SCIENCE DOES NOT SEEK TO ANSWER THE ULTIMATE "WHY"
AS IN "WHY ANYTHING AT ALL"
OR "WHAT IS THE FIRST OR UNCAUSED CAUSE?" SCIENCE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SUCH
QUESTIONS AND SO DOES NOT NEED AN ENTITY-- SOME GOD OR OTHER -AS AN ANSWER AS IN RELIGION.
INSTEAD SCIENCE ASKS, WHAT IS PHYSICALLY HAPPENING AND
HOW DOES IT WORK? IT POSITS A PHYSICAL MECHANISM TO EXPLAIN A PHYSICAL PHENOMENON AND THEN PHYSICALLY TESTS TO DETERMINE ITS TRUTH OR FALSITY.
WHETHER THERE IS OR ISN'T SOME ENTITY BEHIND IT ALL-- IS IRRELEVANT; IF A SCIENTIST HOLDS THAT "GOD DID IT" -- HE OR SHE STILL MUST CARRY OUT THE PHYSICAL INQUIRY, --THE EXPERIMENTS---
TO DETERMINE THE VERITY OF THE POSITED PHYSICAL MECHANISM (GOD IS NOT A PHYSICAL MECHANISM FOR PURPOSES OF SCIENCE)
THIS IS WHAT MAKES SCEINCE SCIENCE.
IT IS A SCIENTIFIC MINDED REFUSAL TO ACCEPT "GOD DID IT " AS FULL EXPLANATION FOR PHYSICAL PHENOMENA THAT MARKS EUROPE'S AWAKENING FROM THE DOGMATIC SLUMBER OF THE DARK AGES.
LIFE IS APPARENTLY CHARACTERIZED BY CERTAIN INTERACTIONS OF VERY COMPLEX NETWORKS OF PHYSICAL ELEMENTS-- AND GIVEN THIS , ONE COULD SAY THAT THE UNIVERSE HAS A TENDENCY TO PRODUCE LIFE--AS IT HAS INDEED DONE HERE ON EARTH--- BUT FROM THIS IT DOES NOT FOLLOW THAT THEREFORE THERE IS SOME KIND OF ANTHROPOMORPHIC ENTITY WITH A PLAN BEHIND IT-- THAT IS NEEDED TO EXPLAIN IT.
AND, IN ANY CASE, SUCH AN ENTITY IS OF NO USE TO THE SCIENTIFIC ENTERPRIZE.
FUNDAMENTALIST INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS A THINLY VEILED "GOD DID IT " AND ADDS NOTHING TO NOR IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR, ANY SCIENTIFIC THEORY. IT IS COMPLETELY DIVORCED FROM
THAT WHICH MAKE SCIENCE SCIENCE.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN MAY BE DISCUSSED IN BIBLE SCHOOL OR EVEN IN A HUMANITIES CLASS. BUT IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE ---- IS FUNDAMENTALLY AT ODDS WITH SCIENCE-----AND SO CANNOT
AND MUST NOT HAVE ANY PART IN THE TEACHING OF SCIENCE.
TO THE FUNDAMENTALIST I SAY
YOU ARE A BIGOTED AND IGNORANT HYPOCRITE WHO WOULD BENEFIT FROM THE ADVANCES OF SCIENCE WHILE TRYING TO UNDERMINE THAT WHICH MAKES THEM POSSIBLE.
Argh. All caps. My eyes!!!!
Two clicks! Buttars, who makes it to Salt Lake City with some regularity, could also wander 20 blocks or so from the State Capitol to the state's geology museum on the campus of the University of Utah. It's a fine institution with some of the best fossils in the world.
Or he could have driven 40 miles south to Brigham Young University, run by his own church, where the biology or paleontology departments would both be pleased to set him right.
Or where the religion department could inform him that the policy of his church is that there is no problem with evolution.
Ignorance is one thing. Intentional ignorance takes things to a whole different plane.
