-day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends antitheories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Charles Darwin originally conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action? Evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken? Evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!” —Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel-laureate physicist
The question of “who” the designer is is completely separate from the question of whether design can be or has been detected. Do you doubt that a car was designed if you never met and will never meet any of the designers? If SETI ever receives an unambiguously intelligent signal from space, will you deny an intelligent origin until we discover who it originated from? Use your brain. That’s why God gave it to you.
A big problem with Intelligent Design is that it is a dead end street. There is no way to cross examine, debate, argue or refute with the idea of design, because any designer is uncooperative with providing information.
Science works on the Cartesian principle that an experiment can be discreet. That is, an intelligent person can design an experiment to test a hypothesis, involving *only* controllable elements within the experiment. It is just as important to disallow elements outside of the experiment that may invisibly manipulate it, unless they can be accounted for as variables.
Take as example the theory that “table salt dissolves in a significantly larger quantity of fresh water”. The theory is carefully phrased to take into account just one type of salt, and one type of water, in a suitable proportion. Other factors, such as temperature, pressure, and other potential variables are ignored, because they are assumed to be “normal”.
When the table salt is added to the water, it can either dissolve or not dissolve as the two potential outcomes of the experiment. If it does something other than that, in “normal” conditions, unless an unaccounted for variable is found, something is “wrong” with the experiment.
At no time does the idea that some entity intended that salt should dissolve in water matter. It is unimportant to the closed experiment. As such it can be ignored.
The same applies to the existence of life. Substantial observational evidence exists that development happened. Whether or not it was intended to have happened does not matter, in any way, shape or form. Even speculation that it did, or not, does not matter to the final outcome of the observation.
So why is the debate happening at all? Those who argue for Intelligent Design are being disingenuous. Before Intelligent Design, they argued that the world was created in 4004 B.C., because a Protestant Irish Bishop, named Ussher, used some flawed Biblical calculation to guess that is when it happened. Then people who weren’t even part of his religion adopted it out of ignorance.
So even from the point of view of religious scholarship they were wrong. But they were so adamant in this belief that they fought against scientific principles that had nothing to do with their religion, insisting that a “literal interpretation” from another religion must be accurate. And for a time, they were politically powerful enough to enforce this ignorance.
Eventually, it became so untenable to advance this idea that they decided to rename it, and adopt pseudo-scientific reasoning to steal the credibility of scientific reasoning, and here we find ourselves today.
Does this mean that Intelligent Design didn’t happen? No. But it does mean that whether or not it did happen, it still is unscientific, and has no place, by itself or shared, being taught in a science classroom, any more than gospel singing belongs in a science classroom.
This also does not mean that the theory of evolution is correct. But as it follows the rules of science, it *does* fit in the science classroom. If it does not follow the rules of science, it does not, either. And this is not nit-picky. If it mostly follows the rules of science, it still belongs more than if it doesn’t follow the rules of science at all.
And by definition, Intelligent Design does not.
“I say this because while there are many religionists who will consider that evolution may be the vehicle through which God created life, very few evolutionists will consider that God might have created evolution.”
—Wow, from my experience that is completely backwards. Most Creationists that I’ve seen take it as religious dogma that evolution cannot be correct, and are thus less than open to its possibility. Meanwhile, not only do many evolutionists consider that God might have created evolution - that’s by far the majority position of evolutionists! Depending on what poll wants to look at, theistic evolutionists outnumber atheistic evolutionists by a factor of 3-5 to 1.
Time again to “Snap Your Finger”!!
What a load of crap. Science routinely checks for “intelligent design.” When forensic scientists test for evidence of a murder, they are testing for the “intelligent design” of a death — as opposed to an accidental cause.
Granted, the test for ID of life is more complicated, but it is based on the same basic principles.
By the way, the notion that the first living cell came to be by random chance cannot be contradicted by any scientific test. Think about it. How could any test possibly prove that the first living cell could NOT have fallen into place by random chance? It would be like proving that random winds never wrote the entire Gettysburg Address on the sands of the Saraha desert. Do you agree then that abiogenesis is unscientific?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
bookmark
Use your brain. all ID does is remove the problem 1 level.
Or admit it’s just good old fashioned Creationism, and drop the pretense.
I suggest you read the quotes I put in post #7. Do you suppose Newton, Einstein, etc. “used their brains”? Maybe you should start using yours.
“Scripture is far too vague on the subject to form any hard opinion.”
Which scripture?
Colossians 1:16-17
16For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.
Wrong. It is truly amazing how many people spend their time criticizing evolutionary theory despite lacking the most basic knoweldge: what the word evolution means.
Evolution is change in the gene pool of a population over time. It is not about where life came from.
SITREP
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