this guy is wrong. id pseudoscience is alive and well as evidenced by jem in this thread: Twenty Years After Darwin on Trial, ID is Dead Category: Anti-Creationism Posted on: November 29, 2011 5:09 PM, by Jason Rosenhouse I just spent the last week working out of my New Jersey office, which is to say I was visiting the family for Thanksgiving. Before that I was spending a lot of time going over the page proofs and compiling the index for the BECB (the big evolution/creationism book, for those not up on the local slang). So it's nice to see that particular project work its way down the home stretch. It was probably sometime during 2006 when I first started thinking seriously about writing a book about my experiences at creationist conferences. When I first started mentally outlining the book I honestly thought ID would be the focus. That's not how things worked out. Among the five major sections of the book only one is devoted exclusively to ID. Once I started writing, it simply became clear that ID just isn't that isn't that interesting anymore. When I first became aware of ID in the late nineties, I worried that evolution might have met its match. Not because of ID's scientific merits, of course. Even as a novice creationism-fighter first learning the relevant science it was clear to me that the ID arguments didn't hold up at all. Behe's arguments about irreducible complexity were logically fallacious, something that is clear even before you peruse the professional literature and discover that Behe's summaries of it were inaccurate. Dembski's probabilistic arguments were an even bigger disaster, since your average freshman math major could tell you there is no reasonable way of calculating the probability of evolving a flagellum or whatnot. No, I worried because ID seemed to be providing something that a lot of people wanted. You see, many folks just flat don't like evolution. They have some vague notion that it's hostile to religion, and it does seem to lower the status of humanity within The Big Picture. But for many of those same people, YEC is just a bridge too far. They're not going to take their Bible literally or dismiss out of hand huge swaths of modern science. Then here comes ID to provide what seems like a scientifically plausible form of anti-evolutionism. You could apparently oppose evolution without descending into outright religious obscurantism. I worried that people would find that sufficiently appealing to avoid looking too carefully at the details, rather like it's easier to just enjoy a chocolate covered Oreo than it is to think about what it's doing to your innards. But that's not what happened. Even leaving aside the blow of Dover v. Kitzmiller, ID has simply collapsed under the weight of its own vacuity. In the nineties and early 2000s, ID seemed to be producing one novel argument after another. They were variations on familiar themes, of course, but books like Darwin on Trial, Darwin's Black Box, No Free Lunch and even Icons of Evolution, written by people with serious credentials and written with far more skill than the YEC's could muster, seemed to advance the discussion in original ways. These books attracted enormous interest among scientists, if only in the sense that they were promoting bad ideas that needed be countered. Many books were written to counter the ID's pretensions, and major science periodicals took notice of them. Not so today. Consider the two biggest ID books of recent years. Michael Behe's follow-up book, The Edge of Evolution, dropped like a stone. It got a few perfunctory reviews written by scientists who perked up just long enough to note its many errors, and then everyone ignored it. Frankly, even the ID folks don't seem to talk about it very much. Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell was likewise met with crickets. It briefly seemed like a big deal, a big book released by a mainstream publisher, but scientists gave it a scan, saw nothing remotely new, and yawned. The ID blogs are hardly in any better shape. It's mostly just post after post whining and kvetching about how mean old scientists don't take them seriously. Consider this sad little post from David Klinghoffer, writing at the Discovery Institute's blog. Referring to people like P. Z. Myers and Richard Dawkins he writes: These people are bullies and cowards. Really, it's pathetic and anyone with a critical capacity and any interest in the Darwin question should have asked himself by now why the main Darwin defenders refuse to wrestle with the most serious Darwin critics -- even if seriousness were measured simply in relative terms -- when they've got no shortage of time to plow through self-published Internet texts by the Hamza Andreas Tzortzises of this world. The occasion for this pouty little rant was this post by P. Z. Myers, which was responding to the claims of an Islamic creationist who was arguing that the Quran anticipated modern science. Klinghoffer does not approve of Myers's choice of blog topics, it seems. (Incidentally, P. Z. Myers has already responded to Klinghoffer.) But to anyone outside the ID bubble the claim that evolutionists have simply ignored the most serious (ahem) Darwin critics is plainly absurd. There have been numerous books and countless magazine and internet postings addressing and refuting all of the major arguments ID has to offer. Quite