I think you miss a few of Dembski's sins here. For instance, Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species rather than On the Origin of Life because the rich evidence that he gathered pertained to the former and not to the latter. But this doesn't occur to Dembski, who thinks in terms of apologetics, not science, and because he doesn't /really/ understand the difference between evolution and abiogenesis, otherwise he wouldn't spend so much time trying to show that Cell City contradicts evolution.
Bravo.
"the cell, is an automated city complete with miniature motors and engines, digital data storage, signal transduction circuitry, monorails that move packages from one location to another."
No doubt the next edition of pandas and people will have a amusing and informative illustration.
I'd just like to point out Dembski's self-congratulatory rhetoric: "intelligent design holds a winning hand", "Intelligent design is a winner in the public debate...."
Of course, Dembski's goal is to provide congenial material his choir can point to whenever someone starts deploying facts and evidence: "Look, you're wrong, a *famous scientist* says so at this link!"
The question is, how well does Dembski's published material meet Dembski's goal? Remember, it need not be accurate, honest, internally consistent, or even sound intelligent. One could make a strong case that any of those attributes would weaken his material, perhaps fatally. Indeed, if he had any integrity, nobody would ever have heard of him.
The DI (perhaps more accurately, the PR firm the DI hires) is where the real appeal is being managed. Dembski's output is just the skunk works, the actual "scientific evidence" on which the DI's arguments ultimately rest. This output is, of course, just more of the same creationist PR. Because that's what works.
"Look, you're wrong, a *famous scientist* says so at this link"
Dembski is neither famous nor a scientist.
Very nice response, Dan!
Actually, I like the Ape-Man transitional fossils in the TalkOrigins "29+ Evidences for macroevolution" (here: http://tinyurl.com/yvs8b).
This seems retarded posting to this because everyone is simply agreeing, but God would simply fall within ceteris paribus and we would assume that if he holds some power, he would continue to do so while the experiment was done. He would therefore fall into some sort of procedural control.
Intelligent Design would ask for an experiment that we put a piece of beef in a glass of milk outside and watch to see how far along it forms in a cow by the end of the school year.
Honestly, there is no test and what biology class would be forced to resolve to is metaphysics and teleology in order to prove such claims. Imagine having to read Heidegger or Malebranche in a biology class. This is absurd. At the price of politician's vitiolic standpoint, we may very well be putting ourselves back 50 years worth of scientific knowledge.
Just so everyone knows, this country is the only country that has problems seeing this disparity. No other country has the same problem to such a large scale as we do when it comes to accepting evolution. It really does not conflict with religion.
A further consideration is that social movements tend to be pendulous by nature. The conservative 50's led way to the rebellious 60's and 70's only to become incredibly repressive in the 80s. This dates back longer than you can even imagine. The Dark ages, marked by fear and abuse of power by the clergy, gave way to the Renesaence and near extinction of Religion. Time passed and religion was rekindled and soon the Enlightement came. A movement which worked to disseminate the abuse of religion and its contorted uses in the hands of monarchs and priestcraft. After the Enlightement, was the Romantic era. Some of the most famous fire and brimstone speeches date back to this time. It goes on. This is, by no means of sophistry. What people are doing is combining religion and state. In public schools, we will now be talking about God. I feel that is the biggest detriment because essentially what lawmakers are doing is setting up a future generation of atheists. If you really feel that social ills will die, many people will be seeing a decrease in theism in the upcoming years.
In many ways, this could be gateway legislation for theological factors playing a larger role. Maybe I reaching by this last statement, but I really don't think it is that hard to believe.
and should ID start being taught, It would be so vulgar to me that I would have no choice but to be forced to violent action. Me and Bill Nye, a couple of ARs will be but a blurb in future school books, but for 2 hours a day the rest of the book can be read about how Phylogentic Trees, comparative DNA testing, and albumin spectroscopy are all lies that Satan has used to trick mankind.
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