“Intelligent design talking points” are now legitimate science?

Correction: The DI is OK with anyone believing what [he] wants to believe. Normally, I wouldn't bother correcting a syntactical typo, but the current obsession to seize on trivial matters as a way to avoid substantive dialogue calls for it. StephenB

You must really think I’m a moron.

Nope. There isn't any doubt. BTW when did I ever say the DI is advocating Islam? Joe

--DrRec: "Which religious dogmas?" Yes, what religious dogma(s) does the Discovery Institute hope to impose on public education? --"My my, are you going to pull a JoeG and tell us the DI is advocating Isalm?" Please focus. --"You must really think I’m a moron." Please do not tempt my lower nature. --"Especially since I’ve already linked to the founder of ID, and the DI website, which is quite specific in its endorsements." No link you have provided will provide information that would support your claim. --"But let us flip the question." No, let us answer the question. --"But let us flip the question. What religious dogmas is the DI ok with? Be specific." The DI is "OK with" anyone believing anything they want to believe. --"Hinduism? Scientology? Paganism? Atheism?" --"Please endorse all you find acceptable…." I don't endorse or accept any of these world views as being true, but I do acknowledge a person's right to believe in one of them or to embrace ID science as an intellectual complement to his/her world view. I will be happy to answer any question or any follow up (and provide remedial education on the subject of ID)--on the condition that you will answer my question: What religious dogma does the Discovery Institute seek to impose on public education. StephenB

According to Dawkins, Provine, Dennett, et al., evolutionism = atheism. Take it up with them Joe

Which religious dogmas? My my, are you going to pull a JoeG and tell us the DI is advocating Isalm? You must really think I'm a moron. Especially since I've already linked to the founder of ID, and the DI website, which is quite specific in its endorsements. But let us flip the question. What religious dogmas is the DI ok with? Be specific. Hinduism? Scientology? Paganism? Atheism? Please endorse all you find acceptable.... DrREC

"Darwinist/atheist ***" Reinforcing the point. Evolutionary biology=atheism only in those who have bought into "creationist subterfuge." Clearer thinkers, like Francis Collins, realize the use of methodological naturalism to investigate the world in no way invalidates supernatural personal beliefs. DrREC

--DrRec: "Right. Eugenie Scott, EXPLICITLY saying the goal of the NCSE is not to promote atheism, as evolution and theism aren’t in conflict is TOTALLY equivalent to the mission statements of the DI I’ve posted above." Does this mean that you are never going to back up your earlier claim and tell us which religious dogma(s) the Discovery Institute hopes to impose on the public schools. StephenB

champignon, 3rd-rate minds consider 10 seconds wasted on dignifying trivia, time well-spent. Axel

Eugenie Scott, who, according to Wikipedia, has been the NCSE's executive director since 1987, is an atheist and a signer of the Humanist Manifesto. The Humanist Manifesto pledges allegiance to "blind watchmaker" evolution?the same archaic evolution the NCSE fights to keep unchallenged in the classroom. AmericanHumanist.org - Humanist Manifesto III

Humans are an integral part of nature, the result of unguided evolutionary change. Humanists recognize nature as self-existing. We accept our life as all and enough, distinguishing things as they are from things as we might wish or imagine them to be. We welcome the challenges of the future, and are drawn to and undaunted by the yet to be known.

I think it's safe to say that Eugenie Scott's association with the NCSE and their agenda is closely linked to her atheistic humanist worldview. Scott, and those like-minded (the running joke known as Nick Matzke, for example), are using Darwinian evolution as a Trojan horse to peddle their religious agenda in the classroom. The Discovery Institute is doing nothing more than challenging this anti-scientific, atheism-in-a-cheap-tuxedo indoctrination by bringing critical thinking into the classroom. For that, all decent people should thank them. Than you, Discovery Institute. Keep kicking Darwinist/atheist ***. It's much appreciated. Jammer

Axel,

It is normally the mark of a second-rate mind to fail to prioritize what one chooses to remember, and what one allows to lapse into desuetude or quasi-desuetude.

First-rate minds bother to get their facts right, particularly when it only takes a 10-second Google search to do so. Third-rate minds are too lazy to bother, but instead spend their energies justifying their laziness with pompous, long-winded rationalizations. champignon

As has been said of economics, materialism makes astrology look respectable. Axel

"I was making a point which continues to escape you. Institutions set goals; methodologies do not. Thus, it is wrong to write about ID’s religious goals without differentiating between motives and methods. Do you finally get the fact that ID methodology has no goals?" DrREC's failure to differentiate between motives and methods bears a curious resemblance to the clumsy confusion of his confreres (described in a wonderful Guardian cartoon, as members of the Covenant of the Double Helix*) between processes of evolution/natural selection (whether true or false), and the motive power, the dynamism propelling them. * http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2010/sep/17/pope-benedict-xvi Axel

"You know SO much about them and their membership but can’t even get the name right. Odd." Not at all. It is normally the mark of a second-rate mind to fail to prioritize what one chooses to remember, and what one allows to lapse into desuetude or quasi-desuetude. What we choose to forget, at least forget the details of, is as important as what we choose to store in our minds. Our cerebrally-oriented, autonomic intelligence generally takes care of that, in any case, except, presumably in the case of people with a photographic memory. But that would surely be confined to the printed word, rather than more extended professional activities; which presumably however could be re-learnt, perhaps more easily, if not more perfectly. Michael Schumacher's giving it a go, anyway. Children tend to be the only thorough-going intellectuals, since they desire knowledge and understanding for their own sake, which perhaps explains their generally superior, visual memory of the positions on a table of playing cards, to that of most adults, for example. Our memories have bigger fish to fry. And they would not include the precise name of a self-styled humanists' organisation. Axel

DrREC:

By the way, if the NCSE is ” INDIRECTLY promoting atheism!” by teaching scientific fact, is the solution to lie?

