Moderator: Dictators in Training
xaoshaen wrote:brinstar wrote:someday, centuries from now, people will laugh at those who refuse to believe in evolution the way we laugh about those who refused to believe in heliocentrism
Are we simply ignoring the fact that heliocentrism was wrong?
Harrison wrote:I am not about to sit and believe existence was as a result of an explosion of a large mass that is now our universe.
I am also not going to believe that existence simply is there at all times and always was.
There is a larger picture and we aren't going to figure it out with telescopes and math.
Harrison wrote:I am not about to sit and believe existence was as a result of an explosion of a large mass that is now our universe.
I am also not going to believe that existence simply is there at all times and always was.
There is a larger picture and we aren't going to figure it out with telescopes and math.
God wrote:Man, Arlos I loved those posts.
Where is Lyion's 2nd response in all this? I am feeling so unsatisfied.
Creationism is an a priori argument drawn from a particular interpretation of the Genesis account of creation. In the context of a public classroom, that means the God of the Bible is the starting point and assumed ground of life's origin and the origin of the cosmos. Drawing from a literal reading of Genesis, creationists postulate a "young Earth" and six 24-hour days of creation. All empirical data are subject to and analyzed within this interpretive grid.
Intelligent design, however, is an a posteriori argument; it is the inference drawn from examination of complex structures in living organisms and the universe.
As a matter of science, intelligent design theory is much more disciplined and modest in its claims than either the theory of evolution or creationism. Intelligent design theory merely infers, but does not attempt to identify a designer. Unlike creationism and the theory of evolution, intelligent design theory does not make dogmatic religious or philosophic claims about the origin of life.
Creationism and the theory of evolution, unlike intelligent design theory, are insular in their approach to science. Creationists reason downward from an article of religious faith and conduct their science within that paradigm. Evolutionists, too, reason downward from an article of faith and conduct their science with the same dogmatic zeal and selectiveness of their creationist counterparts.
Like creationism, the theory of evolution is an a priori argument drawn from the evolutionist's article of faith which holds that the origin of life and the cosmos can only be explained by undirected natural processes. This is a metaphysical claim, not scientific fact. Still, it is not in dispute that one may infer an evolutionary process from the data, but that is not what the evolutionist does.
Good science requires an open mind.
There is more than a little irony, then, in the evolutionists' attempt to paint intelligent design theory with the creationist brush when it is the evolutionists who have the most in common with the creationists.
Creationism requires a student to first affirm the creed that God created the heavens and the Earth, and the theory of evolution requires that a student affirm the creed that there is no God. Both are exclusive claims, neither is scientific, neither can be empirically verified.
Intelligent design theory, on the other hand, does not require that any creed about the origin of life and the cosmos be affirmed. It merely points to the evidence and suggests that the best explanation (though not the only explanation) for the design found in nature and the cosmos is a designer, whoever or whatever that may be.
your rebuttal lacked anything nearly as cool as the killer graphics, spaceships, and cartoon dynamic that video presented
the theory of evolution requires that a student affirm the creed that there is no God.
Intelligent design proponents often cite the bacterial flagellum, a bacterium with a tail that propels it, Miller said. Behe and his colleagues claim bacterial flagellum had to be created with all of its parts because it couldn't function if any of them were taken away, Miller testified. But scientists have proved that the bacterial flagellum can be reduced to a smaller being, a little organism that operates in a manner similar to a syringe, Miller said.
Yet evolution predicts not just successions of forms, but also genetic lineages from ancestors to descendants. The absence of such transitional series in the fossil record bothered Darwin, who called this "the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against the theory." (He attributed the missing links, quite reasonably, to the imperfection of the fossil record and the dearth of paleontological collections.) But this objection is no longer valid. Since 1859, paleontologists have turned up Darwin's missing evidence: fossils in profusion, with many sequences showing evolutionary change. In large and small organisms, we can trace, through successive layers of the fossil record, evolutionary changes occurring in lineages. Diatoms get bigger, clamshells get ribbier, horses get larger and toothier, and the human lineage evolves bigger brains, smaller teeth, and increased efficiency at bipedal walking. Moreover, we now have transitional forms connecting major groups of organisms, including fish with tetrapods, dinosaurs with birds, reptiles with mammals, and land mammals with whales. Darwin predicted that such forms would be found, and their discovery vindicated him fully. It also destroys the creationist notion that species were created in their present form and thereafter remained unchanged.
