Altabin
Posts: 308
Joined: Sep. 2006
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| Quote (oldmanintheskydidntdoit @ Jan. 17 2007,15:56) | TroutMac comes clean about Creationism and ID
| Quote | | These folks are so bankrupt that they're playing games with the language so as to cover their tracks. They talk out of both sides of their mouth, twist definitions to suit their whim for that moment. They hope that the ignorant will fall for their charade just because they call themselves "scientists" and this, they think, gives them credibility enough to make any claim they want. The problem is, many people are ignorant enough to fall for it. They're not about explaining and clarifying evolution… anything but that. They want to confuse the issue - while appearing to have explained something - as much as possible. We just don't understand because we're not scientists like they are. |
Well, change "evolution" for ID and it's accurate!
This guy is dumb dumb dumb
http://www.overwhelmingevidence.com/oe....?page=1 |
From the same thread:
| Quote | | If something is truly random, it has no meaning or purpose. If it has meaning or purpose, it ain't random. Meaning and purpose imply design or maybe a better word is intent. Only intelligence can produce "intent". How many people believe that a rock, for example, can "intend" for something to happen? If anything has a purpose, an intent behind it, then it is designed by an intelligence. |
Trouty, dude, if you're going to be a teleologist at least be an educated one. Aristotle dealt with the fallacy of ascribing intention to nature a good while back now. Natural processes (he says) act to an end, but do so without forethought or deliberation. If something has such and such an essence, then its internal principle of change (or its "nature") will drive its development so that it can best perform the functions appropriate to that essence. As he lays it out, especially in Physics II and Parts of Animals I, nature is exactly as if it were designed, except that there is no designer - just as a spider produces a web which is as it were designed, yet the spider never engages in the kind of deliberation characteristic of a human designer. The appearance - and reality - of design is brought about by individuals each developing (through the interaction of their internal principle with the environment) so as to perform the functions appropriate to their way of life as well as they can. Aristotle's brilliant analysis shows that an external designer - such as the Demiurge of Plato's Timaeus - is an illusion.
You could also benefit, Fishboy, from thinking about what he has to say in the Physics about chance, coincidence and necessity. (I'll leave it someone else to make the obvious point about rolling a die and never getting a seven.)
Sorry to go on about it, but it's still one of my great disappointments that ID (or UD) is so intellectually shallow. As a historian of science with an interest in classical philosophy, I first looked at UD and ID literature with some hopes that it would at least be interesting, if still wrong: I expected to find a re-appreciation of pre-scientific teleological natural philosophy: Aristotelianism, Neoplatonist emanationism, Stoic materialism. Instead, apart from DT's empty and aggressive bluster, all I could see was a thousand ways of saying "Goddidit." They make assertions about "design," "intelligence," "chance" and "intention," yet never bother even to reflect on what they mean by these terms, still less take account of 2000-odd years of human conversation about these very issues (apart from the conversations of literalist theologians).
EDIT: typos
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