Unfortunately the NCSE does not promote the teaching of scientific fact. Joe

JDH: Thankyou for your response. Firstly, in your first paragraph you seem to have missed my point:

Yes, I do that for a living. Notice that sentence. “We write…” The best counter example you can think of is something that only an intelligent being could write???. No computer ever generated its own program. Intelligent beings needed to program it. I don’t know what point you were trying to make but I have to grade that comment as an epic failure and that example as proving my point. You try to dissuade me of believing in intelligent design by bringing up something that only exists because of intelligent design???

I am most assuredly NOT "try[ing] to dissuade me of believing in intelligent design"! (for a start I do not think that intelligent design is falsiable; for a second I think there's a real sense in which we are "intelligently designed"). Rather, tou set an interesting challenge, to which I am attempting to respond, namely your statement that: "I just don’t see how a truly thinking person comes to an atheist position. Sorry, no matter how many times people try to explain it I just don’t see it." You set out your own logical argument for theism, and I am trying to unpack that argument in order to discover where, in your logical chain, we may diverge. So I brought up the example of an agent that can make "rational decisions" but which does not, at least in what I take to be your understanding of the term, have "free will". I am well aware of the fact that computer programs are written by intelligent agents, and did not argue that they are not. My point is that we write them so that they can "make rational decisions" - those decisions are not ours, are not the work of an agent with (putatively) free will, but of a non-free-will-possessing computer program. We delegate, in other words, the decision-making to a computer, trusting that the decisions it will make will be rational (and with justification - after all, we programmed it so that it would make rational decisions). So I think that is the one logical slip in your reasoning: a decision-maker does not have to have "free will" in order to make a a rational decision, ergo, the ability to make a rational decision is not evidence of free will. It may well be evidence that the rational-decision-maker was intelligently designed, but I am not, at present, arguing either way, on that. I am simply saying that the fact that we are able to make rational decisions is not, in itself, evidence that we have free will. God, in other words (I am not advancing this argument, just drawing yoiur attention to its validity) could be an Intelligent Designer, and we the computer programs it designed, able to make rational decisions, as yours do, but without free will. Do you see my point?

As for the definition of random that is simple – a sequence where there is no correlation over time. We know that human beings generally do not do things randomly. In fact I have a friend who told me the story of a statistics prof who the first day of class assigned the homework problem of tossing a coin 50 times and writing down the results. He could always tell the students who did the actual assignment and those who faked it ( just wrote down what they thought were random H’s and T’s ). The reason is because all the students who faked it wrote correlated sequences. They would never write enough long sequences of H’s or T’s but would vary the HTHHTH much more than a random sequence would.

Correlate with what? Let me say what I think you are in fact saying (which is not something normally indicated by the word "correlate" which requires a minimum of two variables, cf it's derivation from "co-" and "relate"). The old chestnut of the stats prof works like this: the way you can tell whether a student had cheated or not (and you can only do this probabilistically, not definitively) is in a series of coin tosses, the probability of each toss is independent of what has gone before. What human beings do is that they tend to up the probability of a change in toss as a function of the number of same-tosses that have elapsed. In other words, the probability distribution of a human-generated pseudo-random series differs from that of an actual series of coin-tosses. But that doesn't mean the human-generated series is not random. It may well be, it's just that it tends to follow a different probability distribution from the results from a real coin-toss. But the same is true of other patterns that are non-intelligently generated, and which you might think of as "random", for instance, the occurrence of the next patch of sunlight on the kind of day that has lots of small patchy clouds and a brisk breeze. If you sat on a rock on that day, with a timer, and noted, every minute, whether the sun was out or in, you'd get some kind of random series. But it would look far more like the product of a human "random" series than a series of coin tosses, because the sizes of the clouds has a non-flat probability distribution. That doesn't mean the sizes aren't "random", unless you are using the word "random" to mean "with a uniform probability distribution". And apparently you aren't :) Oddly there is an exactly opposite example of a cheating detection method to your stats prof example, namely the use of Benford's Law. Benford's Law states that most data generating process result in a non-uniform distribution of digits, whereby the frequency of numbers beginning with a given digit is inversely proportion to the value of that digit. If a human cheats in some way - fakes the data - then the Benford distribution of numbers will tend depart from that given by Benford's law. In other words, human interference will tend to produce a more uniform distribution of initial digits than that suggested by a "natural" process. This technique has been used to detect election fraud, for instance.

OTOH contingent processes are demanded by the initial conditions. Water poured into a flume has only one direction it can go. Now in a (strictly natural setting ) ( a place where no intelligent causal agent can change the outcome ) what we get is a combination of random events and contingent events.

Well, you are using "contingent" in a rather special way. A series of events can certainly be totally contingent on initial conditions, but it can also be totally contingent on incidental conditions as well. "Contingency" in other words, refers to any outcome that depends ("is contingent on") any other event, whether that other event was an initial condition or something that happened along the way. And, as we know, from quantum mechanics, that the world seems to be fundamentally indeterminate, then there can be no events in the universe that are entirely dependent on "initial condictions". So I don't think your definition works here. What I think is a more coherent approach to the concepts of "Chance" and "Necessity" (and while I am a great admirer of Monod, I think his title, not well translated into English, has given us a misleading dichotomy that is not a dichotomy) is to regard "necessary" events as events that are contingent on very few others, possibly only one, whereas "chance" events are events that are contingent on a vast number of individually low probability events, and that there is therefore a continuum, not a dichotomy, of events with probability of p(A|B), where A is the event we are interested in, and B is the event that has the greatest causal relationship to it. Events that have a p of near 1 are "necessary" events, while events with a lower p are "chance" events. If p equals zero, we have a totally non-contingent event. But the point is that it's a continuum, not a dichotomy. No event is entirely contingent on another (as we know from quantum physics) and many events are contingent on a large number of events. And the result is that events take place with a probability that conforms to a probability distribution. Some of these distributions are flat, but very few, in nature. Most have a characteristic curve (Gaussian, or Poisson being the two commonest). I'll address your Rivers in a new post :) Cheers Lizzie Elizabeth Liddle