The human body is also a palimpsest of our ancestry. Our appendix is the vestigial remnant of an intestinal pouch used to ferment the hard-to-digest plant diets of our ancestors. (Orangutans and grazing animals have a large hollow appendix instead of the tiny, wormlike one that we possess.) An appendix is simply a bad thing to have. It is certainly not the product of intelligent design: how many humans died of appendicitis before surgery was invented? And consider also lanugo. Five months after conception, human fetuses grow a thin coat of hair, called lanugo, all over their bodies. It does not seem useful ó after all, it is a comfortable 98.6 degrees in utero ó and the hair is usually shed shortly before birth. The feature makes sense only as an evolutionary remnant of our primate ancestry; fetal apes also grow such a coat, but they do not shed it.
Recent studies of the human genome provide more evidence that we were not created ex nihilo. Our genome is a veritable Gemisch of non-functional DNA, including many inactive "pseudogenes" that were functional in our ancestors. Why do humans, unlike most mammals, require vitamin C in our diet? Because primates cannot synthesize this essential nutrient from simpler chemicals. Yet we still carry all the genes for synthesizing vitamin C. The gene used for the last step in this pathway was inactivated by mutations forty million years ago, probably because it was unnecessary in fruit-eating primates. But it still sits in our DNA, one of many useless remnants testifying to our evolutionary ancestry.
Oceanic islands are simply missing or impoverished in many types of animals. Hawaii has no native mammals, reptiles, or amphibians. These animals, as well as freshwater fish, are also missing on St. Helena, a remote oceanic island in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. It seems that the intelligent designer forgot to stock oceanic (but not continental!) islands with a sufficient variety of animals. One might respond that this was a strategy of the creator, as those organisms might not survive on islands. But this objection fails, because such animals often do spectacularly well when introduced by humans. Hawaii has been overrun by the introduced cane toad and mongoose, to the detriment of its native fauna.
In addition, many IDers have more impressive academic credentials than did earlier scientific creationists, whose talks and antics always bore a whiff of the revival meeting. Unlike scientific creationists, many IDers work at secular institutions rather than at Bible schools. IDers work, speak, and write like trained academics; they do not come off as barely repressed evangelists. Their ranks include Phillip Johnson, the most prominent spokesperson for ID, and a retired professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Behe, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University; William Dembski, a mathematician-philosopher and the director of the Center for Theology and Science at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; and Jonathan Wells, who has a doctorate in biology from Berkeley.
All of these proponents, save Johnson, are senior fellows at the Center for Science and Culture (CSC), a division of the Discovery Institute, which is a conservative think tank in Seattle. (Johnson is the "program advisor" to the CSC.) The CSC is the nerve center of the intelligentdesign movement. Its origins are demonstrably religious: as described by the Discovery Institute, the CSC was designed explicitly "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
Like earlier creationist tracts, "Of Pandas and People" simply denies that this evolution of the jaw hinge occurred. It asserts that "there is no fossil record of such an amazing process," and further notes that such a migration would be "extraordinary." This echoes the old creationist argument that an adaptive transition from one type of hinge to another by means of natural selection would be impossible: members of a species could not eat during the evolutionary period when their jaws were being unhinged and then rehinged. (The implication is that the intelligent designer must have done this job instantaneously and miraculously.) But we have long known how this transition happened. It was easily accomplished by natural selection. In 1958, Alfred Crompton described the critical fossil: the mammal-like reptile Diarthrognathus broomi. D. broomi has, in fact, a double jaw joint with two hinges ó the reptilian one and the mammalian one! Obviously, this animal could chew. What better "missing link" could we find?
