Posted on 10/18/2005 3:56:52 PM PDT by Milltownmalbay
"Miller harshly criticized Intelligent Design, calling it “inaccurate and downright false in every section"
How is it inaccurate? How is it "downright false in every section."?
This is just emotionalism on the part of someone who is threatened by questioning Darwinist dogma.
Intelligent Design is NOT creationism and it seems that these two are always lumped together by skeptics in order to dismiss ID without giving it any more thought.
What amazes me is that they always mislabel the theory. A correct summary would be that the theory states certain aspects of life contain complex components or systems which work in such a way together as to suggest some sort of higher design or would be so useless in the absense of every other that the likelyhood any part was added at a different time from the others defies basic logic.
The theroy does not simply say wow life is pretty complex.
Conservatives need to run away from this issue. Kissing up to a bunch of ignorant yokels makes those conservatives who do look like fools and plays into the MSM's caricaturing them as so.
If anything, we should be using the dismal state of american students knowledge about the subject to indict the public schools, not praising ignorance.
fyi
Don't worry about him he just writes biology textbooks. They really think everyone is stupid and that they can just malign something and suddenly people will accept their "more informed" judgement.
When the ID arguments are not inaccurate or so inconsistent as to defy evaluation of their accuracy, they fall into the category of what Wolfgang Pauli would characterize as "not even wrong".
Thanks, but the list doesn't need this, in addition to what we already have.
"When the ID arguments are not inaccurate or so inconsistent as to defy evaluation of their accuracy, they fall into the category of what Wolfgang Pauli would characterize as "not even wrong"."
Nice statement but it doesn't provide any information as to how ID is inaccurate or inconsistent. What is inaccurate about it? What is inconsistent about it? Inconsistent with the fossil record? I don't think so, the fossil record tells no story about first causes except such a story that is speculated into it by naturalists.
Nah! IMHO conservatives need to say,
"Little Johnny and Susie, learn all you can about evolution.
Your Mom and I, and Pastor Bob think the more you know about how it works, the better, because we believe that God just might have used evolution to create the species we know today.
It's nothing a scientist could prove in a lab, but you know quite a few scientists believe that might have been the way it happened. Of course, Little Susie and Johnnie, a whole lot of scientists also think it's absolute bosh!
Definitely something to think about in Religion Class, or Philosophy Class, kids."
Unfortunately, there is a grain of truth in the MSM portrayal of the yokel factor. It truly does exist. But I wouldn't back off'em. The anti-Intelligent Design crowd is just as stuck on their mantras. What they don't get is that it is perfectly OK not to "believe" in Intelligent Design. It's OK that it cannot be scientifically demonstrated, and that Evolution can.
After all the Intelligent Designer probably believes in them!
In what way are scientists blocking reasonable debate (this wasn't about scientific debate, but about public school curricula - i.e. what they spend our tax dollars on).
Yes I have read origin of the species.
If by complexity theory, you refer to such things as NP-completeness and big O notation, certainly - I'm an engineer and its important to my work. This has some relevance to the topic at hand, relating to genetic algorithms and IDs abuse of the "no free lunch" theorem. If this is some illusion to chaos theory, I'd say yes I know a medium bit.
I certainly knwo a fair bit about basic chemistry.
"And one more thing, you might want to remember that those yokels are why you are free and they may sometimes express themselves simply but they are not ashamed of America or their soldiers and they are not ashamed of God and that puts them on a level that the MSM and those who think like you could never climb too."
Who said anything about being ashamed of america or its soldiers or god? Putting words in peoples mouths isn't a virtue.
Don't forget that the fantastic acomplishments in science and technology are another reason we are free. The nazis, japanese and russians certainly won't forget it, and the only technology our islamofascist enemies have to use against us is our own, because their science went from first class to crap centuries ago.
ID makes no solid predictions for the fossil record, and its major proponents mostly accept the mainstream scientific view as regards the age of the earth and the fossil record, though they will often dodge the question out of fear of offending the "6000 year old earth crowd" who provide some of their funding. So no, I don't think it is innacurate because disagreeing with the fossil record.
Their main arguments concern a few issues:
They have come up with a "explanatory filter", which they claim can detect design. When reduced to its core arguments,
it is useless, because it can not be applied, because it requires ruling out all known __and unknown__ natural causes. Basically this is a "God of the gaps" argument - everything that is unlikely to happen at random, and that we don't have a natural explanation for, must have been designed by a supernatural entity. The problem with this is that as soon as we do find a plausible natural explanation, the filter has failed. This has also been rejected as bad theology, because it implies that with every new scientific discovery, God gets smaller. This filter has never been applied to any biological system, or any other system AFAIK.
They have come up with a concept of complex specified information, which they claim cannot arise through evolutionary mechanisms. Unfortunately, the definition of this quantity is nearly impossible to nail down, and it has never been measured or attempted to be measured for any biological system. Their definitiosn of Information are weasely as well, making it unclear when they are talking about accepted defintions of Information (such as Shannon Information - Shannon's information theories are one of the reasons you are reading this on the internet today), or their own definitions that are accepted by no one else.
They make a an argument that no complex system can evolve if it consists of multiple independent parts such that it ceases to work if one part is removed. This has again never been successfully applied to any biological system (or even the mousetrap that they use as an analogy) - they like to talk about the bacterial flagellum, but are afraid to definitively state it as such a system, with good reason. There are logical problems with this argument- #1 such a system could evolve if it originated as a more complex system with redundancies and then the redudancies atrophied away and #2 cooption, which is a well known evolutionary phenomenon.
YEC INTREP
YEC INTREP
" new theory of evolution called Intelligent Design"
From whatever side of the fence you are own, I think most would say that ID is not a new theory of evolution and it is not even a theory.
There is only ONE theory. The homeschoolers are being lied to if your post is correct.
Because noone knows what ID is othe than "I don't know how we evolved thus God did it". (You are aware that the ID movement leaders believe in an old earth and common descent from squishy organisms, don't you?
Are they taught that ID theory includes:
Evolution,
A very old earth,
common descent for a squishy microbe,
allows that the almighty creator may not be God?
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