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Author Topic:   Is Intelligent Design Religion in the Guise of Science?
Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 166 of 204 (449812)
01-19-2008 6:38 AM
Reply to: Message 153 by faust
01-17-2008 3:33 PM


Re: And Should it be Taught in Our Schools?
Every fossil can be considered a transitional form. Sometimes those transitions went nowhere, sometimes they were passed on with success.
All we actually know is that they died -not that they came from any other form that doesn't look the same. The belief that evolution happened is the only reason you imagine any one creature gave birth step by step to any other creature that is fundamentally different.
Dogs produce dogs produce dogs -that's the reality. You believe, based on indoctrination, and pure faith thereafter, that somehow bacteria eventually gave rise, step by step, to brain surgeons.That's not science. Stick with the facts.
Every fossil can be considered a transitional form.
Yes and its parent looked somewhat like it and so did its descendants if it had any.That much you know for sure. The rest is
based on a belief that small changes will add up to a big overall change eventually.You choose to be believe that based on guesswork -I choose not to based on empirical science -you know observation etc.
Darwin didn't think he'd shown convincingly that macro evolution had happened -he thought that future finds of endless transitionals of a more convincing kind would improve the picture only it got worse.
Why the need for a theory of punctuated equilibrium if the transitionals were so convincing?
That theory just draws attention to the problem -the billions of missing links that would really convince us that gradualism works.
The yawning gaps between different body types, their sudden appearance in all complexity in the fossil record and the lack of evidence for how they got there in the first place.
Stephen Jay Gould said "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."
Well I suppose that makes him a fool for not agreeing with you even though he really believed in evolution -hence 'punctuated equilibrium' as a way out of the quandry.
Luckily now we don't have to look for transitional forms because the nagging problem will never be solved so everything is a transitional form -end of problem!
Morton's Toe, which is having one's second toe be larger than the hallux, was present in less than 5% of caucasians during the 1950's. It is now over double that and within some caucasian populations as much as five times that. And this is just one genetic trait over the course of half a century(thanks bluegenes). Imagine, then, the sum total of our traits and how quickly they can morph us. Slow by our own reckoning, but not by geological time. A longer toe here, an increase of rubidism there, it all adds up.
And this genetic mutation convinces you that sometime future -we will be morphed into something completely different!That's faith for you with time being the magical element that prevents us from empirically proving any of this.Maybe I understand evolution better than you do or perhaps I just lack imagination.

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 Message 153 by faust, posted 01-17-2008 3:33 PM faust has not replied

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 Message 169 by jar, posted 01-19-2008 11:28 AM Beretta has replied
 Message 170 by bluegenes, posted 01-19-2008 12:08 PM Beretta has replied

  
Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 171 of 204 (449957)
01-20-2008 12:11 AM
Reply to: Message 170 by bluegenes
01-19-2008 12:08 PM


