Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.
They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.
After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."
That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Tell me how this is done? What would they look like? Dembski tried to define this mathematically and failed. Do you have something better?
How is it structured?
The ongoing goal of science is to find natural causes. When an unexplained phenomenon comes into view, that's an opportunity for research. The idea that science should simply throw up its hands and say that some problem is beyond solution is so ludicrous as to be beyond parody. The very idea of declaring a problem beyond solution is beyond parody.
You are asking science to put on blinders.
That's basically a tautology, given that ID immediately gets labeled as invoking "supernatural" causes, despite the fact that ID proponents don't use that word.
It's what enabled us to reject the geocentric model in favor of the heliocentric.
I do not recall the deployment of Occam's Razor by Kepler or Galileo, and I do not see anything spectacularly simpler about a universe full of bodies buzzing every which way toward their own private particular Newtonian destiny, over a nice clean, cozy universe of enclosing spheres with a single shared center point, just because you've removed a term or two from a complex description of orbital mechanics.
Personally, I think some form of ID, or at least panspermia, is the best way out of several mutational clock dilemmas that presently puzzle us....which isn't sufficient to make it a science of any significant note.
It's sufficient to make it an hypothesis, at the least.
As is the case with crystal healing, astrology, and pastararianism.
Pastararianism--a schism of Pastafarianism that substitutes
pasteurized milk for tomato sauce.
You wouldn't believe if you read it.
To be able to CHOOSE between a group of given items is a BASIC human function.
How hard it must be for you, entering a restaurant that serves more than one item, and getting something to eat.
"You wouldn't believe if you read it."
And why SHOULD I believe it if you produced it? Would you believe me if I gave you a transcript I claimed to be from God? What would be the criteria to judge it?
You have invoked the hidden name of our Maximus Noodlieness.
For this transgression, You 'R banished to inner lightness, reserved for hand assemblers and former OSI owners.
Only when you want to talk over things that have already been said....
;^)
(I gotta START earlier if I want to win!)
You are not among those who know.
There really doesn't need to be an argument against ID until ID has made an argument for itself.
When you come up with the test for non-natural design, and it passes peer review, you will be in business.
Kepler may not have used the term, but he most certainly believed that the simplicity of his model made it superior. He said that that all the complex motions of the planets in the sky could be attributed to, in his words, "a single magnetic force". And then it was Newton's use of the same tool (again, whether or not he made specific reference to the name of it) led him to conclude that this "magnetic" force is the same force that caused that apple to fall off his tree in his orchard.
I do not see anything spectacularly simpler about a universe full of bodies buzzing every which way toward their own private particular Newtonian destiny, over a nice clean, cozy universe of enclosing spheres with a single shared center point, just because you've removed a term or two from a complex description of orbital mechanics.
It's not the simplicity of results that Occam's razor favors, but the simplicity of explanations for complex results. That's what makes Kepler's model infinitely superior to Ptolemy's.
[[Personally, I think some form of ID, or at least panspermia, is the best way out of several mutational clock dilemmas that presently puzzle us....which isn't sufficient to make it a science of any significant note.]]
[It's sufficient to make it an hypothesis, at the least.]
As is the case with crystal healing, astrology, and pastararianism.
You said that ID is a good way out of some dilemmas posed by current science. How is astrology a good way out of any dilemmas posed by science?
[Question_Assumptions:] This is an interesting pair of examples, because I think it corresponds pretty well to a possible relationship between evolution and ID. In many ways, Newton was correct but ultimately Newtonian physics is incomplete and cannot explain some very important phsyical pheonomena. That means that the average person can generate plenty of evidence to confirm Newton's theories and may never run into those places where Newtonian physics fails to properly explain the universe. Similarly, evolution may be the "Newtonian Physics" of biology, largely correct and incredibly useful but lacking in a few normally hidden but deeply meaningful ways.
Great analogy, Q.A.
I am usually on the Evolution side in these debates, because of the mountain of evidence supporting the propositions of (1) common descent of all life from a single ancestor, and (2) mutation acted upon by selection as the mechanism for speciation. And nothing in the TOE in any way conflicts with my (Jewish) faith. But your argument is an intersting one. I am not sure that we will ever find such evidence for ID-- I believe that God created us, but strongly suspect that His interactions with the world He made left few fingerprints that will be recognizable to us as such. But that doesn't mean that no one should look.
At this stage, I still think ID is more philosophy than science-- the ID'ers have yet to come up with a truly scientific way of looking for evidence of design. But that does not mean that they will not someday be able to come up with one. (I speak here of honest ID'ers, as opposed to Young Earth Creationists who have latched on to the label "ID" to try to smuggle Christianity into a biology class.)
Great point! They're outright admitting that science is completely credible, even while claiming the opposite.
Except that it doesn't support ID.
ID is the biological equivalent of the Bible Code. It will find patterns for the simple reason that the kind of pattern it searches for can be found even in random data streams.
ID talks about specified complexity. Fine. Let ID follow the rules of science and specify what it expects to find before it finds it. That's the rule that science has to live by. You want to test for ID? tell me what you you expect to find before you find it. That's the rule natural selection has lived by for 150 years.
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