The moderation policy does not apply to you; you are held to a higher standard. I expect your posts to have at least some tangential relationship to Darwinism, ID, or the metaphysical or moral implications of each. The purpose of this site is not to provide a place for you to jump up and rant on one of your pet peeves. DaveScot will no longer be posting at UD.
From the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911): “[T]he negro would appear to stand on a lower evolutionary plane than the white man, and to be more closely related to the highest anthropoids.” “Mentally the negro is inferior to the white.” “[A]fter puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro’s life and thought.”
Some commenters have raised questions regarding the propriety of recent posts and UD’s moderation policy. UD’s moderation policy is fairly simple: As a general rule, so long as your comment is not defamatory profane, or a vicious personal attack, you can say pretty much what you want. We have no interest in censoring viewpoints, because we believe ID is true and consequently in any full and fair debate we will win — and if we don’t win we either need to learn to debate better or change our position. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opening this site up to nasty juvenile name-calling fests like one see so often at Panda’s Thumb. But if you keep your comments restricted to Read More ›
3] Intelligent Design does not carry out or publish scientific research Judge Jones of Dover and those who follow him are simply wrong: despite opposition and harassment, there is a significant and growing body of ID-supportive research and peer-reviewed scientific publications. (For instance, the Discovery Institute maintains a list of such research-based publications here. [In an earlier form, this list was actually submitted to Judge Jones, but he unfortunately ignored the brute facts it documents when he wrote his ruling based on misleading and inaccurate submissions by the NCSE and ACLU.]) A few plain words are also in order. For, there has been significant harassment and career-busting that have been targeted at ID proponents. For example, Dembski and Marks were Read More ›
The Natural — Supernatural trope appears so frequently, I have decided to add it to the FAQ. The following new FAQ (many thanks to StephenB and DaveScot, from whom I have cribbed freely) is now open for comment: (38) When an ID theorist says “natural forces” cannot account for certain features of the universe, he must mean that only supernatural forces can account for these features. “If phenomena are not naturally caused, they are supernaturally caused. There is no other alternative.” Barbara Forrest “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” Ludwig Wittgenstein Ms. Forrest has tied herself into linguistic knots, causing her to succumb to the logical fallacy of “false dilemma.” There are Read More ›
FAQ1 has been revised in response to comments. The floor is now open on FAQ2 2] No Real Scientists Take Intelligent Design Seriously Yes, they do. For simple instance, in telecommunications work, we start by distinguishing the intelligent signal from the naturally occurring noise that tends to garble it. Indeed, simply by reading this web page, you implicitly recognize that a sense-making message is far more likely to be the result of deliberate action, not noise. But, strictly speaking, it is physically possible – though vastly improbable — for this page to be the result of noise garbling and mimicking signals. In short, you are using a simple form of The Explanatory Filter used by Design Theorists to discriminate chance Read More ›
Kirk Durston‘s Thoughts on Intelligent Design
In this thread, I would like to lay out my own thinking regarding a method to detect or identify examples of intelligent design. I then would like to unpack my thinking in a slow, meticulous (pedantic perhaps?) way and, if we can get that far, apply it to a few examples, including a protein, and the minimal genome. Read More ›
1] ID is “not science” On the contrary, as Dr William Dembski, a leading Intelligent Design researcher, has aptly defined: “Intelligent Design is . . . . a scientific investigation into how patterns exhibited by finite arrangements of matter can signify intelligence.” In turn, science at its best is an unfettered (but ethically and intellectually responsible) progressive search for the truth about our world; based on empirical evidence and reasoned analysis. If instead one assumes or asserts the prior constraint that scientific explanations must be “naturalistic” or even — as Lewontin openly said – “materialistic,” that mistakenly imposes materialistic conclusions before the facts can speak. This blatantly begs the question, but such a blunder is now all too common; even Read More ›
Anthony Sacramone on how NDE works. BTW, Strange Herring is one of my daily stops. Fun and wise, a rare combination.
In November 2008 I recruited three of UD’s most insightful and prolific commenters – StephenB, GPuccio and Kairosfocus – to craft a revised “Frequently Asked Questions” section for our homepage. I am very pleased to announce that after three months of intense effort by these gentlemen, the new FAQ – which is entitled “Frequently Raised But Weak Arguments Against Intelligent Design – is nearing completion. Watch for the final product to appear on this page soon. Here is an even more exciting part for our readers. We at UD are going to subject our FAQ to the crucible of public scrutiny and comment. You, dear reader, are going to have a chance to comment on, and suggest improvements to, every Read More ›
I’ve been thinking about the God of the Gaps argument today. Proponents of naturalism (of both the philosophical and methodological stripe) use this argument in an attempt to discredit design theory as a means of explaining the physical world. The argument usually goes something like this: There are many things we formerly did not understand, such as the law of gravitation. We might have been content to sit back and say “We don’t understand gravitation and we never will; God must have done it so there is no sense in inquiring further.” But we were not content to rest in our ignorance, and scientists like Newton kept at it until they discovered the law of gravity. There only seemed to be a gap that we needed to fill with God. Similarly today, we can be assured that science will eventually fill in the remaining gaps of our scientific knowledge. Thus, there is never a need to resort to “God did it” as an explanation for any phenomenon. Read More ›
Requiescat in pace
A baby’s cry pierces the dark night Breath begins A hanging man cries, “It is finished!” Breathing ends A precious child, sinless and pure Wrapped in clothes against the cold He who knew no sin, becomes sin That he might be our righteousness A Christmas babe A dying man As dark night follows the bright day So Love bids one follow the other But Sunday morning comes And there is hope.
One of our commenters says he has solved the determinism problem by becoming a “compatibilist.” Briefly, a compatibilist is someone who tries to avoid the logic of his premises by resorting to semantic dodges about the meaning of free will. The compatibilist says that free will is compatible with determinism (thus the name). Isn’t that kinda like saying my existence is compatible with my nonexistence? Yes, it is. But the compatibilist avoids this problem by re-defining “free will.” The compatibilist says that “free will” does not mean “the liberty to choose;” instead, says he, it means “the absence of coercion.” In other words, he says that so long as a choice is not coerced it is completely free even if Read More ›
Today beginning at 4:00 PM Mountain Time. The show streams live at KRKS.com.