Posted on 11/13/2005 6:07:54 AM PST by NYer
The testimony during the Dover trial was to the contrary:
"Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory," William Dembski, one of the movement's chief proponents, said in a 1999 interview in Touchstone, a Christian magazine that Forrest cited in her testimony.[emphasis added] source: http://ydr.com/story/doverbiology/88606/
"amny things make monkeys of men"
I think I can orang that. After all, I'm a "chimp" off the old block as are some gorilla friends I've had. If you gibbon a while, he or she often becomes one anyway.
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| 1 | You have no evidence | Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. | Darwinism is dogma! | I never said that! |
| 2 | Hillary | homosexual | Piltdown Man | You're no Christian! |
| 3 | liberal science | God-hater | government grants | What are you afraid of? |
| 4 | Hitler, nazi, etc. | You have no proof | communist tactics | 2nd Law of Thermodynamics |
| 5 | atheist, materialist, etc. | What made the Big Bang? | evolution causes immorality | gaps in fossil record |
| 6 | Prove the origin of life! | You're Christian-bashing | Darwin worship | I'm not [.....], you are! |
| 7 | arrogant jerk | Take your meds | [quote any scripture passage] | You're foaming at the mouth |
| 8 | It's only a theory! | Were you there? | Noah's Ark | Macro-evolution is impossible |
| 9 | It's all speculation! | [quote any creationist website] | Darwin leads to Marxism | My granddaddy was no ape |
| 10 | Stop the censorship! | That's a "just so" story! | Darwin was a racist | The odds are against evolution |
| 11 | Cambrian explosion | No transitionals! | All mutations are harmful | Speciation is never observed |
Bring on the last days, Armageddon tired of these puns! (I do like the gibbon-take though.)
There's nothing there resembling an actual "theory of ID", perhaps you could quote it for us.
It contains their idea of what testing a scientific theory means:
Yes, indeed it does, but the problem is that "their idea of what testing a scientific theory means" is completely flawed. You can't make something scientific by "redefining" science in a way that makes your bogus proposition look valid for a change. But the IDer's keep trying. Case in point:
TestingNo, sorry, thanks for playing. I'm tempted to dismantle that poppycock myself, but someone has already done so in enormous detail, and far better than I could:
Any good scientific theory is subjectable to testing. Theories that cannot be tested are merely speculation or wishful thinking. In testing for design, three things must be established, contingency, complexity and specification. The flow chart below shows how the testing process works. It is called the explanatory filter:1. Is it contingent? If No, then it is produced by necessity. If Yes, go to 2.
2. Is it complex? If No, then it is produced by chance. If Yes, go to 3.
3, Is it specified? If No, then it is produced by chance. If Yes, go to 4.
4. It is designed.
The advantages of theft over toil: the design inference and arguing from ignoranceAbstract: Intelligent design theorist William Dembski has proposed an "explanatory filter" for distinguishing between events due to chance, lawful regularity or design. We show that if Dembski's filter were adopted as a scientific heuristic, some classical developments in science would not be rational, and that Dembski's assertion that the filter reliably identifies rarefied design requires ignoring the state of background knowledge. If background information changes even slightly, the filter's conclusion will vary wildly. Dembski fails to overcome Hume's objections to arguments from design.
Read it and weep. The authors examine this "design inference" from every angle and show why it's enormously fallacious from start to finish. It's a magnificent example of utterly demolishing the dishonesty of the "ID filter", and demonstrates why it's piss-poor epistemology (i.e., pseudoscience).
A few additional observations: The flowchart has "Is it complex?" as one of its decision nodes. This is utterly vacuous. Things are not either/or, complex-or-not-complex, they have varying *degrees* of complexity. Just how "complex" is the precise breakpoint on that goofy "Is it complex, yes or no?" decision node? What retarded gradeschooler thought up this nonsense? Oh, right, Dembski.
Furthermore, how do you determine "Is it contingent or not, yes or no?" Answering such a question for any non-trivial case would require complete ominiscience -- is Dembski claiming the IDers to be God himself now? Because that's the only way you could confidently answer "no" and move on down the flowchart for any moderately complex subject.
And so on. As usual, the ID "science" is found to be a mish-mash of fallacy, snake oil, hand-waving, and embarrassingly elementary errors which most junior-high students wouldn't be ignorant enough to make.
As you can see, they do not believe God could have created a universe where all that was, is, and will be is necessary.
They don't think God could do that? Fascinating.
They believe that anything that is simple can be produced by chance, but complex things, e.g., Penrose Tiles can't.
And they're wrong in that conjecture. If they learned more about actual science, instead of just repeating age-old creationist fallacies dressed up in fancy language, they'd know this already. In any case, evolution doesn't proceed "by chance" alone, as you falsely imply.
From this starting point, it doesn't seem like sce to me.
Could we have that in English?
Ahh well there goes my theory, back to the drawing board.
Armageddon tired of these puns! (I do like the gibbon-take though.)
Thank you. :) All of these ape puns must make me a howler. Or maybe I can troll the dice....
Well done.
The Grand Master (may he evolve forever) should reward his scribes who produced that work.
