avocationist
Posts: 173
Joined: Feb. 2006
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I just spent way too much time seeking the spot where the word malicious was used.
JAD asks a couple of questions and I have seen him mention this elsewhere as well, and since he often asks to have his posts transmitted here, I'll throw it out because I wonder what sort of answer would be approptiate.
| Quote | Kazmer
You don't have to convince me. I believe the whole business was planned from the very beginning or beginnings and that man is the terminal product of a planned and now terminally executed scenario. The best evidence for this resides in the silence with which my following challenge has been met, the several times I have presented it.
Name a single mammalian genus younger than the genus Homo and a single member of that genus more recent than ourselves.
A second challenge has also not been met.
Pick any two species, living or dead, and provide the proof that one is ancestral to the other.
We do not see "evolution in action" as the Darwinians continue blindly to maintain. We see only the immutable products of a long past evolution, just as Linnaeus and Cuvier both understood long before Darwin. That evolution had nothing to do with chance, nothing to do with allelic mutation, nothing to do with sexual reproduction and nothing to do with the environment generally. It unfolded from within those relatively few organisms which linked one step in the ascending scenario to the next. There is no evidence that such organisms are still extant. |
By gradualism, I mean that many small steps slowly lead to diversification of species and creation of novel structures.
| Quote | If I was to present William Dembski with two 1,000,000,000 digit long binary numbers could he determine which one had randomly occured and which one had been "designed"?
How would he determine which one was designed? |
Well what do you mean by designed. If you simply made up a number and called it designed but it didn't do anything, then of course he couldn't. If your number, however, was a specific set of information that accomplished something complex, and if Dembski were able to discern the relation of the number to some sort of task or other form of meaningful information (there being the possibility that he could not decode it and therefore it would continue to appear random to him) then yes, he could.
The thrust of the Nature's Destiny book is to look at, for example, the table of elements, and consider what certain of them do, such as water or carbon, and see if any other candidates can fill the roles and they can't. We live in the best of all possible worlds. 
Oh, I'm previewing my post and I see you'll fry me for calling water an element. You get the idea.
Renier,
What sort of fundie were you, and how did you change? If you think those guys are fundies, then do you think there are Christians who are not fundie? 'Cause they don't seem fundie to me. Well, some of them are.
CGT,
| Quote | | And you have this thing bass ackwards. Dawkins says that evolution "allows" one to be an atheist. You can not make the same claim of ID. Now, which one is able to make a scientifically viable statement? |
If that were the only statement Dawkins made, you'd be right. I think he says more than that. There is nothing nonvalid about the statement that a system was most likely designed and not random.
You have a good point that it is hard to separate one's science from religious or worldview. But you think Dawkins science is unchanged by it whereas Dembski's is. I don't agree. What seems to be going on here is that there is a great acceptance within the evo community (and indeed far more than I had expected) of theistic or deistic beliefs, so long as they are kept within a certain perspective. What I am saying is that ultimately either Dawkins is right and there is nothing but self-organizing matter, or the deck was stacked. Because if there is a supreme being of any sort then this alters reality at its very outset. Renier and Miller prefer a remote God who is separate from a system that he set up. I would have no argument with that as a possibility except it doesn't appear to be quite true - I don't see the system as being capable of evolving life all by itself, and from a mystical standpoint, a personal and limited God who resides in some particular spot but not in other spots isn't philosophically valid. In other words, I am arguing that all the cosmos is of an underlying unity.
| Quote | | So, you believe that there are good arguments that the Earth is only 6000-10000 yrs. old? |
What??? I have not looked into the age of earth arguments whatsoever and have no opinion. I am pretty sure that it isn't 10,ooo years old because the only persuasion which would think so is Biblical (dont know about koran, but I consider Islam a conflation of several local traditions extant at the time) and the possibility of the Bible being literally accurate is surely less than zero.
It seems to me you argued I believe in ID because I believe in God. I pointed out that people can believe in God and accept evolution. Therefore it is not so that I must be accepting ID due to my belief in God.
As to why Miller is a confused IDist, that is simply because while he definitely accepts a system similar to the one Renier described for us, nonetheless we are in a very different ballgame if there is a God than if there isn't one. Dawkins' reality is not Miller's. It is bizarre to be confused on that.
| Quote | | You made the statement to the effect that people cling to evolution because their egos get in the way. Is it our egos that account for the genetic similarities we see between us and apes, or other mammals. In other words, it is not ego that caused these things to be fact. It is fact that we have significant genetic similarities to apes, other mammals, even further down the line. Ego has nothing to do with it. |
I meant to say that ego gets in the way in human relations in many ways, including clinging to ideas with more than just facts for motivation. The genetic similarity between us and chimps is exxagerated I am sure, but whatever it takes to alter us from chimps to human is what it takes, nothing less and nothing more. Just the fact that we don't even have the same number of chromosomes would seem to refute the 99% estimate. I think the estimate in the end will be more like 95 or 96%. The whole chimp thing has little meaning to me. It's a code made up of the same stuff, arranged differently. You mght as well get upset that the same alphabet was used to produce Lolita as the Nancy Drew mysteries. We are made of the same stuff and the same code as squid. The whole planet is made of star stuff. We aren't chimps, we are the gods of this planet and it's time we started acting like it.
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