Posted on 01/07/2002 3:16:27 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:32:03 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court declined Monday to be drawn into a debate over the teaching of evolution in America's public schools.
The refusal is a victory for schools that require teachers to instruct on the subject even if the teacher disagrees with the scientific theory.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I've long considered the movement behind SETI as unscientific. It is built upon basically religious desire to prove that we are not alone in the universe. Sagan was a religionist without the capacity for self-criticism.
As to the method SETI employs, it is at least logical and systematic, and therefore "scientific."
Can anyone suggest ways in which the methodologies of ID and SETI differ? They seem identical to me: Either they are both scientific, or both fail.
Actually it has. Both by looking at the radio universe itself and by calculation of natural radio source emanation.
Exactly how does one "detect design" using information theory? There are a lot of things you can do with Kolmogorov complexity (e.g. finite state machinery detection), but "design" isn't an information theoretic term. In fact, all the plausible answers for what you mean by "detect design" have consequences that you probably won't like; it necessarily implies limits and restrictions on the designer's capabilities (i.e. the designer can't be the Christian God).
When you explain how all this works, go ahead and use all the big words you like; I work on the bleeding edges of information theory in the real world and am thoroughly familiar with the mathematics and implications.
OK, here:
So, there is evidence suggesting evolutionary scenarios leading to a flagella. Behe tries to ridicule these on page 66, but the best he can do is demand detail.From here. Now, YOU go away!. . .
It is also difficult to accept that a flagella represents Intelligent Design, when it is so different from a cilia or an undulopodia. And why do archae and bacteria use a very different flagellin? What kind of intelligent designer doesn't re-use designs, or even components?
The SETI community doesn't run around proclaiming that ET exists. The ID gang, on the other hand ...
Me too! :)
In the matter of science and science education I call BS where I see it. Tough skittles.
Response: "Nope. Simplest thing in the world. Just find me a mammal fossil from a rock stratum formed long before the mammals existed."
Ah, but there ARE such fossils. This class of fossils is referred to as "DISPLACED" fossils, because, after all, they couldn't POSSIBLY be anything else. They "must have" been washed down or "migrated" by some "natural means."
Thanks! Have you ever in your lives seen a more blatant bid for a free pass to spout garbage and have it go unanswered?
The evidence for evolution is that all the data falls into a clear pattern, explained by mutation and natural selection. If there is solid evidence that the pattern is invalid, the theory would collapse. Seriously.
Yes, but all he says is that the only way to disprove ID is to prove evolution. In other words, the only way to disprove it is to prove a competing theory. Isn't there a way to disprove it without reference to Darwinism?
Is intelligent design falsifiable? Is Darwinism falsifiable? Yes to the first question, no to the second. Intelligent design is eminently falsifiable. Specified complexity in general and irreducible complexity in biology are within the theory of intelligent design the key markers of intelligent agency. If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do. In that case Occam's razor finishes off intelligent design quite nicely.
I think you have that backwards. I do not see ID papers in mainstream journals. You cite them in peer reviewed mainstream journals and I will be glad to read them.
Your attitude is most unscientific. "Peer reviewed" journals publish that which repeats academic dogma or fashion; they will rarely publish views challenging academic dogma. In 1995, for example, tenured professors of sociology would ingratiate themselves to their peers, by standing up at faculty meetings, and bragging of not having read Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve.
Good point, the SETI people are all about gathering data and performing analysis on that data to provide evidence to either support or deny the hypothesis that intelligent life could exist elsewhere within our galaxy. So far, the results deny the existance of life elsewhere in the galaxy, however, the experiment is as yet incomplete. ID seemingly attempts to call the hypothetical a theory by not producing the reproducable and falsifiable evidence to support a designer.
There is a possibility that intelligent life could exist elsewhere in the galaxy, I can accept that. There is no compelling reason to believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere in this galaxy until there is some independently verifiable evidence to support it.
Same holds true for a designer of the universe.
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