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.
Are you honestly telling me that before we could figure out what was written on any of the artifacts we found, we couldn't be sure they were artificial?
Huh? What's the difference between a methodology and an approach? Oh, wait. Maybe you answered that in your next sentence. An "approach" is an unwarranted assumption, made without any methodological demonstration of its validity. Is that about right?
Now, leaving aside your mischaracterization of the scientific method as inclusive of an "assumption of chance" (or, for the purpose of narrowing the issue, accepting that mischaracterization as true), what would your "assumption of design" accomplish?
Since you dismiss out of hand any need to demonstrate by analysis that an object under scrutiny is designed (and simply declare it designed by fiat), what purpose does your declaration of design serve in your subsequent investigation of the object's lineage or constitution?
Frankly, the only purpose of such a declaration that I can discern is the commencement of an inquiry into the identity of the designer. But of course that inquiry is, according to ID proponents, either off limits entirely or, at a minimum, of no interest.
I wouldn't characterize either of those as necessarily true. As I understand it, ID proponents merely acknowledge that there's as of yet no scientific data to go on that would give any solid indication as to the identity of the designer. That doesn't mean that it's of no interest scientifically, or that it's "off limits", and it also doesn't necessarily mean that no progress will ever be made in that direction.
"Are you honestly telling me that before we could figure out what was written on any of the artifacts we found, we couldn't be sure they were artificial?"
We couldn't prove it, no. We obviously could be highly certain it was artificial, but that still needed to be tested. Just like any scientific theory. We hypothesize that no natural cause could produce it, and that it was made by humans. One of the tests to see if it was made by humans is to see if we can decode it. We can. We did. There was a way to test our hypothesis.
The ID Hypothesis as an explanation for the diversity of life we see has no such test. There is no way to falsify it. It isn't science.
My point for bringing them up was to (hopefully) illustrate how it's not always clear whether something is or isn't man-made.
You said:
"But we can look at some random artifact with it stamped on there and immediately recognize that it was not formed by natural processes."
I realize you were talking about cuneiform writing and not undersea "roads," but I'm curious by what process one could "immediately recognize" that something was or was not formed by natural processes.
Well, that's my point. As others (on the pro-evo side) have said on this thread, absolute proof is pretty much found only in mathematical theorems. Everything else is just a matter of probability.
Right, and I understand that. My cuneiform example was intended to show that there are examples of things we could find that we would know almost immediately were artificial. I was saying that to illustrate that it wouldn't be unscientific to make such a conclusion. And so if there are cases when we can see it right away, there are also going to be cases, like the "Atlantis" example, where we should be able deduce it through more in-depth (no pun intended) investigation.
When you have a cause you have an origin. A point at which the process starts. For a process not to start means you have a ray extending backward from the point of the result. This would contradict evolution since it would make the beginning eternal up to the point of the result. You would say there was a moment in time when the decaying process started. Now you saying that the atom is decaying. If the atom is decaying without a start point than the than the atom is eternal and not a billion or trillion or a googul years old. The one big flaw of evolution though is it does not take into account a quality action. We all know that when a manufacturer has quality tools, he can make an item in a lot more less time than it took in the past. During World War II, it took months for us to get information about what was happening in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Today, we can almost instantaneously after an event occurs anywhere in the world. Why does the process have to take so long? Why couldn't it take weeks or months? Also, you don't take into account starting with a mature animal. Either you have a chicken or an egg to start with.
In regards to angels good or bad? There are too many sightings to deny that there are beings that are supernatural.
Plausible? How about highly probable to the point of being virtually certain? Again, there was no serious doubt that the cuneiform tablets we've found were artifically created, prior to our being able to understand what was written on them.
"Plausible? How about highly probable to the point of being virtually certain? Again, there was no serious doubt that the cuneiform tablets we've found were artifically created, prior to our being able to understand what was written on them."
No matter how highly probable it may have appeared, we still needed to test it. There was a means to test it. Unfortunetly ID has no such advantage. You are not answering how it can be tested regarding evolution.
That's because I don't agree that such a step is even necessary in order to establish the validity of the theory. As I said, not knowing what was said on those tablets in no measurable way diminished our certainty that they were intelligently designed. We therefore didn't "need" to decode them in order to come to that conclusion. We did it anyway in order to get more knowledge about them.
"As I said, not knowing what was said on those tablets in no measurable way diminished our certainty that they were intelligently designed."
Their being written partially in Greek didn't hurt either. :)
"That's because I don't agree that such a step is even necessary in order to establish the validity of the theory."
ID doesn't need to be tested? What makes ID so special?
Do you have any background knowledge on what a designed organism would look like, especially one designed by some nonhuman designer, the way we did for the Rosetta Stone.
> Where did I promote ID or creationism?
You've come out against evolution. There are few other options.
> In FACT, I said, "I don't care what the truth is, I just want whatever "IT" is, to be TRUE."
Circular reasoning. If it's the truth, It's true. if it's not true, it's not the truth.
> You claim "SCIENCE" but you want different rules for your religion.
What religion would that be? Remember, only those with little understanding of science woudl be hare-brained enough to suggest that science is a religion. So, what religion are you referring to?
> evolution claims to be SCIENCE so it has to stand by it's SCIENCE, like all other Scientific theories.
Which means that it must stand on the Scientific EVIDENCE that exists.
And it has repeatedly done so. That's why it's accepted sceince.
> your evonazi ilk
Godwin!
> Such animosity and anger shows way more about you than it does about those you attack.
Indeed it does, "evonazi-boy."
I'm not just talking about the Rosetta Stone. The cuneiform artifacts that pre-dated it by a couple of millennia at least (check it out) bear almost no resemblance to modern writing. There would have been a time between discovery and decoding, when we wouldn't know for sure what those markings indicated. But there would have been essentially no doubt that this was the work of man.
ID doesn't need to be tested?
Not in the way that you mean, for the reasons I explained.
Do you have any background knowledge on what a designed organism would look like, especially one designed by some nonhuman designer, the way we did for the Rosetta Stone.
We knew what the Rosetta Stone would look like before we found it?
You've come out against evolution. There are few other options.
So what you're saying is that there are two possible answers to the question of living origins. Only one can be right, and the other wrong. But neither one is "unscientific", unless the question itself is beyond the reach of science to answer.
> there are two possible answers to the question of living origins.
There are many. But only two that get any play. Again, contemplate that you are in "The Matrix." Silly, but there you go with option 3.
> But neither one is "unscientific"
Incorrect. The assumption of the supernatural is inheirantly unscientific.
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