---"Dr. Rec: "Collins is a theistic evolutionist." Well, not exactly. A Theistic Evolutionist, strictly speaking, is one who believes that God used evolution to create man's material body from the bottom up using material processes and then intervened to implant an immaterial soul from the top down. This is the position of John Paul II, who was a true TE in the classical sense. A Christian Darwinist, who tends to pose as a TE, is one who believes that God used evolution to create BOTH man's body and soul from matter, which is illogical and impossible. This is the position of Miller, Collins, and others. It cannot be reconciled with Christianity. Collins is very confused because he believes his position to be the same as JPII. ---“No. Lets get simpler. I’m unaware of a ” Secular Humanist Association” Google turns up the New Orleans or Victoria Secular Humanist Association. Maybe you mean the American Humanist Association? You know SO much about them and their membership but can’t even get the name right. Odd.” LOL: You were unaware of a Secular Humanist Association, but when you Googled and find one, you were scandalized because I didn’t also mention the American Humanist Association, or the Secular Humanist Society, or the Council for Secular Humanism, or a number of other organizations both national and local, all of whom support the Humanist Manifesto and embrace Darwin’s pseudo scientific paradigm. Getting back to substance, why do you think I alluded to Barbara Forrest, who is a member of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association? I was making a point which continues to escape you. Institutions set goals; methodologies do not. Thus, it is wrong to write about ID’s religious goals without differentiating between motives and methods. Do you finally get the fact that ID methodology has no goals? --“Regardless, you have a case where some evolutionary biologists happen to be members of secular organizations. As opposed to a movement founded on getting religion into school, and the destruction of methodological naturalism." You really are behind the curve on this one. The signers of the three Humanist Manifestos made sure that their pseudo science of Darwinism was injected in the schools a hundred years ago and they continue to intrude themselves to this day. Would you like for me to name names? Methodological naturalism, on the other hand, is only about 25 years old. It is a petty rule that Darwinists invented a few years ago in order to counter the ID movement. ---“You really wish we were half as bad as you know you are.” I didn't say that you were bad. I just said that you were in error. --- I’m the one saying the DI explicitly employs ‘scientists’ for the purpose of overturning materialism and introducing religious dogma into schools.” Well, yes on the overturning of materialism, but not on the intrusion of religious dogma. Let's test your claim. Which religious Dogma (Dogmas) is the DI trying to introduce to the schools? Be specific. StephenB

JDH: "This would be design detection." In the same sense that the stat teacher would detect design is a student handed back a paper with 50 T's written on it. junkdnaforlife

The intelligent human being in River 2 is told to make a choice. Either direct every leaf into the eddy, or direct every leaf so it avoids the eddy. He can make either choice, but once he makes the choice, he must stick with the same choice for every leaf. Merely by observing a few leaves and whether they correlate or not, you can tell which choice he made. His choice is just that. A choice. Yet it alters a strictly natural (unintelligent) event from being uncorrelated to being correlated. The whole process has become neither random or contingent. Everything depends upon the choice made by the intelligent human being. The same exact experiment will yield very different results by the introduction of an intelligent being. As a matter of fact, someone observing many runs of the experiment could probably tell that some intelligent being was determining the outcome. This would be design detection. Of course you could believe that the human being making the choices was somehow dictated by natural processes that were either contingent or random. But to believe this takes a mind bending amount of faith. Any reasonably intelligent human could decide to do everything the same after that first choice. For the each trial of the experiment, either always direct the leaf into the eddy, or always direct the leaf to avoid the eddy. To suggest that this was somehow dependent on some physical and chemical properties,stretches the limits of credulity. We are beings that can do things which are neither random nor contingent. To disbelieve that is to misunderstand so many things. Without the ability to make non-random, non-contingent choices, encoding is impossible. I am able to communicate to you over this medium of the internet solely because i am able to string together a large number of processes which select the next letter in this reply. These individual choices to select each letter are not contingent. I don't have to write certain symbols due to initial conditions. Eye ken eeven deecide two missspell efry werd inn won sentense. You will still get the meaning. They certainly are not random. Once you allow for actions which are not random, and not contingent, you enter the world of rational choice. JDH

Exposing Darwinism as a ‘degenerate science program’ https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LpGd3smTV1RwmEXC25IAEKMjiypBl5VJq9ssfv4JgeM/edit?hl=en_US Falsification Of Neo-Darwinism by Quantum Entanglement/Information https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8AQgqFqiRQwyaF8t1_CKTPQ9duN8FHU9-pV4oBDOVs/edit?hl=en_US Shoot Materialistic Atheism is a 'science stopper'; Why should the human mind be able to comprehend reality so deeply? https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qGvbg_212biTtvMschSGZ_9kYSqhooRN4OUW_Pw-w0E/edit?hl=en_US bornagain77

DrREC, perhaps you would do well to realize that Darwinism is a pseudo-science, that should be taught in astrology class! bornagain77

We write computer programs that do this all the time, because computers do that kind of calculation much faster and more thoroughly than we can.

