sparc
Posts: 2088
Joined: April 2007
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| Quote (Texas Teach @ Dec. 01 2016,22:11) | | Quote (Acartia_Bogart @ Dec. 01 2016,21:51) | MatSpirit responds to Barry's challenge.
| Quote | Barry: “MatSpirit, WD400, Seversky, daveS
We know you are lurking around. Why don’t you give it a go?”
I’d like to thank the folks at After the Bar Closes for reprinting your invitation, else I would have missed it.
ID is the traditional Christian belief that God created life, the universe and everything, especially living things and especially us. It also encompasses the traditional Christian belief that this should be readily detectable. “The heavens declare the glory of God” or William Paley for examples.
These traditional Christian beliefs became ID when the Supreme Court ruled that “Creation Science” was just a traditional Christian belief and forbade teaching it in public schools as science.
A very smart law professor named Phillip Johnson, who had found Jesus while in the middle of a messy divorce, then had the idea of just saying that an unnamed Intelligent Designer, who was not necessarily the God of the Christians and Jews (and Muslims too, but keep that under your hat), designed life, the universe and everything. He felt that this could Constitutionally be taught in public school science classes and Pastor Bob could fill in the blanks on Sunday. Right about the time this new idea started gaining traction, Professor Johnson had a stroke visited upon him, but for some reason he didn’t claim the blood clot was Intelligently Designed and kept championing ID.
This left only one problem for ID: finding actual evidence of an Intelligent Designer. Luckily for those with a sense of humor, a twenty-years-in-college professional student named William Dembski was working at a Baptist summer camp. (Professional students often have trouble finding suitable employment, at least employment that they themselves consider suitable.) He mightily impressed the daughter of the President of Baylor college and when the dust settled he was ensconced by Sloan in a comfortable position at Baylor.
There followed over a decade of absolute hilarity (unless you were an ID sympathiser) and when the dust finally settled, Sloan was fired, Dembski was released from all duties at Baylor (but still cashed his paychecks), the names, home addresses, home phone numbers and email addresses of the entire Baylor Board of Regents were published right here on this blog, (which he also started), the world was treated to a cartoon “criticising” a judge with fart noises personally supplied by Dembski, Dembski proved that he couldn’t tell the difference between “some” and “all” in “No free Lunch”, got fired from a Christian college, got fired by the DI and announced he was giving up ID and switching to education. And with Mrs. DeVoss taking over education, that may prove to have been a wise move.
And all that without a single bit of evidence for Intelligent Design that could withstand scrutiny. However, Behe did prove that if God was the Intelligent Designer, then He designed the malaria organism. Though obvious, this was not as welcomed by the ID community as you might think.
Meanwhile, the scientific world kept clearing its throat and saying, “How about evolution? We’ve got lots of evidence for that.”
I guess if I had to give the shortest, most concise definition of ID possible, I would say it’s one of the few funny parts of religion. |
MatSpirit is banned in 3...2...1... |
Post of the week for MatSpirit? |
seconded
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"[...] the type of information we find in living systems is beyond the creative means of purely material processes [...] Who or what is such an ultimate source of information? [...] from a theistic perspective, such an information source would presumably have to be God."
- William Dembski -
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