Posted on 07/13/2006 3:18:03 PM PDT by curiosity
This makes no sense in any context.
I had heard the name George Gilder but didn't know much about him. National Review has a good reputation but I don't read it all that much. This sort of article is why they do have such a good reputation. This was a quality commentary and very impressive.
The sort of thing Gilder wrote about very much reflects to "bioinformatic fervor" you mentioned, DanDenDar. In some ways Gilder's article was all about that. The article was quite forward looking with a good understanding of the history or scientific revolutions -- specifically the newtonian to Einstein/Quantum modern understanding of physics.
This makes no sense in any context.
DI = Discovery Institute.
What discoveries have they made?
(Could it be that they have rediscovered David Hannum's famous theorum?)
So you believe Jesus walked on water and rose from the dead because it can be verified by fact and experience?
Indeed. To believe that creationist has scientific merit you have to subscribe to one or more of the following propositions:
So somehow hundreds of thousands of individual scientists for 150 years have managed to cleave to an obvious fiction for.... what reason exactly? Maintaining a conspiracy of 10 people for any length of time is virtually impossible. Lifelong fame and fortune awaits anyone who supplies tangible objectively convincing evidence supporting a young earth, a global flood, or the idea that biological species are grouped into distinct "kinds". Curiously no-one can manage this. Instead research supporting Darwin's ideas as modified by Mendel, Crick et al just keeps piling up into a veritable avalanche of confirming data. If creationism is true then the creator sure went to a lot of trouble to make it look as if the mechanism used was evolution and billions of years.
What is worse is that so many of the supposed objections, "evolution contradicts the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics", "no mutation is ever beneficial", "no mutation adds information" can be understood by a layman. Puhlease. If any of the obvious objections had any merit then how is the conspiracy of atheist scientists (many of whom we are told by the more nutty creationists are only pretending to be Christians) holding together?
Practically every way the data could have come out would have blown evolution out of the water if evolution were false. Linneous (sp) tried to create nested hierarchies of natural-world objects in the 18th century. The only success that he had in this endeavour was with biological species. Darwin's contribution was to come up with a natural explanation for observations that had already been made, that life on earth appeared to have evolved over geological time. Why would a Creator design all life (but nothing else) in a nested hierarchy that slowly changes over geological time (as measured by depth in the geological column, and more recently confirmed by radiometric dating)? Remarkably the nested hierarchy created using morphology has been mirrored by the genetic evidence. This isn't code re-use, this is a nested hierarchy that gives extremely similar results whatever techniques we use to build it. You cannot build meaningful nested hierarchies of classes that don't share common descent.
Derbyshire did get something wrong though. It isn't 20 years of debate... Creationism was the dominant paradigm ever since human societies started to form, and has remained a competitive paradigm for the last 200. So it isn't 20 years of failure to produce any result of note for creationism, but 10,000 years of failure to produce a coherent explanation of how the Creator worked and make real-world predictions of (for example) what fossils will be found where and (more recently) how comparative species genomes will look. After 10,000 years creationism is batting zero for its predictive power. If there was a Creator then it seems that what He created was evolution.
Sure. Mix up a soup of chemicals and watch the flagellum come together.
How would you know that the Designer hadn't intervened?
You don't think there is a nested hierarchy in the universe?
In my next posting of those ID questions, I'll have to point out that a rational, coherent, responsive reply to #4 should identify something that, if found, would be a contradiction of ID theory (like the proverbial Precambrian rabbit would be for evolution). It's no answer to say that I should make my own flagellum (or whatever) in the lab. It could always be said by ID advocates that such results are confirmation of ID, and one could never exclude the possibility of Providential interference with lab work. And it would certainly be claimed that, regardless of lab work, ID is still the best answer.
I subscribe to the authority and accuracy of the biblical texts first, not my experience. As such, I count both Jesus' walking on water and His resurrection from the dead as fact. I also note the text makes reference to nothing imaginary. Walking, water, and life are all natural, just like intelligent design.
Do it consistently according to rules that predict it would occur. It would prove evolution was a natural event without the requirement of a designer.
It would not disprove God.
Why are you obsessed with disproof of God? I have never understood this. It's insane.
There are some vocal athiests among scientists. There are athiests in all professions, probably even among clergymen.
But science seeks to find out how things work. The worst it can do to religion is demonstrate that things don't work the way some religious people claim they work. At most it can demonstrate that the community of believers, like any community of people, contains some people with wrong beliefs.
Which doesn't make it not real.
Nor is it science to say *God did it* when you don't know the answer.
But ID is a reaction to a conventional wisdom that has come to dominiate the scientific establishment that insists that if one doesn't agree that "God didn't do" one can't be a member.
Once upon a time -- and well-post Darwin -- Christians like Pasteur and Kelvin, who accepted Design axiomatically, ran the scientific societies. Quite a bit of progress occurred during their reigns.
Now, if you have an event for which you make a prediction based on a naturalistic understanding of the world and it turns out completely false, and someone who believe in a Creator makes a prediction about an event that turns out to be true, why would you have higher standing in science that he?
I'm just dropping in. What prediction are we talking about?
What is being demanded by the academia, however, is unquestioning allegience to a belief that many very smart people don't hold and what I think is driving this is not a love of science but an wish to eliminate the only challenger to utilitarian values, and, of course, said utility and values would be determined by the academy.
It IS being ignored by scientists, except when non-scientists try to jam it into textbooks and lesson plans.
"Well, I have never understood the hostility ID engenders. If it is wrong it will be shown,..."
It can't be tested; that's the problem. It can never be shown to be false or to be true.
"if it is impractical it will be ignored."
It is.
LOL. And don't forget scientific journals.
The supporters of ID are often accredited, productive scientists and the only reason they are attacked is because of the religious view of their attackers that all can be explained by random-mutations and natural selection.
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