Yes, I do that for a living. Notice that sentence. "We write..." The best counter example you can think of is something that only an intelligent being could write???. No computer ever generated its own program. Intelligent beings needed to program it. I don't know what point you were trying to make but I have to grade that comment as an epic failure and that example as proving my point. You try to dissuade me of believing in intelligent design by bringing up something that only exists because of intelligent design??? As for the definition of random that is simple - a sequence where there is no correlation over time. We know that human beings generally do not do things randomly. In fact I have a friend who told me the story of a statistics prof who the first day of class assigned the homework problem of tossing a coin 50 times and writing down the results. He could always tell the students who did the actual assignment and those who faked it ( just wrote down what they thought were random H's and T's ). The reason is because all the students who faked it wrote correlated sequences. They would never write enough long sequences of H's or T's but would vary the HTHHTH much more than a random sequence would. OTOH contingent processes are demanded by the initial conditions. Water poured into a flume has only one direction it can go. Now in a (strictly natural setting ) ( a place where no intelligent causal agent can change the outcome ) what we get is a combination of random events and contingent events. To understand the difference between the two processes consider the thought experiment of trying to correlate how long it takes a leaf dropped into a river to reach a certain point, based on how far upstream it was dropped in. River 1 is a smoothly flowing river. A plot of time to reach the end point vs. location upstream is highly correlated. It actually just becomes a plot from which you can determine the velocity of the flow at each point. River 2 has a large eddy current. A plot of time to reach the end point vs. location upstream is a scatter diagram. Everything depends upon how many times the leaf went round in the eddy. The eddy wipes out any causal relationship between how far upstream the leaf was started and how fast it will reach the end point. Now let's put an intelligent human being in the midst of the experiment on River 2. JDH

By the way, if the NCSE is " INDIRECTLY promoting atheism!" by teaching scientific fact, is the solution to lie? If the world was much more "demon-haunted" (to borrow from Sagan), why we'd have so many more believers. Why scientifically explain the seasons, or dawn, or the tides, or thunder, or rainbows, or hurricanes, or the age of the universe or the earth, or geology, or anything, when you could leave people TRUE BELIEVERS (tm) with no rational ability to explain those things? DrREC

Right. Eugenie Scott, EXPLICITLY saying the goal of the NCSE is not to promote atheism, as evolution and theism aren't in conflict is TOTALLY equivalent to the mission statements of the DI I've posted above. That some scientists pointing out that a materially explicable world, that isn't "demon haunted" makes atheism viable isn't the fault of science. Maybe an outcome of science that conflicts with some faiths, but so did disproving a flat earth, a geocentric universe, or a young Earth. DrREC

Here you go DrREC; Eugenie Scott, very deceptively, denies that Darwinism and faith are in conflict in any way early in the EXPELLED movie, and in this segment of EXPELLED we have direct testimony that neo-Darwinism led to a atheistic worldviews of some leading proponents of Darwinism. Thus, whether Scott is honest or not the fact is that NCSE is INDIRECTLY promoting atheism! Scientists renounce God...why? - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpJ5dHtmNtU bornagain77

" The Discovery Institute ....can, at least indirectly, promote Theistic ...values" You think it is the DI's goal to INDIRECTLY promote theism? "The worldview of scientific materialism has been pitted against traditional beliefs in the existence of God, Judeo-Christian ethics and the intrinsic dignity and freedom of man. Because it denies the reality of God, the idea of the Imago Dei in man, and an objective moral order, it also denies the relevance of religion to public life and policy. .... defend the importance of Judeo-Christian conceptions of the rule of law," "“new atheists” have enlisted science to promote a materialistic worldview, to deny human freedom and dignity and to smother free inquiry. Our Center for Science and Culture works to defend free inquiry. It also seeks to counter the materialistic interpretation of science by demonstrating that life and the universe are the products of intelligent design and by challenging the materialistic conception of a self-existent, self-organizing universe" http://www.discovery.org/about.php Find me an equivalent quote from the NCSE website on atheism, and I'll concede the point. DrREC

"Collins embraces Darwinian evolution, which is, by definition, unguided." Let me correct that for you---Collins is a theistic evolutionist. He uses methodologically naturalist methods to study evolution, but personally believes it is guided. He doesn't propose the "guidance" as a studyable science. "I didn’t say that the Secular Humanist Association employs evolutionary biologists (as in putting them on the payroll), but rather that it employs pseudo science to advance its atheistic aims." No. Lets get simpler. I'm unaware of a " Secular Humanist Association" Google turns up the New Orleans or Victoria Secular Humanist Association. Maybe you mean the American Humanist Association? You know SO much about them and their membership but can't even get the name right. Odd. Regardless, you have a case where some evolutionary biologists happen to be members of secular organizations. As opposed to a movement founded on getting religion into school, and the destruction of methodological naturalism. You really wish we were half as bad as you know you are. But back to.. "I didn’t say that the Secular Humanist Association employs evolutionary biologists (as in putting them on the payroll), " I know you didn't. I'm the one saying the DI explicitly employs 'scientists' for the purpose of overturning materialism and introducing religious dogma into schools. DrREC

--DrRec: "I have more respect for Dr Collins'wits. And his personal belief isn't that evolution is unguided." Collins embraces Darwinian evolution, which is, by definition, unguided. Scientifically, he is very talented, but philosophically, he just doesn't measure up. How else can one explain his attempt to reconcile unguided Darwinian evolution with Christianity, which is compatible only with guided evolution. ---"I am not aware of a Secular Humanist Association that employs evolutionary biologists with the stated goal of advancing atheism." I didn't say that the Secular Humanist Association employs evolutionary biologists (as in putting them on the payroll), but rather that it employs pseudo science to advance its atheistic aims. Definition of "employ" = First Definition: a. To engage the services of; put to work: agreed to employ the job applicant. b. To provide with gainful work: factories that employ thousands. Second Definition: To put to use or service. [See Synonyms of use] That I was using the second definition should be evident in the fact that I was referring to ideas (Darwinian evolution) not people (evolutionary biologists. The idea was to dramatize the point that institutions (The Discovery Institute and the Secular Humanist Association) set goals and can, at least indirectly, promote Theistic or Atheistic values respectively, but that ID Methodologies ("irreducible complexity, "Specified complexity" etc.) or anti-ID methodologies (Darwinian evolution) do not. This is the context in which the Wedge document should be understood, that is, as a cultural initiative. Barbara Forrest has made a cheap career out of distorting the differences in order to publicize the lie that "ID science is all about promoting religion, as if a scientific methodology had the power to promote anything. Fortunately, the fact that she persuaded a stupid judge to agree with her is fast becoming a piece of irrelevant history. StephenB

I'd really like to think so! Bydand

Well, that may come out of the definitions of "random" and "necessary" and "rational choice". Elizabeth Liddle

"Is saying I have a “irrational fears of creationist subterfuge” engaging me as a scholar" Interestingly, I didn't say that about you, but about the NCSE. johnnyb

I hope your discussion will elicit an example of " actions which are not strictly natural" - I really would like to come at a definition of "strictly natural" as used above. Bydand

One reason I tend to rant is I just don’t see how a truly thinking person comes to an atheist position. Sorry, no matter how many times people try to explain it I just don’t see it.

