Posted on 02/13/2006 4:31:16 PM PST by MRMEAN
Biologists are beginning to solve the riddles on which intelligent-design advocates have relied
To advocates of intelligent design, the human sperm's tiny tail bears potent evidence that Charles Darwin was wrong--it is, they say, a molecular machine so complex that only God could have produced it.
But biologists now are starting to piece together how such intricate bits of biochemistry evolved. Although the basic research was not meant as a response to intelligent design, it is unraveling the very riddles that proponents said could not be solved.
In contrast, intelligent design advocates admit they still lack any way of using hard evidence to test their theories, which many biologists find revealing.
The new insights on evolution at its smallest scale were a major yet little-noticed reason why a federal judge late last year struck down a plan in Dover, Pa., that would have put intelligent design in public school classrooms. The findings the judge cited will provide the ultimate test of ideas about the origins of life, more lasting than court rulings or the politics of the moment.
Most scientists have long rejected intelligent design, or ID, on the grounds that it is a religious proposal not grounded in observation. ID adherents say biochemistry actually supports their view. They argue that many tiny mechanisms--the tails of sperm and bacteria, the immune system, blood clotting--are so elaborate they must have been purposely designed.
Yet biologists have made major strides on each of those phenomena since the first ID books were published in the mid-1990s.
Working without the benefit of fossils, experts are using new genome data to study how fish evolved the crucial ability to clot blood. A wave of new research on the evolution of the immune system seemed to stump ID witnesses in the Dover case. And even ...
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
"Well, you could start by looking in a mirror, but if you'd rather consider that an accident of random chance of nature, that is your decision."
I'm not physical evidence for the existence of God.
"So why the mockery and derision that people see the handiwork of God in the complex things of this universe?"
I asked a simple question. There was no mockery in it. Stop looking for insult in every line. :)
Actually it is. There's even a web site Who needs that science stuff when you can find the truth by being a controversial writer, broadcaster and journalist?
Here's the question to which I posted "Cthulhu:" Who wound it up to begin with? Since you seem confused and lost already, let me point out that "it" refers to the universe.
Are you really that stupid? I can explain it to you if you are, but I get curious at all this blank-look "Who me?" affectation from the anti-science wizards whenever they commit a fallacy or a misstatement of fact.
"Did any schools refernece the concept of Gia in the 1990s? Even in a non-serious manner as Earth Day approached?"
No. That's mythology, not science.
The funny wrinkle in ID is that they claim to accept multiple god-like entities with beyond-natural-powers.
There is something odd about monotheistic creationists accepting an idea that admits polytheism as a possibility.
I know who Cthulhu is. I know how you operate here. I know you suffer from delusions of adequacy.
You think you're cute and you think you're clever. And you're badly in error on both counts.
I was merely making the point that something can't be wound BACK up that wasn't wound up to begin with. There's a lot more to the universe than we know, or probably even can ever know as we keep discovering new realms that demonstrate more complexity than we ever considered.
I know you don't like questions that you can't answer, but you should be used to them by now.
That's the ACLU interpretation of the Establishment Clause, not its actual meaning.
That's more like my point. There's no need for a "who" to "wind up" the universe anymore than there was a need for someone to make you younger before you were born.
But if God did create evolution, it would be a lie to say He didn't. It would also be a colossal error to say that we would be here whether God exists or not.
Thanks for your response, Vade.
That's just where we disagree. Many of us believe in God and believe He did indeed "wind up the universe", for lack of a better term.
If you believe otherwise, fine. I accept that. I'm not going to go around preaching to you. I've never done that here, and never will.
But let's face it, you and I are completely clueless as a practical matter about where all this (the universe, life, etc.) came from, or why it operates as it does, and so on.
I just think there's a different explanation than you do.
Again, mainstream cosmology has no "winding up" phase, so it's not just me. There was no "winding up" phase in your life, although you will wind down.
But let's face it, you and I are completely clueless as a practical matter about where all this (the universe, life, etc.) came from, or why it operates as it does, and so on.
Does that make it a useful place to run when you're losing on questions more easily settled? There are no valid "Second Law" arguments against evolution. The origin of the universe happened at a time before life began evolving.