<About the Eye> A possible sequence of such changes begins with pigmented eye spots (as seen in flatworms), followed by an invagination of the skin to form a cup protecting the eyespot and allowing it to better localize the image (as in limpets), followed by a further narrowing of the cup's opening to produce an improved image (the nautilus), followed by the evolution of a protective transparent cover to protect the opening (ragworms), followed by coagulation of part of the fluid in the eyeball into a lens to help focus the light (abalones), followed by the co-opting of nearby muscles to move the lens and vary the focus (mammals). The evolution of a retina, an optic nerve, and so on would follow by natural selection. Each step of this transitional "series" confers increased adaptation on its possessor, because it enables the animal to gather more light or to form better images, both of which aid survival. And each step of this process is exemplified by the eye of a different living species. At the end of the sequence we have the camera eye, which seems irreducibly complex. But the complexity is reducible to a series of small, adaptive steps.
The gold standard for modern scientific achievement is the publication of new results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. By that standard, IDers have failed miserably. As William Dembski himself noted, "There are good and bad reasons to be skeptical of intelligent design. Perhaps the best reason is that intelligent design has yet to establish itself as a thriving scientific research program." IDers desperately crave scientific respectability, but it is their own theory that prevents them from attaining it. Thus, while IDers demand that evolutionists produce thousands of transitional fossils and hundreds of detailed scenarios about the evolution of biochemical pathways, they put forth no observations supporting the plausibility of a supernatural designer, nor do they show how appeal to such a designer could explain the fossil record, embryology, and biogeography better than neo-Darwinism.
arlos wrote:Yet evolution predicts...
'The gold standard for modern scientific achievement is the publication of new results in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. By that standard, IDers have failed miserably.
open hostility from those who hold to neo-Darwinism sometimes makes it difficult for design scholars to gain a fair hearing for their ideas, research and articles by intelligent design scholars are being published in peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Stephen Meyer has published an article supportive of design in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington (a peer-reviewed biology journal published at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution). Jonathan Wells recently published a pro-intelligent design article with one of the oldest still published biology journals in the world, Revistia di Biologia. Biochemist Michael Behe has defended the idea of “irreducible complexity” in the peer-reviewed journal Philosophy of Science, as well as publishing research critical of the mechanism of neo-Darwinism in the peer-reviewed journal Protein Science. Examples of peer-reviewed books supporting design include The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press) by William Dembski and Darwinism, Design, and Public Education (Michigan State University Press). There are others.
Support for ID comes from Intelligent design theory is supported by doctoral scientists, researchers and theorists at a number of universities, colleges, and research institutes around the world. These scholars include biochemist Michael Behe at Lehigh University, microbiologist Scott Minnich at the University of Idaho, biologist Paul Chien at the University of San Francisco, emeritus biologist Dean Kenyon at San Francisco State University, astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez at Iowa State Univeristy, and quantum chemist Henry Schaefer at the University of Georgia, among others.
To test ID, it is enough to show how systems that ID claims lie beyond the reach of Darwinian and other evolutionary mechanisms are in fact attainable via such mechanisms. For instance, ID proponents have offered arguments for why non-teleological evolutionary mechanisms should be unable to produce systems like the bacterial flagellum (see chapter 5 of my book No Free Lunch [Rowman & Littlefield, 2002] and Michael Behe’s essay in my co-edited collection titled Debating Design [Cambridge, 2004]). Moreover, critics of ID have tacitly assumed this burden of proof — see Ken Miller’s book Finding Darwin’s God (Harper, 1999) or Ian Musgrave’s failed attempt to provide a plausible evolutionary story for the bacterial flagellum in Why Intelligent Design Fails (Rutgers, 2004).
Intelligent design and evolutionary theory are either both testable or both untestable. Parity of reasoning requires that the testability of one entails the testability of the other. Evolutionary theory claims that certain material mechanisms are able to propel the evolutionary process, gradually transforming organisms with one set of characteristics into another (for instance, transforming bacteria without a flagellum into bacteria with one). Intelligent design, by contrast, claims that intelligence needs to supplement material mechanisms if they are to bring about organisms with certain complex features. Accordingly, testing the adequacy or inadequacy of evolutionary mechanisms constitutes a joint test of both evolutionary theory and intelligent design.