Re: And Should it be Taught in Our Schools?
If a small amount of water falls over a waterfall in one second, it does not require any great faith to come to the conclusion that a much larger amount, about sixty times, will fall over it in a minute, and that the small "one second" amount calculated over centuries or millennia will add up to an enormous amount.
I understand your argument but just don't think the analogy is suitable for the occasion. The process that you outline is easy to see and its possibilities are easy to imagine but can you so easily extend it to biological evolution using the evidence that we have at our disposal?
The first problem would be with the geological time frame. If you believe as most geologists do that it is representative of time (due to uniformatarian assumptions) then obviously it looks like these large changes must have occurred -so "they weren't there and now, with time, they are." But how about looking back at those assumptions in the first place.
Then - you can breed a mongrel mutt into large dogs or small dogs with time and selection but is there a limit to what you can produce, even given time to accomplish the task.If you breed small, you lose genetic information for large. The whole process involves getting rid of the information you do not require.
How much useful new information will you get that is available to morph that dog into a completely new kind of creature?
Empirical science only shows that we will get a dog of some kind; same thing with fruit flies forced to mutate rapidly through many generations -did they morph, in some ways but only in negative and destructive ways because that is mostly what mutation does -but they are clearly all fruit flies so can new and useful genetic information build up as a result of mutation over time -we don't know that empirically.
So we have no absolute evidence that these large scale changes supposedly represented by the geological column are possible and it is not ironclad that the geological column equals time.
Just because a toe can change and become longer and its appearance in the population increases in frequency with time, that doesn't tell us where the toe information came from in the first place. We can see a mutation of information being transmitted through the generations and maybe imagine the long term morph of the entire human but it is based on believing that it has happened in the past, not on empirical science with repetition and observation.
All very simple, even for a creationist. We then know that the waterfall is constantly changing its shape and its nature.
But your example is easily imaginable even for creationists who must clearly be credited with having no imagination. The sorts of changes we are comparing to, biologically speaking, are the reptile to bird types of changes where somehow the info for feathers and hollow bones and a new and completely different lung structure and circulatory system and nerve innervation to allow the new assets to do their job,built up to produce an entirely new kind of creature with entirely new abilities.This is rather difficult to imagine. Such perfection, such a random mechanism like mutation, no plan, just voila take that.
We have no testable scientific reason to believe this.
People like Behe accept that at least some organisms change into others without requiring the intervention of invisible designers.
I agree that Behe accepts that concept but there are a whole range of individual beliefs accepted within ID. The point of ID is not the theological belief systems of the individual but instead the disbelief really that a mechanism such as random mutation could have invented or put together the marvels of nature in the first place. Not one of its adherents disbelieve in the concept of random mutation and selection, they just question the origin of the initial genetic information and most question the limits of change that are possible given what we can know and test and demonstrate empirically.
There's a magical limitation on degree of change allowed in both forms of creationism
Yes and it's based on what we can demonstrate to happen in a general sense, sans the imaginative aspects.We can't prove that a reptile became a bird with time but we can see that a type of reptile may demonstrate variability within the genetic features that it possesses in its first appearance within the geological record - so a leg may be lost or changed or duplicated or changed but empirically we cannot account for a leg becoming a wing or acquiring feathers where there were once scales.
All limitations are arbitrary, because none of them are evidence based
Actually in the sense of what I have explained above, the limitations of creationists are far more evidence-based than the evolutionists limitations, which seem to be pretty much unlimited given what they believe is possible mutation-wise.
Perhaps a waterfall could become two or three smaller waterfalls in your God's world, but isn't allowed to become rapids?
Or perhaps we only object when the waterfall morphs into a bird and no clear link is imaginable.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 170 by bluegenes, posted 01-19-2008 12:08 PM bluegenes has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 175 by Percy, posted 01-20-2008 8:11 AM Beretta has replied
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Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 172 of 204 (449966)
01-20-2008 1:13 AM
Reply to: Message 169 by jar
01-19-2008 11:28 AM


Re: More Palm the Pea con games.
Beretta writes:
I'll go with the God of the Bible
You already admitted that ID is nothing but religion
when asked "Who is the Designer.
So by inference anyone that believes in the God of the Bible and dares to admit is, is unscientific. Any conclusions that person may accept or reject are then based on religion which makes that person dishonest because it is 'religion in disguise.'
What do you believe?
Gould writes:
The first, preferred by Darwinians because it preserves both gradualism and adaptation, is the principle of preadaptation: the intermediate stages functioned in another way but were, by good fortune in retrospect, pre-adapted to a new role they could play only after greater elaboration.
So Gould lays out the problem which is real and then proceeds to come up with an imaginative solution or two and that makes the problem disappear? His imaginative potential solutions are not what we care about -there's no proof, it's not science. What is being quoted, which is not at all out of context nor misrepresented is the problem which many evolutionists have admitted, exists.
Gould writes:
Why may we not imagine that gill arch bones of an ancestral agnathan moved forward in one step to surround the mouth and form proto-jaws?
There we go, the 'imagine' word again. Well imagine away but don't accuse creationists of being inventive and going beyond the bounds of what is scientific.
none of that has ANYTHING to do with the topic which is "Is Intelligent Design Religion in the Guise of Science?"
Personally I think it does, except to point out that it seems to me that ID proposes a manner of sticking to the science by critically examining what we know and what we believe to be true by faith. We actually want to impose a limit on how much imagination should be allowed by the faithful of the imaginative evolution religion and show people how to think critically rather than be told that evolution (macro) happened, it's a FACT, you HAVE to believe us even though we've never seen it happen.They want to be allowed to propose an alternative that is equally possible but which you may reject if you feel so inclined, but not on account of the evidence against it, since neither can be proven as it is history.
Evolution is a conclusion based on the evidence and not a presupposition.
No it is an imaginative tale produced by men based on the facts that we possess. ID proponents work with those same facts and come to a different conclusion.Neither can be proven -which is more likely -that is the question? Do not force the one possible solution down our children's throats as fact - present both sides and while you're doing it, don't force feed either as truth.What anyone may choose to believe will not change the reality of what is true but lets separate fact from philosophy and divide empirical science from imagination.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 169 by jar, posted 01-19-2008 11:28 AM jar has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 174 by Rrhain, posted 01-20-2008 1:41 AM Beretta has replied
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Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 180 of 204 (451094)
01-26-2008 7:13 AM
Reply to: Message 174 by Rrhain
01-20-2008 1:41 AM


