J-Dog
Posts: 4402
Joined: Dec. 2006
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For those of us that REALLY, REALLY can't wait, and REALLY, REALLY want to see what all the fun and excitement is all about with Dembski's new Opus:
Q For The Class: Does this now qualify us to go over Amazon and review?
For extra credit, compare and contrast excerpts of book with huge piles of stinking excrement.
http://www.thedesignoflife.net/excerpts.asp
"Most of origin-of-life research is as relevant to the real problem of life's origin as rubber-band powered propeller model planes are to the military's most sophisticated stealth aircraft." (Ch.8)
"The origin of information is not a problem of chemistry. Chemistry can be a carrier of information, but it cannot be its source." (Ch.8)
"Chemists typically do not concern themselves with the problem of the origin of information because their work presupposes a smart chemist ready to provide it!" (Ch.8)
"The claim that natural laws are sufficient to account for the origin of life is far-fetched. Natural laws work against the origin of life. Natural laws describe material processes that consume the raw materials of life, turning them into tars, melanoids, and other nonbiological substances that thereafter are completely useless to life." (Ch.8)
"For Clarence Darrow, evolution justified a biological determinism that turned humans into puppets of their evolutionary past." (Ch.9)
"How does evolutionary ethics make sense of people who transcend their selfish genes? Genuine human goodness, which looks to the welfare of others even at one's own (and one's genes') expense, is an unresolvable problem for evolutionary ethics. Its proponents have only one way of dealing with goodness, namely, to explain it away. Mother Teresa is a prime target in this regard. If Mother Teresa's acts of goodness on behalf of the poor and sick can be explained away in evolutionary terms, then surely so can all acts of human goodness." (Ch.1)
"Gould admits that anything Dawkins really cares about regarding biological structures – their origin, function, complexity, adaptive significance – is the product of natural selection. Gould was as much a Darwinist as Dawkins." (Ch.3)
"Vestigial structures are entirely consistent with intelligent design, suggesting structures that were initially designed but then lost their function through accident or disuse. Nevertheless, vestigial structures also provide evidence for a limited form of evolution. From both a design-theoretic and an evolutionary perspective, a vestigial structure is one that started out functional but then lost its function. Yet, in the case of evolution, vestigiality explains only the loss of function and not its origination. Vestigiality at best documents a degenerative form of evolution in which preexisting functional structures change and lose their function." (Ch.5)
"When Eugenie Scott calls for a technician to stand over a monkey's shoulder and correct its mistakes, she commits the fallacy of begging the question or arguing in a circle. In other words, Scott presupposes the very thing she needs to establish as the conclusion of a sound scientific argument. Indeed, scientific rigor demands that we ask who in turn is standing over the technician's shoulder and instructing the technician what is and is not a mistake in the typing of Shakespeare. If the technician's assistance to the monkey is to mirror natural selection, then the technician needs to help the monkey without knowing or giving away the answer. And yet that's exactly what the technician is doing here." (Ch.7)
"Darwinists have traditionally hidden behind the complexities of biological systems to shelter their theory from critical scrutiny. Choose a biological system that is too complex, and one can't even begin to calculate the probabilities associated with its evolution. Consider the eye. A widely held myth in the biological community is that Darwin's theory has explained the evolution of the vertebrate eye. In fact, the theory hasn't done anything of the sort." (Ch.7)
added in edit: I think we need a new thread just for this.
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Come on Tough Guy, do the little dance of ID impotence you do so well. - Louis to Joe G 2/10
Gullibility is not a virtue - Quidam on Dembski's belief in the Bible Code Faith Healers & ID 7/08
UD is an Unnatural Douchemagnet. - richardthughes 7/11
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