Intelligent Design?

[AVengeance]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

Why should it be in scientific discussion? There is no scientific basis for ID.

Pattern recognition is not scientific evidence? You can determine "intelligent design" all around you, from park benches to tall buildings. No one in their right minds would look at Mount Rushmore and think for a moment the faces looking back at them were carved by time, chance, and the forces of nature. But why not? If the face you see in the mirror is the result of billions of years of chance, why not other things? I think people forget how many things they simply "believe" when they're told to, without "empirical evidence" to support their belief.

I don't have enough faith to be an athiest.

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by AVengeance

Pattern recognition is not scientific evidence?

Not when faith enters in to jump to the end conclusion of "god".

Originally Posted by AVengeance

I think people forget how many things they simply "believe" when they're told to, without "empirical evidence" to support their belief.

I don't have enough faith to be an athiest.

Such as??

[avsp]

Originally Posted by AVengeance

Pattern recognition is not scientific evidence? You can determine "intelligent design" all around you, from park benches to tall buildings. No one in their right minds would look at Mount Rushmore and think for a moment the faces looking back at them were carved by time, chance, and the forces of nature. But why not? If the face you see in the mirror is the result of billions of years of chance, why not other things? I think people forget how many things they simply "believe" when they're told to, without "empirical evidence" to support their belief.

I don't have enough faith to be an athiest.

Ever seen a face in a the clouds?

Moving on, (back?)

Christian ID fails to address the question of how the designer was made. However the notion that some aliens possibly 'seeded' the universe with some kind of 'template' (panspermia?) is an interesting thesis

The whole desire by Christian creationists seeking to engage with science is fruitless IMO. It is them admiting the 'triumph' of science as the predominant way of justifing stuff

Religion is 'illogical', .., but then much of expereince is & theres nothing wrong with that. Creation, existance & consciousness are strange, wierd & wonderful experiences & the belief that purely scientific approach is soley applicable seems 'limiting' to me

Direct experience of the divine provides as good a reason as any. I'm always puzzled at the general lack of such as a 'justification' for belief.

For scientists to speak of the 'big bang' is as much as a 'get out' as claiming that God exists outside of space/time. The difference is that science accepts that the consensus view may change as evidence/understanding changes, whilst the Christians, (quite literally?), see their explanations as set in stone.

cliffs: For Christians to seek to engage with science is to fail to see the 'advantages' of their view & to, tacitly, admit the 'advantages' of the scientific method thus acknowledge the previlance/sucess of the scientific view & thus do their 'cause' a disservice

[AVengeance]

I really don't care to have science replaced with religion. The two are not the same, and answer very different kinds of questions (most of the time). What I don't like is when there is a religous worldview taken of scientific unknowns. The Big Bang is a good example. We weren't there. We can't test it, falsify it, prove or disprove the Big Bang. Same goes for the age of the Earth. We can't test it, prove it, falsify it, yet it is shouted from the rooftops by athiests as proof against the Bible. In fact, the more we find out about the speed of light not being a constant, there is all kinds of doubt being thrown on atomic clocks, red-shift, and numerous other past proofs of the Big Bang and the supposed age of the Earth.

All I want is for science to stop where science stops, and admit "I DON'T KNOW" when it is appropriate to do so.

[Dumpy Dooby]

I posted this over on OT. I figured I could go ahead and post it here too since it seems relevant.

Facts: Fossils date back as far as 4+BYA. Chromosomes have distinct markings on them that indicate they have been merged. Lines of fossils indicate a transitional change from one species to another. All fossils ever discovered for land animals indicate that the species had eyes, ears, four limbs, and most sexually reproduced.

Theory: Life began 4+BYA. Things didn't change much between then and 500-600MYA when nerves, muscles, eyes, and brains are seen in animals. Thereafter, transitional changes occur in various species until the first tetrapods (sarcopterygi) appear 365MYA. Sarcopterygi evolved to become every mammal and reptile on Earth through a set of similar transitional changes. The occurance of these changes are due to environmental changes, which does not preclude the change in behavior amongst surrounding species. Thus, the prey need to evolve with the predators, and the predators must evolve with the prey, else Natural Selection will unapologetically take them out of the gene pool.


