TraderNik wrote: Pure bunk. The purpose of this thread was to dispute the claim that ID is creationism. The arguments from the ID critics that ID is creationism have been totally refuted. TraderNik wrote: Totally false! No one has attacked the scientific method and no one has claimed ID is scientifically provable. What has been claimed is that when it comes to the orgin of life there is as much empirical evidence supporting a teleological origin as there is supporting a non-teleological origin. Tradernik wrote: More nonsense. Faith has nothing to do with it. Teleology is already apparent in the purposefulness of biological processes. All we have to do is NOT ASSUME that the purposefulness of biological processes has been "scientifically proven" to be an illusion, because that's not true. The assumption of ateleology is LESS empirical than straightforward acknowledgement (and investigation) of apparent teleology. TraderNik wrote: You seem to equate teleology with a supernatural force. That's not what it is. TraderNik wrote: I don't recall anyone making that argument, certainly not me. TraderNik wrote: You are confusing ID with creationism. Creationists are the ones trying to get the Genesis account taught in school not the ID'ers.
You deserve credit Teologizzzt for fighting off these joker's for 1100 posts! Discussing the specifics of the theory are beyond me, I leave that to the experts, but pointing out their utter hypocrisy is child's play.(When I labeled your argument "circular", I was refering only the points at which it was. ) Virtually every scientific mind throughout history has considered the concepts embodied in this theory in some way or another. Only a fool would dismiss this is the equivalent of believing in "Flying Unicorns" and/or "Spagehetti Monsters". Talk about taking a leap of faith! They've revealed themselves in more ways than one. There is a course in the History of Cosomology at my former(Public) College, which covers the progression of ID in it's various forms, (actually there hasnt been much progression in this idea for centuries), and IMHO High School students would be well served if an equivalent course was available to them, or at least a few chapters in World History ... The anti-religious automatically consider it to be a trojan horse for christians to take over schools, when in actuality it provides a scientific approach to critically considering the existence of a divinity. A question that seems to be on the minds of a lot of people. I'd like to believe in a "Designer", but I'm not totally convinced. There are certainly more compelling arguments in favor of one than against one.
Why not just take it one step at a time? Computers can be programmed to "design" things. Do we really need to know about the programmer, to see that a program is in play? The reaction to the concept of design by the atheist is funny and predictable, as it is typical of all or nothing. The very thought of design immediately takes the atheist to a DESIGNER, or God and they freak out. Why not just leave it at design? Design of nature, design or something else, but design, not chance... They are terrified of a crack in the wall that they have up of ignorant chance...
Too bad you haven't really learned anything from your (public) college courses. You don't even know what a scientific method is for Christ's sake! And BTW, there are certainly more compelling arguments in favor of multiple "Designers" than in favor of a single "Designer." You don't even know what you're talking about.
Before we concern ourselves with identifying intelligent designers we first need to have a logical reason to suspect that something is intelligently designed. Scientists that are investigating a non-teleological origin of life are doing nothing more than following up on their suspicions. Even once something is scored as tentatively designed, I don't think the next logical step is to ask "who?" When dealing with ID at the origin of life I would ask the following questions instead: a. If X is designed, is anything else designed? b. Does some coherent pattern emerge when scoring things as designed? c. Does this pattern suggest further insights into the workings and evolution of life? Only once questions a-c have been sufficiently answered can we seriously turn to "who?" That is, we need to get a fairly solid grip on the extent of design before we can even begin to seriously speculate.
The whole idea that life on earth is 'designed' is based in religious faith. There is no reason to suspect that life on earth is designed, unless one believes in God, in which case it is a fait accompli. The ID/Creationists, in attempting to portray themselves as objective observers, considering life on earth and then positing a designer as the originator of that life, are employing faulty reasoning. If you ask them 'Why is it that you think that life on earth is designed?', they will say 'Because it seems to me to be designed'. If you then ask 'Why does it seem to you to be designed?', they say 'Because I cannot conceive of any other way that life could have originated'. The problem is, this non-belief in any other origin of life is... yes, you guessed it... informed strictly by their faith in God. The whole thing is based on this premise - that there exists a Creator entity. Since this can never ever be tested or verified in any way, ID/Creationism will always remain within the realm of faith. Scientists do not approach the problem of the origin of life on earth from a position of pre-existing faith-based beliefs. Scientists observe what can be seen and measured and then try to formulate theories which account for what they see. The fact that they are constantly being proved wrong is the best part of the scientific process. ID/Creationism can never be proved wrong. Therefore it is not a theory, but a religious faith. ID/Creationism is a rebranding of the Creation theory. Those who conceived it have stated explicitly that their goal is the remaking of Western society in a manner 'more consonant with theistic ideals'. Religious faith is a private matter. Please practice your religion in private and among your co-religionists. And get over the fact that ours is a secular society in its public face. It is shameful that at a time when the West is under attack by religious fundamentalists, ID/Creationists would have us crawl backwards into the dark ages of superstition and belief in ghosts and goblins, by advocating the mixing of religion and public administrative policy.
