Kristine
Posts: 3061
Joined: Sep. 2006
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| Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ April 05 2007,15:07) | | Here's a peer-reviewed article that is that rare bird, an article explicitly about "intelligent design" that hasn't been repudiated by the publisher. FtK can access it online, even, eliminating the need for a trip to the library. |
Very nice! (I'll ignore the quip about her not going to the library.) 
| Quote | | We know, for example, what the function of the Antikythera Device, a clockwork bronze assembly found in an ancient Greek shipwreck, was because we know the kinds of organisms that made it, we know the scientific, religious and navigational interests they had, we know about gears, and we know what they knew about the apparent motions of the heavens. … But suppose it was found by interstellar visitors long after humans went extinct. What would they know about it? Unless they had similar interest and needs to ourselves, or were already able to reconstruct from other contexts what human needs and interests were, for all they know it might be the extrusion of some living organism (which, in a sense, it is), just like a sand dollar. It might never occur to them to compare it to the apparent motion of the heavens from earth circa 500 BCE. |
Add to this that so much of the world's creations have been discarded as unimportant "primitive" idols due to the cultural biases of the discoverers at the time, only to be finally examined and recorded by later curators as the background information of our cultural assumptions changed. Dembski's EF is so naive.
Love the Sam Spade motif throughout - with a great twist at the end. Great humor. So much of scholarly writing in the humanities is (even when it's not crazy postmodern bunk) obfuscative and dry.
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Which came first: the shimmy, or the hip?
AtBC Poet Laureate
"I happen to think that this prerequisite criterion of empirical evidence is itself not empirical." - Clive
"Damn you. This means a trip to the library. Again." -- fnxtr
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