Posted on 09/24/2009 6:08:52 AM PDT by xcamel
William Dembski, the “intelligent design” creationist who is a professor in philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, has some rather interesting requirements for students of his creationism courses — 20% of their final grade comes from having written 10 posts promoting ID on “hostile” websites: Academic Year 2009-2010.
Spring 2009
Intelligent Design (SOUTHERN EVANGELICAL SEMINARY #AP 410, 510, and 810; May 11 – 16, 2009)
NEW! THE DUE DATE FOR ALL WORK IN THIS COURSE IS AUGUST 14, 2009. Here’s what you will need to do to wrap things up:
AP410 — This is the undegrad [sic] course. You have three things to do: (1) take the final exam (worth 40% of your grade); (2) write a 3,000-word essay on the theological significance of intelligent design (worth 40% of your grade); (3) provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on “hostile” websites, the posts totalling 2,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).
AP510 — This is the masters course. You have four things to do: (1) take the final exam (worth 30% of your grade); (2) write a 1,500- to 2,000-word critical review of Francis Collins’s The Language of God — for instructions, see below (20% of your grade); (3) write a 3,000-word essay on the theological significance of intelligent design (worth 30% of your grade); (4) provide at least 10 posts defending ID that you’ve made on “hostile” websites, the posts totalling 3,000 words, along with the URLs (i.e., web links) to each post (worth 20% of your grade).
I told you I didn’t read it. If I wanted tons of hot air I would read the books of the TOTUS-reader’s ghost writers.
Learn to write or find another communications medium.
I addressed your underlying issue.
And once again, if you can’t see the irony of your post then you are clueless beyond hope.
[[Do, I once again offer you the opportunity to show how to place an intelligent designer into any — ANY — scientific process, theorem, axiom or even hypothesis.]]
You tell me- you’re side has been doing that for a long time now- your intelligent designer is nature- but you can’t show how nature was able to create the itnelligent design- you simply just wave your hand and insist it must have
[[Once again, just a modicum of knowledge about science would serve you and your ilk well.]]
I think you meant to say ‘just an undying FAITH in naturalism and it’s miraculous, science violating abilities would aparently serve us well’ Macroevolution isn’t based on science- it’s based on a philosophical ideological beleif that straysd outside of science- again- let’s see the evidnece showing nature was soemhow able to violate scientific principles- or are you just goign to insult creationsits and ID’ists the rest of your life? If thats’ all you got- then whatever- we understand- being married to a failed hypothesis is like battered wife syndrome- you know it’s wrong to stay, but you just can’t leave because you think ‘one day things will be different’
>>Science makes no presuppositions about the existence or non-existence of transcendent causes. Neither does science make any presuppositions regarding the influence or effect a transcendent cause might have in the material world or the ability or inability of science, using the methods of empirical science, to detect those influences or effects.<<
That is a non-statement. Science follows the facts in the physical world. If it leads to an ID, then he/she/it has many questions to answer.
You’re so cute. Do your mommy and daddy know you use their computer thingy late at night to pretend you are a grown-up?
Check your Dr. Pepper can — it is probably close to empty.
But it won’t.
ID is just for people who are too lazy to do real science. It boils down to “it is tooo HARD, so IDdidit.”
It amazes me you pop off so much on these threads with so little understanding of real science (not the metaphysical science you try to pass off with many words of little meaning).
[[I told you I didn’t read it.]]
Of course you didn’t because it REFUTES your claim
[[I addressed your underlying issue.]]
You addressed nothing- you tucked tail and hid behind insults
[[And once again, if you can’t see the irony of your post then you are clueless beyond hope.]]
once again- you’ve got NOTHING and apparently think resorting to ad hominems is a winnign strategy- if you can’t see the futility of that tactic, then you are clueless beyond hope
[[You’re so cute. Do your mommy and daddy know you use their computer thingy late at night to pretend you are a grown-up?]]
Isn’t that precious? Playground insults- Golly- you’re progressign from rational to childish at amazing speed
[[ID is just for people who are too lazy to do real science. It boils down to “it is tooo HARD, so IDdidit.”]]
I think you meant to say ‘just an undying FAITH in naturalism and it’s miraculous, science violating abilities would aparently serve us well’ Macroevolution isn’t based on science- it’s based on a philosophical ideological beleif that straysd outside of science- again- let’s see the evidnece showing nature was soemhow able to violate scientific principles- or are you just goign to insult creationsits and ID’ists the rest of your life? If thats’ all you got- then whatever- we understand- being married to a failed hypothesis is like battered wife syndrome- you know it’s wrong to stay, but you just can’t leave because you think ‘one day things will be different’
[[It amazes me you pop off so much on these threads with so little understanding of real science]]
Still not goign to address any of the issue brought up eh? Whatever
[[That is a non-statement. Science follows the facts in the physical world. If it leads to an ID, then he/she/it has many questions to answer.]]
WOW! did you miss the p oint!
“”We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
That very statement tells me these are people who do not jave the foggiest notion of what TToE is.
And 700 — OMG 700 scientists, few of which are experts in the area out of 10 million or so across the planet and 2 or 3 million in the USA. That is.. hmm.. My calculator doesn’t go that far to the right of the decimal place .. let me try it a different way. If I did this right, that represents .00007% (feel free to check my math)
Good job. You sure brought it.
