Posted on 09/17/2007 8:19:22 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
Dr. Michael Shermer and Dr. Paul Nelson -- Evolution vs. Intelligent Design - A Debate
Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine, the Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the co-host and producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown.
He is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin's Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudo history. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time.
According to the late Stephen Jay Gould (from his Foreword to Why People Believe Weird Things): "Michael Shermer, as head of one of America's leading skeptic organizations, and as a powerful activist and essayist in the service of this operational form of reason, is an important figure in American public life."
Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University. Since his creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, and the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, he has appeared on such shows as 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Larry King Live, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries, and other shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as interviews in countless documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel.
Dr. Paul A. Nelson is a philosopher of biology who received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1998), where he specialized in the philosophy of biology and evolutionary theory. He is currently a Fellow of the Discovery Institute and Adjunct Professor in the MA Program in Science & Religion at Biola University.
Paul’s articles have appeared in Biology & Philosophy, Zygon, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, and Touchstone, and chapters in the anthologies Mere Creation, Signs of Intelligence, Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics, and Darwin, Design, and Public Education. His forthcoming monograph, On Common Descent, critically evaluates the theory of common descent.
Paul is a member of the Society for Developmental Biology (SDB) and the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB).
Paul resides in Glenview, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago. He is married to Suzanne P. Nelson, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant professor of pediatric gastroenterology at Northwestern University, and has two daughters, Hannah (age 13) and Olivia (age 11).
Wow! The evolutionists haven’t had the nerve to debate non-evolutionists on a college campus for several years now.
Ping!
This will probably turn into a circus..............
psychologist versus biological philosopher. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
The real debate takes place in the laboratories and in the library--where floors of journals house the evidence.
Creationists don't get into those journals when they are preaching religion, rather than doing science. That is why they are so fond of debates. They have lost the scientific battle, so they are turning to PR and showmanship.
(P.T. Barnum would be proud of them!)
A History Channel 2-hour documentary titled "How the Earth was Made", aired.
It was excellent on several levels, but the title had me thinking all night.
The History Channel chooses their titles very carefully (and misleadingly), universally up to now.
For the sake of discussion, if there is a creator of the universe, please enlighten us how a mere earthling would be able to apply the scientific method to prove the existence of a being so large in scale as to have created not just the universe and the galaxy, but many galaxies. How would that work?
The scientific method deals with the natural world; it leaves metaphysics and theology to other practitioners.
When something can be observed or measured in some way, science can deal with it.
When something is entirely supernatural, science has no way of dealing with it. But philosophers and theologists can still do whatever they want! Knock yourselves out, have a field day. But don't mistake it for science.
Problem is when scientists feel they can definitively say there is no God, when in fact they haven’t any way to test or measure such a proposition. But they use it to batter believing people into accepting immoral conditions and situations.
“don’t mistake it for science.”
Fine. And don’t mistake science for the whole truth about everything. You have declared the limits of science, and you are free to do so, but you can’t declare by fiat the limits of reality. Reality does not fit within your scientific limits.
Fine. And don’t mistake science for the whole truth about everything. You have declared the limits of science, and you are free to do so, but you can’t declare by fiat the limits of reality. Reality does not fit within your scientific limits.
There is more to "reality" than science? OK, you talked me into it.
You can have magic, superstition, wishful thinking, old wives tales, folklore, what the stars foretell and what the neighbors think, omens, public opinion, astromancy, spells, Ouija boards, anecdotes, Da Vinci codes, tarot cards, sorcery, seances, sore bunions, black cats, divine revelation, table tipping, witch doctors, crystals and crystal balls, numerology, divination, faith healing, miracles, palm reading, the unguessable verdict of history, tea leaves, new age mumbo-jumbo, hoodoo, voodoo and all that other weird stuff.
Take it all and run with it. I'll stick to science.
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