One of my favorite cartoons.
Posted on 04/11/2005 10:25:55 AM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
"If a god created me, then he quite obviously created me such that I would not believe in him, and who am I to challenge that?"
He gave you the WILL to believe in Him or not. It's your call on your faith.
Odd
I thought the focus of debate was the ARTICLE which states life is to complex to have been an accident.
One of my favorite cartoons.
According to Dembski, the detection of "design" requires that an object display complexity that could not be produced by what he calls "natural causes." In order to do that, one must first examine all of the possibilities by which an object, like the flagellum, might have been generated naturally. Dembski and Behe, of course, come to the conclusion that there are no such natural causes. But how did they determine that? What is the scientific method used to support such a conclusion? Could it be that their assertions of the lack of natural causes simply amount to an unsupported personal belief? Suppose that there are such causes, but they simply happened not to think of them? Dembski actually seems to realize that this is a serious problem. He writes: "Now it can happen that we may not know enough to determine all the relevant chance hypotheses [which here, as noted above, means all relevant natural processes (hvt)]. Alternatively, we might think we know the relevant chance hypotheses, but later discover that we missed a crucial one. In the one case a design inference could not even get going; in the other, it would be mistaken" (Dembski 2002, 123 (note 80)).
What Dembski is telling us is that in order to "detect" design in a biological object one must first come to the conclusion that the object could not have been produced by any "relevant chance hypotheses" (meaning, naturally, evolution). Then, and only then, are Dembski's calculations brought into play. Stated more bluntly, what this really means is that the "method" first involves assuming the absence of an evolutionary pathway leading to the object, followed by a calculation "proving" the impossibility of spontaneous assembly. Incredibly, this a priori reasoning is exactly the sort of logic upon which the new "science of design" has been constructed.
Not surprisingly, scientific reviewers have not missed this point – Dembski's arguments have been repeatedly criticized on this issue and on many others.
Bravo!
Anti-guv, you see God as somehow evil, I see him as a loving universal being that made us in order to express unbounded emotion. This especially rings true when I wake up every morning to see my 2 year old boy silently sleeping right next to me. Moments like that prove to me that there is a God. A God capable of producing emotion. An emotion that enables you to feel Gods presence at that very moment in time.
That consious emotion wasn't created accidentally. Yes, it took 15 billion years to get there, but that emotion was designed by God.
It's ALL about emotion, with universal wisdom directing the course. Consious awareness was produced for that very reason. To think that we aren't a part of God's being would be, in my opinion, irresponsible thinking.
Wouldn't it be rational to think that a God created a consious being in due time that is aware of who they are in order to recognize life and existence.
A universe void of such thought would be, well, irrelevant, and boring.
It's the correct definition.
A crystal has higher entropy than the ionic solution because the atoms are in a lower energy state.
Wrong. A crystal has low entropy. The local reduction in entropy is dwarfed, however, by the greatly increased entropy of the evaporated water molecules.
Do you believe opponents to the teaching of ID are on side of objective thinking and rational argument?
I guess you didn't comprehend what I've clearly posted above in plain English. My conclusion is that free will exists and that gods do not. I don't hold either belief "in order to" be consistent with evolution, even though both are.
The absence of free will alongside existence of gods would also be perfectly consistent with evolution (a preordained universe). So would the absence of free will with nonexistence of gods (a self-contained deterministic universe). So would the presence of free will alongside the existence of gods (an indeterminate universe).
None of the above are even remotely inconsistent with evolution, so evolution obviously does not predicate my conclusion regarding them.
With everything I've read on evolutionary theory, it's still full of holes.
Yet it's taught as science.
Why?
The firewall should exist in the classroom, because ID is NOT a scientific theory.
That is a quite rational formulation. So, how do you know that god is telling you the truth?
Well said!
"exception that proves the rule" comes to mind when discussing Antiguv's position on the existance of God.
Ted Bundy's parents were neither omniscient nor omnipotent. If they were, then of course they were responsible for the consequences when they willfully created someone they knew would do that.
That's a great analogy actually. Good job!
People are responsible for their own actions
Is god responsible for his own actions?
If a god created a musician then a god created him. If a god created a musician but did not have any control over what the musician would end up doing, then he is a limited god. I already discussed limited gods above.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite. --William Blake
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