Re: More Palm the Pea con games.
And what do we have here? Bacteria mutated into bacteria with a mutation.So we have bacteria at the beginning and bacteria at the end.
Should we then believe that bacteria will ever be anything but bacteria?
That's called variation. If you want to call it evolution -then fine, it is micro-evolution and it does not imply that macro-evolution is possible.
Science tells us bacteria can mutate within a range -full stop.
Believing that bacteria could mutate into something other than bacteria would be philosophy not science. You have to believe it but that's not science.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 174 by Rrhain, posted 01-20-2008 1:41 AM Rrhain has replied

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Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 181 of 204 (451097)
01-26-2008 7:48 AM
Reply to: Message 175 by Percy
01-20-2008 8:11 AM


Re: And Should it be Taught in Our Schools?
ID doesn't have any problem with the geological time frame. And ID also understands that modern geology is not based upon "uniformitarian assumptions" as creationists understand that term.
Modern geology is based on uniformatarian assumptions if it believes that what we see now is all that can be used to explain everything we see around us.
The past is the key to the present. That is a uniformatarian assumption.There are catastrophists out there in modern geology but for the most part, uniformatarian geology seems to be the most popular belief.
ID accepts common descent and believes that evolution was responsible for much of the diversity of life we see today.
You're right, in general they seem to accept that.Not all of them agree with it but they are not arguing that point -they are arguing against randomness in nature.
Science is based upon empiricism, meaning that the process of discovery is based upon observations of the real world. It doesn't mean, "Anything that doesn't happen before your very eyes didn't happen." It also doesn't mean, "Extrapolation is invalid."
But anything that you can't see happen is not repeatable so it can't really be science.Extrapolation may be valid for some systems but is it valid for biological systems? We don't know to what extent that is true. Are there biological limits to diversification? Will a bacteria always be a bacteria just because that is all we ever see? Or did some extrapolation of that occur in the past, an extrapolation that we can't see happening now?
If there were bacteria in the past and there are bacteria now -does that mean that bacteria stay bacteria or must we imagine that long ago and far away, some bacteria diversified into to something more complex that was no longer a bacteria?
And figuring out what happened in the past just by looking around is also something everyone does, as any parent whose ever come home and found the living room lamp broken can attest.
Bad analogy.We know bacteria existed in the past, we know they exist now.Do we know they changed into something more complex in the past? No we don't. We can't extrapolate on that either. Just because the lamp is broken doesn't mean we can work out that ,given time everything else will be broken.
In other words, all we're talking about is rational thinking, and creationists only argue against it when it leads to conclusions that conflict with their religious beliefs.
No actually we are being quite rational by not assuming that which we have no reason to believe is possible. You have to use materialist assumptions if you're going to believe that it is possible for a bacteria to change into something more complex, something that is not a bacteria.
Science is tentative and can never be absolute or ironclad or 100% certain about anything, not in physics, not in chemistry, not in geology, not in biology, not in any field of science.
So,on that note we cannot say with certainty that simple things evolved into more complex things in the past.In which case, why are we teaching as fact those things that may have other explanations?
If it conflicts with your belief system (materialism) does that mean it is not true? Shouldn't science allow for other reasonable, evidence-based possibilities? -like ID?
All accepted scientific theories are empirical in that they're based upon study of the real world.
Theorizing about what may have happened in the past (historical science) does not mean that the theory is true.Some data may support that theory, other data may not.
All accepted scientific theories are empirical in that they're based upon study of the real world.
But extrapolation is used and that extrapolation may not be valid.
But the important point here is that the theory of evolution explains the evidence, has been tested innumerable times and has passed every test. We have no scientific reasons for questioning the theory.
It is a possible explanation of the evidence, has only been tested to the degree that it is possible to test and most definately has not passed every test. You have to ignore the innumerable anomalies that are not explained by the theory in order to be content with the theory. There are a lot of scientific reasons for questioning the theory.
You go on to describe the core ID belief that the processes of random mutation and natural selection are insufficient for explaining the diversity of life, and this is a scientifically valid hypothesis, but the ID community has not as yet been able to offer any evidence in its support
Or you do not like their evidence or their interpretation of the evidence which goes against the consensus opinion of what the evidence means.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 175 by Percy, posted 01-20-2008 8:11 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
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Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 182 of 204 (451098)
01-26-2008 9:03 AM
Reply to: Message 176 by Percy
01-20-2008 8:36 AM


