OMG (pun intended), the whining over ID is hurting my ears.
ID is not important because it purports to be science – what is worth noting is that something as simplistic as ID can sway the minds of the public.
Why is that significant? While evolutionary scientists and other pseudo-philosophers opine at the gullibility of the public, what they are missing is this – macro evolution is not science, and even the uneducated public sees this. ID is just the rumbling of increasing doubts in the silly evolutionary assumptions, now spreading to the edumacated.
Evolutionists who are unable to separate their science from their evolutionary assumptions and faith commitments are relegating themselves to the scrap heap of ideas because they are failing in being intellectually objective (at best), and at being intellectually honest to boot.
ID is only making tentative assertions, and asking good questions. However, the vitriolic, if not fearful response of the evolutionary faithful is a clear indication that they not only believe that science is being attacked by religion and superstition, but that it goes much deeper than their love for science. In truth, any threat to evolution threatens their religious assumptions (namely those of atheism). For the secular fundamentalist, there is no other approach to science, or reality.
Or as First Things put it
The champions of [the ID] movement have rendered a signal service in exposing the non-scientific philosophical dogmatism of many evolutionists.
God forbid that science might be consistent with (note, I did not say proves) a creationist view. To the evolutionist, it seems, every attempt to approach science from a deistic or Christian view is a "God in the gaps" approach. To claim such, however, is at best ignorance, and at worst, willful stupidity, misdirection, and malice. Theistic evolutionist Dr. Craig Rusbult has a nice discussion called God of the gaps: What does it mean? Should we say it? Here’s my final poke at the whining atheists, a nice quote from that article:
But simply saying "God of the gaps" is imprecise and confusing, it leads to false stereotyping because it lumps together different views instead of distinguishing between them, and it only attaches a label instead of clearly expressing a logical concern. It can cause confusion (when a reader wonders "what is the intended meaning?") and miscommunication (when a writer intends one meaning and a reader receives another) and irritation (by those who are being wrongfully stereotyped and having their views misrepresented). It isn’t intellectually useful or spiritually edifying, so we should trash the term.
I don't want my daughter being taught about stupid "ID" because its just Christian propaganda dressed up in disguise. Why won't you just admit that? Why won't you just admit that you want Christian values and "science" taught in schools to all children, because you don't respect the religious views of anyone but Christians? Why is that so difficult for you?
How is it that evolution isn't science? It looks at evidence; proposes a mechanism; and generates testable hypotheses.
Re: god o' the gaps: that's just what ID is. If Rusbult can't grasp that, it's his problem, not the term's.
In truth, any threat to evolution threatens their religious assumptions (namely those of atheism).
Isn't this a dicey way of proceeding? Rather than engaging the arguments (viz., explain an ID experiment or even a mechanism), it posits deeeeeevious secret motives. It's one tinfoil-hat-wearing step away from linking evolution with the Illuminati.
It looks to me like your problem is less with evolutionists-against-ID than it is with evolutionsists-against-creationists (creationists, at least, are able to generate specific testable hypotheses). If that's the case, you really should make that clear, and then direct your criticism accordingly (for example, the pandasthumb post would be irrelevant, since it's devoted to the gibberish that is ID, rather than against creationism).
To the evolutionist, it seems, every attempt to approach science from a deistic or Christian view is a "God in the gaps" approach.
This passage is why it looks your post is aimed at YEC criticism. YEC doesn't resort to God-o-gaps. The problem is that no one said it did.
If, like the ID'ers, you argue: "I don't know; ergo God did it," then you're patently arguing from ignorance, and not from other assumptions that will stand or fall with the empirically testable consequences of those assumptions (which is what YEC & evolution do).
Macro evolution is not science because, though it proposes a mechanism, it is not testable. It make questionable assumptions about how the geographical strata were formed, it makes fanciful guesses based on a very imcomplete fossil record, and ignores or misclassifies fossils that contradict it. It is a philosophy of science, a world view and approach, but evolutionists refuse to acknowledge this, which makes creationists rightly suspect that they are unable or unwiling to distinguish between their science and their religious and philosophic assumptions.
Also, macro-evolution hides behind the idea that science is always imprecise, and is allowed to modify itself as new evidence shows up. The problem with that is, they fail to define the point at which one finally realizes a model can't be modified enough to fit the facts, and should be discardes. When does your system of exceptions become so hoplessly complex that you realize that your foundational model is broken?
