Posted on 03/23/2006 10:06:14 PM PST by RDHarrison75
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches at paragraphs 31-35 that man can come to know God exists with certainty, through science, philosophy and direct encounter in personal religious experience. The new book, Darwin's New Clothes, brings this possibility into clear focus with closely reasoned logical arguments and science.
What is the ID advanced?
Generally speaking, ID says, in essence, that at certain points in the evoutionary cycle, an "Intelligent Designer" stepped in and did stuff (sort of like the black monolith in 2001).
Is this the ID being advanced?
Ping
Pinging the usual suspects.
Care to answer questions on the thread you started?
Can't wait to have Imodium post his/her/its pre-fabricated list of links that prove the fact of micro evolution, but which totally fails to prove that something can rise from nothing, that life can rise from non-life, that multi-celled organisms can rise from single-celled organisms, that intelligence can rise from non-intelligence, or that everything is the product of chance. And then we can watch him foam at the mouth at the suggestion that he's failed to make his point, providing stunning evidence for the validity of the biblical teaching of "original sin."
IOW you prefer mythology over science.
Your perogative, I suppose.
I am requesting this thread be removed. It is the author trying to sell his own book.
We can pick it up on another thread.
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful - just stupid).Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love, 1973.
The book is free. It is also 80,000 words and I just posted the link. You people sure read fast.
Do you get real time answers on this list from everyone who starts a thread 24 hours a day. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume they are human and have to sleep. (I am not).
To answer your question, not because you demand it without authority, but because I happened to drop in, it took me 3 years and 80,000 words to write this book to be clear on the subject so those with an opposing agenda could not twist the words around to their own use. The polished book is posted in oder that we might discuss the book, not to rewrite it online and make all the mistakes I made previously so that others who enguage in debating propaganda can manipulate the words to their advantage.
Your question appears to be a setup for that purpose therefore I will not answer it because it is best answered in the book. The link is there.
If you have a specific question about the theories and facts in the book I will be happy to address them at my convenience next visit, assuming you do your homework first.
Here is an excerpt from the introduction to the book which reveals that I am proposing a version of ID that is basically standard: complex biological information has no other explanation in science.
The late hour and the fact that I am exhausted from writing the ... thing had given me hopes that the discussion might proceed without me having to do all the work.
Intelligent Design: A Refutation of Darwinian Evolution
It has been an exciting twelve years in science following the meeting of the cadre of intelligent design (ID) scientists at the home of Professor Phillip Johnson on the beach in California in 1993.[1] Scientists have since reported unmistakable signs of intelligent design in biology and presented a volume of evidence that poses a startling challenge to neo-Darwinian evolution and related genetic drift theories.[2] Not all evolutionary theories need be opposed to intelligent design, of course, only those that insist that all the processes responsible for the origin and development of life are purposeless and accidental.
Modern Darwinian biologists and evolutionary writers tend to avoid the words “accidental” and “purposeless,” preferring to use “random” in a technical way that does not rule out God or a designer. It is therefore often hard to see if they are arguing against intelligent design or not. The use of the technical form of “random” gives Darwinists the advantage of not having to defend the ability of accidental processes to construct amazingly complex biological machines, that is, to defend the impossible. Modern Darwinists use the term “random” merely to mean either unpredictable due to insufficient information, not caused by the environment, or not restricted to only the best adaptations for the organism.
Nonetheless, Darwinists (oddly) continue to claim that evolution has ruled out the need for God or an intelligent designer in the explanation of life. My thesis in this book is that only the classic version of neo-Darwinian theory, which posited truly accidental processes, eliminates the need for God or an intelligent designer to explain life, but that the classic version cannot be defended. It is indefensible because, as we demonstrate here, accidental processes are incapable of originating complex biological machines.
The new, long implemented but unannounced, version of neo-Darwinian theory can be better defended, but it offers no explanation of the source of complex biological information and machinery other than a rather lame deferral to natural law, which itself, has no explanation whatsoever in current science. Natural law arises in a fraction of a second after the complete mystery that preceded the big bang, a mystery that science knows absolutely nothing about. Therefore the new version does not rule out the need for God or an intelligent designer, one of which is necessary to explain the origin of sophisticated information content now claimed to be attributable to natural law.