Re: More Palm the Pea con games.
In a scientific setting, those who offer religious explanations unsupported by empirical evidence are being unscientific.
So then large scale evolution is a religious explanation since it is unsupported by empirical evidence. It is a potential extrapolation but unproven since we cannot do a repeatable experiment.ID suggests that the complexity of life is such that it defies simple explanations such as simple variation adding up to major change.
Creationists have this weird idea that one can't be religious unless it infuses all parts of their lives
One doesn't have to be a brain surgeon to see that if something is true it must fit everything in life.If everything was initially created then it did not evolve from simple unicellular organisms. Showing variation in a life form does not explain where the complexity came from in the firt place.
Showing that genetic material mutates doesn't explain the origin of the genetic code.You have to imagine that it came together by chance natural processes -you cannot prove that and to me (and others)it is not a very satisfying explanation for what we observe.
Gould is posing a hypothetical question so that he can argue against it, as he goes on to do. You've just done what you've been arguing creationists do not do, lifted a quote out of context to make it seem that Gould is arguing for the opposite of what he actually believes.
He's doing the same thing many evolutionists do -imagining something must have happened (everything is random and undirected, matter is all there is)and then making up a story of how it may have happened. Not very scientific.I didn't say he is arguing for the opposite, I said he is imagining a solution to a problem and since nobody was there and nobody can repeat the experiment, it is altogether an exercise in imagination. Is that science?
Evolution is a very widely accepted theory supported by mountains of evidence that has undergone countless validations.
Now where have I heard that before? -in 50 000 previous posts I think -does that make it true, no - except the part that it is a widely accepted theory, that part is true.
ID is a religious concept
Unless it is the truth and there is an intelligent designer in which case random undirected evolution is the religious concept.You have to believe it is true despite some of its patent absurdities.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 176 by Percy, posted 01-20-2008 8:36 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 187 by Percy, posted 01-26-2008 10:55 AM Beretta has replied

  
Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 184 of 204 (451104)
01-26-2008 10:07 AM
Reply to: Message 178 by bluegenes
01-20-2008 2:41 PM


