avocationist
Posts: 173
Joined: Feb. 2006
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I think I have to see if I can keep this short.
Jon and others seem to say that in all the ID writings, they have not found a good argument. Sure, I find this strange. Anyway, I will go through the Miller-Demski flagellum papers and comment. Hopefully today.
Unfortunately, the perfect hand of bridge involves all four players getting a full suit. I specified that! I took Spetner's word for it in the sense that I would be very suprised if he would be stupid enough to make such an error when correcting someone else's. And I have you folks to help me out. If he is way off, I will personally write to him.
Puck, although you called me cheap and dishonest, I'll go thru and answer the most pertinent points.
I don't suppose that dinosaurs indicate a mistake.
| Quote | Miller gets down on his knees before a man in a dress and funny hat, and lets him put a little white disc on his tongue, because he believes the prayers of the man in a dress has miraculously changed it into the body of Jesus. So that can't be the whole problem.
Wow....that just sounded incredibly spiteful. I thought you liked Jesus. Did he give you the idea that being a jerk was ok? |
Not too spiteful, mostly just matter of fact. The point was, his faith does not prevent him accepting evolution theory. I do like Jesus. Altho his existence cannot be proven.
I don't know what LMAO stands for.
I'm not sure how the fact that the probability is the same each time you deal relates...I don't know the law of large numbers.
| Quote | | Of course he didnt....only an idiot would assume that he could quantify the probability of all random occurences that have ever occured. He can guess...but unless he was there...he cant really give you odds. |
Yes, no one knows the real odds of the real events he was speaking about, but his point was to show that people don't have an appreciation of deep time. What he showed was that he, who is NOT ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE, also has no feel for when a calculation is necessary.
I've seen it written, re god of the gaps or just history, that Newton's theories bothered people because they thought God or his angels moved the planets. His mechanistic universe supposedly unemployed God.
| Quote | | Pyramids, from our point of reference do not occur naturally. We have never seen giant complex structures arise from nature....however, you have no point of reference for the cell |
Yes, this is the problem exactly. We are discussing living systems that reproduce. If not for that, there wouldn't be confusion.
| Quote | | Im sure mathematicians will hate me for saying that, but in biology all that matters is that it can be proved to work, |
Much in NDE is also unproved.
Improvius, | Quote | | Even if they had an actual comparitive method, they'd still have to assume the existence of "non-design". We must be able to observe things that are not the result of intelligent design. In other words, there must be some things that God did not create. This necessary assumption seems antithetical to fundamentalist doctrine. |
Not sure why you say it is a necessary assumtion. God created everything - you must mean things like wind blowing over sand and leaving patterns. Yes, this is just the sort of thing that IDists do use.
CJ,
As I already said above, the point that people need to understand large numbers is valid, but my point was that Dawkins doesn't understand, and he uses deep time like magic. It isn't magic.
I have a good argument against the flying squirrels idea. Completely different construction - gliding apparatuses don't lead to wings. It is in one of my silly books here somewhere. Perhaps I should learn to use th scanner.
I haven't read the original of the fish eyes paper; I suspect I won't learn from it. But I'm willing to. I know where to find the Berlinski critique, but I don't remember if the paper is linked. It seems odd you call Berlinski's points bombast. I rather thought the 4 or 5 defenders engaged in bombast - although I did not think so until I read Berlinski's replies to them. I read their points first, and I decided that they demolished whoever they were arguing against and decided not to bother reading further. But my eyes strayed down and I read the first paragraph or two of Berlinski's answers. Yes, I thought he demolished them.
| Quote | | "I don't see how" (X) occured is just not a convincing argument |
Sure, but they say a lot more than that.
| Quote | | when someone is telling you that they DO see a plausible progression. |
But Miller, for example, said no such thing. More later.
| Quote | | The problem you have with "managing to incorporate them into existing structure" might be ignoring that the original function of a 'co-opted' structure may have been an entirely different one in the ancestral lineage. |
But that IS the problem. In biology, everything has to interface perfectly. Co-option - I don't understand how it is supposed to work. It sounds to me like parts lying around in the garage. My husband does this sort of thing all the time - he invents things from parts lying around to get a job done - such as placing drywall on the basement ceiling with only a weakling to help. How does the cell co-opt a part or several parts that were used for different things and make them fit, and how does it decide that hey, I've got this handy piece here, now let me code it into a different spot in the genome to go with this other thingie... I mean how does it get into the blueprint? do you see what I'm asking? You've got a widget out in the cell, and you've got a need or some evolving system - but how does the 'idea' occur to get them together in the genome that that the building of the new structure is coordinated?
| Quote | | If something can move a millimeter in a year, then in a few billion years it could cross a middle sized continent. |
But it isn't that simple and that is what the argument is about.
