Posted on 08/12/2014 8:09:40 PM PDT by JimSEA
When Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution through natural selection 143 years ago, the scientists of the day argued over it fiercely, but the massing evidence from paleontology, genetics, zoology, molecular biology and other fields gradually established evolution's truth beyond reasonable doubt. Today that battle has been won everywhere--except in the public imagination.
Embarrassingly, in the 21st century, in the most scientifically advanced nation the world has ever known, creationists can still persuade politicians, judges and ordinary citizens that evolution is a flawed, poorly supported fantasy. They lobby for creationist ideas such as "intelligent design" to be taught as alternatives to evolution in science classrooms. As this article goes to press, the Ohio Board of Education is debating whether to mandate such a change. Some antievolutionists, such as Philip E. Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of Darwin on Trial, admit that they intend for intelligent-design theory to serve as a "wedge" for reopening science classrooms to discussions of God.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
>>The funny thing is, I never felt like a “philistine” in his presence<<
Post in haste, repent in leisure (I will never be able to decide if it is good or bad that FR doesn’t have “edit”).
You and the target of my ill-advised rant are clearly intelligent and articulate.
A moment of pique — please accept my apologies.
>>Yet, even if you are making a valid point, this article was written 12 years ago<<
I started out this thread by noting same.
I got drawn in — DANG!
But it has been fun doing a mini CREVO in a lightweight way.
“Instincts and cross breeding are covered in the tree of life.”
Perhaps you could expand on this.
As it is, it sounds like you are spewing forth random phrases.
“But that was back when scientific debate was encouraged. Scientific American has forfeited its standing as a scientific journal. It is now just another propaganda rag.”
Yes and this was 12 years ago.
mark for later
worldviews/morality are not dna.
A couple of points...or four.
1. The theory of ID doesn’t have to be true for the theory of evolution to be false. One or the other can be true or both can be false. Meyer has made a very strong case that Darwinian evolution does not explain known data. He made a pretty strong if not 100% persuasive case for ID. Maybe neither is right, and so we need to continue the search - that may be the most reasonable conclusion.
2. You keep getting stuck on the fact that we don’t know who or what the intelligent designer is or was. But that is not the focus of ID. ID merely states that given the facts we know about the origin of life and its evolution, intelligent design is by far the best explanation. It remains to be discovered, if possible, who or what the designer is. If SETI were to discover an “intelligent” signal from outer space, would it be not reasonable to infer that it was the result of some intelligent entity, even though we may never know who or what that entity is? How is that different from us discovering this incredible machinery called the cell that looks for all intent and purpose like it is intelligently designed and us not knowing who the designer is? In both cases, just because we don’t know yet (and may never know) who the designer is, doesn’t keep us from concluding that it was the result of intelligent design. Further, just because the designer in both cases is out of our reach, and thus we cannot “apply” it for our use and benefit, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In other words, “applicability” to your utility is not a requirement for its existence. So you saying I can’t utilize it so it’s of no value to me doesn’t make it disappear from existence, even if it was in the past.
3. And as for applicability, the process of intelligent design happens every day. The computer you use is due to intelligent design, the clothes you wear are the result of intelligent design, the car you drive is from intelligent design and so on. The fact that we don’t know (yet) who was the designer of the code in the DNA and all its associated machinery, doesn’t preclude that it couldn’t have been designed, and it sure as hell it has all the characteristics of a very complex design.
4. How exactly is the theory of evolution “applicable”? What biological inventions have been made as the result of Darwin’s theory of evolution? Haven’t all the biological inventions have been made as the result of intelligent design (by man)?
Why couldn’t God’s hand guide evolution?
It was/is a silly specious article. Unintentionally hilarious at times.
This is especially funny:
“As an analogy, consider the 13-letter sequence “TOBEORNOTTOBE.” Those hypothetical million monkeys, each pecking out one phrase a second, could take as long as 78,800 years to find it among the 2613 sequences of that length. But in the 1980s Richard Hardison of Glendale College wrote a computer program that generated phrases randomly while preserving the positions of individual letters that happened to be correctly placed (in effect, selecting for phrases more like Hamlet’s). On average, the program re-created the phrase in just 336 iterations, less than 90 seconds. Even more amazing, it could reconstruct Shakespeare’s entire play in just four and a half days.”
I also like the part where the author decides to claim it is all bogus that scientific theory has to be disprovable or falsifiable.
Probably less than 1.8.
But even higher, your belief in the gay gene is the issue.
My guess is you don’t even have a bachelor degree in a scientific discipline.
>>Why, exactly, is the possibility of a superior intelligence having intervened on this planet “unscientific?”<<
The main trouble with intelligence in general (let alone superior intelligence) is that attempting to define it scientifically basically reduces it to a logical absurdity.
As one of my philosophy professors in college pointed out, all chemistry can be reduced to physics. (Chemistry is basically an augmented kind of atomic physics: studying and applying the motion of a whole lot of atoms and molecules at once instead of individually.) Arguably, one can also reduce the functioning of your brain down to chemistry and physics (neurons firing, various hormones being released, etc.)