Re: Imagine no Imagination
Look at the history of anything, a country, a mountain range, a river, a human culture, your own life from birth to present, whatever you want, and you see that constant small changes add up to large changes.
But bacteria 600 million years ago and bacteria now are not very different -the same applies to so many life forms. If some barely changed over so much hypothetical time,can we conclude that others did manage to break the bacteria barrier and end up as brain surgeons? Stasis is the general rule in the fossil record and variation with limitations is what we observe now on this planet.
By a vague "most" geologists, I think you mean more than 99%, and I'd suggest a virtual 100%
Can consensus be considered to be a measure of truth? So many consensus opinions have turned out to be untrue so perhaps the geologists have been brainwashed into believing the consensus opinion.ID is here to counter the dogma -it makes people think outside the box for a change.
The only assumption underlying science is that reality can be observed
And in all too many cases, imagined.
Nature requires far longer than the time that we've been breeding dogs
Yes and we never get anything but a dog. So 'time' is the way of imagining what cannot be proven.If 600 000 year old bacteria remain pretty much unchanged and blue-green algae remain pretty much unchanged, the rest is imagination and 'time' may not be able to change that.
Your last sentence seems to imply that wolves, from which dogs were bred, have all the attributes of all dogs.
Variation within limits.They're never going to grow wings.They vary -they have the genetic material to produce legs and tails of varying proportions but not wings or feathers or anything foreign to the basic ingredients.Selection only selects from that which is genetically possible.
It appears that lots of "information" has been added to dogs
Selected not added -only mutations which are genetic mistakes are added -in most cases that is not an advantage. In very few, there may be a slighlty advantageous side effect -like malarial resistance in a mutational condition. No complex new organs are going to build up due to mutation.
artificial breeding, like evolution in the wild, is a matter of both adding and subtracting characteristics.
No, selecting what already exists, choosing the attributes one prefers, not adding characteristics.
In the wild, for a fruit fly to become something that is not a fruit fly, you'd be talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of generations.
If that were true they would have carried on trying but they didn't because all they ever got was useless mutants.And they were all fruit flies.
Think about the most intelligent breeds of dogs, and ask yourself whether or not an increase in the intelligence of wolves is "new and useful information built up as a result of mutation over time" and whether or not we know that empirically.
Perhaps they selected for intelligence???
In the case of your creator God and his supposed creation, it isn't a question of "no absolute evidence", it's a question of absolutely no evidence at all
Much like your belief that small changes can add up to large changes that we will never see happen because of 'time constraints'.
Your large changes with time may be true but my creator may be the one that's true.How would we know???
I strongly suggest that you apply the same level of cynicism to all creation mythologies that you apply to the scientific consencus of our times (but I know that this'll conflict with desire, so you won't).
Perhaps you should apply a greater level of cynicism to the 'consensus' opinion but that might conflict with desire.
A collection of fossils, like the horse ancestors/ancestor relatives, are examined and measured up by paleontologists and anatomists in the present, and the process can certainly be repeated and it is certainly observation
You measure, and examine bones and then you can remeasure and re-examine -that's hardly the point of repeatable experimentation.You cannot prove relationship by observing (and reobserving) that something looks like it might have changed into something else.I want to see it change into that something else and defy what we observe with nature and its apparent limitations.Then I too will be a believer!
Use the evolutionary imagination, and it might tell you that because we have much larger brains then the other apes, creatures with brains larger than theirs but smaller than ours must have existed along the line in between.
Or maybe varieties of brain sizes exist just like people have a variety of size and shape heads which is not to say that we are related to apes at all.
Why are apes not turning into humans as we speak? Why are they apes and we are clearly humans and all the supposed hypothetical inbetween stages are no longer happening. Your imagination is just so much stronger than mine!
I understand why you could imagine what you imagine -I just don't happen to agree, and imagining that it happened is not the same as proof that it did.
I.D.ers are religious creationists like yourself, but they tend to have a better understanding of science than biblical literalists, and they know that they have to fit creationism around the ever growing body of evidence that shouts "evolution", like the things I'm mentioning here.
They don't 'shout' evolution -you are imagining the shouting as well -you are a product of the energetic brainwashing of previous generations of believers.
What mutations do is produce variety within a species, which is why you and I do not have identical bones, lungs, circulatory system, etc. You can doubt mutations that significantly change bones, if you want to, but look at this:
Mutation -will tend to be weeded out by natural selection which tends towards maintaining integrity of the human kind.
Our lungs and bones are not identical, they vary within a range - but we will never have wings because we do not have the complex genetic information required to produce them.
The end result can look very clever, but exactly the same thing happens with the random change and selection programs used to design airplanes.
Bad analogy -airplanes require an intelligent designer -not random breakdown of parts to form new innovative features.
They want magical origins for the marvels of nature, but they have no evidence that magic happens, so they're a bit stuck from a scientific point of view.
Believing that random undirected mutation can conceivably result in such incredible creatures, organs, biochemical integration, fine tuned systems -that to me is belief in magic. Just like believing that an airplane could arrange itself into a flying machine by way of random parts lying around a junkyard in a wind storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 178 by bluegenes, posted 01-20-2008 2:41 PM bluegenes has replied

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Beretta
Member (Idle past 5597 days)
Posts: 422
From: South Africa
Joined: 10-29-2007


Message 188 of 204 (451329)
01-27-2008 9:40 AM
Reply to: Message 187 by Percy
01-26-2008 10:55 AM


