avocationist
Posts: 173
Joined: Feb. 2006
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Guthrie,
| Quote | | It is possible to imagine things which have no physical existence, but in order to see if they do or not, you need to do science. |
That's just what I hope for.
| Quote | What makes you think that
1) God is the existence principle?
2) and invulnerable? |
Because there is nothing more fundamental than existence itself, and because the existence of anything at all is perplexing in the extreme. Because something which has the power or property of self-existence is needed in order for anything to exist. Invulnerable for the same reasons.
The Greek gods were so different from anything that I would consider a real conception of God that I suspect alien visitation to have caused the whole mythology.
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Chris,
You say Darwin believed God caused life, but others have differed. It doesn't look like he left a clear set of beliefs, perhaps because he didn't have one. It seems to have been an evolving question in his life. He certainly at least dabbled in the problem of origin of life, and because he did not know that single-celled organisms are complex, abiogenesis probably didn't seem like a huge problem to him.
Obviously, others disagree that there is no evidence of design, and about who is doing the deceiving of children in schools. The arguments given by ID are not philosophical.
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Renier,
If it is not a miracle unless it goes against the laws of nature then there are no miracles, and that is more or less what I think. But if there is a God and he parted the Red Sea, is that a miracle? I say no, but it would indicate that this other being has means and knowledge about what can be done to nature that we do not have. Big deal. We can do similar things which animals cannot do.
| Quote | | I am gnashing my teeth not to insult you, after you made the above statement. I cannot for the life of me consider this statement to come from an honest person. Am I missing something? What detail does ID have? You don't read science journals, do you? |
No, certainly not the kind that would require a biology degree to read. What I have read are things like the Meyer paper and the critique of it and the answers to the critique. I've read Miller's paper about the Flagellum and Dembski's answers to that. From these (and more) I get the impression the ID is way out in the lead. So, although I am unfortunately relying on second-hand information, I am reading what leading proponents have to say in trying to answe the Behe challenge, and it looks to me like they aren't even close to meeting it.
Some of the anti-evolution books I've read have critiquied quite a lot of the literature.
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I think I see what this all about. You need a designer to be there. You want science to confirm this. |
I can see why you'd suppose that but it isn't so. I wouldn't care if neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory was true or not, although I consider it fundamentally impossible for there to be both a God and for everything about this universe to be "unplanned, unguided, accidental, and without purpose." This is why I say Ken Miller is a confused IDist. There appears to be more of a range here than I expected about evolution theory's compatibility with deism and theism. Since someone said I should define Darwinism, I use that term so as not to contaminate the word evolution, which most IDists believe in to a greater to lesser extent. Darwinism or neoDarwinism, (which is not actually dependent upon whether or not Darwin himself believed in God) is the idea that all processes were random, life is an accident, and no God is needed to explain anything anywhere.
Actually, Ken Miller seems utterly schizophrenic. The Catholic God, the one who has authorized the pope to give people 500 days off of purgatory at his discretion, was just hands off while things like flagella got themselves together. Except that he intervened on the quantum level sometimes. In fairness, I haven't read his book. How can a guy who believes that the pope is Christ's vicar use the same terminology to describe the unfolding of the universe that a staunch atheist like Gould uses? To state that life unnfolded without plan or purpose is an atheistic metaphysical position.
So again, I could perhaps be some sort of theistic evolutionist, although I don't see a big difference between that and ID.
| Quote | | Do you think raping science with pseudo-science is the honourable thing to do? Behe does. |
This level of hostility is a red flag to me. Behe accepts more of regular evolutionary science than most IDists, and he does not have a fundamental problem with his religion. He mentions that he always did suppose that God must have started life itself but it doesn't sound as if he pondered it extensively at the time. It is rather odd, when considering the complexity of certain biological apparatuses and coming to a design inference, to be accused of rape and pseudoscience. Behe may be wrong, but to say his position is foolish is...well foolish. None of this has anything to do with the evidence that evolution occured, because Behe thinks it did. Look at it this way - either there is a God or there isn't. And if there is a God, s/he either had something to do with how things turned out, or s/he didn't. I mean really, that is all this amounts to.