This is interesting, because of course lifelong atheists (and some non-life-long atheists) tend to think the same way - that "no truly thinking person etc". Having been in both positions, I can, I think, see both positions, or, at any rate, I can see that a "truly thinking person" could reasonably come to either position. So I try not to rant - not about that, anyway!

I think ( and I know Elizabeth will strongly object through some obfuscation of language that I have never been able to understand ) Atheism => Materialism => No Free Will => No Creature Has Ability to Make a Rational Choice, Only Random or Necessary Choices => No Rational Development of Inductively Derived Principles => No Scientists => No Science.

Well, I think one of the problematic arrows there is the one I've bolded (although it's not the one that primarily concerns me). A lot depends on what you mean by "a rational choice". Clearly, any decision-making algorithm (I'm) can make a rational choice in the sense of being able to weigh up inputs and select the output that maximises the probability of some outcome. We write computer programs that do this all the time, because computers do that kind of calculation much faster and more thoroughly than we can. And I think we can probably agree that such programs don't have "free will" at least in the sense that you are using the term. So could you perhaps unpack what you mean by "rational choice"?

I just do not see the way out of this. Either there are beings which are capable of taking actions which are neither random nor necessary ( given the initial conditions ) or not.

And here I think is another potential soft place in your logic. You imply that if something is neither "random" nor "necessary" it must be something different from both. Could you explain, very precisely, what you mean by "random" and "necessary"? Because I think your argument hangs heavily on there being an excluded middle here, which you would call "choice".

I do not see how rationality and science can occur without such beings existing. Once it is admitted that rational, intelligent beings ( who commit actions which are not strictly natural exist ) – there must be a supernatural. Once we admit the supernatural – it becomes much, much more probable that the Universe was designed than it was not designed. Only the precondition that there is nothing beyond the natural makes the “random universe” the preferred hypothesis.

Well I have sympathy with your conclusion, but I think there is a hole in your premises :) If you could address my questions, I'd be grateful, and will try to take it, as clearly as I can, from there. Thanks Lizzie Elizabeth Liddle

DrREC and Pet. both want desperately to embrace science as a atheistic enterprise and distant it from Theism, all the while completely ignoring that atheism undermines any rational basis that science needs to be successful. Sorry guys, Atheism/Materialism is the 'science stopper' and that is just the way it is!! But please do continue on in your denialism, as if reality does not matter to your worldview and prove my point! bornagain77

Could you explain, Eugene, exactly what you mean by "choice contingency"? Thanks. Elizabeth Liddle

JDH: I'm sorry you find my language unclear, but it is not "obfuscatory" if by "obfuscatory" you imply a deliberate intent to confuse. Oddly, I was in almost your exact position, about five years ago, and clearly have not been as successful in explaining my current position to you as others were in explaining theirs to me. I will have a go at addressing your post when I have had time to think of how to put this as clearly as I can! In the mean time, please be assured of my good faith on this. Elizabeth Liddle

Absolutely. The scientific method is a formal process, and therefore choice contingency driven. The fact that the scientific method, being a formal process, captures the essence of the physical world and makes useful predictions, points to choice contingent causation laying the foundation of this world. They will never acknowledge the role of choice contingency. They will use rhetoric of all sorts including accusations of quote mining etc. no matter how counter-intuitive, in order to deny the unique role of choice contingent causation and, ultimately, to deny the existence of God. Eugene S

Most branches of science have at some point been charged with ignoring the intervention of God in the ordering of phenomena. Certainly astronomy. Certainly medicine. Certainly geology. Certainly meteorology and vulcanology. Certainly some areas of physics and chemistry. Looking for alternatives to divine intervention seems to be a habit. Petrushka

"Why would someone who unwittingly embraces the atheistic paradigm of unguided evolution" I have more respect for Dr. Collins's wits. And his personal belief isn't that evolution is unguided. Of course, it is part of the "creationist subterfuge" to portray all evolution as such. "The Secular Humanist Association employs Darwinist pseudo science in order to establish and maintain institutional and hegemonic control over the subject of origins (and, by extension, God). " Do you really believe what you just wrote? I'm not aware of a "Secular Humanist Association" that employs evolutionary biologists with the stated goal of advancing atheism. DrREC

Yeah but what are your actual comments regarding Lewontin and Ruse’s sentiments?

The response is that it's a quote mine. It distorts Lewontin's argument and make it look unreasonable. It leaves out, for example, the reason for the argument.

To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.

Of course there is no guarantee that miracles don't or can't happen. The argument is that if reality can be altered and nature is not regular, science cannot study it. There would be no reason to believe that the cause of one event could be expected to be the cause of another. Causation itself would be capricious. I believe KF, or one of the regulars here argued that regularity is the background against which miracles can stand out. Well that's what science studies, the background, the regularities. I don't know of any way to decide if a phenomenon is regular other than to look for regularity and test for it. Petrushka

A follow up: You'll notice Im being pounced on as an irrational atheist. I never advanced atheism on this thread. I wouldn't. I said I was apathetic on the matter. That a thread about science education would devolve to rants against the "irrational atheist" of creationist lore really proves my point. You asume anyone who would doubt ID as such. For many of you here, there is only pro-ID vs. pro-Atheist. You've bought into, and spew out the "creationist subterfuge" which I "irrationally suspect." Thanks for proving my point. DrREC