Unhappy with thus allowing ID on the playing field of science, evolutionary theorist now typically try the following gambit: Intelligent design, they say, constitutes an argument from ignorance or god-of-the-gaps, in which gaps in the evolutionary story are plugged by invoking intelligence. But if intelligent design by definition constitutes such a god-of-the-gaps, then evolutionary theory in turn becomes untestable, for in that case no failures in evolutionary explanation or positive evidence for ID could ever overturn evolutionary theory.
I cited earlier Darwin’s well-known statement, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.” Immediately after this statement Darwin added, “But I can find out no such case.” Darwin so much as admits here that his theory is immune to disconfirmation. Indeed, how could any contravening evidence ever be found if the burden of proof on the evolution critic is to rule out all conceivable evolutionary pathways — pathways that are left completely unspecified.
In consequence, Darwin’s own criterion for defeating his theory is impossible to meet and effectively shields his theory from disconfirmation. Unless ID is admitted onto the scientific playing field, mechanistic theories of evolution win the day in the absence of evidence, making them a priori, untestable principles rather than inferences from scientific evidence.
Bottom line: For a claim to ascertainably true it must be possible for it to be ascertainably false. The fate of ID and evolutionary theory, whether as science or non-science, are thus inextricably bound. No surprise therefore that Darwin’s Origin of Species requires ID as a foil throughout.
arlos wrote:ID = "We don't understand how it could've happend, so that must mean Goddidit!"
Lyion wrote:arlos wrote:ID = "We don't understand how it could've happend, so that must mean Goddidit!"
As opposed to Neo Darwinisim, which says "We don't understand it, but naturedidit. Randomly and non intelligently. This is better referred to as Shit Happens.
The most complex and intricate systems just appeared out of blind chance.
Tikker, I fail to see any religion involved, save the status quo 'Creationism' argument repeated ad nauseum. I have personally never been a Creationist, and I'm not at all over the top religious.
KILL wrote:Eziekial wrote:
Maybe all science is just a quest of man to know "how" god did what he did.
problem is, it contradicts the bible, so that makes it impossible
Lyion wrote:If Hillary wins Texas and Ohio, she'll win the nomination.
Tossica wrote:Seriously, there is NO WAY Sony is going to put HD-DVD out of the game.
Tikker wrote:if you believe that god created(or intelligently designed) the world/universe then you are indeed a creationist, of one flavour or another
Lyion wrote:Tikker wrote:if you believe that god created(or intelligently designed) the world/universe then you are indeed a creationist, of one flavour or another
Wow, that is so wrong, inaccurate, and ignorant I can't believe you said that Tik. You are a smart guy. Do some research and find the difference.
As an addendum, many of the best and brightest scientists in the world believe God created everything. I assure you the majority of them are in no way creationists.
Old Earth Creationism
Old-Earth Creationists accept the evidence for an ancient earth but still believe that life was specially created by God, and they still base their beliefs on the Bible. There are a few different ways of accomodating their religion with science.
* American Scientific Affiliation, Ipswich, MA.
(This groups has mostly OEC members, but it doesn't turn away members and has some YEC and Theistic Evolutionist members, too.)
http://www.asa3.org/index.html
periodical: Perpsectives on Science and Christian Faith
Gap Creationism (also known as Restitution Creationism)
This view says that there was a long temporal gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, with God recreating the world in 6 days after the gap. This allows both an ancient earth and a Biblical special creation.
* Armstrong, Herbert W., Mystery of the Ages. Dodd, Mead, New York, 1985.
Lyion wrote:Gidan, if you saw an engineered high performance car on the side of the road would you consider immediately naturedidit randomly? The human body is a trillion times more complex than that car, and yet people have no problem due to years of piss poor science saying that exact same thing.
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