This from the person who told me in a prior thread that they would only interact with those who wrote you with reasoned discourse.
Then you write this.
Please take a moment to consider your actions before you post, please.
The really big lie which is being promulgated by the evos is that the dialectic is between evolution and religion. That's BS. In order to have a meaningful dialectic between evolution and religion, you would need a religion whicih operated on an intellectual level similar to that of evolution, and the voodoo doctors down in Haiti would probably not be interested.
The real dialectic is between evolution and mathematics. Professing belief in evolution at this juncture amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in modern mathematics, probability theory, and logic. It's basically ignorant.
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are defending it because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some axpect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too!
The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....
You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek.2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
Sort of like saying "More Small-Minded Idiots for Creationism".
Not very nice is it? As my grandmother used to say "If you haven't got anything nice to say, at least be polite. And mind your manners."
Unfortunately, this sentence doesn't make any sense. No process is intelligent, but follows simple rules which may or may not be iterated a vast number of times to yield complex results. Without external enthalpy, a process will only yield more entropy. However, with external enthalpy a process can be driven backward to create a reduction in entropy (locally at least). Of course, it gets interesting when you consider that essentially everything in the universe is fundamentally a dumb process.
Aside from the he said/he said aspect of this tiff, I'd like to hear from you published scholars out there: What is standard procedure when an editor is compiling a book of academic essays like this? I'm sure that, at the least, Pennock's publisher contacted Dembski's publisher, if only to find out where to send the royalty check? (Or do authors who got their essays included in a book normally get royalty checks?)
Who else should we ping who would know about this sort of thing?
"The only-exception-in-the-universe-to-the first-&-second-laws-of-theromodynamics-so-we called-it-something-else-with-a-deceptive-title" theory.
*sigh* Anything so as to have an excuse to not bow the knee.
Dembski is no stranger to controversy, and I'm not referring here to his theories! Apparently Dembski has a reputation as being somewhat reckless & thin-skinned in academic circles.
This statement is plainly wrong. The ID movement seeks to save society by making "God did it" once again a respectable hypothesis in scientific theories.
#4. Materialism, Naturalism, Darwinism, all these isms, what do they have to do with me and my life?
Materialism (or naturalism) is significant because it tends to set the boundaries for what is right and wrong in contemporary society. It defines the "rules" that govern much public discourse. It dictates the terms of elite debate, so that even those who are not materialists have to presuppose it in the public square. It goes to the intellectual roots of contemporary society, even though it contradicts the stated justifications of most public institutions. In particular, materialism makes nonsense of the claim that the state must respect the "inalienable rights" of individuals "endowed by their Creator," even though many materialists appeal to such notions for rhetorical effect.
If materialists are right, then we created "God" rather than the other way around. A character of Doestoyevsky's once said: "If God is dead, then all things are lawful." At the very least, if materialism is correct, then there is no transcendent right or good apart from the material world. However, while materialists generally define matter or the material world as the fundamental reality, they often tolerate "spiritualities" compatible with the materialist axiom. A culture that is thoroughly materialistic can still foster a worship of the state, the individual, or nature itself. Inevitably, whatever happens to be the case defines what ought to be. So, in an authoritarian setting compromised to materialism, elite rulers can dictate what is right and true with impunity. In a democratic setting, majority sentiment, shaped by elite opinion, is the ultimate arbiter. In either case, where materialism holds sway, might makes right.
FAQ #4, Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture
The CRSC (Discovery Institute's ID arm) has gotten much more subtle in its statements lately, but they used to be much more forthright in their support for creationism and an explicitly supernatural creator:
... This rigid scientific materialism infected all other areas of human knowledge, laying the foundations for much of modern psychology, sociology, economics, and political science. Yet today new developments in biology, physiscs, and artificial intelligence are raising serious doubts about scientific materialism and re-opening the case for the supernatural. ......but ultimately they just can't deny it without losing their movement's whole purpose for being. As they see it, the only way they can save society from nihilism is to get people in academia & other opinion leaders to believe again in a grand, supernatural authority figure who can, deus-ex-machina like, come down & "lay down the law", without having to explain or justify His decisions to us.
Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture, ca. 5/1997
After all, if an authority figure has to explain himself, then that implies we are able to critique his actions, and that opens up a whole can-o-worms, what with our messy, differing opinions & all. It's anarchy I tells ya, ANARCHY!!! One suddenly starts to understand how scared the Catholic Church must've felt when all those Protestant splinter groups started forming, each one pushing their own interpretation of the Bible.