The ‘Darwinist Inquisition’ Starts Another Round

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[Louis Foxwell]

So you'd be ok with a local school board that authorized Naked Play Time With Uncle Bob.

Truth is an ivory towered bunch of pseudo-intellectual educators are likely to approve such reading. Local school boards are not.

[Louis Foxwell]

I would disagree with anyone who describes a car's origins as natural.

Then an ant hill is not natural?

[Doctor Stochastic]

...radioactive decay. So you are saying nothing is acting on the atom from without or acting inside from within?...

Yes. Assuming otherwise leads to results contradicted by experiments.

[Louis Foxwell]

...radioactive decay. So you are saying nothing is acting on the atom from without or acting inside from within?... Yes. Assuming otherwise leads to results contradicted by experiments.

I love these puzzles! Where is the research?

[Pietro]

"The reason so many people are initially attracted to ID is because they do not approve of the way the left uses evolution as a means to diminish God, faith, and morality"

There is that of course but you shouldn't downplay the idea that life is far more than merely the material. Nor should you underestimate the idea of design, specifically an intellegent design buried in the seeds of life, below evolution. There is a powerful self organizing force in the universe; where does that come from?

BTW, thanks for your reasoned response, one sees so little of that on these threads.

[orionblamblam]

> you've told me all I need to know about your reasoning capabilities.

No. Read my resume for that.

> you're the poster child for what public schools have turned out

Actually, no. I *DO* know about science, unlike the bulk of US public school students.

[porkchops 4 mahound]

Well just as soon as you, or anyone else, proves a specific theory, or belief, about the origins and reasons for life, all those other "false" ones will just disappear.

The Darwinists are just spitting enraged that anyone would DARE to question their "accepted SCIENCE" orthodoxy. They are just like islamists in that way, no questions or doubts allowed re: "evolution".

Or ELSE! You kaffir cur!

(Sorry got carried away a tad)

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"Well just as soon as you, or anyone else, proves a specific theory, or belief, about the origins and reasons for life, all those other "false" ones will just disappear."

1) No theories are proved in science. Proof is what you do when you are working with mathematical theorems.

2) The ToE has nothing to do with the origins or reasons for life. It doesn't attempt to answer those questions, it's not part of it's scope. Requiring a theory to answer questions that lie outside it's domain is illogical.

"The Darwinists are just spitting enraged that anyone would DARE to question their "accepted SCIENCE" orthodoxy."

You're projecting.

[porkchops 4 mahound]

Thanks for proving my point.

Darwinist fundamentalism is religion.

Don't be so testy, just bend a knee to Mr. Darwin, and worship at the altar of the geological column and carbon dating, if you want. I don't care.

I Don't know the answers, neither do you, nor does anyone else.

Just don't pose Darwinism as "accepted and settled SCIENCE" because that is a LIE.

I don't care what the TRUTH is.

I care that it is the TRUTH, which is untestable, which means in the end, it always comes down to FAITH.

So don't cry now because your church of evolution has to play by the same rules as all other religions, theories, beliefs, opinions, myths, traditions, humans contain.

PROVE it, P R O V E IT, or "stifle yer self Alice", about other approaches being baseless ignorant superstitions.

You Darwinists tend to act just like the islamist mob, demonstrating your mutual tolerance of questions and doubts of your mutual "unerring" dogmas.

[orionblamblam]

> Just don't pose Darwinism as "accepted and settled SCIENCE" because that is a LIE.

Evolution *is* accepted and settled in the scientific community. There is debate on specifics, but the fact that it happened is no more debated amongst biologists than the rocket equation is debated amongst aerospace engineers.

Your little hissy fit does not change that fact.

> I don't care what the TRUTH is.

Then you'd make a suck scientist.

> PROVE it, P R O V E IT, or "stifle yer self Alice"

If only you would direct that at the IDers...

[general_re]

It has been an unassailable philosophical and logical position since the Greek philosophers that there can not be an uncaused cause.

Not really. It's more of an assumption, with a bit of support from our everyday experiences. The logic of it was quite successfully assailed by Hume, and later, Kant - essentially, what Hume did was show that arguments regarding causality all tended to simply assume causality, effectively begging the question. Anyway, given what we know of quantum mechanics, any such proof has now been rendered empirically false.

Second, I distinctly remember one of my theology profs insisting that there can be no uncaused cause in the universe. I guess I took that as an Aquinian proof of God.

Well, if that was 40 years ago, that would have been about the time that Bell developed the inequalities eliminating hidden-variable theories, so I suppose we can't fault your theology prof for not being up to date on the cutting edge of particle physics. Anyway, the first-cause argument has other problems as well, but first and foremost these days is that there are uncaused events happening right around you all the time. When an atom decays, nothing inside or outside the atom causes it to go boing - it just does, all by itself, essentially because it can. And not only is it uncaused, it's completely random as to when it does.

This is a testable prospect, by the way, and the test for this was first proposed, as I said, in the mid-60's, partly in response to Einstein's objections to the state of quantum mechanics - it was later carried out in the early 1980s by some French physicists, and subsequently by many others. As a result, it is known that there are no unknown "hidden variables", no deterministic mechanisms inside or outside an atom that causes it to decay - it just goes boing, and that's that. And Einstein was wrong.

