Posted on 07/03/2009 8:42:41 AM PDT by virtuous
A new Zogby poll shows that a majority of Americans support intelligent design.
According to the poll, only 33 percent stated that they believe in Darwinian evolution, while 52 percent stated they believe life was guided by intelligent design.
Steve Meyer is the director for science and culture at the Discovery Institute. In his new book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, Meyers suggests that the digital revolution is fueling the popularity of intelligent design.
"In the book I've written, I discuss the evidence of the digital code that's inside life -- the four-character digital code in the DNA molecule. I call it the signature in the cell. Bill Gates says it's like a software program, only more complex than any we've ever written," he notes. "You have at the base of life not just...matter and energy, but you have information as well, and I think that's very intuitively something that arises from an intelligent source, not from undirected processes."
He adds that as people become aware of the scientific discoveries that show the complexity of life and they compare that with the complexity of the technology around them, they tend to question the "textbook" account of the origin of life that basically states that life arose from an undirected process.
Yes, even “intelligent” people like Richard Dawkins believe in Intelligent Design, its just that they attibute it to aliens from another planet, and not God. LOL!
There’s a difference between “i d” and the “I D” idea of the “I D Movement”.
If you are under the impression that the "I D Movement" people identify the intelligent designer as the Christian God, you believe something that was never true.
The pollsters (not Zogby, which was only hired to carry out the poll) designed the questions with hot-button terms and then claimed the wording represented “Darwinian evolution” even though their terms aren’t part of the definition of evolution. It’s a bogus poll.
Agreed. Evolution was portrayed as being completely random.
I never said the IDrs mention a Christian God, they just mention an intelligence behind Creation. That is the prime foundation on which all monotheistic religions are built. Furhter conclusions about the nature of man and the universe are necessary to derive Christianity.
HerrBlucher: "Yes, even “intelligent” people like Richard Dawkins believe in Intelligent Design, its just that they attibute it to aliens from another planet, and not God. LOL!"
HerrBlucher: "I never said the IDrs mention a Christian God, they just mention an intelligence behind Creation. That is the prime foundation on which all __monotheistic religions__ are built.
See the problem?
You'd have been better off stopping after that first sentence above, because in your second sentence you admit that _you believe_ that the "I D Movement" people are pushing "a religion" focusing on "one God".
The ID Movement itself denies any such thing.
Wow, talk about jumping to conclusions, yikes!
I was making fun of Dawkins squirmy backtracking in "Expelled", pushing the problem of irreducible complexity off earth and on to some other planet. He squirmed and proposed this scenario because he is unable to even allow the alternative scenario of a supernatural intelligence behind creation.
From what I know of ID, the goal is to simply show that Chance + Time cannot answer what we scientifically observe in the universe. After that you are on your own....God, Gods, reincarnation, afterlife, whatever etc.
I cannot engage in conversation with someone who isn't able to recognize incoherance in his / her position.
In other words, I'm outta here.
The best and most recent poll we have is the voters in Dover, PA voting the IDers off the school board before the trial started.
Why bother when "irreducible complexity" is no problem? IOW the original IDer claim -- that an IC system (one where all parts are necessary to the function of the system such that none can be removed) cannot be created in a stepwise fashion -- is simply false. (IDers will often admit this when pressed persistently by a skeptic, even if they remain content to use this falsified trope on the sheeple.)
There are in fact several ways to generate IC systems by small steps. For instance the addition of parts or steps that are not initially necessary (only helpful) but which later become necessary due to other changes.
Or there's the removal of scafolding. Simple example the later would be a stone arch built around interior stones later removed. The final arch is irreducibly complex (every stone is essential to maintain the arch) but it was formed one stone at a time.
Functional shifts provide other paths. (Think of the arch with the interior stones still in place as not a disfunctional arch, but a functional wall.)
Tell that to the genius Richard Dawkins, he is the one that felt the need to invoke Aliens in the face of irreducible complexity.
While it may be true that step by step the extremely complex DNA molecule could have been formed purely by chance, the chance of that occurring is so ridiculously low it borders on the impossible, as Dawkins was apparently aware and under such pressure made a fool out himself.
First, no one, not one single person, certainly no scientist working on origin of life issues, thinks DNA "formed purely by chance".
Secondly, the DNA molecule is not "irreducibly complex," nor have IDers ever argued that it is IC. They use entirely different arguments (e.g. "specified complexity") with regard to DNA, and these with regard to the information component, not the molecule as such. (Nor by the way is the informational DNA code IC. Even a high school freshman learns that it is redundant.)
Sorry to be blunt, but you don't seem to know what you're arguing for any better than you know what you're arguing against.
Ok then, lets simplify this so we don't argue over irrelevant details. The IDrs are saying that Chance + Time is inadequate to explain the origin of life, and so the concept of ID. And Dawkins, faced with that, and apparently not understanding the issue as you do, resorted to Aliens to explain the origin of life on earth. But he didn't solve the problem, he just moved it to another planet.
And that was the reason for my original lighthearted jab at the pompous Dawkins.
We can argue all day the details of what IDrs are asserting, but the bottom line is: Chance + Time vs Intelligent Design.
ping!
Well, then we'll apparently have to argue all day about what evolutionists are saying, because none of them would say that. At least I've never heard it -- as a "bottom line," first aproximation, simplification, or anything of the type -- from a biological evolutionist, or origin of life researcher, as a characterization of either evolutionary theory or origin of life hypotheses. (Can't say about Dawkins specifically, however. Never been a fan of his and have not paid much attention to him ... however much he seems to be constantly angling for attention.)
I have, of course, heard the "chance + time" characterization from creationists, but only from that source.
Look, I'm no scientist and no big expert, but I have thumbed through college level textbooks on evolution and related subjects from time to time, and dipped into relevant scientific literature just a bit. Let me assure you that some dozen or so major, and many more minor, mechanisms are considered wrt the operations of biological evolution:
Natural selection, kin selection, sexual selection, group selection, founder effect, genetic drift, the neutral theory of molecular evolution ... those are just a few mechanisms, off the top of my head, without looking anything up, from a non-expert who hasn't followed the subject closely in some years ... I could easily make the list far, far longer.
Here's how Merriam Webster defines a scientific mechanism:
the fundamental processes involved in or responsible for an action, reaction, or other natural phenomenon
IOW, particular processes that have particular effects. That is not "chance". Chance (alone) never has been and never can be a scientific mechanism (although it can be an element of a mechanism).
So, anyway, no. We do NOT agree on the "bottom line" you suggest. It is in fact a decidely, and inexusably, false strawman which I actively reject, as I'm certain would any other evolutionist here.
33 percent believing in evolution astounds me.
Could it be that 33 percent of our population might now be either agnostic or atheist?
Great find! Here’s another link to an article over at DI re: the same study:
http://www.discovery.org/a/11451
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