I guess, as a creationist sympathizer, I have many goals, some that have to do with science, some with philosophy, and some with education and public policy. In random order:
- Impact of Evolutionary Philosophy: Because evolution has philosophical, religious, as well as scientific and public policy implications, we need to examine these critically. Evolution is more than a scientific theory – it is a philosophy and worldview that we should critically examine
- Evolution and Atheism: Because one important impact of evolutionary philosophy is that it supports an atheistic world view (but not exclusively), and because philosophy is not science nor truth, it should be treated as such
- Macroevolution: Because macroevolution is unprovable and not the same as speciation, adaptation, and natural selection (which all occur and are equally compatible with creationism), it should be separated out into the philosophy of science.
- Scientific Dogmatism: Because the current scientific community is dogmatic in its love of evolutionary philosophy, anyone who questions it, even if they have impeccable credentials, is black-balled of fired. There are many current examples of this. This must stop.
- Evolution and Science: The real fact is, the majority of science is done without any evolutionary assumptions, since it is not really needed to do good science. In fact, an evolutionary approach, or any solitary philosophical approach, impedes scientific discovery. Most of our greatest scientists and thinkers of the past have had a deist model – i.e. a design model.
- Is ID a Creationist Plot: Yes and no. Many creationists have adopted it as their Trojan horse into the schools, but most IDers are interested in the design question – ID is consistent with an evolutionary view as well as creationist – it only infers that naturalistic explanations do not currently explain things. A deist view does not obviate science with “if we don’t understand the natural process, God did it” – rather, it merely loosens the stranglehold that atheistic, naturalistic evolutionists have on the philosophy of science by simply asking, “how could we identify design if it were present?”Loosening this stronghold will remove the “apparent” but often unnecessary disagreements between science and faith (faith as opposed to superstition, which are not the same), and deliver us from the mechanistic, industrial age “modern” view into a post-modern view – one that embraces all of reality and truth as connected, rather than relegating the spiritual to the realm of subjectivity, unreality, imagination, and superstition.
A purely mechanistic view of life may keep us safe from the vagaries of spiritual life, but it also keeps us from the wonderful realities of the spiritual life, and the increased understanding gained from the integration of disciplines.
I have yet to see anyone prove that there is such a thing as a "spiritual life" which involves the supernatural. What is a "spiritual life" anyway? And how does it differ from regular life?
I remain unconvinced that I.D. is anything but a religious trojan horse.
Well, based on my reading of xian theology, and esp. the works of watchman nee, the soul is the mind, emotions, and intellect – all the natural parts of the persona.
Nee goes on to say that in the spirit are the functions of communion (with god, self, others), intuition, and conscience (which some see as on the interface between spirit and soul). But for me, communion with God, self, and others is chief in the life of the spirit. Now, whether or not you consider that "supernatural," I'll leave to you.
There's a far more concrete evidence to back the idea of evolution than there is to back anybody else's ideas Seeker. That's part of the problem – you guys can say, "No no, but…" but there's never any evidence. Just hopes and wishful thinking. I'll take evidence over hope any day.
Because macroevolution is unprovable
Everything scientific is unprovable, and all of it is undergirded by extrascientific assumptions and propositions. ID's beef is with science as such, not evolution. Any ID critique (evidence is missing, there are philosophical assumptions at work, etc) can be levelled at any other scientific field.
That's why ID isn't a competing theory at all – it has nothing interesting to tell us about the origin of species or anything else – its insights (or, to someone familiar w/ the philosophy of science, its banal regurgitations of traditional phil. of science) belong in an introductory unit discussing the nature of science.
Communion (or communication) with others and self is just regular life and has no need for a special designation, I think. Communion with God (or gods)is what's normally thought of as "supernatural" and has no basis in fact that I can see.
And, I agree with Sam, I.D. (or, rather, creationism with a happy face) cannot be proven (or disproven) and there is no empirical evidence for it. If evolutionary theory has some holes in it, it's not because some "god" (or "intelligence") miraculously intervened but because we haven't empirically dicovered why. When God can be proven to have had a hand in things I'll believe it. Otherwise, it's just conjecture and superstition.
Well, I certainly believe that macroevolution is conjecture and superstition, and not science in the strict sense, like, for example, newtonian physics is.
It's a house of cards built on assumptions with inferences made from the historical data. As I have said, natural selection, adaptation, and speciation all occur, but these are consistent with, even better fit, to a creation model, and they do not prove in any sense that macroevolution is reponsible for the level of integration and complexity we see in nature.
I don't claim ID to be empirical science at all, and it is certainly not a "competing theory of origins" like Creation Science is. It is merely a statistical examiniation that asks a very good question – if we came upon an unknown object, how could we tell is was designed buy an intelligence, as opposed to a naturally occurring thing? This is a great question, and it is being asked in part because macroevolution's claims are so audacious, so almost patently silly that it amazes any of us who have at least a little skepticism that this orthodoxy is so vehemently defended.
seeker asks, "If we came upon an unknown object, how could we tell is was designed buy [sic] an intelligence, as opposed to a naturally occurring thing?"