Russ,
| Quote | | It's when we start specifying scientifically - indeed, epistemologically - meaningless candidates (e.g. a "disembodied intelligence", "supernatural agency", "The Designer") that you lose me. |
I'm sorry about that and I sympathize. But look closely at what Jeannot said on the pissant thread:
She says ID is unscientific because-
"First, it requires a programmer that could be supernatural, which is not falsifiable,"
And so this is a kind of circle that is going on. If the scientist decides that evidence simply cannot point to the supernatural, even indirectly, then what are we to do if our universe was indeed caused by an intelligence or self-existing entity? Science would forever bar itself from discovering truth.
| Quote | | The point is, ID doesn't provide anything substantial to refute. |
It is falsifiable, and since it is a direct refutation of Darwinism, it had better be, or else they are both unfalsifiable. The falsification would be finding out how complex biochemical systems could self-originate.
I cannot validate or invalidate Davison's quackery, I merely pointed out that I am glad to see someone thinking outside the box (others are as well) because I think evolutin theory needs new ideas.
| Quote | The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow |
Ha, ha! Good one. It reminds me of one of my favorite parts of Through The Looking Glass, when Alice is being hired by the Red Queen. The queen tells her that at teatime she will get jam on her toast every other day. Oh, good, says Alice, Is it jam today?
No, says the queen, it is always jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow. It is never jam today.
No. I am not putting procedural rules ahead of evidence. I'm saying you can't suddenly slap down 59 articles and demand a real and true opinion on the spot. If even a few of those articles were really good, why didn't they use them properly? Behe did his search of the literature and he testified that there were no good pathways in the literature. He cannot be expected to give an opinion on articles slapped down in front of him. Some of those articles might have been the very ones he rejected in his search. some of them may have had only the barest passing reference to the subject. If indeed any of them truly refuted Behe's points, it would mean that the article was unknown to him at the time of his testimony. It is his responsibility to peruse them now, but not during his testimony. You keep saying that everyone is lying. Behe, Spetner. I think the dialogue is not on that low a level.
I'll of course try to give the immunity thing a go, but that is just one more thing to pile on. But you seem to have high hopes for it...
When I say I have read Dembski's articles, I mean I have not read any of them which rely on his math principles. I have a familiarity with his probability bound, but that's all. Not all his writings depend upon his math.
| Quote | | What if the creationists purporting to critique the biologists |
But some of them ARE biologists, and some of them are agnostics - really! They could accept evolution easily. They could certainly be deists.
If you are going to say (and you did) that personal motive drives their conclusions, then I can only point out as I already have done that no one is immune and
The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Living!
No matter who you are!
The garbage at the disco inst - that was an article about how most people in Ohio want ID covered in school - it was not saying that because most people want it they are correct in an objective sense about evolution.
| Quote | | Forgive me, but the two ballgames look pretty similar to me. |
Oh,yeah? Well then our problems are solved. NDE is true for you, and young earth creation is true for scordova, and a new-age pantheistic consciousness god for me - and we're all correct.
| Quote | (Avo: ) I have wondered this, and I don't have the answer. Look, ...a human being is floating in the endless black without a compass or coordinate.
And there are two kinds of people in this world. A tiny minority who have noticed this, and the rest who haven't thought about it.
Now, don't tell me; let me guess: which category does Avocreationist fall into? And is one's opinion of ID, or creationism in general, correlated with which group one falls into? |
No. Not at all. You asked me an ultimate truth-type question, and I gave you the straight dope. We're in dire straights here. Actually, belonging to a religion would be a hindrance to seeing this.
Influenza bacteria was just not thinking. Bird - I bought his book 'cause I heard of it. I wasn't aware of his connections but while reading I suspected he might be connected with them due to using the same notation to show that a quote is not from a creationist.
Evidence for a disembodied intelligence or a 'spiritual' aspect to reality - there's more than you might think but there's just no time.
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? To modernize Swift, what do you consider that stuff that comes out your ass?
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