Anyway, that is an idea that I have not seriously challenged for 40 years. Can you point me to some literature?

What sort of literature - Hume, Kant, or QM? The good doctor can probably give you better QM references than I can, so I'll leave that to him ;)

[ValenB4]

I do believe that there is more to the universe than the material. And I do believe that God set things in motion and there is design - according to his divine plan. But from our subjective point of view due to our being finite, imperfect, short lived beings, evolution is the means of his creation. As finite beings with imperfect knowledge, we cannot perceive anything beyond the physical universe (our scope of measuring the physical universe can change however). Therefore, while we occupy this life, we cannot perceive anything beyond evolution.

Trying to graft a non-scientific idea like ID onto science is a self-contradicting task. There is no way to gather objective evidence for what constitutes design. While you could say everything constitutes design, that's not scientific and doesn't get us anywhere in terms of learning anything new.

[MHalblaub]

"The fuel was generated by living material."

Plants won't grow without sunlight.


"Even with our intelligent input we can't create living organisms from inanimate material."

Maybe we are not so clever as we think.


"So what makes you so confident that a random universe forever becoming more random has the ability to do such a task?"

Ever asked a jackpot winner about the possibility to win the jackpot? I trust the palaeontology research results to be true in most cases. Fraud is a habit common to human and apes. But lies and errors are detected in science through ongoing investigation. Calling the whole thing a fraud is an error or nonsense. I myself discovered fossil snails in the alps. No, no flood tectonics. We have continuous documents from china around the time the biblical flood ought to happen.

[CarolinaGuitarman]

"Thanks for proving my point. "

Uh, no.

"Don't be so testy, just bend a knee to Mr. Darwin, and worship at the altar of the geological column and carbon dating, if you want. I don't care."

Carbon dating isn't used to date fossils. I'm sure you knew that. lol The relative dates of the geological column were established independently of the ToE about 10 years before Darwin published. By Creationist geologists.

"I Don't know the answers, neither do you, nor does anyone else. "

I know some of them. I agree you don't know any.

"Just don't pose Darwinism as "accepted and settled SCIENCE" because that is a LIE. "

Only if by lie you mean it is true. It's been settled science for about 150 years. It keeps getting better and better with age though, so in that sense it's still settling.

"I don't care what the TRUTH is. "

Obviously.

"I care that it is the TRUTH, which is untestable, which means in the end, it always comes down to FAITH. "

So, you don't believe in the ability to acquire knowledge. It shows. Maybe in your case it is true. :)

"So don't cry now because your church of evolution has to play by the same rules as all other religions, theories, beliefs, opinions, myths, traditions, humans contain."

I am not crying, I am laughing uncontrollably at your lumping together religious belief and scientific theory as if all types of knowledge have the same epistemological status! lol

"PROVE it, P R O V E IT, or "stifle yer self Alice"

That's Edith, not Alice. If you want to play the part of Archie Bunker you have to know who he was married to.

Name one theory in science that has been proved.

"You Darwinists tend to act just like the islamist mob, demonstrating your mutual tolerance of questions and doubts of your mutual "unerring" dogmas."

Ah, more projection.

Thanks, I needed a good laugh so early in the day! :)

[inquest]

[you've told me all I need to know about your reasoning capabilities.]

No. Read my resume for that.

LOL, no, all I have to do is read your posts. That does the job quite well.

[drhogan]

well, that's much more clear.
i'll have to leave it to the biologists to argue this--i never studied evolution at even the college level.

[Pietro]

thanks for your excellent response.

"Trying to graft a non-scientific idea like ID onto science is a self-contradicting task."

This is where I must question your logic. I think there is ample evidence that life, at all levels, demonstrates a self organizing power that is beyond the ability of current science to explain. Why is that?

I think it's because science has limited its vision soley to the material properties of life. If there is a self organizing force in this world then it should be perceivable. It need not necessarily be beyond our abilities to understand, although it very well may be.

In either case we will never find it if we don't look for it. And we can't look for it if we're not even allowed to discuss it.

And that, my friend, is the crux of this whole debate. It is nothing short of an academic establishment that has determined what can and cannot be discussed by labeling everything outside of their narrow perview as religion, and therefore, not serious.

Furthermore, by successfully labeling ID as cloaked religion they can leverage the usual anti-religious zealots to defeat it in the courts.

[Right Wing Professor]

The universe may not be closed.

That's a contradiction in terms. The universe is everything.

Also, entropy is in the eyes of the beholder, is it not?

No, it's a well defined thermodynamic state function that one can measure.

[Right Wing Professor]

We have all seen the math regarding the number of mutations necessary for a simple organism to occur by random selection. The numbers exceed the atoms in the universe.

I've never seen anything but simplistic a priori estimates that assume that proteins came together all at once with a defined single sequence. Know of anything that will take me more than 5 minutes to drive a truck through?

[RobbyS]

Can you give me an example of the use of "supernatural causes" as an explanation of physical events by ANY philosopher of the time? Cardinal Bellarmine, who was willing to give his theories a pass provided he did not claim certainty for them, seems not to have "got" just what Galileo was saying, but he certainly did not think that objects were moved by spirits.