Well, I have no scientific training and am a complete layman. But even I know that, if we come upon an unknown object (or unknown phenomena), we should follow scientific procedure: put forth hypotheses to explain it and then design experiments to test these hypotheses. They are then either confirmed or disproved and discarded. How do we set up experiments to prove that "God" or some other supernatural phenomenon caused this unknown object? And, indeed, how can we disprove such a hypothesis? Impossible. Has anyone, anywhere, proved that some god intervened and caused some object or phenomena to appear? Why not assert that it's the work of aliens and UFOs, or Bigfoot? Why would one jump to this conclusion unless they already have a religious viewpoint and seek to shoehorn the observed unknown object into it? The fact is, that this creationist stuff is just not science: if fact, it's anti-science. If you want to believe it, fine, but don't pretend that it's science. For anyone displaying "a little skepticism," it comes in as a poor second.
It is clear that we are getting nowhere. Again, those who oppose ID only hear "God in science" and start to sing their separation of church and everthing else song. They have no love for true skepticism, but only a dislike for spiritual disciplines of the mind that they can only mock.
In other words, you have no argument and can only whine about being challenged.
No, more like the responses to my arguments don't address my arguments, but instead, the same straw men and misunderstandings of my position are thrown up. In any communiation, one must seek first to understand. That's not happening here, so for now, I will move on to my next post.
Yeah, right: you don't hear what you want to hear so you turn your back on the debate.
Of course, this is from the xtianist fanatic who demands "skepticism" from his opponets. What a laugh!
Open Letter to Science Mag
From William Dembski, Guillermo Gonzalez, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards, and Jonathan Witt
Alan I. Leshner (“Redefining Science,” July 8) says intelligent design isn’t science because scientific theories “explain what can be observed” and are “testable by repeatable observations and experimentation.” But particular design arguments meet this standard. Biologist Michael Behe, for instance, argues that design is detectable in the bacterial flagellum because the tiny motor needs all its parts to function—is irreducibly complex—a hallmark of designed systems. The argument rests on what we know about designed systems, and from our growing knowledge of the cellular world and its many mechanisms.
How to test and discredit Behe’s argument? Provide a continuously functional evolutionary pathway from simple ancestor to present motor. Darwinists like Kenneth Miller point to the hope of future discoveries, and to the type III secretory system as a machine possibly co-opted on the evolutionary path to the flagellum. The argument is riddled with problems, but it shows that Miller, at least, understands perfectly well that Behe’s argument is testable.
If irreducible complexity can’t even be considered in microbiology, how do we test the Darwinian story there? We certainly don’t observe the Darwinian mechanism producing molecular machines. Is it true by default, by dogmatic pronouncement? That doesn’t sound very scientific.
The whole idea of testing the superhatural is a straw man arguement becuase the supernatural would exist outside of the ordinary laws of nature. It's like trying to prove an mathmatical equation with poetry. The scientific method is set up to exclude the supernatural.
Try reading Strobel's book the Case for a Creator. There is actually much more evidence, scientific measurable evidence, for creation than for the (ever changing) "theory" of evolution.
PS catch the recent poll of scientists? 70 percent believe in God, and these are the hard sciences, not social sciences.
Another thought about evolutionary impact on modern thought. 1) in the US and many other places, the concept of "created equal" is foundational for our understanding of human rights 2) In the US and other places, mass genocide, racism, and the holocaust itself stemmed from an understanding that some humans were not as evolved ( a necessary conclusion of evolution) as others and were not as worthy of life. Witness the "eugenics" programs in the US up until just a few decades ago. The justification for slavery in this country was largely based on the understanding that those being enslaved were somehow less than fully human. It is historical fact, not just debate rhetoric, that Hitler often cited his belief in evolution as proving the inferiority of certain groups of people. The turn of the century had men in cages and zoos (pygmie men at the world's fair for example) as less than human. The list goes on.
I think the whole question of evolution is in some ways independent of religion. When I lost my faith in God for a period of 10 years, I never stopped believing that evolution was a farce – because I had looked at the *evidence* (and my degree in Biochemistry), not the bible.
It's nice that so many scientists believe in God. The problem, IMO, is that they also believe in the evolutionary world view, which is skewing science and many other disciplines (politics, sociology).
However, I do agree that you can't test for the supernatural, but ID has some merit in that it is poking at the "evolution in the gaps" approach to data that evolutionists have long taken – "sure, we are missing the transitions we seek, but they're out there." I mean, a model must be predictive, so they have room for missing data, but the missing data, and contradictory data is so stupendous that the continued faith in macroevolution is more like a religion than a science. It doens't, however, need God to fill in the gaps, it needs to be abandoned for a better model.
Creationism. :D