Now for a question that causes a lot of controversy: does this mean your mind can also be reduced to chemistry and physics? A materialist believes so; dualists, idealists, and certain other believers in immaterial and supernatural forms believe otherwise. If the materialists are right, you are no more than a very complex biochemical machine; and as such, everything you think and do is predetermined. To be sure, recent discoveries in quantum physics might keep your fellow humans from being able to study these processes closely enough to predict every one of your actions, but it remains that you have no real free will. Chemistry and physics determine everything you do. Intelligence is merely another natural force.
If the materialists are wrong (and I believe they are), then you do have free will; this derives, however, from something other than your brain. Plato would have pointed to his forms, Epicurus would have referred to a mysterious force which causes the atoms in your brain to swerve from what would otherwise be their naturally determined course, and Christians (among others) would say that it derives from your soul. The problem with this? All of these are supernatural forces. Science can only study natural forces. Intelligence is therefore unscientific.
If intelligence is merely biochemistry, then an intelligent designer is entirely scientific; however, he (she? it?) is also bound entirely by natural laws. Everything an intelligent designer does is driven by the same laws of chemistry and physics that drive you to design and build things. This doesn’t preclude the possibility of the supernatural existing, or the intelligent designer in question being an omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient God operating from beyond our space-time continuum, but it does render these possibilities unnecessary.
If intelligence is supernatural, then we are daily dealing with an unscientific and yet very real force that has many very immediate and obvious impacts on our scientifically observable world, and yet does not lend itself to scientific study. That something could be very real and true and yet unscientific is very disagreeable to people who equate the word “scientific” with real. (Thanks to our materialistic pop culture, this is quite massive number, maybe even a solid majority.) In this scenario, an intelligent designer is this disagreeable situation writ large: a creator not bound by any natural laws and not subject to any scientific study.
From where I stand, this is the very unpopular position that I hold: that God is very real, supernatural and completely unbound by natural laws, and therefore unscientific. Also, I believe in a very real, very unscientific, miraculous creation. I believe there have been some very real, very unscientific miracles since then: there is no scientific formula for turning water into wine, resurrecting the dead, or ascending into Heaven. I believe in a literal six-day miraculous creation (granted, some of it taking place before this planet was here to make any rotations on its axis by which to measure days), completed six-to-ten-thousand years ago give or take a few thousand years. (Some of those genealogies in Genesis may have been condensed.)
I also believe in the Garden of Eden, the tragic Fall of man and subsequent expulsion from this garden, and an intelligently directed re-design of nature thereafter to enable nature to fight back against the destructive tendencies our sinful nature produces in us. That’s why we, who’ve dominated the world and driven several species to extinction, still regularly fall prey to bacteria and viruses too small to see; why some species breed explosively and consume our resources, forcing us to fight them for our sustenance; while others are large and deadly predators and still others are fitted with quills and fangs and venom to be a constant danger to humanity and all the other species.
I do not believe in evolution because it is not historical, not necessary to creating anything in this universe, and is not particularly necessary to any academic discipline whatsoever, scientific or otherwise, except for materialist mythology. Chemistry, physics, biology, cosmology, economics, politics, sociology, philosophy, and all other disciplines have gotten along just fine without evolution, and will continue to get along fine without it when it ultimately is thrown into the same scrap heap of failed ideas as our pagan ancestors’ studies in sorcery, our medieval ancestors’ Aristotelian biology and cosmology, and more recent ancestors’ forays into phrenology, Communism, Lysenkoism, and punctuated equilibrium.
The elimination of evolution as a viable idea will occur around roughly the same time as the collapse of our welfare state, leading to the subsequent death of the so-called “scientific community” whose government-subsidized studies in materialist mythology will have absolutely no practical application to the chaotic situation at hand, whereupon natural selection (yes, that’s a real enough phenomenon; I’ve seen it happen) will weed them out. I do hope and pray I shall live to see that day, terrible as it’s likely to be.
becaus God didn’t lie as to how He created everything. the hebrew language used in genesis describing the time period of “day” - yom - is the same everywhere else they discuss a literal 24 hour day.
“Thank GOD, I did not get drawn into it “
Same here, but having read through the whole thread
freedom 03 lost big time. TKO
Thing is ...That’s the Old Testament right? Revelations and all that? I mean that’s not Jesus or the apostles. I’m pretty sure the Holy Roman Catholic Church believes God worked through evolution.
>>But even higher, your belief in the gay gene is the issue.<<
Now that I have met you, I am sure it exists.
>>My guess is you don’t even have a bachelor degree in a scientific discipline.<<
You can guess all you want. You have yet to provide any scientific analysis — in fact you have shown an ignorance of science surpassed only by sites such as huffington post and democrat underground.
>>Same here, but having read through the whole thread
freedom 03 lost big time. TKO<<
Science facts art a cruel mistress.
But I understand how you might be confused.
There's no evidence for evolution at all.
Natural selection is a bedtime story too. It simply isn't true.
You are projecting.
And drunk.
And still ignorant of science and general vocabulary.
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