Posted on 09/30/2005 2:09:51 PM PDT by truthfinder9
It's amazing that these Darwinian Fundamentalists claim they're for science only to turn around and try to destroy any contrary theories or evidence. They're really getting desperate, the ID movement really has them rattled.
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September 30, 2005
It’s happening again: another scientist, another academic institution, another attempt to stifle freedom of thought. The “Darwinist inquisition,” as a Discovery Institute press release calls it, is as predictable as it is relentless.
This time the setting is Iowa State University. One hundred twenty professors there have signed a statement denouncing the study of intelligent design and calling on all faculty members to reject it. The statement reads, in part, “We, the undersigned faculty members at Iowa State University, reject all attempts to represent Intelligent Design as a scientific endeavor. . . . Whether one believes in a creator or not, views regarding a supernatural creator are, by their very nature, claims of religious faith, and so not within the scope or abilities of science.”
I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this thing is getting out of control. To begin with, the reasoning of the Iowa State professors is, frankly, some of the weakest I’ve ever seen. They give three reasons for rejecting intelligent design. The first is what they call “the arbitrary selection of features claimed to be engineered by a designer”—which, even if that were true, would prove nothing. If certain features were chosen arbitrarily for study, how does that prove that no other features showed evidence of design? The number two reason given is “unverifiable conclusions about the wishes and desires of that designer.” That is a dubious claim; most serious intelligent design theorists have made very few conclusions about any such “wishes and desires.”
But the third reason is my favorite: They say it is “an abandonment by science of methodological naturalism.” Now this gets to the heart of the matter. The statement goes so far as to claim, “Methodological naturalism, the view that natural phenomena can be explained without reference to supernatural beings or events, is the foundation of the sciences.” I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a scientist, but I thought that the heart of the sciences was the study of natural phenomena to gather knowledge of the universe. I thought we were supposed to start without any foregone conclusions about the supernatural at all, that is, if we wanted to be truly scientific.
It seems to me that the intelligent design theorists aren’t the ones trying to inject religion and philosophy into the debate—the Darwinists are, starting out with predetermined conclusions.
But it gets even better than that. The Iowa State fracas started because one astronomy professor there, Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez, has attracted attention with a book on intelligent design. It’s a little odd to accuse Gonzalez of being unscientific; he’s a widely published scientist whose work has made the cover of Scientific American. But that’s exactly what’s happening. And here’s the kicker: Gonzalez barely mentions intelligent design in the classroom. He wants to wait until the theory has more solid support among scientists. All he’s doing is researching and writing about it.
Now the lesson here for all of us is very clear: Don’t be intimidated when confronting school boards or biology teachers about teaching intelligent design. All we are asking is that science pursue all the evidence. That’s fair enough. But that’s what drives them into a frenzy, as we see in Iowa.
Truth is an ivory towered bunch of pseudo-intellectual educators are likely to approve such reading. Local school boards are not.
Then an ant hill is not natural?
Yes. Assuming otherwise leads to results contradicted by experiments.
I love these puzzles! Where is the research?
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
> 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...
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 ;)
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.
No. Read my resume for that.
LOL, no, all I have to do is read your posts. That does the job quite well.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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