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To: Amos the Prophet
When you lump intelligence and design characteristics with the supernatural you are defining terms to fit your preconceived bias. The only way to study intelligence and design is as natural phenomenon.

Please explain how to emprically differentiate between the following:

1) An irreducibly complex organism/biological mechanism

2) An organism/biological mechanism that appears complex but in actuality, naturally evolved, but we're just not 100% sure how yet

If you can give just one example of how to differentiate between these cases, you might have a case that ID is science. Until then, it is only so much pseudoscience...

128 posted on 11/17/2005 11:16:35 AM PST by Quark2005 (Science aims to elucidate. Pseudoscience aims to obfuscate.)
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To: Quark2005

PLEASE don't partake of the IDiot error of using the term "irreducible complexity"

the proper concept which they have bastardized is "irreducible simplicity"


130 posted on 11/17/2005 11:21:19 AM PST by King Prout (many accuse me of being overly literal... this would not be a problem if many were not under-precise)
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To: Quark2005
Please explain how to empirically differentiate between the following: 1) An irreducibly complex organism/biological mechanism

First, the notion of an irreducibly complex organism is an absurdity since all organisms are irreducibly complex. To remove a factor from any organism is to irretrievably terminate that organism. A genetic alteration in a given organism makes a different organism. The two are not the same nor is one less or more than the other. Second, natural evolution is not inconsistent with ID.

Third, claiming that science is restricted to the phenomenological reduces science to non-reality based quackery.

You may count the scales on a fish as a means of categorizing divergent populations but you can not determine mating choices without reference to motivational influences, not all of which are mechanistically categorizable.

Color, for example, has no chemical properties. It is refracted light. (To claim that light is actually materialistic but that the materialists simply have not yet figured out how it is, is disingenuous at best.) Yet color is a highly determinative factor in the choosing of mates, especially among cold blooded critters.

I have seen animals change colors to suit their environment or their mood and to communicate between species. Yet they do not do so in the same way every time. The results are not duplicatable. Again, to assume that they are duplicatable but we have not yet figured out how, is not a defensible position.

136 posted on 11/17/2005 12:35:22 PM PST by Louis Foxwell (THIS IS WAR AND I MEAN TO WIN IT.)
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