Posted on 01/30/2006 10:27:35 PM PST by Sweetjustusnow
The two scariest words in the English language? Intelligent Design! That phrase tends to produce a nasty rash and night sweats among our elitist class.
Should some impressionable teenager ever hear those words from a public school teacher, we are led to believe, that student may embrace a secular heresy: that some intelligent force or energy, maybe even a god, rather than Darwinian blind chance, has been responsible for the gazillions of magnificently designed life forms that populate our privileged planet.
Sandage told a 1985 conference on science and religion that the Big Bang was a supernatural event that cannot be explained within the realm of physics as we know it, and that science had taken us to the First Event, but it cannot take us further to the First Cause. The sudden emergence of matter, space, time, and energy pointed, Sandage said, to the need for some kind of transcendence.
What has either got to do with the existence of a deity?
ReligousBoob1, ReligiousBoob2, ReligiousBoob3, NewReligougBoob, ReligiousBooblurkin', SeniorReligiousBoob...
If you have some evidence the articles he posts are not of Ichneumon's authoring, please present it.
You couldn't resist, could you. You had to end your post with an insult.
Your proof?
Good luck. When I challenged him to produce page numbers for the usual quote-mined extracts from Feduccia he was posting, he couldn't.
Loosey-Goosey Intellectual Relativism alert!
As another freeper asked, do you really think we should "always" dialog in "opposing viewpoints" in curricula (for example when presenting the historical reality of the holocaust)? Or is this just antievolutionary special pleading falsely disguised as a general principle?
Education certainly can, and often should, at least in some number of illustrative cases, include "a dialogue between opposing viewpoints;" but only when genuinely contending viewpoints, each with some measure of objective viability and merit in the relevant domain of scholarship, actually exist.
Of course this is not the case with creationism or ID. Whatever you may personally believe about their truth value, it is a simple fact that neither has (at least yet) achieved substantive standing in the market place of scientific ideas. Certainly neither has achieved a standing remotely comparable to evolutionary theory. This is an objective fact confirmable by consulting the professional literature of science. To present creationism or ID on one hand, and evolution on the other, as comparable "opposing viewpoints" is to flat out lie to students.
Your rhetoric simply attempts to deny or avoid this uncomfortable FACT. This is the usual role of intellectual relativism and intellectual affirmative action, but it's unseemly for a conservative. Let the liberal-left engage in word magic: pretending that saying something is so makes it so.
Any good conservative should be willing to let ideas compete -- ACTUALLY COMPETE -- in the intellectual marketplace, where they can succeed or fail on their demonstrated merit or lack thereof. Conservatives should sneer at calls for the sham, non consequential psuedo-competition of contrived "balance" in textbooks and curricula, failure-free and carefully measured to appease identity groups and salvage their delicate self-esteem.
After all, creationists in these threads regularly inform us that evolution is teetering on the brink of collapse. I happen to think that's B.S. and bravado which even the claimants don't believe (not deep down). But if it's so then LET evolution collapse, and if it's genuinely surpassed and replaced by some superior scientific theory then let evolution be removed from science textbooks and curricula. Why do those who (supposedly) consider their ideas on the verge of victory wish to establish the precedent that substandard ideas -- ideas that can't cut the mustard in PRACTICE -- should be dishonestly presented as competitive in curricula? I think the answer is obvious.
Behe may be emotional about the subject, but he does not paint his opponents as idiots.
The philosophical definition of science doesn't have to be methodologically validated. The definition of science is the definition of science. Philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism are not the same.
A desire to consider the supernatural within the rubric of science in now way changes the definition of "science" any more than the homosexuals' desire to marry each other changes the definition of "marriage."
I believe that you are proceeding from the misconception that "science" is something more than it is, or that a scientific statement or conclusion is more than it is. A scientific truth, for lack of a better word, is merely a conclusion reached through the scientific method; i.e., it makes a statement about the natural word, as informed by natural phenomena and facts of nature. By definition, it cannot say anything about the supernatural.
Science is not a search for ultimate Truth, or the meaning of life, or some such. It is just the application of the idea of the scientific method to the natural world. That's it. If I were to conclude that this means that there is no God, or that there is a God, or anything like that, then that conclusion is as unscientific a statement as they come. Once you add anything supernatural in there, it ceases being science. Maybe you are doing a scientific-theology, if such a beast is even cognizable, but it is not science.
There's no requirement that "vestigial organs" be "completely useless". They may merely represent a "vestige" (and/or a shift of function) with respect to their former function.
For example the known functions of the human appendix (AFAIK releasing a few useful enzymes, which might btw be released by any handy bit of mucous membrane along the intestinal tract) is clearly vestigial with respect to the function of the organ in, say, gorillas: holding large amounts of course vegetable matter that requires additional time to be digested.
Please, enough of claiming to 'know' the truth. Guys like you have been wrong time and time and time again, and yet that doesn't stop you from spouting some new cockamamie theory as gospel truth, and doing it with a straight face. Some of us are smart enough to understand how much we really dont know.
For example... It was thought up until very recently that a person could not grow brain cells. BZZZ- WRONG! Now we know that is not true. "The appendix serves no purpose". BZZZ- WRONG! "Tonsils serves no purpose". BZZZ- WRONG! And on and on.
Why did an alleged "designer" give us the exact same mechanism that furred animals use to erect their fur for heat-retention and threat displays, despite the fact that due to our sparse body hair, it serves neither of those functions for us? For what "design purpose" do we get goosebumps?
Some believe that goosebumps in humans act as an aid to amplify the sense of touch. This of course would makes perfect sense, as an additional 'fight or flight' mechanism.
The former is a mathematical expression denoting an understanding of physical forces. The latter by default postulates a sole cause that omits intelligent design. This is due to a philosophical stance that defines science as incapable of, or disinterested in, anything beyond what is physically observed.
The omission of intelligent design on the part of devotees to materialism is not due to a lack of evidence so much as an aversion to religious implications, which implications may or may not be necessitated by the presence of intelligent design. If it is objectively true that an intelligent being designed the DNA molecule, for example, science will blind itself to this truth not because there is lack of evidence or possibility, but for other reasons with which you are intimately familiar. Emotional, philosophical reasons, not empirical ones.
Very well could be, and as an added benefit, your fur (if you are an animal with fur) stands up straight as a result of the muscles tightening around the hair folicles which also minimizes the heat exchange you refer to. Sounds like pretty effecient design work to me.
When an evolutionist testified in the famous 1925 Tennessee Scopes Trial that are "no less than 180 vestigal structures" in the human body, was he correct?
I would not say such things if I were you.
The more you tighten your grip, PatrickHenry, the more primes will slip through your fingers.
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