a few scientists have taken time out from their real jobs to take ID seriously, ponder its arguments, and formulate counter-arguments that they then patiently explain to anyone who is interested. Klinghoffer obviously does not agree that the counter-arguments have been successful, but that's a far different charge from saying that ID has been ignored. What would Kilnghoffer have Myers do? Write another post explaining why irreducible complexity is nonsense? Another post explaining why complex specified information is crap, or why Dembski's use of the No Free Lunch Theorems is silly, or how Jonathan Wells was wrong about everything in Icons of Evolution? There's only so many times you can refute the Darwin/Hitler connection, or the urban legends about creationists being fired from their jobs just because of their beliefs, or the endless wolf-crying claims that the latest bits of esoterica from the back pages of Nature somehow refute evolution, before you move on to other things. The situation hardly improves if you move over to Uncommon Descent. At one time UD aspired to be the outpost for serious ID thinking. Those days are long past. To see what it has become makes even a hardcore anti-ID guy like me a little sad. For one recent example, here's Granville Sewell making his thermodynamics argument one more time. Evolution is a movie running backward, that is what makes it so different from other phenomena in our universe, and why it demands a very different sort of explanation. In a postscript he writes: The âcompensationâ argument, used by a fictional character above to argue that because the Earth is an open system, tornados constructing houses and cars out of rubble here would not violate the second law, and widely used by very real characters to argue that the most spectacular increase in order ever seen anywhere does not violate it, was the target of my Applied Mathematics Letters article âA Second Look at the Second Lawâ. In that article, I showed that the very equations of entropy change upon which this compensation argument is based do not support this viewpoint, they instead illustrate the tautology that âif an increase in order is extremely improbable when a system is isolated, it is still extremely improbable when the system is open, unless something is entering which makes it not extremely improbable.â See what I mean about ID having nothing new to offer? Sewell has been peddling this nonsense since 2001, when he got The Mathematical Intelligencer to publish an opinion piece by him on this subject. Do we really have to explain, again, that the notion that local decreases in entropy can be offset by global increases is just a straightforward consequence of what the second law says? That the second law does nothing more than put a lower bound on the magnitude of the entropy change that results from some thermodynamical process, and that a claim that evolution contradicts the second law must be backed up with a plausible calculation showing that the bound did not hold in the case of evolution? That every serious attempt to estimate the entropy change in the course of evolution shows that Darwin is safe by many, many orders of magnitude. Must we once more point out that declaring a sequence of events to be consistent with the second law in no way implies that that sequence is probable? (contd)
Is this the sort of serious ID theorizing to which Klinghoffer wants us to pay greater attention? The occasion for this post is the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Phillip Johnson's Darwin on Trial. This is the book that kicked off the ID phenomenon in the early nineties. Many of the ID blogs have been posting tributes to Johnson, such as this one by David Berlinski. It's a remarkable post. It goes on and on in Berlinski's familiar, tortured, âSee how well I write!â style. He starts with the standard chest-pounding directed at Richard Dawkins and Michael Ghiselin, moves on to familiar creationist idiocies about the fossil record or the neutral theory of evolution, dredges up ye olde Lewontin quote (you know the one I mean), takes some shots at Gould's NOMA idea, and boasts about how the California Science Center and the University of Kentucky recently paid nuisance money to ID folks to avoid dealing with frivolous lawsuits. All so standard. And boring. You have to wade through all the way to the end before coming to anything about ID that is not mired in the past, or that does not involve dredging up some old imagined glory. Berlinski closes with: And now? Both critics and defenders of Darwin's theory have been humbled by the evidence. We are the beneficiaries of twenty years of brilliant and penetrating laboratory work in molecular biology and biochemistry. Living systems are more complex than ever before imagined. They are strange in their organization and nature. No theory is remotely adequate to the facts. There is some evidence that once again, the diapason of opinion is being changed. The claims of intelligent design are too insistent and too plausible to be frivolously dismissed and the inadequacies of any Darwinian theory too obvious to be tolerated frivolously. Time has confirmed what critics like Phil Johnson have always suspected. Darwin's theory is far less a scientific theory than the default position for a view in which the universe and everything in it assembles itself from itself in a never-ending magical procession. The religious tradition and with it, a sense for the mystery, terror and grandeur of life, has always embodied insights that were never trivial. The land is rising even as it sinks. And this, too, is a message that Phil Johnson was pleased to convey. You can be sure Berlinski was mentally thinking, âDamn, I'm good!