This is the claim that creationists make of evolution, but evolution likes to hide behind the "science is evolving" idea.
While some people approach ID as a God in the gaps idea, it is more than that. It is an outright confrontation regarding the question that evolutionists hate to answer – the sheer statistical impossibility of evolution leading to the complexity of life we see today. The "God" in the gaps for evolution is the idea of infinite time – "given infinite time, chance random mutations have the opportunity to evolve into life." The other 'God' in the gaps for evolution is the "we'll find the evidence someday" idea. But today, and since the time of Darwin, that evidence is sketchy at best, if not contradictory to evolution.
And I think that evolutionists appear disingenous, if not ideologically narrow and anti-intelletual when they continue to use conflate ID with creationism and creationists, even using such terms as ID Creationists to represent IDers. Me, I am a creationist sympathizer, but ID is just a little theory that comes alongside the much larger, more established Creation Science community and asks to join in our fight for honest science. ID is consistent with both creationism and theistic evolution, it is not just a creationist ruse to get into the schools.
Again, my main point is that ID may not be great science, and it is only a small statistical idea, not a full-fledged theory of science or origins. But it is very significant in that it resonates with the public because it is poking at evolution's achilles heel – the statistical impossibility and implausibility of evolution. And while evolutionists comfort themselves with their own gods in the gaps (limitless time, discoveries yet to be made, and the writings of Dawkins), their continued hubris in not acknowledging and distinguishing their religious and philosophic assumptions from their science is making them exceedlingly vunerable to the meager challenges of ID.
Sure, creationists are glad that ID is questioning evolution and
So a "small statistical ideal" should be presented as being equal in explanation to a body of scientific research from the past hundred or more years? Are you serious?
Yes, indeed, intelligent design really happened! I believe it. Haven't any of you seen that famous IT documentary, "2001: A Space Odyssey"? It's obvious that aliens intervened in earth's past to create human beings. The "X-Files" also proves it, as do the giant land-drawings in South America, the pyramids and Area 54. Aliens are intelligent, especially the ones who flew flying saucers here. I believe it. What proof do any of you have that it didn't happen? Evolution is just a desperate attempt by "evolutionary scientists and other pseudo-philosophers" to deny the truth and turn our children into commies. It's so obvious to any believing person (like seeker). Anyway, at least as obvious and well-founded as the Bible.
I am not, nor do I think ID, is saying that ID is a theory of equal breadth to evolutionary theory. It is merely raising the statistical implausibility of macro-evo9lution, one which evolutionary religionists deny, or backpedal to their gods in the gap, namely time and Richard Dawkin's fanciful science fiction. If you read my original post without your ID filter, you can see that I do not elevate ID at all, but use diminutive words.
As for the last 100 years of science, the best science of the last 1000 years, as I have mentioned repeatedly here, was done by deistic and Christian scientists, and I have tried to present the arguments and opinions of noted thinkers who have intimated that evolutionary thought is not really essential to most science done in recent times, and in some cases, has proven to inhibit science.
Returning to a deistic and Christian world view, while leaving an atheistic, evolutionary one is not undoing science, it is forsaking a model that has hindered science since its inception. I'm sure somone has a list out there, but what notable discoveries can be attributed to evolutionary theory? What advances in medicine or any other discpline? And of the list I'm sure you could create, how many of those can be eliminated if you understand that learning from similar systems in other animals is not evolutionary, but can be just as easily, if not more easily used as an operating principle of Creationism?
As I have said, ID is not the be-all and end-all of science, it's just attacking the Achille's heel of evolution – the one that eventually may bring it crashing down, if one of its other unsupported suppositions doesn't do it first. I am continually amazed at how dogmatically sure so many evolutionists are about their theory – although I was once among them before I realized that I had been duped by people who had other motives than merely good science – they had to maintain their worldview, or else admit that they didn't know, and admit that perhaps things DID appear all at once, fully formed, and have degenerated since that time.
But again, since I don't think that you can definitively prove anyone's theory of origins, I am most interested in bringing down the house of cards of the haughty and deluded evolutionary preachers by inserting enough doubt (based on the plethora of evidence that supports such doubts) into their minds and the minds of the public that they begin to consider that other models, esp. the Creationist model, may be just as likely, or more likely. Since it is my conviction that the Creationist model is MORE likely to be correct, I enjoy bringing down the intellectualy bullies, or at least, stealing their sheep and the public opinion so that they may cease leading people astray, both scientifically and spiritually.
