Posted on 08/28/2005 2:14:36 PM PDT by AZLiberty
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Is "intelligent design" a legitimate school of scientific thought? Is there something to it, or have these people been taken in by one of the most ingenious hoaxes in the history of science? Wouldn't such a hoax be impossible? No. Here's how it has been done.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Indeed. Unfortunately it was his belief in Intelligent Design that led him to reject Quantum Mechanics. In practical terms, his beliefs were a scientific handicap.
If the article was written recently, it almost certainly refers to the Dembsku/Behe school of Intelligent Desing, which is specific in its opposotion to undirected evolution. It is in no way connected to anything Einstein said or thought.
It has to do with the "scientific" observation that while some cast evolution theory as unassailable in order to snobbishly poo-poo ideas of Intelligent Design and a Creator, those same people get religion very quickly when times get tough.
"Here's how some scientists think some eyes may have evolved: The simple light-sensitive spot on the skin of some ancestral creature gave it some tiny survival advantage ..."
Think? May? LOL!!!! This is what they are teaching our children?
Thank you for stating something that needed to be said but is usually absent from these discussions.
When you are debating those who either do not understand or who mis-state and misuse the definitions of the words they are using it is impossible to have a useful discussion. "Theories" and "hypotheses" are not, in and of themselves, "science". They are simply useful tools with which to investigate and attempt to understand. Science is simply a logical method for utilising these tools.
To put it simply, some scientific theories are never really "proven" - they are merely "accepted" as long as they are useful. The state of knowledge and available data which support that acceptance is in constant flux, and always subject to new discoveries and information. Hard-core dogmatists, no matter what their position, are not helpful.
The difference between the two is as follows:
Evolution would propose that there would be different variations, which would be successful or not, and the more successful aspects would be more populous.
Intelligent design would suggest that G-d would not make any unsuccessful designs, such as Mammoths, or dinosaurs.
Evolution would suggest blind fish in caves. Intelligent design: would G-d design that? What do you think?
Evolution would suggest several intermediate forms of humanity between primitive apes and modern man. Since these have been found (some 10 so far) this is pretty good predicting.
Intelligent design: what would that predict: G-d created intermediate forms, (for practice?) and then wiped them out?
"The explanation value of the evolutionary hypothesis of common origin is nil! Evolution not only conveys no knowledge, it seems to convey anti-knowledge. How could I work on evolution ten years and learn nothing from it? Most of you in this room will have to admit that in the last ten years we have seen the basis of evolution go from fact to faith! It does seem that the level of knowledge about evolution is remarkably shallow. We know it ought not be taught in high school, and that's all we know about it." (Dr. Colin Patterson, evolutionist and senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, which houses 60 million fossils)
Beats the cr@p out of your "we don't understand it so God must have done it" position.
(Thank you for referencing the good doctor. Now we know that you support his views ...)
"In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil 'missing links', such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes. . ."
(Dr. Colin Patterson, evolutionist and senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, which houses 60 million fossils)
I think Billybob misfired on this one. He dismissed as a paper tiger the meaning of Intelligent Design that Dennett was obviously using, and by using a different meaning, found Dennett to be dumb or a huckster.
The meaning that Billybob used may well be the proper one of longer standing. But it is transparently not the meaning that Dennett used, Dennett was quite clear in describing what he meant, and there is indeed a 'theory' of popular discussion which is the appropriate reference of Dennett's essay.
Billybob's rebuttal is baseless.
No faith is required, just the willingness to consider the evidence.
Not really. It's kind of a wash. We really don't have any idea how the eye got here, now do we?
My point is this crap being posited about the evolution an eye is pure speculation. It is not science and should not be taught in Biology textbooks because there is zero evidence that the eye changed over time in any creature.
It's much worse than I suspected. I'm poring through my son's College Biology textbooks now. A few excerpts are at my profile page. Macro evolution as presented in this textbook is a wish and a hope with ample use of terms such as "we think" or "it may explain". The rationale as presented is laughable.
Eventually enough people will see what's going on and like myself, write letters and demand that macro evolution and related concepts be stricken from these Biology textbooks. It is not science.
They need to present both macro evolution AND ID in the textbooks or extract macro evolution concepts from the textbooks. At this point in the debate the best course may be the latter.
That's a bold-faced lie.
Well, I have no desire to defend the creationists, especially those of the young-earth variety. Both their theology and their science are questionable.
But creationists and others have a point when they complain that evolution is used as a weapon against religion. Too often it is used that way, by people who should know better.
I believe it was Richard Dawkins who said that evolution makes it respectable to be an atheist. Now, that is a very unscientific statement: science by definition cannot answer questions relating to God. Thus if someone says he believes in God, that is properly classified as a religious or philosophical point of view, not a scientific one. If someone says he does not believe in God, that is a religious or philosophical opinion. Evolution cannot be used to support either position. Yet that does not stop people from doing just that.
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