Interesting thing I found out about intelligent design

[battery chucka' one]

I was always under an impression that the teaching of ID and such was somehow a way to actually introduce a thought of a Biblical God into curriculum and such, as well as accepting that the God of the Bible is a plausible idea for creation. However I found out, recently, that the whole idea was to 'fill in the gaps' where science can't explain things. Therefore, if science can't find a plausible explanation using its own devices, then scientists use ID to take care of it. The 'god' they use is rather benign and took a step back after creation and has nothing further to do with man after this time. If this is true then, yes, this is bad science and bad theology. How nice of MTLR to just not bother to point all this out at all.

[Mike the Lab Rat]

Twaddle.

I've debunked intelligent design in depth repeatedly in other threads. Hell, I even STARTED a thread on the Dover court decision. Your accusations are weak and unfounded.

While you're doing your alleged research, google up the Wedge document, Kitzmiller vs. Dover, and read some posts from The Panda's Thumb. Dembski is a proven dishonest hack with a wholly religious agenda, and Michael Behe is a scientific hack who admitted -under oath in federal court- that the same twisting of scientific definitions that would be necessary to define ID as "science" woud also admit astrology as "science." The guy's proposal of "irreducible complexity" is utter horseshit and EVERY SINGLE example he claims that "proves" irreducible complexity" - bacterial flagella, blood clotting, drug resistance mutations in HIV- has been thoroughly debunked

Science studies NATURAL explanations, not supernatural. Supernatural explanations are in no way, shape, or form, testable or provable in a lab setting. Your "God of the gaps" is not science and is poor theology (are the extinct species we find as fossils God's "mistakes?"). If you legitimately want to know how one scientist reconciles his devout Christianity with his scientific acceptance of natural selection, read Ken Miller's "Finding Darwin's God."

I've also recently finished reading Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish, which discusses how our body's "quirks" (like hiccups, male hernias, and our piss-poor knees) are structural remnants & tweaks from our macroevolution from fish-like ancestors onward. Shubin also does a phenomenal job explaining HOW scientists decide where to go digging for fossils. The book is very accessible to the layreader (as opposed to Sean Carroll's books on "evo-devo") and is also short - only about 200 pages.

[battery chucka' one]

My God isn't the 'god of the gaps'. That would be the god that lazy science peeps like yourself made up to be the 'missing link' in their research. My God invented science, not the other way around. I'm accepting that ID is folly, much the same way you've discussed. You just didn't bother to mention that it's a tool of scientists.

God created the earth and heavens. Then, He gave science to the curious in order to better explain their world. Those curious then decided to use the science that God gave them in order to prove that He didn't exist/wasn't necessary. Therefore, they were left with 'gaps' and no God to fill them. Hence, they went ahead and invented their own god to explain them. This was a god that always was to play second fiddle to science (their true god). No doubt it was meant that, once science was available as an explanation, that god was taken out of the gap.

So, why again did you not bother to mention that this is the 'god' discussed in ID? Sounds like pretty crappy science on your part to delete that crucial fact.

What, did it slip your mind that there was someone in the bathroom with a hand cannon?

[Mike the Lab Rat]

My God isn't the 'god of the gaps'. That would be the god that lazy science peeps like yourself made up to be the 'missing link' in their research. My God invented science, not the other way around. I'm accepting that ID is folly, much the same way you've discussed. You just didn't bother to mention that it's a tool of scientists.

Uh, bco...intelligent design IS NOT a tool of scientists. In fact ID is NOT science. You will never find a peer-reviewed article in ANY cell bio, molecular bio, biomedical, etc. that lists "intelligent design" as part of their methodology. Why? because it has nothing to do with science. It is Biblical creationism dressed up to sneak in as science Hell, the most prominent ID "textbook", "Of Pandas and People" is a creationist textbook in which they did a (poor) find-and-replace job, swapping "intelligent designer" or "designer" for "God." The Kitzmiller case subpoenaed the proofs for the ID version of the text from its publisher and the "smoking gun" showed the piss-poor edit job.

God created the earth and heavens. Then, He gave science to the curious in order to better explain their world.

We agree that science is a tool that man uses to understand's God' creation.

Those curious then decided to use the science that God gave them in order to prove that He didn't exist/wasn't necessary.

Science does not seek to "prove" that God doesn't exist.

Science's rules regarding the use of only natural explanations is not a form of "anti-God bias," but is part and parcel of how science has been done for HUNDREDS of years. It is ultimately not useful to just say "oh well...we haven't figured out how this molecule or structure in a more primitive species is related to a similar one in a more modern species, so let's just say God did it."

