Posted on 02/09/2010 3:15:53 PM PST by cornelis
It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the movement must be judged not only a failure, but a debacle.
Very few religious skeptics have been made more open to religious belief because of ID arguments. These arguments not only have failed to persuade, they have done positive harm by convincing many people that the concept of an intelligent designer is bound up with a rejection of mainstream science.
The ID claim is that certain biological phenomena lie outside the ordinary course of nature. Aside from the fact that such a claim is, in practice, impossible to substantiate, it has the effect of pitting natural theology against science by asserting an incompetence of science. To be sure, there are questions that natural science is not competent to address, and too many scientists have lost all sense of the limitations of their disciplines, not to mention their own limitations. But the ID arguments effectively declare natural science incompetent even in what most would regard as its own proper sphere. Nothing could be better calculated to provoke the antagonism of the scientific community. This throwing down of the gauntlet to science explains not a little of the fervor of the scientific backlash against ID.
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
ID was always a theory in search of evidence, Evolution is a theory that has shoe horned incomplete evidence into a entire system that is then demanded that complete belief be placed into.
ID is needed if only to sharpen Evolutionary Theorists work, the more ID demands “prove it” the more searching takes place.
“This throwing down of the gauntlet to science explains not a little of the fervor of the scientific backlash against ID.”
More, it’s their sense of entitlement and arrogance that anyone would challenge them. Look at the the response of the global warming crowd to any variation from the “consensus dogma”.
Prov 16:33 The dice are cast into the lap, but every result is from the Lord.
Chuckles - Ok I'll bite.
My guess is that for you 'fundamentalist' is a bad word - only when attached to systems of thought or belief to which you are not an adherent.
How about a fundamentalist constitutionalist? Or maybe a fundamentalist 2nd Amendment proponent? Either one sounds to me like a badge of honor.
Bottom line: if the fundamentals are worthless, then I would submit that the entire line of thought is as well.
Are you a meat-eater - or one of those who eat vegetarian steak?
Don’t look for an end to the ID movement because Philip Anschutz...
I really like what little I have gleaned about this man. I love “The Foundation for a Better Life” ads. He owns two movie studios and several (thousands) of theaters. I would love to see him do “Atlas Shrugs”.
I would apuligize, but I don't think I can spel the wurd.
“but there are thousands of people who find faith in Christianity and therefore believe in ID.”
Whoa there, hoss. I’m not for evolution or this new ID thing. Everything I’ve read, ID goes to a lot of trouble at explaining the how. How I got where I am is not that important to me. Whether some Bible thing is literal and the universe is 12 years old or it’s figurative and it’s as old as our national debt is large, makes no difference to me. Who put me here and why is another ordeal altogether.
Y’all can give yourselves aneurysms about all this junk and when you’re done you’ll have called each other all kinds of heretic about something that couldn’t even change my wife’s choice of which dress to wear to a wedding; and my wife changes her opinions on dresses by the second.
So knock yourselves out. As it says in Mathew 25, when you’re done and the Good Lord splits us apart and says, “Y’all did good,” I don’t recall signing on to ID as being a part of that checklist. When he says, “Sucks to be you,” I’m pretty sure not believing in ID wasn’t on that list either. But hey, who needs the Good Lord to tell us what’s important when we have internet theologians.
Go at it, folks. It won’t make a bit of difference.
Amen.
Bump for later.
know problum!
Derbyshire linked it because it comforts him in his atheism, but it isn’t much of an article. Like most scientists, the author is undoubtedly good at working within a model in his field, but not so good at thinking about issues of methodolgy and sociology of science. Implicit in his writing is a 1950ish Popperian understanding of scientific method, which has long since been abandoned in its naive form as a result of work by Kuhn, Imre Lakotos, and others. In his response to someone commenting on Anthony Flew’s abandonment of atheism Barr incredibly says it had nothing to do with intelligent design, but rather had to do with the Anthropic Principle. Yet, the whole point of Wheeler’s long ago paper (1973) on the Anthropic Principle was that the physical constants in the universe give rise to a reasonable inference that the universe was designed to support human life. Fred Hoyle has said the same thing, just to name another prominent physicist.
Oddly, Barr, a physicist, is trying to write an obituary on a theory (ID) that, in the form he is discussing it, has to do with biology. While I don’t know whether ID will eventually be vindicated or not, I think that it is clear that Darwinism is only supported by group think in the universities. Random mutation won’t bear the burden of the work it has to do in the theory. Gould and others have recognized this, as well as other problems, but Richard Lewontin has been the most outspoken in demanding that Darwinism be defended - at least to the public - because he doesn’t want God to get a foot in the door. People need to understand that while science has always been subject to agendas and politics, the politicization is more intense now than ever, largely because of the massive amounts of government money that flows through the system, IMHO.
I can’t believe I am posting on this because these threads are virtually always an annoying waste of time...
No problem with that except there is a double standard wrt how science views evolution and ID.
"Well, there's your problem"
You're not supposed to look for the data that supports a speculation. The theory has to explain all the data you already have.
You make a good point . . . as the ancients have already said, nothing will come from nothing. But they make quite a stir for being debacles and failures.
Too many people on both sides of the issue don’t understand that cosmology, evolutionary biology, paleontology should never be considered arbiters of metaphysical truth. These sciences are a process, not a conclusion.
If they’re honest, the best they can do it give us “Our our best educated guess given the current state of knowledge in this field happens to be...”
Dude you took away much more from my comment than I could imagine. I have a faith in Jesus Christ, and that was my point.
"As this chapter is written in the early twenty-first century, the hypothesis that the universe reflects intelligent design has provoked a bitter debate in the United States. How very different was the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century! Then, virtually everyone believed in intelligent design. Faith in the rational design of the universe underlay the worldview of the Enlightenment, shared by Isaac Newton, John Locke, and the American Founding Fathers...."
Continued here: The Fractured Fairy Tale of Darwinian Evolution
<>
"....for example, in the words of our founders, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable Rights. Under the terms of Darwinism, such a statement is unalloyed nonsense, because there is no "Creator" and no "rights" that are unalienable. Thus, metaphysical Darwinism has its own kind of absolutism, but I think a better word is "totalism," which has the intended association with "totalitarian." It is a total explanation that is anything but liberating, if for no other reason than it renders spiritual freedom an illusion. Or, you could say that it can only be total at the cost of excising what is most dear to us -- eg., freedom, truth, unity, etc. ..."
Continued here: Absolutist Philosophy and Totalist Necrophilia
Anshutz is also known for buying the SF Examiner(2004) on which he built all the other Examiners. He also bought the Weekly Standard from Murdoch last year for practically nothing.
“What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists.”
Well if that statement was in fact the litmus test for all science, and all funding for scientific inquiry, then funding for continued work and development of “string theory” in physics would have to end, because it has never produced anything that can be empirically tested and proven and all work on it remains exploration of no more than a theory.
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