Posted on 12/12/2005 8:01:43 AM PST by PatrickHenry
Actually, genetic engineering is just cut and paste with existing materials. It is not design any more than stringing Shakespeare quotes together is writing.
What ID lacks, and what it could genuinely use, is understing of how the materials work, how the blueprints lead to organisms. You really can't do design without understanding your materials.
I am puzzled why design advocates aren't conducting research toward demonstrating that design is possible.
I think you have answered the question. Anyone who hedges on the question of whether they would behave well without fear of punishment or expectation of reward really doesn't have any internalized moral compass.
I am assuming you are referring to design and intelligence in the phenomena being studied. Are you suggesting that all phenomena are designed?
You will not be allowed to proselytize edible idolatry to our children. Let the holy wars begin, noble equine vs. Spaghetti-Os. Bring it on!
You mean, will I behave virtuously or not?
That depends on the concept virtue, i.e. understand its origin and application. Again, you'll need more details to get a good answer.
By your own definition of virtue, naturally. You currently have a sense of what is "moral" versus what is "immoral", correct? Will you continue to live according to that sense, or not?
Who is hedging? And on what point?
Just answer the question. Would you behave differently if you were certain there would be no personal consequenses for being altruistic or selfish?
No, this is not self-evident. You have already removed one of the conditions for virtue in the initial question and thereby excluded my understanding of elements involved in virtue. So I need your understanding of virtue.
Methodological naturalism is the stance almost all of us adopt almost all the time these days. We put more confidence in physicians than in faith healers; in meteorologists rather than seers; in radar rather than divination. Our experience is, that as knowledge and understanding of our universe grows, so the domain of the supernatural shrinks.
To the contrary, I assert that the natural is part of what you would consider "supernatural" and indeed, the natural declares that God exists. For instance, that there was a beginning, that the universe is intelligible at all, the unreasonable effectiveness of math, the existence of information in the universe, that order has arisen out of chaos (the void), willfulness, autonomy, semiosis and so on.
What you are speaking to is causation. Where you have looked you have found physical causation. Science depends on physical causation to understand nature, so that is not surprising.
But I doubt you have weighed the full concept of causation. For instance, were it not for A, C would not be. Were it not for space/time, events would not occur, etc. Or as Physicist remarked on another thread, existence exists.
To that I would add that everything we observe ought to be understood in that context. Intentionally not doing so, leaves one in worse shape than a blind man in the elephant metaphor (from post 529)
Considering your credentials and fields of interests which I have discerned from your postings on the forum over the years, I also suspect there are many anomalies you have not yet weighed.
For instance, you mentioned prophesy. Here's a simple one which is not part of either a Jewish or Christian canon. Consider that the book of Enoch was dated by Laurence “before the rise of Christianity, most probably at an early period of the reign of Herod” because it prophesied the reign of King Herod the Great which began 37 B.C. and was quoted by Jesus Christ and His apostles. In other words, the presumption of scholars is that prophesy cannot be true and therefore if something prophesied actually happened, it must have been written after the event mentioned. That is a false presupposition which leads to error. In this case, a copy of the manuscript was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran – fragment 4Q208 – and was dated with a paleographic age 200 B.C. and was carbon-dated, calibrated 166-102 BC and 186-92 BC.
We could examine other prophesies in Scripture - but to do so would involve much more discussion, sources, etc. But if you are interested in such things, we can set them up and proceed to examine them one at a time.
You can put aside your whip. This is a discussion forum, not an interrogation.
I said to Bedfellow that the question is unclear on the starting points. If you have a deductive argument, conclusions will differ, depending on the starting points.
Nah. Look at medicine. Once the plague was a supernatural visitation. Now it's a medical condition. One excludes the other.
The fact that you have to ponder this says something about you as a person.
In any case, a medical condition does not exclude divine agency.
Would you behave any differently than you do now?
I'll take that as a compliment. Dogma and simplification (scientific and philosophical) is politically dangerous. And the compliment belongs to Socrates, who taught me to ponder.
A good scientific theory must explain the data, but it must also be vulnerable to the data. The validity of the theory must be put at risk when we make observations or do experiments. There must be things that, apart from the theory in question being true, we would reasonably expect to observe, but which are prohibited by the theory.
However you said here, in response to your correspondent's complaint that ID "is compatible with *any* pattern" of evidence, "that makes it the best theory then, because it best fits most of the evidence."
This is wildly perverse. It's saying that a theory can be consistent with any possible observation -- that is be invulnerable to the data and therefore untestable, and still be good theory. This is most emphatically not the case.
When organized matter is found to behave in accord with predicatable laws, then it is reasonable to attribute this to intelligent design. What is intelligent design but taking matter and then organizing it to behave according to predictable laws?
Actually this is the opposite of ID. Propents of ID claim to infer "intelligent design" in precisely those case that (they assert) CANNOT be accounted for by the natural behavior in the form of predictable laws!
What's more you're taking a presupposition shared BY all scientific theories (the uniformity of natural law) and saying it's a prediction OF a particular theory.
Supernatural is by definition what is not natural.
Consider that the book of Enoch was dated by Laurence “before the rise of Christianity, most probably at an early period of the reign of Herod” because it prophesied the reign of King Herod the Great which began 37 B.C. and was quoted by Jesus Christ and His apostles.
Please identify the verses from Enoch that prophesy Herod the Great.
" In any case, a medical condition does not exclude divine agency."
It's not that calls to divine action aren't possible after the natural causes of the medical condition are discovered, it's that they are no longer necessary. Why bring in a supernatural explanation when a natural, testable one will do perfectly well?
If the intersection of sets A and set B is zero, and if the union of A and B is C, and we move elements into set A, from within C, then we must subtract the same elements from B.
In any case, a medical condition does not exclude divine agency.
It does if you accept a naturalistic explanation for disease.
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