But what I want you most to remember: asking "Who wound it up?" is Begging the Question. Got it now?
I was RESPONDING to a prior post in which someone else made the reference about winding things BACK up. You know that, so why do you keep on with this nonsense?
And now you're off on a second law of thermodynamics tangent. When did I say there was a second law problem with evolution? You have me confused with another person posting here, I believe.
Thanks for admitting in a roundabout way that it wasn't me who raised a thermodynamic problem with evolution. Maybe it was roundabout enough that no one will pay much attention to your mistake.
I wasn't dismissing the post in question. I merely asked the poster's opinion. He's still welcome to answer if he wishes, and I won't bite his head off for responding.
He described how the universe will wind down and stated that there will be no one to wind it back up again. I merely asked who wound it up in the first place, hoping to find out his opinion. I wasn't begging the question, as it's an unanswerable question. But it's not a question upon which we can't have an opinion. I was simply hoping to hear his since he seemed to have a good grasp of the subject, and seemed able to discuss things without getting angry at people who might disagree with him.
It was a creationist who raised it and your dismissal of the mainstream response was incorrect. There was nothing wrong with saying "Earth will cool off (after an initial baking, but that is another story), things will run down, and there will be nobody to 'wind things back up'".
Again, you are "winding down" (getting old) but no one needed to wind you up (youthen) you. Your object is just a facetious wave-away to distract from another creationist getting his head handed to him for showing up dumb as a stump with the same old invalid talking points.
I wasn't begging the question, as it's an unanswerable question.
You asked "Who?" If it's a "who," it has to be somebody's invisible friend. I picked "Cthulhu," but I'm not wedded to the hypothesis. You see, asking "Who?" is begging the real question. The real question is whether ANYBODY's invisible and omnipotent but otherwise anthropomorphic buddy exists at all and had ANYTHING to do with the whatever the beginnings of the universe were.
Exactly! It was someone else who raised the thermodynamic problem with evolution, not me.
I never said there was anything wrong with the response in question (the one about things winding down, no one to wind them back up, etc.).
I merely asked someone's opinion about who wound up the universe in the first place, if indeed it will wind down and there will be no one to wind it BACK up.
You may have a point that my use of "who" implies that it's a someone who created the universe, established its laws, and so forth. But that wasn't an unreasonable response to the original post. I was asking the question from my own point of view, which is that there is a God and He did set all this up. But if someone disagrees with me, that's fine.
I think it gives a person more dignity and self-respect to know that they were created in God's image for His purpose than to believe that they descended from animals and when they die that's the end. It also gives a reason to treat the bum on the street as someone of importance when one realises that under the dirt, filth, drugs, and alcohol, is a human being whom God loves and died for. People deserve dignity because of that; in spite of their conditions and circumstances. That explains the motivation behind much of the mission and relief work done by religious organizations around the world.
I believe that humans are all created by God, in his "image" (spiritual image; as a Jew, I do not believe that God has, or ever had, a physical image), and therefore each of us has intrinsic worth and dignity. I also accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that all of the humans, animals and plants on earth all share a common ancestor, and that separate species arose through the natural processes of imperfect reproduction and natural selection.
There is nothing contradictory in these views. To the contrary, I believe that I glorify God Almighty by recognizing how He was able, through the natural laws He created, to cause simple self-replicating molecules to evolve into creatures capable of worshipping Him (and capable of using their brains to recognize and understand the natural processes at work in His universe).
What has your personal opinion about dignity and self-respect got to do with whether the theory of evolution is true or not?
Wouldn't that infer all organisms, floral and fauna, are created in God's image.
If your answer to that is no, then at what specific point in evolutionary history did this profound event take place?
All flora and fauna were created by God, but there is something unique about humanity, which the Torah describes in metaphoric language as being "in the image of God."
If your answer to that is no, then at what specific point in evolutionary history did this profound event take place?
Hard to say exactly what specific point-- the soul doesn't readily fossilize-- but I suspect not until our exact subspecies (homo sapins sapiens) or very close to it. There is no evidence of any earlier hominids (with the possible, and still controversial, exception of neanderthalensis) creating art or music. Other evidences of the divine image-- compassion, altruism, reverence-- would be even harder to ascertain from the fossil record.
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