Do we need any more proof for the mindset of these people than this? The scientific method has been hammered in this thread and others by the devotees of ID/Creationism. The fact that Zeleologist now outrageously denies something that is written in black and white a few pages back shows what happens when the faithmongers are faced with the contradictory, self-referential nature of their position. Thread Closed.
excuse me? you give yourself far too much credit. you lack much in the way of the reasoning skills. You regularly draw incorrect and to be blunt idiotic conclusions. for instance you conclude, "I don't even know what a scientific method is" .... why should anything you say be taken seriously after that?
very good read ....... A better explanation than anyone here can provide. I suggest the vocal critics contact the cited researchers and ask them how they can believe in "flying unicorns" and "speghetti monsters" http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9501/bigbang2.html Dr. "Fritz" Schaefer is the Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and the director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize and was recently cited as the third most quoted chemist in the world. "The significance and joy in my science comes in the occasional moments of discovering something new and saying to myself, 'So that's how God did it!' My goal is to understand a little corner of God's plan." --U.S. News & World Report, Dec. 23, 1991 This is the second part of a two-part lecture given by Dr. Schaefer. Part 1 of this lecture appeared in The Real Issue, November/December, 1994. We shall begin with the philosophical aspects of A Brief History of Time, which really explains why it has sold so many copies. Stephen Hawking has stated, "It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws, but in that case, one would just have to go by personal belief." When asked whether he believed that science and Christianity were competing world views, Hawking replied, "...then Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity." He knew that Newton had strong religious convictions. A Brief History of Time makes wonderfully ambiguous statements such as, "Even if there is only one possible unified theory [here he's talking about the unification of quantum mechanics with an understanding of gravity], it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"(p. 174). I love that statement. Hawking pokes fun at Albert Einstein for not believing in quantum mechanics. When asked why he didn't believe in quantum mechanics, Einstein would say things like, "Well, God doesn't play dice with human beings"(p. 56). Hawking's response is that God not only plays with dice, He sometimes throws them where they can't be seen. The first time I read A Brief History of Time, for the first 122 pages I thought, "This is a great book; Hawking is building a splendid case for creation by an intelligent being." But then everything changes and this magnificent cosmological epic becomes adulterated by poor philosophy and theology. For example, he writes, "These laws may have originally been decreed by God, but it appears that he has since left the universe to evolve according to them and does not now intervene in it" (p. 122). The grounds on which Hawking claims "it appears" are unstated and what happens is that a straw God is set up that is certainly not the God of Biblical history. What follows is a curious mixture of deism and the ubiquitous God of the gaps. Now, lest anyone be confused, let me state that Hawking strenuously denies charges that he is an atheist. When he is accused of that he really gets angry and says that such assertions are not true at all. He is an agnostic or deist or something more along those lines. He's certainly not an atheist and not even very sympathetic to atheism. One of the most famous and quoted statements in the book is, "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator [the cosmological argument]. But if the universe is really completely self- contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?"(pp. 140- 1). So Hawking is uncertain about his belief in a god of his own creation. I cannot resist the conclusion that Stephen Hawking's god is too small. At the end of the book he states, "However, if we do discover a complete theory. . . then we would know the mind of God"(p. 175). I'm sympathetic to this statement but I think he's claiming a bit much. I would modify it to say that if we had a unified, complete theory, we would know a lot more about the mind of God. The Anthropic Principle I must say something here about the anthropic principle: there are a number of scientific parameters or constants, any one of which, if changed just a little bit would make the earth uninhabitable by human beings. A book that I strongly recommend is by Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos. He has a substantial discussion of the anthropic principle and demonstrates why many physicists and astronomers have considered the possibility that the universe not only was divinely caused, but in fact divinely designed.