You
>>Still not goign to address any of the issue brought up eh? Whatever<<
You won’t and still you insult yourself and people who read you.
I have made it clear what real science requires. I can’t do anything if you don’t understand basic science well enough to meet the tiny challenges I have posted. It isn’t about insulting (your posts indict you more deeply than anything I could ever say — in form and content), it is about how your imagined logic applies to hard scientific processes and procedures.
I have patiently explained these to you and yours over and over. I can’t help you if you can’t understand them.
But keep disrespecting yourself. Your posts look like a baby who keeps soiling himself while smiling and saying “I did a poopy!”
You have the tools — I even described them to you. If you choose not to use them then we know your agenda. And you are so gonna get it when mommy (who knows if you have a daddy — your “look at me” issues suggest not) comes downstairs and finds you are wasting real grown-up’s time again.
Just repeating myself a bit here, CottShop! To put it another way, all I was saying is that no one has ever shown (or demonstrated) that all causes in nature MUST be "natural" ones. There is apparent intelligence at work in nature. From what I understand of methodological naturalism, intelligence would not be a "natural" cause, since it has no material basis.
You wrote:
We know nature isn’t capable of the foresight and anticipation seen in the complexity of Metainformation, and it certainly couldn’t arise from chemicals— hence I think it can be quite strongly shown that an intelligent Designer capable of anticipating and planning was needed.Sounds perfectly reasonable to me, dear CottShop!
Thank you ever so much for writing!
To put it another way, all I was saying is that no one has ever shown (or demonstrated) that all causes in nature must NOT be "natural" ones.
The "editing" business I was referring to is the reduction of one's problem to the size of one's model, so to speak. A pithy way to put it is, "If all one has is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail."
Or put another way, it's like placing a template down over reality, and everything that shows through is admitted as relevant to one's problem; but the template itself also occludes much from view, which is still very much a part of the reality under investigation.
I hope this makes sense. Sometimes the most obvious things are the most difficult to explain. Go figure!
Anyhoot, if the use of doctrinal templates is what constitutes a "method," then it seems to me it's a pretty bad one. FWIW.
Thank you oh so very much for sharing your wonderful insights, dearest sister in Christ!
That's true, ColdWater. But my point was people like you keep on saying that people like me insist on having NOT-natural causes for everything that happens in the word, or we will never be happy. Thus we are "anti-science." And we will not rest until we indoctrinate your children into this view!!!
Which is pure hogwash. There were/are many, many great "theist" scientists in many fields over the ages, e.g., Kepler, Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Gregor Mendel, Georges LeMaitre, George V. Coyne, etc., etc. They didn't let their faith in the God Who made the Universe and gave its laws queer their science at all.
Of course, theist biologists are as rare as sabre-tooth tigers nowadays. Francis Collins — who headed up the Human Genome Project — is a refreshing exception.
LOL~ I kinda like GGG's posts, but that is very funny.
Thank you oh so very much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
How do you justify your belief that every problem has a logical explanation?
How do you define what a logical explanation is? I can see that things in the world can have logical consequences arising from causes that are quite irrational. Can we cite an irrational cause as a "logical explanation?"
To illustrate, an example from Nobel Laureate (Literature, 1981) Elias Canetti's stunning novel Auto-da-Fé: Peter Wien, great scholar and leading sinologist of his time, having gone totally insane, was the cause of the immolation of his beloved and treasured library (of 25,000+ books) and of himself. (That must have been one Hell of a weenie roast.) This is a logical explanation. But it misses the point of what happened to Peter to cause his utter psychic breakdown, and tells us nothing about the etiology and course of his disease, why it happened, etc. Still, the cause of the fire was irrational, arising in a thoroughly devastated mind — which according to materialists/methodological naturalists is just an epiphenomenon of the physical brain, yada-yada, and as such mind is really unable to cause anything. This would be classed as an immaterial or NOT-natural cause, thus a fiction to begin with.
The scientists will come in to do the forensics after the fact. It seems science cannot tell us very much else about what happened.
[[Just repeating myself a bit here, CottShop! To put it another way, all I was saying is that no one has ever shown (or demonstrated) that all causes in nature MUST be “natural” ones.]]
I think I misread you the first time- I thought you were inferring that ‘noone could show who the supernatural is’, which is why I answered what I did- Your statement above makes it more clear that you were speaking aobut somethign different- to which I agree and to which the site I lsited above pretty much says what you said.
Golly- 10 million peopel so wedded to a hypothesis that they refuse to cede what those 700 finally came to cede- Gee- You’ve convinced me- Evolution must be true (And I’m sure you’ve got statements fro mthem all that they ifnact beleive the darwinian hypothesis no doubt)
This isn’t a numbers pissing contest- this is about who does and does not cede that it’s impossible for nature to create information needed for species survival- if somethign is impossible, it’s impossible- waving a hand and dismissing that fact does NOT make it possible again- no matter how many peopel are wedded to the hypothesis- 700 scinetists were intellectually honest enough to admit the impossibilities of the Darwinian theory
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