Evolution is just as much of a theory as gravitational theory, but that doesn't make it fact. Newton's gravitational theory was/is not fact. Newton's gravitational theory was replaced with Einstein's because Newton was, indeed, wrong.

[imind]

Originally Posted by avengeance

The Big Bang is a good example. We weren't there.

we don't have to have witnessed something in order to understand how it happened; many crimes without witnesses are solved with forensic evidence.

Originally Posted by avengeance

We can't test it, falsify it, prove or disprove the Big Bang.

o rly? everything you always wanted to know about teh big bang but were afraid to ask.

Originally Posted by avengeance

Same goes for the age of the Earth. We can't test it, prove it, falsify it,

this, too, has been extensively documented.

yet it is shouted from the rooftops by athiests as proof against the Bible.

and shouted by many christians who refuse a limited literal reading of teh bible.

there is all kinds of doubt being thrown on atomic clocks, red-shift, and numerous other past proofs of the Big Bang and the supposed age of the Earth.

setterfield? links?

[Dumpy Dooby]

Intelligent Falling

Link to a real good long article:

Not by chance

I don't post this to defend the standard Judeo/Christian view of things. Only to point out that our thinking about gravity and bible stories may both be wrong and it is very hard to admit what we don't yet undertsand.

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by Dumpy Dooby

Intelligent Falling

Link to a real good long article:

Not by chance

I don't post this to defend the standard Judeo/Christian view of things. Only to point out that our thinking about gravity and bible stories may both be wrong and it is very hard to admit what we don't yet undertsand.

I love the Onion.

[AVengeance]

Great post, DD!

"Let's take a look at the evidence," said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden."In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.' He says nothing about some gravity making them fall—just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, 'But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.' If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling."

Teh Bibble Proves It!!!1!

On a serious note, I'm still trying to reconcile how it is we can be SO SURE of the age of the Earth when we measure time with the "constant" speed of light. Since the speed of light is now known to NOT be a constant, how can we believe these measurements? The Earth could be younger OR older, couldn't it? If the universe is curretly expanding (current scientific belief) then it would stand to reason light WAS faster than it is now. If that's true, then our measurements are skewed, and the universe, and the Earth itself, are really younger than commonly believed.

[AVengeance]

The incredible shrinking meter?

Speed of Light as a Function of Time

[imind]

Originally Posted by AVengeance

The incredible shrinking meter?

Speed of Light as a Function of Time

on setterfield's work.

Setterfield's hypothesis, while initially embraced by the majority of the creationist community, received heavy criticism from the scientific establishment for several years since its introduction in 1981, and was finally rejected by the creationists themselves after it became such a major embarrassment that even the San Diego-based Institute for Creation Research rejected it (Acts and Facts , May 1988, G. Aardsma).

yoiu can read the essay for the finer details.

[Kytro]

Originally Posted by AVengeance

On a serious note, I'm still trying to reconcile how it is we can be SO SURE of the age of the Earth when we measure time with the "constant" speed of light. Since the speed of light is now known to NOT be a constant, how can we believe these measurements? The Earth could be younger OR older, couldn't it? If the universe is curretly expanding (current scientific belief) then it would stand to reason light WAS faster than it is now. If that's true, then our measurements are skewed, and the universe, and the Earth itself, are really younger than commonly believed.

I believe this theory isn't real science.

From Wiki:

There are any number of problems with this claim, from the obvious to the subtle. One of the more obvious ones simply invokes Einstein's famous formula, E = mc2: If Setterfield is correct and the value of c was much larger in the past, the energy released in chemical reactions would be much higher during this early epoch. When confronted with this argument, Setterfield claimed that the value of Planck constant was increasing to offset this effect. This would have equally noticeable effects on the universe, which are likewise unseen. In a more general sense, c is so "ingrained" into basic physics that any macroscopic change would be likely to result in the universe not being able to exist in its current form at all. No convincing argument covering these issues has been proposed.

Further, all modern measurements agree to a value that precludes the decay. In Setterfield's report he introduced a "cutoff date beyond which there is a zero rate of change", apparently to address this issue, making the theory unfalsifiable by new observations of c. Further, he claims that the speed was also fixed for some time in this early epoch, apparently to avoid an infinite speed, but offers no strong argument why this would be. So the claim is that the speed was fixed at the beginning of time, is again today, but was decreasing measurably in an arbitrarily selected period between the two.

