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To: TASMANIANRED
“The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.”

Sam Harris. The End of Faith


Belief gets in the way of learning.

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973


24 posted on 11/01/2007 8:58:05 PM PDT by Coyoteman (Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.)
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To: Coyoteman

I’m agnostic. I have no God in this fight.

I view ID not so much as an independent scientific theory as I do a -critique- of evolutionary theory. In that, I think it’s proponents argue quite well. Take the simplest and oldest of the ID arguments - the irreducibile complexity of the eye. I’ve seen the evolutionist’s responses to that one - and they’re not only unpersuasive, their responses (such as that of Dawkins) have evidenced deliberate deception. In this case, he claimed a computer model that showed how the eye could have developed. I found this supposed model on the web, and examined it for a good hour. It didn’t even -begin- to show what Dawkins claimed it to show. It was about as persuasive as someone claiming they had calculated the exact value of pi, and when you look at it, it’s a piece of paper with “22 / 7” written on it.

There’s also the lack of transitional forms. I agree with the ID arguments that, for evolution to be true, they ought to be -everywhere-. The evolutionist’s arguments for why they’re so incredibly rare are frankly terrible arguments (and their supposed discoveries of those few transitional forms they claim to have found have been repeatedly debunked as hoaxes).

As a “non-partisan” agnostic observer, I’ve seen a good deal of BS along the lines of global warmism also produced by the evolutionists. You can consider me quite skeptical of evolutionary theory as it stands, and the behavior of those defending it is very much like the behavior of those who consider a successful debunking of evolutionary theory as concrete evidence of the Judeo-Christian God.

My personal opinion? I -do- think that if evolutionary theory doesn’t pan out, then yes, at least for now, the logical deduction is that given no better explanation, “intelligent design” is the most reasonable conclusion for what we can observe. It doesn’t mean it’s the Judeo-Christian God (although it could be). It could also be that we were designed by little green aliens from Alpha Centauri who -did- evolve in a different environment and without any irreducably complex organs. It could be nanobots left over from the intergalactic war between Xenu and the Legion of Ascended Mormons. Who knows.

It is at that step, where they presume that proving Intelligent Design means proving the J-C God, that I think the ID’ers swerve from scientific critique into faith based argumentation. But there’s plenty, -plenty- of places where the evolutionists engage in faith based argumentation as well.

So. For the record. Trying to debunk it by merely asserting that it’s a trojan horse for religionists isn’t going to do a damn thing to convince me. I can tell precisely where the leap goes from a valid scientific critique to a faith based conclusion, and feel myself in no danger of mixing the two up. The line between evolution as a valid theory and the faith based argumentats of it’s proponents is way more blurry, and much more dangerous, IMO, and thus I am forced to treat it with much more skepticism. Ad hominem attacks such as yours only advance that skepticism. Do better.

Qwinn


32 posted on 11/01/2007 11:27:55 PM PDT by Qwinn
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