---DrRec: Historically and currently it is undeniable the goal of ID remains: ---(DrRec Quoting Johnson)“….the purpose of the Discovery Institute is plain. Phillip Johnson, a senior fellow at the Institute, stated last year on a Christian radio talk show that “Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit, so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools.” Although it is usually a waste of time to provide intellectual distinctions for Darwinists, it seems prudent to make the point for those who have not yet become impervious to reason: [A] Discovery Institute = A CULTURAL INITIATIVE that challenges materialist ideology and re-establishes teleological thinking, which is consistent with the idea that God created the universe for a purpose. [A1] ID science = A bottom-up METHODOLOGY that detects design patterns in nature, interprets all evidence on its merits, and, by extension, accepts both positive and negative indicators--including the evidence for and against evolution. [B] Secular Humanist Association = A CULTURAL INITIATIVE that established materialist ideology in the name of science and militates against teleological thinking, which rules out the existence of God apriori. [B1] Darwinist science = a bottom up METHODOLOGY that seeks to explain away design patterns in nature, twists and distorts evidence to fit the Darwinist paradigm, and refuses to admit any countervailing evidence. Putting the matter in the proper logical order, The Secular Humanist Association employs Darwinist pseudo science in order to establish and maintain institutional and hegemonic control over the subject of origins (and, by extension, God). The Discovery Institute employs ID science in order to challenge the imposed ideology of the Secular Humanists. Thus, when someone resorts to the phrase “ID's goals" without differentiating between motives and methods, and without grasping the fact that a "methodology" cannot have a "goal," we can safely discount his comments as one more example of mindless partisanship. --DrRec: "You won’t see Francis Collins arguing the goal of evolutionary biology is to get atheism in the schools, now will you?" Obviously not. Why would someone who unwittingly embraces the atheistic paradigm of unguided evolution suddenly gather his wits and issue warnings about it. StephenB

Sorry. The same tired quotes get old. Does science use methodological naturalism? Yes. Are all leading evolutionary biologists atheists? Hardly. Does teaching evolution require teaching atheism? No more so than teaching meteorology or gravity. It doesn't need to be atheistic gravity, designed gravity, or Intelligent Falling. Just gravity. But back to the original point, given the history and obsessions of ID, do I have “irrational fears of creationist subterfuge" ? DrREC

Someone beat KF to a Lewontin!!!

Yeah but what are your actual comments regarding Lewontin and Ruse's sentiments? Or are irrelevant one-liner's your idea of how to conduct a debate? Most prominent evolutionists promote atheism, with evolution forming a substantial part of that belief system. Stu7

Case in point. The schools say the appearance of fossils in the fossil record can be investigated including criticisms of previous conclusions. Actually thats the whole point of error here Biological origins and relationships should never or almost or never be founded, supplied, or buttressed by evidence premised on geological ideas . This has been a logical flaw in the history of evolutionary biological investigation. ID folks do it too by their Cambrian explosion criticisms. Its not just the presumptions that are wrong but the whole genre of judging and weighing biological ideas on unrelated facts of casts of life found in stratas of layers of sediment judged to be this old and that old. Evolution is not true and therefore couldn't possibly have investigation, much less the higher standard of investigation called science, behind it. Therefore logically either the evidence is not there or misunderstood or there has been no scientific investigation of the data found. Its all been a hunch , a reasonable idea, and a lines of reasoning. Ask the kids not about the quality and quantity of evidence for evolution but whether in origin issues the scientific method is been applied to these matters that insist they are true because they are science results. Get the microscopes out. Robert Byers

"Why not just engage them as scholars?" I generally discuss the science here. Is saying I have a "irrational fears of creationist subterfuge" engaging me as a scholar, or demonizing my view on what is legitimate science education? Especially in light of the stated goals of the ID/creationist movement, you really live in denial. Trying to portray your adversary to be half as bad as you know you are is a devious strategy. Why not ask Francis Collins if the stated goal of evolutionary biology is atheism? Now ask Phillip Johnson what the stated goal of ID is. Compare and contrast. DrREC

Someone beat KF to a Lewontin!!! DrREC

Scott, you are a good sport :) Elizabeth Liddle

I don't know what you would accept as sound and rational, but those three links expand into many thousand if you follow them. Petrushka

At first I thought my computer was possessed. Then I realized there was probably a natural explanation. ScottAndrews2

Does that provide a sound, rational answer to my observation? No, it does not. Barb

heh. Elizabeth Liddle

LOL. Did you follow any of those three links? Petrushka

DrREC: What documents, plural, are you using besides the Wedge Document? Also, three links out of a website containing hundreds of discussions is a pretty poor sampling on which to rest your case. Barb

Dr. Rec, One reason I tend to rant is I just don't see how a truly thinking person comes to an atheist position. Sorry, no matter how many times people try to explain it I just don't see it. I think ( and I know Elizabeth will strongly object through some obfuscation of language that I have never been able to understand ) Atheism => Materialism => No Free Will => No Creature Has Ability to Make a Rational Choice, Only Random or Necessary Choices => No Rational Development of Inductively Derived Principles => No Scientists => No Science. I just do not see the way out of this. Either there are beings which are capable of taking actions which are neither random nor necessary ( given the initial conditions ) or not. I do not see how rationality and science can occur without such beings existing. Once it is admitted that rational, intelligent beings ( who commit actions which are not strictly natural exist ) - there must be a supernatural. Once we admit the supernatural - it becomes much, much more probable that the Universe was designed than it was not designed. Only the precondition that there is nothing beyond the natural makes the "random universe" the preferred hypothesis. JDH

