avocationist
Posts: 173
Joined: Feb. 2006
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Okay, so I'm moving everything here.
Dear Innoculated Mind, I hope you haven't innoculated it against anything good, like new information.
| Quote | | But contrary to what they say, you can indeed infer about the nature of the designer from the design. |
No, you really can't. You can infer that it was capable of design, not much else. Check out Lloyd Pye, a fringe guy who is sure all life has been steadily seeded here by other beings in the universe and he has lots of interesting data about it. He thinks both evolutionists and creationists have their heads in the sand.
I think the exercise in separating the design inference from the religious dogma is a good one for the Christians, because it is such a good thing for people to do, and they won't do it unless forced, which is to say, the exercise of really asking themselves, "what do I know for sure?"
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Renier,
I did not say 'there is a God'. I said that IF I had made that assumption, others would follow.
The assertion that there is no evidence for God doesn't interest me. First, not all scientists come to that conclusion. It is far more prevalent in biology, where Darwinist materialism holds sway. Some physicists believe they have found evidence of nonlocal consciousness. I don't know the percentages, but atheism is far smaller among physicists than biologists.
Second, it is a matter of perception. God is the subtle aspect of reality, not the gross.
I didn't read much of that very long insertion because I just couldn't see that it had much relevance to my own views. Do you know why I am here? I'm here because I was about to be banned for "gratuitious religion bashing."
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Puck,
Yeah, about Hume, I think that rarity is a major factor in deciding an event is supernatural. In fact, we calmly accept the every day things which we also can't explain, just because we see them more often.
There are no flaws with my Newton comparison because you assumed I thought the Bible or Christian dogma had anything vital to do with his basic reverence for God. Let's begin by clarifying the difference between religion and spirituality. There is a whole world of spirituality as well as nonChristian religions out there. Yet down here in these Darwinian-creationist dungeons we get only a steady diet of fundamentalist understanding to work off of. Religions have names. I have no particular religion and find faith of little worth.
I'm thrilled to find out Newton was a free thinker. He failed at alchemy, of course, as most alchemists do. It takes some very, very unusual thinking to comprehend alchemy.
| Quote | | BTW...I am a Deist....and my religious beliefs have no bearing on my scientific ones. |
What religious beliefs can a deist have?
I do not think you have understood the complex specified information argument. The coin toss answer I've seen before as well. Look, every moment of your day and every item within it is unique and unrepeatable. So the chances of it occuring in just this way if predicted beforehand would be vanishingly small. The solutions we see in biology may not be the only possible ones, but they are extremely unlikely in comparison to the vast search space of random possible connections.
| Quote | | Hubris is also responsible for "the meaning of life". Life doesnt require meaning...it could be accidental. |
I don't think it's hubris. Seeking the meaning of life is a very sane response to the situation we find ourselves in. There are many profound and important meanings to life, but there is not one overriding one. That is because existence itself is the most profound aspect of reality, and any and all explanations are therefore lower than it, derivative from it. It is not because life might be accidental that it 'lacks inherent meaning.' It lacks inherent meaning because life itself is the most inherent thing.
It may be that I missed the point of the rock. I thought I gave good answers. You say it doesn't matter who struck the rock. But we are talking about a 'miracle' situation, and last I checked, most people can't perform miracles. So in this case, we would need to definitely study why one particular person could do it. This would be part of finding out how it occurred. What I'm trying to say about miracles is that if they occur, they are within the laws of nature, even if they are not within our current abilities to reproduce ourselves. Imagine a primitive person, faced with a pile of sand and metal shavings. If you waved a magnet over it and separated out the metal, he might find it magical. In the same way, if there is a God who does anything (I'm not sure yours does) then s/he has done things within the laws of nature, utilizing knowledge of nature we don't currently possess. Someone said to me that the resurrection was a supernatural event. But I answered that if Jesus would be so cooperative as to die for us and resurrect himself every morning at 9 o'clock, and allow teams of scientists to study the event, we would find out a lot about how it occurs.
| Quote | | .They still need to tell us how the rock is producing water. |
Amen.
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GCT,
| Quote | | With evolution, you don't need to talk about atheism vs. theism, but with ID you do? |
No, I think it comes up with all of them. Darwinist evolution from the beginning was an attempt to get away from superstition and unexamined a priori acceptance of revealed scripture, yes, but it was also an attempt to do away with a need for God altogether, and the repugnance of the Christian God was a major emotional motivation. So from the beginning this was an attempt to explore the viability of a materialist worldview.
| Quote | | ID is dependent on having some sort of supernatural being (defined as such, since this being is responsible for "designing" the features of the universe and only the "supernatural" could be the designer of the natural.) |
Well, the argument that we must ultimately rest upon a cause of nature I agree with, but ID itself needn't go that far. The point of ID is that if the evidence points to a designer, we can't exclude it because we don't want it to be true.
And if there is a supernatural being who caused nature then we are all dependent upon it, and if that is the case there are only two positions for the sentient being to take: awareness of it or unawareness of it.
| Quote | | Since it is dependent on that supernatural entity, it is inherently in the region of religion. |
Region of the spiritual.
You know what I like about this whole big drama? In which the scientists have wiped the slate clean in one fell swoop and said "Okay, let's start with what we know is true and work from there."
It's a beautiful thing to do. It was time to clean house. Now the physicists are getting more and more serious about consciousness. The God we end up with will not be the one we left behind. And thank God for that.
| Quote | | Also, you try to argue from personal incredulity, but what is more probable, the process called evolution that has multitudes of evidence, or the undefined process called ID that posits an entity that science can not provide any evidence for, by the own definition of the entity? |
Well, I am pretty satisfied based on the books and articles I have read that there isn't much evidence for Darwinism, and that the IDists are more scientific than the Darwinists because the IDists are into detail. It's all about Reality with a capital R and reality is all about detail. What's more, I see no possibility of a universe without God. None at all.
| Quote | | and there is no evidence that can point to god since all evidence simultaneously points to god and not god all at once. |
In my opinion that is a clue about the immanence of God - that God is part of everything.
About the branches of science - Yes, as I mentioned above, evolution tends to be more atheistic in that they have had from the beginning prominent proponents who have made this almost part of the platform. I believe the Cornell president said something about this, and someone else said that those who think evolution is compatible with religion have not understood evolution and so forth. But as I also answered, science itself is not a being with whom I can find fault. ID is simply against the tendency to refuse admittance to and to ridicule any but a materialist interpretation of evidence. This has nothing to do with the scientific method.
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) difficulty in imagining things beyond the range of their sight, and things that take longer to happen than their lifespans. That's why we need to exercise our imaginations. 
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