And Louis, your infantile sarcasm marks you as one who lacks the desire or ability to reason. At least insert a little logic into your mockery, will you? Otherwise, it's just blather.
What sarcasm? Alien Origin Theory is just as valid as your Creationist model. Please disprove the existence of aliens, or prove (or disprove) the existence of God.
Seeker,
The best science done in the last 1000 years was done by Christians? Are you sure about that? Before making a sharp righthand turn toward fundamentalism, Islam's enormous universities across Africa, and southern Spain, were doing incredible work early in those 1000 years that you're talking about.
I don't think you can back that claim up very easily, unless you want to ignore the contributions of others simply because of recent events.
Anyway, Seeker, the reason that I appear so lockstep with evolutionists isn't that I partically have a burning love of science – I can't understand it, so it bores me – but that I hate the idea of my daughter being taught Christianity. And since ID is nothing more than Christian Creationism dressed up as David versus Evolution's Goliath, I'm just as pissed about the attempts of ID supporters to sneak this into schools.
For the millionth time, I don't want my daughter being taught Christianity. I don't want her being taught to hate gays – if you want to teach your children that, do so at home. But I'd prefer that she learn the prevailing scientific thought of the day, not the version that you'd prefer.
I recently gave you a nice list of scientists whose world view was explicity Christian or deistic. It's pretty much a who's who of our greatest scientists:
Hugh, Ockham, Oresme, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon , Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, William Harvey, Robert Boyle, Sir Isaac Newton, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, Carolus Linnaeus, William Herschel, John Herschel , Georges Cuvier, Samuel F. B. Morse ,Michael Faraday, Charles Babbage, James Prescott Joule, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin , James Clerk Maxwell, John Napier, Leonhard Euler, George Boole, Bernhard Riemann , Copernicus, Brahe, Flamsteed, Davy, Dalton, Henry, Fleming, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, George Washington Carver, Wernher von Braun.
So by questioning evolution, I am forcing Christianity on your children? Despite the involvement of Christians in the ID movement, it is not Christianity. If evolutionists would have gotten off of their high horses, and as I explained, honestly explained the difference between science and theory, science and philosophy of science and their faith assumptions, ID would not be so powerful, or so supported by Xians. As you may or may not have read, many Creationist organizations are NOT on board w/ ID, because they find it a weak argument, and not as strong as a contender as Creation Science itself.
At least you are right in the fact that evolution *is* anti-christian (arguably) and atheist, so perhaps you *should* support evolution even if it isn't true, so that you can keep the evil religionists out of education. We wouldn't want our future scientists thinking like Occam, Farraday, Kepler or Newton.
Again, my point here is not really to defend ID, but to point out that evolutionary dogmatism is anti-intellectual – and that's what makes ID so powerful a tool – because that rigiditiy and arrogant resistance to a deistic or Christian world view make it vulnerable to attack. Modern secular evolutionists maintain a pro-atheistic religious stance. And thinking people won't stand for it. Secularists have no interest in pluralism – they want a state-sponsored exclusion of religion in the public marketplace, or that's how it appears.
ID is not the problem – it's merely a symptom of evolutionary hubris in the marketplace of ideas. And hubris comes before a fall. You'll see. Atheists will be losing the battle of public opinion, screaming to themselves "but *I* am the true scientist, *I* am the true scientist". They will tell everyone that we are going back to days of witch burnings and superstition – but they are wrong. As I described in The Biblical Origins of Science, Christianity, because it is TRUE, produced real science in our modern times, and is the best soil in which human potential and knowledge can grow.
No response to the contribution of Islam? Or simply because YOU don't know the names were the contributions worthless?
Macro evolution is not science because, though it proposes a mechanism, it is not testable.
Of course it is. The mechanism is posited (genetic mutation; natural selection) – we then say, well, if these two species had branched out at such-and-such time that we can tell from the fossil record, then we'd expect genetic drift to produce n mutations in the genetic code.
This experiment was recently performed, and the results conformed to expectations.
You see, this is where we get mixed up. Natural selection is not evolution. Neiter is adaptation. Neither is genetic mutation. All of these also fit within the Creationist model. Even speciation is not macro-evolution. It is just a type of adaptation – it is not caused by a genetic change, but a genetic shift of expression within the existing genome.
But this common misunderstanding of the many uses of evoultion leads to people thinking that evolution is proved – but your usage above, is a logical fallacy. Here's some definitions.