â as he wrote those pretentious final lines. But this is all so sad and silly. It will come as news to most biologists that the last twenty years of progress in biochemistry and molecular biology have been disconcerting to evolutionary theory. And the claim that evolution performs a philosophical role, and not a practical one, in modern scientific practice is refuted by the simple expedient of perusing the journals in any decent science library. For a moribund, unworthy theory, evolution sure does seem to produce a lot of results, as judged by the sheer number of papers people manage to write on the subject. In the mid-nineties it was possible to wonder seriously if ID was a serious intellectual movement, or just another fad that would die out on its own. That verdict is now in. ID is dead. As a doornail. Even as YEC shows renewed life with the success of the Creation Museum and the fracas over their planned Noah's Ark theme park, the ID corpse isn't even twitching anymore. http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2011/11/twenty_years_after_darwin_on_t.php
Are these IDers ------------------------------ âThe human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.â - Albert Einstein âThe statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.â - Ilya Prigogine (Chemist-Physicist) Recipient of two Nobel Prizes in chemistry I. Prigogine, N. Gregair, A. Babbyabtz, Physics Today 25, pp. 23-28 âThe really amazing thing is not that life on Earth is balanced on a knife-edge, but that the entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural âconstantsâ were off even slightly. You see,â Davies adds, âeven if you dismiss man as a chance happening, the fact remains that the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of lifeâalmost contrivedâyou might say a âput-up jobâ.â - Dr. Paul Davies (noted author and Professor of Theoretical Physics at Adelaide University) â...how surprising it is that the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe should allow for the existence of beings who could observe it. Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values.â - Professor Steven Weinberg (Nobel Laureate in High Energy Physics [a field of science that deals with the very early universe], writing in the journal âScientific Americanâ.) 16O has exactly the right nuclear energy level either to prevent all the carbon from turning into oxygen or to facilitate sufficient production of 16O for life. Fred Hoyle, who discovered these coincidences in 1953, concluded that âa superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology.â - Hoyle, Fred. âThe Universe: Past and Present Reflections,â in Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 20. (1982), p.16 (for more of these coincidences click here) âIf you equate the probability of the birth of a bacteria cell to chance assembly of its atoms, eternity will not suffice to produce one⦠Faced with the enormous sum of lucky draws behind the success of the evolutionary game, one may legitimately wonder to what extent this success is actually written into the fabric of the universe.â - Christian de Duve. âA Guided Tour of the Living Cellâ (Nobel laureate and organic chemist) Probably the leading paleontologist alive today, Simon Conway Morris, the scientist who discovered the significance of the Cambrian explosion of animal life, writes in his seminal book, Lifeâs Solutions, that he is âconvincedâ that natureâs success in the lottery of life has â****physical implications.â âI find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing.â - Alan Sandage (winner of the Crawford prize in astronomy) Willford, J.N. March 12, 1991. Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest. New York Times, p. B9. âAs a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.â - Max Planck (founder of the quantum theory and one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century) âAmazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this [complexity] possible. Realization of the complexity of what is accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word âmiraculousâ without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the word.â - George Ellis (British astrophysicist) Ellis, G.F.R. 1993. The Anthropic Principle: Laws and Environments. The Anthropic Principle, F. Bertola and U.Curi, ed. New York, Cambridge University Press, p. 30 âWe are, by astronomical standards, a pampered, cosseted, cherished group of creatures.. .. If the Universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in.â - John OâKeefe (astronomer at NASA) Heeren, F. 1995. Show Me God. Wheeling, IL, Searchlight Publications, p. 200. âAstronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say âsupernaturalâ) plan.â - Arno Penzias (Nobel prize in physics) Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed. 1992. Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. La Salle, IL, Open Court, p. 83. âIt is, for example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together.