Posted on 10/31/2009 6:48:08 PM PDT by Coleus
Sorry, Intelligent Homicide implies that people did something, not that something did something. People you can examine and cross examine, an invisible something you cannot. This is why God cannot be subpoenaed to testify in court, because He is not in the habit of showing up.
Scientists disallow what cannot be examined. Even though invisible, gravity is consistent. God is not. There is no mathematical formula for God. No inclusion of God as a variable. Thus, no exclusion of God as a variable. Therefore, God is ignored. This is not disrespectful of God, in fact, it is more respectful of God as a singularity.
This is why God does not have a name. Or a height, weight, hair color, eye color, looks like a giraffe and an oyster. Unless you can compare God with something else, anything else, God cannot fit into any formula.
So the best respect for Intelligent Design is to ignore it.
Who is it, then?
You’re obfuscating. Who’s the designer?
Like I’d dignify that... you’ve got to know better than that?
At what point in history did you meet Charles Darwin?
Is God the designer?
When did you meet Darwin?
I never have. He died many years before I was born.
Can you answer my question?
Sure... first explain your motive.
This thread is about intelligent design. I want to know whom we’re talking about.
Ah... yep, I have my problems with ID. It’s a crappy replacement for belief in God. I see where you’re coming from now.
You know I believe that God is both the Designer and the Creator. I personally believe that teaching ID is no better than teaching any other false religion. ON the other hand, I would love it if you and your children and your children’s children were indoctrinated with the teachings of the Word of God and the principles of the God of the Bible.
You’re not a proponent of ID, then?
Wrong. Even if you cannot “examine” the “designer,” you can still examine the design. Why is this simple fact so hard for some people to understand? It’s as if they check their brains at the door.
Forensic scientists can determine that a murder occurred even if they cannot determine who committed the murder. If you find a cell phone on the ground, you can tell that it was designed even if you have no idea who (or what) designed it. If SETI receives an intelligent signal from space, do you think they will refuse to say so until they know who, what, or where it originated from? Yeah, right!
Let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose the unambiguous message “Intelligent Design” appeared in the clouds in thousands of places all over the world. Suppose it kept occurring for weeks on end. According to your “reasoning,” that would not be evidence of intelligent design because the “designer” of the messages is not directly visible. Do you see how incredibly nonsensical your “thinking” is?
Does it show?
I understand the desire for some to have a semblance of faith in schools in hopes it will lead to something more, but I believe in the God revealed to us through the scriptures and not in some nameless “designer”. If you just teach ID and don’t reveal the true Creator then it’s pointless. Maybe it would work as a means to an end, but I’m sceptical. You can’t white-wash Creation or any other scriptural principal and produce the end result... salvation. Would I be happy to have something in place of nothing in the battle between right and wrong (good and evil)? I guess. I just don’t get the warm fuzzies about god-light.
Newton, Einstein, von Braun, et al?
Those guys must not be real scientist./s
Whether God is the designer or not is a separate question from whether ID occurred in nature. I personally think God is the Designer, but others don’t. See post #7. Sir Fred Hoyle was an atheist and a physicist who believed strongly in ID based on the overwhelming evidence of it in nature. The article that started this thread noted another atheist scientist that accepts ID. Did you read it?
Well, through your persuasively arrogant attitude, I can tell that you have doubts in your own theories, which you try to conceal by belittling others with rather lame arguments.
Shooting holes in your argument is easy. Take your example: “If you find a cell phone on the ground, you can tell that it was designed even if you have no idea who (or what) designed it.” The point of the exercise is that it doesn’t matter if it was designed. Do you think for a moment that at a crime scene, the forensic scientists give a hoot about the maker of a cellphone, passionately arguing that it matters if it was made by Sony, or whoever?
This is because, for their purposes, that it is a cellphone, and maybe the information it contains, is what matters. Who made it, or why, is incidental information.
Yet you think that by insisting that it matters who made the cellphone, you will discover something. No you won’t. Because it doesn’t matter. It is incidental to everything else.
How about your other brilliant thought problem: “Suppose the unambiguous message “Intelligent Design” appeared in the clouds in thousands of places all over the world. Suppose it kept occurring for weeks on end. According to your “reasoning,” that would not be evidence of intelligent design because the “designer” of the messages is not directly visible.”
No, that is not true. However, were the message “Intelligent Design” to appear in the clouds, etc., without any other context, only a fool would think he knew what it meant. It *is* ambiguous. Two words, apparently in the English language. Appearing around the world, even to people who for the most part do not speak English.
The important questions, the scientific questions, would be “How are these words formed?” and “What do these words mean?” That there was an intelligence behind their formation, though it might be assumed, cannot be examined scientifically, so would have to wait. While waiting, scientific efforts would be used to try and answer the questions that might be scientifically answered.
The invisible cloud former, if it chose to remain invisible, could be anything, so nothing could be said about it that was germane to the event., until such time as it materialized in such a way that it could be examined.
Thanks for the honest answer.
If God isn’t the designer, who is? And what’s God’s role if He’s not the designer?
How does that contradict my post?
One way that intelligent design might impinge upon science is if the designer is "supernatural", thereby violating (in actual fact, not merely as a potential theoretical construct) the principle of "uniformity of causes in a closed system".
If and only if, a supernatural intelligent agent acts "hands off" of the system to within at most a small perturbation, can science proceed with assurance of being veridical. (And no, I don't want to get started on models asymptotically resemble reality as they are refined.)
All I mean is, if an angel or whatever can arbitrarily screw around with your experiment, then it's not much use performing them, unless you have good enough reason to believe that it won't happen very often, and that the angels don't interfere enough outside of the lab to destroy the predictive power of the experiments.
So to make science possible, most agree to dispense with supernatural agents; and empirically, it works for most modeling and prediction most of the time.
The problem is, the plural of anecdotes is not data; but on the other hand, the plural -- or even the singular of anecdotes, need not guarantee falsehood.
So the inference that "since the model's predictions are empirically sound, this disproves the supernatural" does not hold.
Cheers!
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