Intelligent Design is not creationism

James Bond 3rd:

No. I bailed out when you demanded overwhelming evidence for a design inference.

 

So you don't have the data. Liar.

 

James Bond 3rd:

What I don't have is overwhelming evidence. Just as you don't have overwhelming evidence for abiogenesis. What a moron.

 

Teleologist is deleting posts left and right now, trying to manage all the lies!!

He just posted asking me to show where he deleted a past post - I was just about to quote it when I saw that... it has disappeared!!

(By the way the text is in jb's post a few back where Zeleologist says 'more lies').

Perhaps, Z, you were piss-drunk when you did the deletion and you can't remember it.

 

back to evolution! http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/phylogenetics_01

 

where did life originate? http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/origsoflife_03

 

Hi 2cents!

I'm working on a way to upgrade your contributions so they are worth more than just 2 cents.

Let's take yin yang for example. How is this helpful?

The original idea behind the yin, which is passive energy or chi, and the yang, which is active energy, is that they come from the Tao - which is absolute stillness. But since the Tao cannot perceive itself, then it decided to split into two and manifest eternally, giving rise to an ever changing and seemingly infinite interaction of balancing forces.

My teachings come from the Tao...a state of non-dualism. Beyond the Tao there is really no such reality as perception, change, or even energy.

Dualism is an attempt to normalize - make real - perception, change and energy. In order to perceive, there must be a split. This gave rise to consciousness. This "consciousness" is buried so deep, it is unconsciousness relative to your surface thoughts.

The unconscious mind goes to such great lengths to avoid the Tao that it ignores it, or attempts to devolve every non-dualistic effort into dualism. This is what happened with the Vedanta.

The Vedanta is a non-dualistic spiritual document that teaches that the truth of Brahman is all that there really is, and anything else is an illusion - untrue, nothing, zilch - period.

The Vedanta was wisely interpreted by Shankara as Advaita or non-dualistic. That interpretation is good for about one out of a thousand people. For the other nine hundred ninety nine there are several more popular untrue interpretations that represent attempts to destroy its non-dualistic metaphysics and turn it into what it is not. This includes Madva's effort to take its unqualified non-dualism and turn it into qualified dualism.

This is where you can see an astonishing parallel between what happened to Hinduism, and what happened to my teachings. I taught pure non-dualism...but the world has interpreted it as dualism.

To function as I did, your attitude must be as if you are in this world, but not of this world. In other words, of the two worlds - the world of truth and the world of illusion - only the truth is true, and nothing else is true.

So as regards male and female, I treated them equally. This is because I did not see either men or women as bodies. I did not acknowledge differences. I knew that each persons reality was spirit, and could not be limited in any way. So they could not really be male or female.

This thought is reflected in saying #22 of the gospel of Thomas , 70 of which sayings originate from his memoirs. The others are spuriously added in by others as dualism creeps into the picture.

Dualism has now led you to believe you come from a sea vent, rather than from the Tao. You worship the idea of evolution, even though nothing of time and form and change is real.

How is this better than denying a complex cell can have a designer? Each cell is designed by an intelligent dreamer. But a dream is not real! There are not many thoughts that make up form. Form is one thought - separation - taking many forms. Separation is not really possible, so the cell is not possible. But while you think it is, your experiences will be like those of a cell.

Jesus

 

You are too kind my friend, and that is the truth.

Thank you for elaborating on yin yang. My intention was more modest, essentially to introduce a perspective that differs significantly from standard Western dichotomic thought. The wiki text shouldn't be taken too literally, instead of male female, one can think in terms of random causal, past future etc etc... just a visualisation tool

Re where we came from though, and the idea of evolution, rest assured that there is no act of worship from me, nor do i find that the scientific explorations of the origins of "life" conflict in any way with the Tao, nor do i believe that they will bring us the answer to "everything" about us, infinitely far from it


and neither do i have an intention to deny that a complex cell can have a designer, all the contrary

but let's not dwell too much on form, most of our misunderstandings arise from the fact that "life" and "non-life" as we perceive them are an illusion...

 

Ignorance Is Bliss When It Comes to Many Opponents of ID

By John West


A student at Southern Methodist University (SMU) has provided more evidence for why there needs to be events like tonight’s Darwin v. Design conference on college campuses. In today's campus newspaper, anthropology student Ben Wells offers a jeremiad against the purported evils of Discovery Institute and intelligent design. Unfortunately, his article is so incredibly off-base that all he ends up doing is displaying his complete ignorance of the topic. Not that he is alone. Last week, journalist Lee Cullum wrote a similarly ill-informed opinion piece for the Dallas Morning News. The problem for many critics of intelligent design is that they are so sure they are right, they don’t bother to read the people they are denouncing. As a result, they end up attacking a straw man rather than refuting the actual claims made by ID proponents.

That is why we get such inane coments as:

"this [Discovery] Institute, which is on our campus, this weekend does not seek to debate ideas in an academic, scientific or even rational setting... The claims they make, claims based purely on religious or supernatural grounds, can NOT be tested in the material world".

Mr. Wells alleges that Discovery Institute “does not seek to debate ideas in an academic, scientific or even rational setting.” That must be why we invited the biology, geological sciences, and anthropology departments at his own university to send representatives to our event tonight to share the platform and present their objections to intelligent design. (They declined.) That also must be why ID scholars write academic books for such publishers as Michigan State University Press and Cambridge University Press and technical articles for such science journals as Protein Science and the Journal of Molecular Biology. If Mr. Wells truly believes that academic publications--and invitations to debate other scholars on college campuses--somehow constitutes proof that we do not want to "debate ideas in an academic, scientific or even rational setting," then I wonder what type of evidence would persuade him otherwise?!

As for his assertion that the claims made by ID proponents are “based purely on religious or supernatural grounds,” I guess that is why Michael Behe (a practicing biochemist) devotes most of his book Darwin’s Black Box to detailing the intricate biochemical evidence of design; or why Jay Richards and Guillermo Gonzalez (the latter a practicing astronomer) go into such detail about the cosmological data supporting design in The Privileged Planet; or why philosopher of science Stephen Meyer presents in such detail the empirical evidence relating to the development of new genetic information in his peer-reviewed biology journal article on “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories.” Observational evidence supplies one of the foundations of the design inference in nature. (Also contrary to Mr. Wells, intelligent design is testable in precisely the same ways as Darwinian evolution.

Alas, I seriously doubt whether either Mr. Wells or Ms. Cullum has read any of the numerous academic and scientific publications written by scientists and other scholars supportive of intelligent design. I e-mailed both of them asking what they have read by ID proponents, but thus far I have received no response. Their silence is telling. For many critics of ID, it is all too clear that ignorance is bliss. Rather engage in a genuine exchange of ideas, they are content with attacking straw men and tilting at windmills.

 

Jeez, dear friend, just thought i'd mention this, T-Duality... you remember when you once wrote: "seek, and do not find"?

this is equivalent in principle to "seek, and find plenty (ad infinitum)", which is another way to look at what our genus is keeping itself busy with