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To: Jeff Gordon
I can see you have religion on your mind and that is your primary target. Simply read the original ID literature. It had/has nothing to do with God.

It says nothing about a God. It says that there is not enough time allowed for the complexity seen and uses a math model to demonstrate that. That then causes the "intelligence" hypothesis; that the origin of life on earth was guided/seeded by an "intelligence."

I'm writing this for open-minded others/lurkers who can recognize that that proposition does not equal "God." It can equal another race from another galactic region. It can mean we don't have all the answers about the universe yet and about what is the meaning and extent of intelligence.

Neither of those is Thor throwing a hammer or Jehovah parting a sea.

Let me ask you. Do you think extra-terrestrial higher intelligence is possible?

184 posted on 04/15/2002 10:39:05 AM PDT by xzins
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To: xzins
It says that there is not enough time allowed for the complexity seen and uses a math model to demonstrate that.

As has been pointed out repeatedly, the math model is obviously wrong in several respects because it makes assumptions that don't map to reality. A big part of the reason we have discussions about it at all is that while the flaws are "obvious" to people with expertise in the relevant fields, they are not "obvious" to lay people or individuals with only pedestrian familiarity with the subjects. People like Dembski really grate against my nerves by their apparently intentional misuse of fields such as information theory in which I have deep expertise.

190 posted on 04/15/2002 12:00:53 PM PDT by tortoise
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To: xzins

I can see you have religion on your mind and that is your primary target. Simply read the original ID literature. It had/has nothing to do with God.

It says nothing about a God. It says that there is not enough time allowed for the complexity seen and uses a math model to demonstrate that. That then causes the "intelligence" hypothesis; that the origin of life on earth was guided/seeded by an "intelligence."

I'm writing this for open-minded others/lurkers who can recognize that that proposition does not equal "God." It can equal another race from another galactic region. It can mean we don't have all the answers about the universe yet and about what is the meaning and extent of intelligence.

But that's just not true! It's all about preserving some overarching Father Figure whom society can obey, in order to supply a secure, objective morality which the ID'ers believe the real world cannot supply.

Or as they themselves originally put it:

Life After Materialism

For more than a century, science attempted to explain all human behaviour as the subrational product of unbending chemical, genetic, or environmental forces. The spiritual side of human nature was ignored, if not denied outright.

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, physics, and artificial intelligence are raising serious doubts about scientific materialism and re-opening the case for the supernatural.

What do these exciting developments mean for the social sciences that were built upon the foundation of materialism? This project brings together leading scholars from the natural sciences and those from the humanities and social sciences in order to explore what the demise of materialism means for reviving the various disciplines.
 

How to join Discovery Institute


-- CRSC website, circa 1998

The IDers' boilerplate disclaimers notwithstanding, I doubt very much that they would be happy if mankind started believing that ancient genetic-engineering aliens created us. Would we worship them? Would we take their word for what moral code we should follow? Would we take Phillip Johnson at his word if he were to write that the aliens happened to be Christians themselves and they want us to derive our morality from the Bible?

Clearly not. The IDers' words betray them.

192 posted on 04/15/2002 12:06:29 PM PDT by jennyp
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To: xzins
Do you think extra-terrestrial higher intelligence is possible?

Yes

What do you think about Occum's Razor?

209 posted on 04/15/2002 4:06:10 PM PDT by Jeff Gordon
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