C-decay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[AVengeance]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

It was. The discussion went like this...

ID: We believe that life has an intelligent designer. Life is too complex to have spawned randomly.

Science: Do you have any empirical evidence to support this claim?

ID: No

Science: Come back when you do.

That's incorrect. The ID proponent believes there is much evidence of intelligent design. I already pointed out pattern recognition. The more complex the pattern, the less likely it is to be a creation of random chance. The problem isn't that ID proponents lack evidence, it's that anti-ID'ers simply deny it.

Originally Posted by Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by AVengeance

That's incorrect. The ID proponent believes there is much evidence of intelligent design. I already pointed out pattern recognition. The more complex the pattern, the less likely it is to be a creation of random chance. The problem isn't that ID proponents lack evidence, it's that anti-ID'ers simply deny it.


[/i]

That's just not true. Complexity does not equal less random. If anything it equals more.

Please find me one, single, credible shread of evidence that supports intelligent design and not something that just shows a possible hole in Darwins theories. Lets try and let ID stand on it's own. It's is not the other side of the coin from evolution. It's one of many possibilities. Disproving Darwin would do nothing for ID.

[imind]

That's incorrect. The ID proponent believes there is much evidence of intelligent design. I already pointed out pattern recognition. The more complex the pattern, the less likely it is to be a creation of random chance. The problem isn't that ID proponents lack evidence, it's that anti-ID'ers simply deny it.

says who? according to what principle? hows bout a snowflake? guage for me how complex that is, and given that we know these form naturally, doesn't that negate your whole premise?

what other evidence have you? put it out for us.

[AVengeance]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

That's just not true. Complexity does not equal less random. If anything it equals more.

Please find me one, single, credible shread of evidence that supports intelligent design and not something that just shows a possible hole in Darwins theories. Lets try and let ID stand on it's own. It's is not the other side of the coin from evolution. It's one of many possibilities. Disproving Darwin would do nothing for ID.

I'll agree there. Most of what Darwin believed has been disproved. Only a thread of one of his original ideas lingers.

[AVengeance]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

... Complexity does not equal less random. If anything it equals more.

Please find me one, single, credible shread of evidence that supports intelligent design and not something that just shows a possible hole in Darwins theories. Lets try and let ID stand on it's own. It's is not the other side of the coin from evolution. It's one of many possibilities. Disproving Darwin would do nothing for ID.

First, don't give Darwin so much credit. He had a basic idea that is sort-of true, but beyond that, he's been debunked by modern science. By ID standing on its own, I think you mean "without science" because scientific observation demonstrates intelligent design and the difference between randomization/chaos and design/order.

Originally Posted by imind

says who? according to what principle? hows bout a snowflake? guage for me how complex that is, and given that we know these form naturally, doesn't that negate your whole premise?

what other evidence have you? put it out for us.

Are you seriously comparing a water to dioxyribonucleic acid? You're comparing a "shape" to an entire computer program written with complex molecular chains? That's not even apples and oranges, dude.

A snowflake isn't complex any more than a big pile of rocks is more complex than a small one. Certain physical laws are in place that govern the shape of the rock pile and the snowflake.


So tell me then: I see a shape of a nose in the side of a mountain. It is (not likely / unlikely / likely / very likely / certainly) the result of random chance. I see the face of George Washington in the side of a mountain. It is (not likely / unlikely / likely / very likely / certainly) the result of random chance. Highlight the correct answer.

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by AVengeance

I'll agree there. Most of what Darwin believed has been disproved. Only a thread of one of his original ideas lingers.

That is just totally false.

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by AVengeance

Are you seriously comparing a water to dioxyribonucleic acid? You're comparing a "shape" to an entire computer program written with complex molecular chains? That's not even apples and oranges, dude.

So tell me then: I see a shape of a nose in the side of a mountain. It is (not likely / unlikely / likely / very likely / certainly) the result of random chance. I see the face of George Washington in the side of a mountain. It is (not likely / unlikely / likely / very likely / certainly) the result of random chance. Highlight the correct answer.

Do you think that there isn't a rock formation out in the universe somewhere that looks like Washingtons nose?