No one's stopping them.
Most are areas that real scientists (as opposed to the "ID scientists") are already exploring, and have been for quite some time. And unfortunately for the ID folks, the results to date overwhelmingly support evolution.
And I'll bet fifty bucks that the actual scientists achieve more results and breakthroughs in these fields than the "ID gang" does in their thousand-year-old fruitless game of, "I know there must be evidence of design in here *somewhere*, if we just keep looking hard enough..."
But as usual, the ID folks manage to misunderstand even basic science -- I love the goofy screwup in this one on your list:
7. Cambrian explosion (sudden appearance of most species during same time period)
Um, no, sorry. "Most species" have appeared in the 500+ million years *AFTER* the Cambrian. Like 99+% of the ones which have lived on the Earth. There are a few hundred species which appeared in the Cambrian. There are over THREE MILLION currently living on Earth (none of which existed during the Cambrian), and countless more which have existed in between (like at least tens of thousands of dinosaur species, etc).
If the IDers can't even get the *easy* stuff right, how can we trust them with the hard stuff?
I find it perfectly reasonable that they should be able to follow whatever lines of inquiry shows promise. Anybody disagree?
Not at all. They're perfectly free to go chasing whatever they like. No one would dream of stopping them.
All we ask is that they stop lying about real science, and stop trying to dishonestly pretend that their half-assed efforts to date are actual science. Is *that* too much to ask?
"half-assed efforts"
the right cheek or the left one?
Hey! Are you Stuck on Stupid! We are on your side!
Maybe a more precise term would be explosion of "phyla."
You might be interested in the description given by Dr. Paul Chien, Chairman of the biology department at the University of San Francisco, after returning from studying the Cambrian-era discoveries in China:
"The general impression people get is that we began with micro-organisms, then came lowly animals that don't amount to much, and then came the birds, mammals and man.
"Scientists were looking at a very small branch of the whole animal kingdom, and they saw more complexity and advanced features in that group. But it turns out that this concept does not apply to the entire spectrum of animals or to the appearance or creation of different groups. Take all the different body plans of roundworms, flatworms, coral, jellyfish and whateverall those appeared at the very first instant.
"Most textbooks will show a live tree of evolution with the groups evolving through a long period of time. If you take that tree and chop off 99 percent of it, [what is left] is closer to reality; it's the true beginning of every group of animals, all represented at the very beginning.
"Since the Cambrian period, we have only die-off and no new groups coming about, ever. There's only one little exception citedthe group known as bryozoans, which are found in the fossil record a little later. However, most people think we just haven't found it yet; that group was probably also present in the Cambrian explosion."
What you call the very beginning happens to be three billion years into a three and a half billion year history.
Did I mention that things without bones or hard shells don't leave many fossils?
Billion, shmillion, does it matter to us?
I think that what this argument is really about is adherents to mainstream science are upset with what they perceive as heretics making waves in established fields. Happens a lot.
Mainstream media is being challenged, so are the mainstream Protestant denominations, etc. Mainstream education has had a cross to bear with all those pesky home-schoolers. I can even remember when mainstream Rockefeller Republicans were challenged by young conservatives, but that's another time, another thread.
The world turns and changes. Guess we'll have to live with it.
Interesting that you should mention this. Here's what Dr. Chien had to say on that subject:
"When an opportunity came up to talk with Chinese paleontologists and to visit them and the original site of fossil discovery, it became something I had to do. So last March I organized an international group to make a visit there.
"In some ways there are similarities between the China site and the other famous site, the Burgess Shale fauna in Canada. But it turns out that the China site is much older, and the preservation of the specimens is much, much finer. Even nerves, internal organs and other details can be seen that are not present in fossils in any other place.
(Interviewer): And I suppose many of these are probably soft-tissue marine-type animals?
Chien: "Yes, including jellyfish-like organisms. They can even see water ducts in the jellyfish. They are all marine. That part of western China was under a shallow sea at the time."
But they cited no evidence, and made no references to any scientific research.
Dr. John West, a political scientist at Seattle Pacific University, is senior fellow at Discovery Institute. He says these political responses to scientific issues are getting nasty.
Indeed, there is a lot of antagonism and condescension on campuses against ID, and students are disparaged and degraded upon the basis that they espouse a different theory, but it's also taking place all around us including FR. The fear of learning something which might jeopardize the existence of the current notion isn't new. We all know about past persecutions, and as Dr. West pointed out, "hate speech, speech codes, outright persecution, and discrimination is taking place on our college campuses, in our school districts, against both students and teachers and faculty members.”
Silence your opponent not with evidence or scientific facts, but with a paradigm of insults and smarmy remarks. I, on the other hand, want to learn as much as I can, especially when:
Consider the workings of the genetic code. That code produces all kinds of molecular machines, plus all the other components of life. ID advocates say that to believe those components are just Darwinian accidents takes a blind faith in the creativity of dumb molecules.
Darwin said that such complexity must have developed piece by piece. Behe said that is bunk. All the pieces must be in place at the same time or the motorized tails would never work.
Darwin's gradual theory has no good explanation for that -- ID does.
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