Thus, as audacious as this proposition is, the proposition that God created the universe, and that we are made in the image of God, and that we therefore can rationally understand, and comprehend, the universe to a deep level, has stunning confirmation for its validity on many levels of science. Moreover, on the other hand, the counter proposition that this universe was not created by God, and that we are not made in God’s image, and that there is no particular reason why we should comprehend reality, has some very strong arguments against it. In fact these arguments are so strong that they have rendered the atheistic position completely absurd. The following references reveal the bankruptcy of the atheistic mindset as to explaining why we should comprehend reality so deeply: ,,,This following site is a easy to use, and understand, interactive website that takes the user through what is termed ‘Presuppositional apologetics’. The website clearly shows that our use of the laws of logic, mathematics, science and morality cannot be accounted for unless we believe in a God who guarantees our perceptions and reasoning are trustworthy in the first place. Presuppositional Apologetics – easy to use interactive website http://www.proofthatgodexists.org/index.php Further notes; Random Chaos vs. Uniformity Of Nature – Presuppositional Apologetics – video http://www.metacafe.com/w/6853139 BRUCE GORDON: Hawking’s irrational arguments – October 2010 Excerpt: For instance, we find multiverse cosmologists debating the “Boltzmann Brain” problem: In the most “reasonable” models for a multiverse, it is immeasurably more likely that our consciousness is associated with a brain that has spontaneously fluctuated into existence in the quantum vacuum than it is that we have parents and exist in an orderly universe with a 13.7 billion-year history. This is absurd. The multiverse hypothesis is therefore falsified because it renders false what we know to be true about ourselves. Clearly, embracing the multiverse idea entails a nihilistic irrationality that destroys the very possibility of science. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/1/hawking-irrational-arguments/ The Absurdity of Inflation, String Theory & The Multiverse - Dr. Bruce Gordon - video http://vimeo.com/34468027 Last power point of preceding video states: The End Of Materialism? - Dr. Bruce Gordon * In the multiverse, anything can happen for no reason at all. * In other words, the materialist is forced to believe in random miracles as a explanatory principle. * In a Theistic universe, nothing happens without a reason. Miracles are therefore intelligently directed deviations from divinely maintained regularities, and are thus expressions of rational purpose. * Scientific materialism is (therefore) epistemically self defeating: it makes scientific rationality impossible. Atheistic materialism simply dissolves into absurdity when pushed to extremes and certainly offers no guarantee to us for believing our perceptions and reasoning within science are trustworthy in the first place. This absurdity extends all the way into Darwin’s evolutionary theory itself: Should You Trust the Monkey Mind? – Joe Carter Excerpt: Evolutionary naturalism assumes that our noetic equipment developed as it did because it had some survival value or reproductive advantage. Unguided evolution does not select for belief except insofar as the belief improves the chances of survival. The truth of a belief is irrelevant, as long as it produces an evolutionary advantage. This equipment could have developed at least four different kinds of belief that are compatible with evolutionary naturalism, none of which necessarily produce true and trustworthy cognitive faculties. http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/should-you-trust-the-monkey-mind What is the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism? ('inconsistent identity' of cause leads to failure of absolute truth claims for materialists) (Alvin Plantinga) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yNg4MJgTFw Can atheists trust their own minds? - William Lane Craig On Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byN38dyZb-k The following interview is sadly comical as a evolutionary psychologist realizes that neo-Darwinism can offer no guarantee that our faculties of reasoning will correspond to the truth, not even for the truth he is giving in the interview, (which begs the question of how was he able to come to that particular truthful realization, in the first place, if neo-Darwinian evolution were actually true?); Evolutionary guru: Don't believe everything you think - October 2011 Interviewer: You could be deceiving yourself about that.(?) Evolutionary Psychologist: Absolutely. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128335.300-evolutionary-guru-dont-believe-everything-you-think.html Here a Darwinian Psychologist has a moment of honesty facing the 'hard problem' of consciousness; Darwinian Psychologist David Barash Admits the Seeming Insolubility of Science's "Hardest Problem" Excerpt: 'But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can't even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don't even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.' David Barash - Materialist/Atheist Darwinian Psychologist http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/post_33052491.html “Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...” CS Lewis – Mere Christianity "But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" - Charles Darwin - Letter To William Graham - July 3, 1881 “It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” J. B. S. Haldane ["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. etc.. etc.. etc.. bornagain77