Merely pushing the question of where biological information comes from back a step to natural law does not improve the quality of the explanation for two reasons. First, it is not at all clear that the basic kinds of information patterns that compose natural law could ever generate the astronomically complex design configurations in living creatures. Second, natural law arose in a split second after the big band from a complete mystery. Having the source of biological information that gives rise to life arise in a split second from a complete mystery is not a good explanation, and in fact no explanation at all.
Evolutionary debates and discussions over the past ten to fifteen years have seen a very subtle mixing of these two versions of Darwinian evolution and it is hard to say at a given point which version Darwinists are claiming. It is as if they are trying to have it both ways, accidental processes to rule out God, and natural law driven processes to be defensible. This subtle trick of language, switching between the classic version of neo-Darwinian theory that the public still believes is the predominant theory, and the unannounced new version, is what I call “Darwin’s bluff.” The bluff lies in the assumption that society will not catch the experts equivocating between two different uses of the word “evolution”—leading us to an unwarranted believe in a fictional accidental universe thereby.
Darwin was not guilty of this trick, of course, it only applies to his modern adherents. I do not accuse modern Darwinists of an intentional misrepresentation (nor do I have sufficient information to exonerate them). I am simply at a loss to see why they haven’t formally announced to the public the social and scientific importance of the conceptual shift they have made away from accidental processes. Perhaps it is not too late to do this by convening meetings on an updated evolutionary synthesis. Professor Michael Behe has demonstrated that the current theoretical framework is necessarily out of date because it was developed before the advent of modern biochemistry. Referring to the last scientific synthesis of ideas on evolution in the middle of the twentieth century he says:
Inevitably, evolutionary theory began to mean different things to different disciplines; a coherent view of Darwinian evolution was being lost. In the middle of the century, however, leaders of the fields organized a series of interdisciplinary meetings to combine their views into a coherent theory of evolution based on Darwinian principles. The result has been called the “evolutionary synthesis,” and the theory called neo-Darwinism. Neo-Darwinism is the basis of modern evolutionary thought.
One branch of science was not invited to the meetings, and for good reason: it did not yet exist. The beginnings of modern biochemistry came only after neo-Darwinism had been officially launched. Thus, just as biology had to be reinterpreted after the complexity of microscopic life was discovered, neo-Darwinism must be reconsidered in light of advances in biochemistry. The scientific disciplines that were part of the evolutionary synthesis are all nonmolecular. Yet for the Darwinian theory of evolution to be true, it has to account for the molecular structure of life.[3]
Whatever the thinking or intentions of modern Darwinists may be, in this book I call their bluff. They cannot have it both ways. Either the processes underlying the origin and development of life are accidental or they are not. Either God and a designer are ruled out by the classic theory (in which case the theory can be refuted), or the processes of life’s origin are not accidental (and their theory cannot be refuted but an intelligent designer is still needed to explain the ultimate origin of highly complex information Darwinists claim to be derivable from natural law).
Which position are Darwinists going to hold once their bluff is called? Are they in substantial agreement? Will they come to substantial agreement? Will we be able to understand the new formulation once it is achieved? Who knows? Heretofore their language has been a little vague and clearly geared to their own technical use rather than a public understanding.
We do know this much. Darwinists claim to be opposed to intelligent design, and they claim to be materialists. They claim that Darwinian evolution ushered in a new era of scientific explanation in which God and intelligent design are unnecessary, and they are today fighting tooth and nail to keep our students from hearing the valid scientific evidence opposing Darwinian evolution, including the evidence that is only posed against accidental processes.