| Quote | | Just think about defending ID. What is it you are really defending? |
I will admit that I am not completely without fear of Christianity at its worst. And for some, ID is just a convenient corroboration to bolster their real agenda, which is scripture. But I defend ID because I think it is true. The wedge document came from Johnson, whom I would agree is a fundamentalist. But it is not clear to me that he MUST have ID, or that he happens to think it is true.
| Quote | | Maybe this Intelligent Designer you are seeking is really nothing else but Evolution. |
I'm not sure in what sense you mean that, but I do tend to think that way simply because I am a monist.
| Quote | | One can be spiritual without being dishonest, or stupid, or fundie. |
Ah, we agree.
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Russell,
I can't believe IDists are rebranding themselves as anti-evolution when it is one of their main tenets that evolution occurred. In fact, that's why I use the term Darwinist, by which I mean neoDarwinism in its generally understood sense of random mutation + natural selection adequately accounting for life forms, and that the process was unguided and accidental.
I think it's odd you say ID ideas will be worth reading when they get into the literature. That's like a medieval Catholic saying the beliefs of the Cathars and Waldenses (who were massacred) will be worth considering when they get validated at a church council. It's all about the prevailing group in power. We are talking about psychological patterns of human behaviors. There's a good essay about the corruption of the peer-review process by Frank J. Tipler called Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy?
http://www.iscid.org/papers/Tipler_PeerReview_070103.pdf
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GCT,
About Darwin, I answered above but his daughter was not the only consideration. He specifically mentioned that Christian doctrine would send his father and grandfather to ####.
I wasn't saying ID is predicated on a cause of nature. Nature is predicated on a cause of nature. Id itself doesn't go that far.
I didn't say we must assume God exists, I said if God exists, we can either be aware of that or unaware.
| Quote | | Once again, how does one scientifically test for god? Besides, spiritual or religious realm (really they are the same) either one is outside of science. |
Some people are saying that quantum mechanics has proved nonlocal consciousnesss, and that material reality cannot function without consciousness. If so, that would come quite close to a proof of God. One can say religion and spirituality are the same, but there's a big difference in assuming a coherent, unified universe held together by some sort of Universal Mind versus fundamentalist Christian dogma.
| Quote | | you support ID because you see "no possibility of a universe without God" yet you want to claim that it is completely scientific. |
I did not say I support ID because I believe in God. It may be that I am able to see the ID arguments because I am not prejudiced against them. I don't really care how evolution occurred, except that I don't see how I could ever agree with the metaphysical position of Dawkins or Gould. I find the kind of intervention that IC systems may require disturbing and hard to reconcile with my ideas of how God would work organically as a kind of Self-evolution via nature. I prefer front-loading, but maybe not. It maybe that the intelligence of the cell is just a reflection of the ongoing omnipresence of God in everything. If there is a life force (which I think there is) then why not a mind force?
| Quote | | God is part of everything .. is both evidence for and evidence against god all at the same time. |
In an odd kind of way, yes. Do you see the humor in that?
| Quote | | Can you cite one thing, just one that is strictly evidence for god that does not rely on the a priori assumption of god's existence? |
The one I gave earlier. The existence principle.
| Quote | | The ID movement is not scientific, it is a religio-political movement centered on combatting atheism. Their insistence on creating straw-man definitions of evolution that equate it to atheism speak to this. You are even making the mistake of equating philosophical materialism with methodological naturalism. |
Despite that it is dedicated to the overthrow of the materialist worldview, it is also scientific. They are not mutually exclusive. And it is a little disingenuous for people here to insist that it does not teach atheism. I have spoken to many young people including my own and they have been taught a nihilistic worldview in school, one that they find depressing. Everyone needs to clean up their act. The Christians need reformation, and the evolutionists need to stop peddling atheism.
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