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 ...
1) Look for evidence of communication, interaction with a designer.
2) Look for evidence of spontaneous genesis in non-unique multiple dispersed closed environments. (stuff appearing in 1 mud puddle when thousands of equivalent mud puddles exist).
3) Look for evidence of mistakes, or failures. (entrons)
I believe evidence exists for each of the above.
That's the problem with design; until you specify who the designer is, what their powers are, and what their motivation is, anything and everything can be evidence for design.
There are many Christian evolutionists (scientists) on this site.
the problem is not that evolution explains that mane arose from animals but that it refuses to leave any room for God in the unknown. It seems to assume a godless universe.
Evolution says nothing about whether a god or gods exist or not.
continued...
4) Look for evidence of uniquely defined fixed constants for values that should otherwise, naturally, be highly variable. The coupling constant, alpha, for instance that Feynman suggests must have been defined by God. (among a dozen other such constants)
Do you ever get anything more than chirping crickets in response to that question? If you do then I've missed it.
As desired, the actual hierarchy of Darwin Central remains a mystery. There have been endless speculations in the tabloid press regarding the identity of the current Grand Master. I am privileged to be his spokesman.
On behalf of the Grand Master, I am,
PatrickHenry
Endless speculation placemarker.
Sorry, but the assumption of natural cause is the only possible assumption that science can make. It has always been the assumption. Even when scientist were all searching for evidence of God, they were looking for regularities and consistencies, not miraculous interventions.
It is only when the regularities and consistencies began to impinge on Biblical literalism that religion started crying foul.
Real trouble started when geology began to resemble a clockwork, and the ticking traced back more than a few thousand years. The last straw came when life itself was compared to the clockwork.
Of course, true ID advoctes will not be worried about Biblical literalism. they are satisfied by the clockwork metaphor. What they find offensive is the assertion that varition is stochastic and that populations are shaped by the rather brutal process of natural selection. The notion that nature itself has free will is just too much.
So what it boils down to is that ID asserts strict determinism. Everything was wound up at the beginning, all the rules in place, everything that would happen in time was anticipated and known by the designer.
On what grounds do you think it's likely or unlikely that no such test exists? Is it intuition, because you assume they are wrong, or because you have some evidence that no such test exists? Is there any reason why people shouldn't try to come up with such a test?
We can look for human artifacts because we know all sorts of things about humans already. But looking for evidence of a designer, having no knowledge at all of what the designer might be, is a different kettle of fish.
I don't think that's true. Looking at the fire pit, for example, it is just as useful to know what a natural fire leaves behind as it is to know what a man made fire leaves behind. If you only knew what a natural fire looked like, it would be possible to determine that a fire didn't look natural.
As a semi-made up example, suppose natural fires are started by lightning and lightning very rarely strikes twice in the same place. If I come upon the remains of a fire that contains many layers of strata suggesting there were many different fires in the same place, I could simply assume that this spot was a random fluke of probability or I might start looking for another reason why there were repeated fires in the same spot and look to make sure that I'm interpreting my evidence correctly. At that point, random chance, some other natural mechanism for starting fires, or even the hand of a fire builder all become reasonable alternative explanations that are all tested, just like ID, by looking for characteristics that distinguish the natural from the deliberate. And what's important to note here is that the person who insists that random lightning strikes started all fires before a certain period of history can always claim, without proof, that any fire was random but that's not necessarily the correct conclusion if some other agent or process was really at work. Just because something is possible does not mean it was probable or even correct.
Archaeology is full of alternate interpretations for the same evidence when it's inconclusive. And as with other fields of science, those interpretations are often biased by the assumptions of the researcher. For example, an archaeologist that accepts the Clovis theory of human migration into the Americas will be inclined to look at an inconclusive fire pit and see evidence of a natural fire while a an archaeologist who believes that the Americas had a pre-Clovis population might be more inclined to see it as evidence of a pro-Clovis population. The evidence doesn't prove either one right, but neither are they being unreasonable in their interpretations.
Yeh, but I see who signs my checks, spokesboy.
They're signed by machine, you dunderhead! Do you think the Grand Master would devote his time to bookkeeping chores?
And their objection to ID is? (Other than guilty by association.)
Evolution says nothing about whether a god or gods exist or not.
"Evolution", in the broader non-technical sense that it's often used, allows the universe to be godless, which to many is the same thing. That's where I think ID comes into play. In the big scheme of things, it doesn't contradict evolution. What it does is to provide a formal way of presenting the possibilty that the universe is not godless to students without delving into any particular theology.
Nobody said they were.
I don't have a dog (or a dogma) in this fight, but it sometimes seems to me that the Creationist Young Earthers just supply the straw man targets the docents need, to avoid the critical science guys like Dembski and Behe.
Dembski isn't a scientist; he isn't even much of a mathematician. And few of us have any compunction about criticizing Behe's 'science'. We had tons of fun with his allegedly 'irreducibly complex' systems.
I'll try to forget it if you'd like me to. ;)
It's the same old bludgeon of ignorance.
"You can't make me see" placemarker
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.