Science is not Truth????
you misunderstand the nature of scientific investigation. All scientific investigation is of past events. Even when you see something happen before your very eyes, you're actually observing something that happened in the past.
The difference is in whether you observed it or not.
Science observes variation and natural selection.Therefore that is science.
Science has never observed a reptile turning into a bird -therefore to conclude that it happened is not science.
Large scale evolutionary change and Intelligent design are both historical concepts - which one happened? or did neither happen? -neither can be proven because we can observe neither.
Real science is the stuff we can observe happening.We use real science to decide what can happen.Real science -observable science is what we use in technology.Nobody has a problem with real science being taught in the classroom.
The problem comes in with the philosophy of methodological naturalism which is being taught as fact in the classroom.
This says that 'matter is all there is' -even if it is not true -and 'random undirected evolutionary processes produced everything we see' -even if it is not true.
So in essence what I am saying is science should stick to what is truelly scientific which excludes those things which are not observable by virtue of the fact that they may have occurred in the past but we cannot see them happening today,so we cannot say with certainty that it happened at all .
Religion is something you believe happened -you have faith that it did happen but you have never observed it happening.
That would include both large scale evolution and ID.
So ultimately macro-evolution and ID are both religious concepts -which means evolution is religion in the guise of science and ID is religion in the guise of science SO either
(1)neither should be taught as fact OR
(2)both should be discussed (with their supporting evidences) in the science classroom.
The problem that ID has with macro-evolution is that it may not be true and the problem that evolutionists have with ID is that it may not be true.In fact they are both sure the other one is not true.
Both should be taught as philosophy (possible scenarios) but neither should be taught as fact to the exclusion of the other otherwise you are teaching your religion, not science.
If your definition of science were correct, then not only is evolution not science, but neither is ID nor any other field of science is science. In other words, if you're right, there's no such thing as science.
No, not true.Factual observable things are science.Technological advance relies on that kind of real science.
When you push something it moves, push it with greater force, it moves faster -you can use that observation and produce something according to that universally observable scientific principle.
Doctors use knowledge of anatomy and biochemistry and pathology and pharmacology in their work and advancements. They can fix a broken toe but imagining that the toe developed through mutational processes from the simple one-celled organisms doesn't help your practice of medicine in the least.You don't have to be sure of where it came from in order to fix it.
Engineers use facts in their engineering.That is science.
To qualify as science the people IDists have to convince first are scientists, not school board members.
IDers spend a lot of time trying to drum in the difference between historical and evidence-based science but evolutionary scientists seem to have a block of understanding where that is concerned.
The general public, less brainwashed, does not seem to have a problem understanding the difference.
Evolutionary scientists refuse to have ID concepts in peer-reviewed magazines, they go ape like they did with Stephen Meyer's article after it was published.What is their problem? Why do they feel so threatened by alternative explanations to their favorite 'consensus' opinion? There have always been paradigms in science and to change that paradigm involves fighting the entrenched paradigm because people resist change especially when they want to retain their monopoly on knowledge.It's like trying to take down a corrupt government when they own the media and other ideas are not allowed to be heard.
I think the biggest problem is the misconceptions that abound about what ID is trying to achieve- they are trying to get a fair hearing and to allow children to hear both sides of the origins debate as well as to explain to them where science and philosophy must be separated.
If you tell children that they arrived via random mutational changes from a common single-celled organism, you are not telling them a fact, you are pushing your religion about what you believe happened in the past.
If everything was initially created, then we should be able to uncover evidence of the means and mechanisms of that creation.
Ultimately yes, maybe we will -but teaching what is not fact as fact in the meantime, is not going to advance knowledge about those means and mechanisms.
ID should be focusing their efforts at uncovering this evidence, instead of on convincing laypeople that ID, an idea shared by less than 1% of scientists and almost no biologists, is actually science.
The percentage quoted here is an indication of how much more severe the brainwashing is amongst scientists than in the general public.'Matter is all there is, everything can and must be explained by purely material processes'.What if that is not true? There are plenty intelligent people out there that are not actively working in the universities.Are people in universites the only ones that know anything? That makes scientists like a priesthood in a religion of their own.They have decided that matter is all there is, that everything can be explained without a creative intelligence -therefore they are right and everyone that objects is wrong?
There are a lot of people within the universities that believe in a God that created us, but dare they mention it or steer their research in that direction? -no.The priesthood will not allow them to think outside the box, they will not get funding, their websites will be shut down, they will be shunned and vilified.That's like being a Christian in a Muslim country - shut up or face the consequences say the Imams -so also say the evolutionists to the IDers. They get away with it now but the opposition is growing and rightly so. You can't protect a bad idea from criticism and if ID is such a bad idea, it will crumble on its own, if evolution is the bad idea, it will have to make way for a paradigm shift.
Of course I can't prove it to you. Science is tentative.
So don't teach it as fact when it is not.Only teach facts as fact.An eye works like this. An ear works like this.FACT.An ear is a residual structure in the evolutionary process -no, not fact.Learn to discriminate between fact and theoretical possibilities.
The task is merely to construct a consensus.
And allow the consensus to be exposed to valid criticism so that science can advance.
Science isn't about truth
Well that's an interesting comment. Science should be about truth.
The truth about evolution is being tested and science, in the pursuit of truth, should welcome that testing, not resist it.
If new evidence or insights invalidates evolutionary theory that doesn't make ID the winner.
No but insisting that evolution is fact does not invalidate ID either.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 187 by Percy, posted 01-26-2008 10:55 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 190 by Percy, posted 01-27-2008 1:47 PM Beretta has not replied
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