Therefore, they were left with 'gaps' and no God to fill them. Hence, they went ahead and invented their own god to explain them. This was a god that always was to play second fiddle to science (their true god). No doubt it was meant that, once science was available as an explanation, that god was taken out of the gap.

Your understanding of science and the scientific method is fundamentally flawed. The "gaps" that have appeared have caused researchers to determine the NATURAL causes (which ultimately, are part of God's creation) within the gaps. It has spurred scientific reserch. Your whole "oh well, God must be the spackle in the scientific gap" explanation would bring research and progress to a screeching halt.

So, why again did you not bother to mention that this is the 'god' discussed in ID? Sounds like pretty crappy science on your part to delete that crucial fact.

I didn't leave anything out, you dimwit.

The God of ID is indisputably the Judeo-Christian God, no matter how coy Johnson and Demsbki try to dance around it. Scientists don't make reference to that God -or any other- because supernatural explanations are unacceptable in science. The purpose of science is to examine natural phenomena, understand how they occur, and to make useful predictions regarding these understandings. Science does not deal with God, angels, souls, the nature of good and evil, etc. That is the realm of religion.

Scientists don't use ID. It is a wholly religious argument. That's why scientists like Ken Miller testify against it in court trials and why scientific groups like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Foundation, the National Science Teachers Assocation, the National Assocation of Biology Teachers, the National Center for Science Education, etc. all oppose its teaching in schools.

What, did it slip your mind that there was someone in the bathroom with a hand cannon?

Cute phrase, but utterly wrong.

ID has no research to back it. None. Philip Johnson, the "father" of ID has admitted it:

I also don’t think that there is really a theory of intelligent design at the present time to propose as a comparable alternative to the Darwinian theory, which is, whatever errors it might contain, a fully worked out scheme. There is no intelligent design theory that’s comparable. Working out a positive theory is the job of the scientific people that we have affiliated with the movement. Some of them are quite convinced that it’s doable, but that’s for them to prove…No product is ready for competition in the educational world.

Natural laws explain the motions of the planets, how atoms and molecules act, how species appear and go out of existence, etc. Science has no need to rely on divine intervention. Deus ex machina in drama and literature is considered a sign of piss-poor writing, and attempting to use that method for science also demonstrates piss-poor thinking and/or laziness.

edit: This just in from my RSS feed from "The Panda's Thumb":

The UK-based "International Society for Science and Religion" has released a statement on intelligent design.

An excerpt:

We believe that intelligent design is neither sound science nor good theology. Although the boundaries of science are open to change, allowing supernatural explanations to count as science undercuts the very purpose of science, which is to explain the workings of nature without recourse to religious language. Attributing complexity to the interruption of natural law by a divine designer is, as some critics have claimed, a science stopper. Besides, ID has not yet opened up a new research program. In the opinion of the overwhelming majority of research biologists, it has not provided examples of "irreducible complexity" in biological evolution that could not be explained as well by normal scientifically understood processes. Students of nature once considered the vertebrate eye to be too complex to explain naturally, but subsequent research has led to the conclusion that this remarkable structure can be readily understood as a product of natural selection. This shows that what may appear to be "irreducibly complex" today may be explained naturalistically tomorrow.

Scientific explanations are always incomplete. We grant that a comprehensive account of evolutionary natural history remains open to complementary philosophical, metaphysical, and religious dimensions. Darwinian natural history does preempt certain accounts of creation, leading, for example, to the contemporary creationist and ID controversies. However, in most instances, biology and religion operate at different and non-competing levels. In many religious traditions, such as some found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism, the notion of intelligent design is irrelevant. We recognize that natural theology may be a legitimate enterprise in its own right, but we resist the insistence of intelligent-design advocates that their enterprise be taken as genuine science - just as we oppose efforts of others to elevate science into a comprehensive world view (so-called scientism).

Bingo.

Intelligent design is not science, and science is not religion. Anyone who conflates the two is a gibbering dumbfuck.

[poptart]

I've also recently finished reading Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish, which discusses how our body's "quirks" (like hiccups, male hernias, and our piss-poor knees) are structural remnants & tweaks from our macroevolution from fish-like ancestors onward.

Genius, haha.






Solid proof of macroevolution from pigs.

[Felix]

The guy's proposal of "irreducible complexity" is utter horseshit and EVERY SINGLE example he claims that "proves" irreducible complexity" - bacterial flagella, blood clotting, drug resistance mutations in HIV- has been thoroughly debunked

but what about the mousetrap

[Mike the Lab Rat]

but what about the mousetrap

If you're referring to the goofy argument that a mousterap is completely useless if any one of its pieces is missing, many folks, including Ken Miller, have defused that claptrap.