â âIt now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.â -Anthony Flew Professor of Philosophy, former atheist, author, and debater âIt has occurred to me latelyâI must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilitiesâthat both questions [the origin of consciousness in humans and of life from non-living matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical realityâthat stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself.â - George Wald, (Noble laureate and professor of biology at Harvard University) wrote this in an article entitled âLife and Mind in the Universeâ which appeared in the peer-reviewed journal the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry: Quantum Biology, symposium 11 (1984): 1-15. As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agencyâor, rather, Agencyâmust be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit? - George Greenstein (American astronomer) Greenstein, George. The Symbiotic, Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos. (New York: William Morrow, (1988), pp. 26-27 âWhat turns a mere piece of matter from being mere matter into an animated being? What gives certain special physical patterns in the universe the mysterious privilege of feeling sensations and having experiences?â - D.R. Hofstadter âWhen I began my career as a cosmologist some twenty years ago, I was a convinced atheist. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that one day I would be writing a book purporting to show that the central claims of Judeo-Christian theology are in fact true, that these claims are straightforward deductions of the laws of physics as we now understand them. I have been forced into these conclusions by the inexorable logic of my own special branch of physics.â - Frank Tipler (Professor of Mathematical Physics) Tipler, F.J. 1994. The Physics Of Immortality. New York, Doubleday, Preface. âA life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world.â - John Wheeler (American physicist) Wheeler, John A. âForeword,â in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler. (Oxford, U. K.: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. vii. âAstronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing and delicately balanced to provide exactly the conditions required to support life. In the absence of an absurdly-improbable accident, the observations of modern science seem to suggest an underlying, one might say, supernatural plan.â - Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias, co-discoverer of the radiation afterglow (Quoted in Walter Bradley, âThe âJust-soâ Universe: The Fine-Tuning of Constants and Conditions in the Cosmos,â in William Dembski and James Kushiner, eds., Signs of Intelligence. 168) âI had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption ... For myself, as no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneous liberation from a certain political and economic system, and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.â (REPORT, June 1966. âConfession of Professed Atheist,â A. Huxley) http://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/science-quotes/
Nothing new then. No argument, so it's ALL down to ad hom with you. From proving a negative to dark matter, not one valid argument have you carried through past infantile comment and false assertion. A definate pattern with you religious freaks.
you're foulmouthed you're a liar. It's not possible to lie about something not lied about. On the other hand , you have lied. Just as you have lied above. And you can't camouflage 'intelligent design' with 'design' . you're hopelessly confused The argument has not changed. You think any appearance of fine-tuning means evidence for a Intelligent "Designer". It doesn't. It never has in science, nor rationally by any means. The argument only changes in your weird religious dreams. you're irrational Repeatedly jumping to infantile conclusions does not mean you have an argument. There is an appearance the Earth is flat, but there is NO evidence the Earth is flat. Illusions are not valid evidence. Science does not say the Earth is flat no matter how much you would misquote scientists to suggest otherwise if you thought you could squeeze an intelligent designer God in. There is an appearance the universe is fine-tuned, but there is NO evidence the universe is fine-tuned. Illusions are not valid evidence. Science does not say the universe is fine-tuned (certainly not in the way YOU mean) no matter how much you misquote scientists to suggest otherwise, because you think you can squeeze an intelligent designer God in . you're a troll Why have you been trolling pages of misquotes. Trolling vids that don't say or can mean what you claim. Trolling false assertions you can't back up. Yet lookee here, eventually even a nutter like yourself can't avoid the reality. You admit it ! It's Gravity that can be responsible, no need for any "Designer" God. Multiverses won't help you either. Stephen Hawking and others of your favorite scientists state, they can occur within one historical universe such as this one. so.. you're foulmouthed you're a liar you're hopelessly confused you're irrational your'e a troll. Maybe you should try and deal with that lot first, instead of always trying to project onto others the depravities you manifestly own .