They certainly used to be claiming the processes that spawned life were accidental. In their article “The Meaning of the Theory of Evolution,” which constitutes chapter 2 of the seminal tome, Grzimek’s Encyclopedia of Evolution, Peters and Gutmann lay out the original conflict between Darwinian evolution and intelligent design in an absolutely undeniable way by saying the processes are truly accidental:
At this point we would like to discuss some of the general cultural, spiritual, and philosophical implications of the theory of evolution. Our pre-evolutionary world view, powerfully influenced by the classical philosophers, was one that attributed the diversity of life forms and their function to the presence of a grand plan operating with a purposeful goal. Once life was examined under the neutral observation of scientists, using the methodology employed to arrive at the theory of evolution, we developed an entirely different understanding. The process of evolution is not activated by some goal-oriented plan (e.g., ever better adapted animals or more and more complex animals) but is instead the result of chaotic, purely accidental changes in the genetic complement of organisms.[4]
Intelligent design theorists, of course, stand in direct opposition to this claim. Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, Director of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, has presented a comprehensive case against accidental processes having originated life and the sophisticated biological information in the higher life forms in a recent groundbreaking article “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories.”[5] Citing a plethora of peer reviewed scientific studies, Meyer presents straightforward arguments that establish a magnitude of improbability for classic neo-Darwinian evolution that science can no longer ignore. He convincingly argues that the enormous amount of genetic and other biological information needed to evolve all the major life forms could not have been generated by chance mutations or accidental processes alone.
Professor Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity thesis, presented in the landmark book, Darwin’s Black Box, goes far, particularly in conjunction with Meyer’s work and William Dembski’s probability bound analysis, towards presenting a case for nothing less than the physical impossibility of neo-Darwinian evolution’s hypothetical accidental process having occurred within the time and physical resources available in the history of the universe.
You turn a pretty phrase from time to time, but you do not show how ID is anything other than Creationism's retarted cousin.
In essense you are saying that the forces that drive evolution happen within an ID "tunnel" that directs its overall progress.
This is not testable using the scientific method.
It also still requires a crutch in the form of some sort of magical interloper.
Statements such as "Natural law arises in a fraction of a second after the complete mystery that preceded the big bang, a mystery that science knows absolutely nothing about." tell us that you really don't know anything about science -- and certainly TToE -- at all.
If you need help understanding the difference between a "theory" and a "belief" (or in your case pure assertion), I can direct you to many very good texts.
Your lipstick on this pig ain't gonna get her to the dance.
You posted your preposterous, self-serving babble at 10:06. I asked for clarification at 10:08. So you just do hit and run?To answer your question, not because you demand it without authority,
I don't need authority. Who the hell do you think you are Newbie? You post nonesense and I ask for clarification. That is the way it works here, sonny boy.
but because I happened to drop in, it took me 3 years and 80,000 words to write this book to be clear on the subject so those with an opposing agenda could not twist the words around to their own use. The polished book is posted in oder that we might discuss the book, not to rewrite it online and make all the mistakes I made previously so that others who enguage in debating propaganda can manipulate the words to their advantage.
Ah, the "flood o' words" defense. Your use of the word "propaganda" reveals your anti-science agenda.
Your question appears to be a setup for that purpose therefore I will not answer it because it is best answered in the book. The link is there.
IOW: You can't answer any direct questions.
If you have a specific question about the theories and facts in the book I will be happy to address them at my convenience next visit, assuming you do your homework first.
My homework conists of reading and understanding 150 years of scientific exploration of TToE. Not some pubuck kid's meandering "thoughts" about how magic affects evolution.
What's the last article you've read relating to the subject?
This is a perceptive comment and very true.
Scientists understand this. People here boisterously and rudely supportive of evolution generally don't -- or rather it is unimportant to them. To those who shape these arguments biology and evolution are just vehicles to drive their agenda which is a commonplace anti-God adolescent rebellion mentality. Comments all ready on this threads illustrate this mindset.
The above does not address the validity if ID at all.
"Rick HarrisonDidit" placemark
I grew up a Heinlein fan and still revere him as one of the SF greats.
However, the above comment is not accurate. Anything that permits the taking of life is a threat when placed in the hands of politicians who attempt to extract "laws" from such behavior.
Also, it would have hurt others if any of the great inventors had offed themselves before making their contribution(s).
It is dangerous to play around the edges of the sanctity of life.
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