Posted on 09/01/2005 8:52:24 AM PDT by Para-Ord.45
...he co-authored with theologian Jay W. Richards called "The Privileged Planet."
The book claims that Earth is so unique, it must have been created by an "intelligent designer."
One Iowa State professor, Hector Avalos, accused Gonzalez of having a hidden religious agenda...Gonzalez's academic archenemy at Iowa State is Hector Avalos, an associate professor of religious studies at Iowa State who is also the faculty adviser for the ISU Atheist and Agnostic Society.
"I didn't expect this level of vitriol," he says after hanging up. "This level of intense hostility, just knee-jerk emotional response from people...."
I thought I picked up a whiff of him on the Saturn Moon Hotspot thread.
You are part of minority that notes a distinction between abiogenesis and evolution. For all intents and purposes as far as the general population, main stream media, and pre-secondary education goes, abiogenesis is a subset of evolutionary theory. Though you are technically correct in making the distinction, you are still banging your head against the wall in a losing battle to educate a world which consistently uses one term, evolution, to encompass the other, abiogenesis. At the end of the day, you are left with a headache and lot of people thinking you don't have a clue what you're talking about. The salt in the wound comes some time in the future when, due to common usage, the definition of evolutionary theory in Merriam-Webster changes to include abiogenesis. Good luck.
Yeah, the godless are "gnashing their teeth".
They can't wait till they go to hell to do it.
You're right. Lets have discussion and diversity of ideas!
Tell me, do you consider the following creation story to be worth discussing, or is this too diverse for you?
At the beginning of the world it was covered in darkness. A chief, a chieftianess and son lived at Kungalas. Although the child was greatly loved, he died without cause. The whole tribe mourned each day beside the boy's lifeless body. One morning instead of her dead son the chieftainess witnessed the rising of a boy out of her son's body which burned brightly. She was overjoyed to see her son come back to life. This glowing boy grew large until his father began to call him a giant. Giant boy ate most of the tribe's food, so his father sent him over the sea to find more to eat. Giant boy flew inland and took with him a stone, a raven blanket and a dried bladder full of berries. He dropped the stone in the ocean and rested upon it. Each time he dropped a stone and rested he created a new rocky island. Giant Boy scattered the berries across the land and created a forest filled with fruit. He scattered the salmon roe and trout roe into the rivers to create an abundance of fish. From this day Giant Boy never lacked food in the new world.
You can use ID as fish bait now?
I'll give you something breathed life if you give me all living creatures are descended from a common ancestor.
No. Intelligent Design would not be disproven by a second planet with living creatures. There's no reason why a Great Designer wouldn't place life elsewhere in the universe.
But a second planet with living creatures would place many Biblical principles in doubt, such as the one that called mankind God's special creation. This and a couple other references compel Christians, which I count myself as one, to believe that there cannot be sentient life elsewhere in the universe. It would shake to the core the foundation of Christianity.
That's another reason why scientist are so adamant about funding SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). They want to disprove the Bible.
Have any of you actually read the book mentioned at the beginning of the first post? It uses "Science" to put forth the premise that, given an unbiased look at the facts, Earth IS so unique it makes sense to wonder if we are in a "creation". This book is so full of science, I couldn't understand some of it...but then, I am an idiot.
Actually, no. "Darwinism" (darwinian evolution) works exactly the same no matter how the first life came into being. Evolutionary theory takes the existence of living things as a "given" and precedes from there.
There is nothing unusual about this btw, nor does it indicate any sort of "weakness." All scientific theories presuppose "initial" conditions. If they didn't they would be unworkably broad, unbounded and vague. For instance darwinian theory makes no sense except concerning entities that reproduce, have properties of inheritance, manifest the properties of superfecundity (produce more offspring than can possibly survive) and so on.
One (but only one) of the problems with ID, btw, is that it's advocates refuse to delineate the initial conditions of the theory. (Of course many of the advocates admit, if inconstantly, that ID presently fails to qualify as a scientific "theory" anyway.)
What does this even mean? I don't understand your complaint here. You understand that protein folding is obviously deterministic (even if not entirely understood or predictable) right? Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that a given primary structure (the end to end sequence of amino acids) necessarily produces a certain tertiary structure (the three dimensional form, and thereby the function, of the protein).
What does "spontaneous organization" mean when referring to a deterministic process like this?
Also, I know that new proteins are produced (i.e. for commercial purposes or in biomed research) by means of artificial selection of randomized primary sequences. For example you throw out variants that fail to bond, or bond less tightly, to a target molecule. There's nothing "spontaneous" about this process, except that random variation and selection are utilized and entirely new proteins are created.
Exactly my point. The uniqueness (or lack of same) of Earth has nothing to do with ID's validity, unlike what the author contends.
I disagree. You need only prove that Darwins theory is false, untrue and impossible. Once that is accomplished and accepted we will probably go back to an updated pre Darwin teleology of some sort and look at Darwinism as an unfortunate but necessary detour in man's understanding of natural history.
Man's Knowledge is not necessarily linear, progressing in a straight line. Sometimes we take wrong turns, get lost, then make course corrections.
In the field of economics socialism was all the rage in the previous century. Now it's passe.
Evolution in my opinion was never strictly a science as we have come to understand the term. It has elements of what I call 'natural philosophy' embedded in it. It became an all consuming mantra that sought to answer all of life's most important questions. In other words 'it over reached'.
Cassette mutagenesis experiments suggest that the probability of attaining (at random) the correct sequencing for a short protein 100 amino acids long is about 1 in 10 to the 65 power(Reidhaar-Olson & Sauer 1990)
Recent mutagenesis research has provided additional support for the conclusion that functional proteins are exceedingly rare among possible amino acid sequences. The probability of finding a functional protein among the possible amino acid sequences corresponding to a 150-residue protein is similarly 1 in 10 to the 77 power.(Axe 2004)
It is unlikely that a new protein fold via a series of folded intermediates sequences (Blanco et al. 1999)
post-translation processes of modification in producing a functional protein make it impossible to predict a protein's final sequencing from its corresponding gene sequence alone (Sarkar 1996)
Muller, G. B. & S. A. Newman. 2003. Origination of organismal form: the forgotten cause in evolutionary theory. G. B. Muller and S. A. Newman, eds., Origination of organismal form: beyond the gene in developmental and evolutionary biology. M.I.T.
Thomson, K. S. 1992. Macroevolution: The morphological problem
Miklos, G. L. G. 1993. Emergence of organizational complexities during metazoan evolution: perspectives from molecular biology, palaeontology and neo-Darwinism.
Webster & Goodwin 1996; Shubin & Marshall 2000; Erwin 2000; Conway Morris 2000, 2003b; Carroll 2000; Wagner 2001; Becker & Lonnig 2001; Stadler et al. 2001; Lonnig & Saedler 2002; Wagner & Stadler 2003; Valentine 2004)
You are correct, ID is a theory. But is not a scientific theory. Learn to differentiate between the vernacular use of the word "theory" and as it applies to scientific theory.
Do us all a favor and find a different catch phrase to use in place of debate.
Do us all a favor and stop trying to confuse ID with a scientific theory.
ID's only place in the science class comes from the fact that some of the actual scientific research being done under its mantle challenges evolution. In those cases, they are scientific attacks against a scientific theory. But those attacks in themselves do not make a theory.
bump for later reading
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