looks like jem has turned into an angry theist since he has been exposed of making shit up to suit his beliefs. he has this rather silly tactic of twisting the words of scientists to make it look like they agree with him. if any scientist ever uses the word "designed" in any sentence in any context jem will jump on it and twist it and claim they are saying they agree with him that biblegod designed the universe. lets look at a few of the most prominent scientists jem likes to namedrop and see what they really say about design. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leonard Susskind: this was the first guy jem lied about claiming he supported design until we exposed the lie. what does he really say about design: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDgzRIiQ4b8 Stanford University theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind rejects the idea of "intelligent design" as a theory for the origins of the universe. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stephen W. Hawking. lately jem has taken to claiming Stephen Hawking supports intelligent design. what does he really say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQhd05ZVYWg&feature=feedwll&list=WL Amazing documentary hosted by Stephen Hawking asking the key question so many people have wondered since the beginning of mankind, does a "god" or a "celestial dictator" exist?? Stephen Hawking disects the science of the universe in answering this very fundamental question. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steven Weinberg: another one jem claims supports intelligent design by a god. what does he really say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66CeQb4EVOI Steven Weinberg's Athiesm Their [the proponents of Christian "intelligent design"] discussion of the supposed weakness of evolution rests on a fallacy about the way science works. Scientific theory is never regarded as certain; it's continually confronted with testing, asking if it can explain what we can see in nature. That work is never finished. There are always some things left that haven't yet been explained. That's true of physics as well as biology.... This work goes on and on -- it's not a weakness of the theory. I don't regard it as a weakness of my own work that it hasn't explained everything in elementary particle physics. -- Steven Weinberg, having been asked to describe the merits of the claims made by Christian creationists that they want only "more" or "better" science, during a September, 2003, State Board of Education hearing, from Michael King, "In Search of Intelligent Life at the SBOE (State Board of Education)" (Austin, [Texas], Chronicle: September 19, 2003), quoted from (and citation notes derived from) The Texas Freedom Network, "TFN Clips" (September 19, 2003) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Richard Dawkins: this one is laughable. to claim that the most strident atheist actually supports intelligent design. "Intelligent design is not an argument of the same character as these controversies. It is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. "
I repeat there is no science when you keep pointlessly repeating there is . Claims by a bible thumper about what Stephen Weinberg is supposed to have said to him, has no value. That is exactly the kind of simple-minded deceit you like to peddle and troll about. Stephen Weinberg is clear about what he says on the appearance of fine-tuning. I posted it. You ignored it. You ignore most everything being said. You'd rather post garbage like you have above. It's why you remain an ignorant uninformed deceitful troll. You do what you're best at.
One by One I will show No Thinker and Stu to be frauds and trolls... Dawkins-- clearly states physicists say there are fine tunings. Check at about 1 minute and 25 seconds in. <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mlD-CJPGt1A?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Susskind If you actually listen to video you linked to -- you will hear his answer qualified with his speculation there is a multiverse... Susskind has explained himself many times on this board. In the past I have given you this quote form New Scientist magazine. "If, for some unforeseen reason, the landscape turns out to be inconsistent â maybe for mathematical reasons, or because it disagrees with observation â I am pretty sure that physicists will go on searching for natural explanations of the world. But I have to say that if that happens, as things stand now we will be in a very awkward position. Without any explanation of natureâs fine-tunings we will be hard pressed to answer the ID critics. One might argue that the hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge is as faith-based as ID."