Replies

AG: It is a choice, a philosophy and nothing more. When a discipline declines to look at the non-spatial, non-temporal, non-corporeals (such as God, spirit, soul, conscience, mind, information or successful communication, autonomy, forms, geometry and other mathematical structures, qualia such as likes and dislikes) - it should not then be declaring that "all that exists" is all that it considers (microscope to telescope, matter in all its motions.)

I said the same thing to BB yesterday: There is absolutely nothing preventing the DI, or Templeton, or Penrose & Yockey, or anyone else who's interested, from sponsoring such research and showing its utility.

AG: After all, encouraging science to abandon the presupposition of "methodological naturalism" was the original goal of the intelligent design movement.

B666: Why is encouraging scientists to abandon the only guaranteed knowledge-producing process in the history of mankind is a good thing in your mind?

Good point, Balrog. LIke I said above, they're free to explore the non-material stuff, and if it pans out, they might be able to interest scientists. That is, it will need to make interesting predictions, research programs, survive review by skeptics, and so on.

However, the ID movement's real purpose has always been to be a Trojan Horse for creationism, Christian here, Muslim in Turkey. Dembski said "ID the the Logos of John's Gospel and information theory" (paraphrasing, too lazy to check the exact words)

Thank you for your post!

Research is in process already at Sante Fe, etc. (Kauffman, Rocha, et al) They are asking the same questions as the intelligent design supporters, they just eschew the label. LOL! To me, it doesn't matter as long as they are looking.

The phrase "showing its utility" fascinates me. The days of the big thinkers (Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg etc.) are long gone. Riemann's geometry had no "utility" when he discovered it - and yet Einstein was able to pull it off the shelf to describe General Relativity.

IMHO, funding of math and science investigations should not require a current application for the result.