First off, it is completely possible to make a fully-functional mousetrap with fewer than the five pieces in the classic standard trap. Secondly, the flaw in the entire argument is that it assumes that the individual components are useless for anything other than a moustrap (and in the biological version of the argument, that the subcomponents of the flagellar motor or blood clotting are useless.

In a DVD titled "Fossils, Genes, and Mousetraps," (available for free from Howard Hughes Medical Institute), Miller mentions that scientists and science-minded folks have shown him that they have made fully-functional moustraps out of the original, deleting pieces. Similarly, biologists have shown conclusively that the subcomponents and precursors of the bacterial motor served other functions prior to their later use. This point was even made during the Dover trial, and as it turned out, the data was out PRIOR to publication of Behe's "irreducible complexity" drivel in "Darwin's Black Box," showing him to either be a hack or a fraud. The evolutionary stages that led to "modern" blood clotting has also been elucidated.

Of course, for folks so deluded by their religious biases that they're stupid enough to make Darwin and his theories tantamount to Hitler and Stalin (e.g., Ben Stein), little things like logic and truth are a mere inconvenience. By the way, if you want to see how delightfully two-faced ID proponents are about "open debate and discussion," go to the "Panda's Thumb" RSS feed (feed://pandasthumb.org/atom.xml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;}, go to the search window on the right-hand side, and type "Expelled." You'll get to read how Stein and his hypocritical flock are so paranoid about the shoddy science and spiel of their flick that they toss out all but the pre-screened Kool-Aid drinkers at screenings.

[poptart]

Felix, you mentioned in another thread that you go to church.

What kind of church do you go to, and what is it that you believe?


Curious.

[Felix]

Felix, you mentioned in another thread that you go to church.

yes I do

What kind of church do you go to, and what is it that you believe?


Curious.

it's a non-denominational Christian Church....

me, I believe in the seeing my granddaughter every week....

spirituality comes in many different forms......

[poptart]

Ahh yes, alright.

Grandpappy.

[SunCoastSooner]

but what about the mousetrap

If you're referring to the goofy argument that a mousterap is completely useless if any one of its pieces is missing, many folks, including Ken Miller, have defused that claptrap.

First off, it is completely possible to make a fully-functional mousetrap with fewer than the five pieces in the classic standard trap. Secondly, the flaw in the entire argument is that it assumes that the individual components are useless for anything other than a moustrap (and in the biological version of the argument, that the subcomponents of the flagellar motor or blood clotting are useless.

In a DVD titled "Fossils, Genes, and Mousetraps," (available for free from Howard Hughes Medical Institute), Miller mentions that scientists and science-minded folks have shown him that they have made fully-functional moustraps out of the original, deleting pieces. Similarly, biologists have shown conclusively that the subcomponents and precursors of the bacterial motor served other functions prior to their later use. This point was even made during the Dover trial, and as it turned out, the data was out PRIOR to publication of Behe's "irreducible complexity" drivel in "Darwin's Black Box," showing him to either be a hack or a fraud. The evolutionary stages that led to "modern" blood clotting has also been elucidated.

Of course, for folks so deluded by their religious biases that they're stupid enough to make Darwin and his theories tantamount to Hitler and Stalin (e.g., Ben Stein), little things like logic and truth are a mere inconvenience. By the way, if you want to see how delightfully two-faced ID proponents are about "open debate and discussion," go to the "Panda's Thumb" RSS feed (feed://pandasthumb.org/atom.xml" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;}, go to the search window on the right-hand side, and type "Expelled." You'll get to read how Stein and his hypocritical flock are so paranoid about the shoddy science and spiel of their flick that they toss out all but the pre-screened Kool-Aid drinkers at screenings.

Very informative post Rat. I'll have to check those books out. I'm usually pretty backed up in what I intend to read but these choices might have to get priority on my list in the near future.

[Felix]

but what about the mousetrap

If you're referring to the goofy argument that a mousterap is completely useless if any one of its pieces is missing, many folks, including Ken Miller, have defused that claptrap.

damn MTLR, I was just funnin ya....when I saw Behe's whole mousetrap as "irreducibly complex" argument, I thought it was the funniest shit I'd ever seen an ID proponent espouse.....

[Mike the Lab Rat]

Hey, I was just trying to be thorough.

I mean, I wouldn't want bco yet again claiming that I left anything out...

Behe is a freaking twit. His own department at Lehigh considers him an embarrassment. His responses during the Kitzmiller/Dover trial didn't help his reputation either.