Thus, as audacious as this proposition is, the proposition that God created the universe, and that we are made in the image of God, and that we therefore can rationally understand, and comprehend, the universe to a deep level, has stunning confirmation for its validity on many levels of science. Moreover, on the other hand, the counter proposition that this universe was not created by God, and that we are not made in God’s image, and that there is no particular reason why we should comprehend reality, has some very strong arguments against it. In fact these arguments are so strong that they have rendered the atheistic position completely absurd. The following references reveal the bankruptcy of the atheistic mindset as to explaining why we should comprehend reality so deeply: ,,,This following site is a easy to use, and understand, interactive website that takes the user through what is termed ‘Presuppositional apologetics’. The website clearly shows that our use of the laws of logic, mathematics, science and morality cannot be accounted for unless we believe in a God who guarantees our perceptions and reasoning are trustworthy in the first place. Presuppositional Apologetics – easy to use interactive website http://www.proofthatgodexists.org/index.php Further notes; Random Chaos vs. Uniformity Of Nature – Presuppositional Apologetics – video http://www.metacafe.com/w/6853139 BRUCE GORDON: Hawking’s irrational arguments – October 2010 Excerpt: For instance, we find multiverse cosmologists debating the “Boltzmann Brain” problem: In the most “reasonable” models for a multiverse, it is immeasurably more likely that our consciousness is associated with a brain that has spontaneously fluctuated into existence in the quantum vacuum than it is that we have parents and exist in an orderly universe with a 13.7 billion-year history. This is absurd. The multiverse hypothesis is therefore falsified because it renders false what we know to be true about ourselves. Clearly, embracing the multiverse idea entails a nihilistic irrationality that destroys the very possibility of science. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/oct/1/hawking-irrational-arguments/ The Absurdity of Inflation, String Theory & The Multiverse - Dr. Bruce Gordon - video http://vimeo.com/34468027 Last power point of preceding video states: The End Of Materialism? - Dr. Bruce Gordon * In the multiverse, anything can happen for no reason at all. * In other words, the materialist is forced to believe in random miracles as a explanatory principle. * In a Theistic universe, nothing happens without a reason. Miracles are therefore intelligently directed deviations from divinely maintained regularities, and are thus expressions of rational purpose. * Scientific materialism is (therefore) epistemically self defeating: it makes scientific rationality impossible. Atheistic materialism simply dissolves into absurdity when pushed to extremes and certainly offers no guarantee to us for believing our perceptions and reasoning within science are trustworthy in the first place. This absurdity extends all the way into Darwin’s evolutionary theory itself: Should You Trust the Monkey Mind? – Joe Carter Excerpt: Evolutionary naturalism assumes that our noetic equipment developed as it did because it had some survival value or reproductive advantage. Unguided evolution does not select for belief except insofar as the belief improves the chances of survival. The truth of a belief is irrelevant, as long as it produces an evolutionary advantage. This equipment could have developed at least four different kinds of belief that are compatible with evolutionary naturalism, none of which necessarily produce true and trustworthy cognitive faculties. http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/09/should-you-trust-the-monkey-mind What is the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism? ('inconsistent identity' of cause leads to failure of absolute truth claims for materialists) (Alvin Plantinga) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yNg4MJgTFw Can atheists trust their own minds? - William Lane Craig On Alvin Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byN38dyZb-k The following interview is sadly comical as a evolutionary psychologist realizes that neo-Darwinism can offer no guarantee that our faculties of reasoning will correspond to the truth, not even for the truth he is giving in the interview, (which begs the question of how was he able to come to that particular truthful realization, in the first place, if neo-Darwinian evolution were actually true?); Evolutionary guru: Don't believe everything you think - October 2011 Interviewer: You could be deceiving yourself about that.(?) Evolutionary Psychologist: Absolutely. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128335.300-evolutionary-guru-dont-believe-everything-you-think.html Here a Darwinian Psychologist has a moment of honesty facing the 'hard problem' of consciousness; Darwinian Psychologist David Barash Admits the Seeming Insolubility of Science's "Hardest Problem" Excerpt: 'But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can't even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don't even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.' David Barash - Materialist/Atheist Darwinian Psychologist http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/11/post_33052491.html “Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...” CS Lewis – Mere Christianity "But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?" - Charles Darwin - Letter To William Graham - July 3, 1881 “It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” J. B. S. Haldane ["When I am dead," in Possible Worlds: And Other Essays [1927], Chatto and Windus: London, 1932, reprint, p.209. This following video humorously reveals the bankruptcy that atheists have in trying to ground beliefs within a materialistic worldview; John Cleese – The Scientists – humorous video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M-vnmejwXo etc.. etc.. etc.. bornagain77

DrREC, Well seeing as Brent isn't going to quote Lewontin, I will:

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

Have you actually ever read a more close-minded approach to the study of the world around us? And there's Professor Michael Ruse's more candid admission:

Certainly, historically, that if you look at, say, evolutionary theory, and of course this was brought out I think rather nicely by the talk just before me, it's certainly been the case that evolution has functioned, if not as a religion as such, certainly with elements akin to a secular religion. Those of us who teach philosophy of religion always say there's no way of defining religion by a neat, necessary and sufficient condition. The best that you can do is list a number of characteristics, some of which all religions have, and none of which any religion, whatever or however you sort of put it. And certainly, there's no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion. I think, for instance, of the most famous family in the history of evolution, namely, the Huxleys. I think of Thomas Henry Huxley, the grandfather, and of Julian Huxley, the grandson. Certainly, if you read Thomas Henry Huxley, when he's in full flight, there's no question but that for Huxley at some very important level, evolution and science generally, but certainly evolution in particular, is functioning a bit as a kind of secular religion. Interestingly, Huxley -- and I've gone through his own lectures, I've gone through two complete sets of lecture notes that Huxley gave to his students -- Huxley never talked about evolution when he was actually teaching. He kept evolution for affairs like this, and when he was talking at a much more popular sort of level. Certainly, though, as I say, for Thomas Henry Huxley, I don't think there's any question but that evolution functioned, at a level, as a kind of secular religion.

The bottom line is that all of the most prominent figures within the modern evolutionary synthesis all promote atheism. Stu7

Here are some quotes reflecting that prevalent Judeo-Christian worldview present at the founding of modern science: To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge. Nicolaus Copernicus "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being. … This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called “Lord God” ??????????? [pantokratòr], or “Universal Ruler”… The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect." Sir Isaac Newton - Quoted from what many consider the greatest science masterpiece of all time, his book "Principia" Even Albert Einstein, although he was certainly not thought of as a particularly religious person, reflects how the Judeo-Christian worldview influenced his overall view of reality in this following quote; “I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.” Albert Einstein But a more mysterious question to the issue, is the fact that this seemingly foreign, even outrageously bold, proposition of the rational intelligibility of the universe, that could even be dared to be comprehended by mere human minds, should be so successful as a proposition of thought. For why should it be that mere human minds, human minds who happened to have the audacity to believe that their minds were, of all things, created in the image of the Being Who had created the entire universe, would be so successful as to establishing a solid foundation for modern science, unless this seemingly outlandish idea of being made in God’s image were actually true? In other words, why should science be so successful unless the seemingly outrageous propositions underlying the foundation of modern science were actually true? Dr. Meyer reflects on the success of that outrageous proposition here in this video: Epistemology – Why Should The Human Mind Even Comprehend Reality? – Stephen Meyer – video (notes in description) http://vimeo.com/32145998 Moreover, modern science has actually revealed that this outrageous proposition, (that the universe was created by a rational Mind, and that our mind is created in the image of that rational Mind, and that therefore we can comprehend the universe to a deep level), is confirmed on many levels by science. Here Eugene Wigner reflects on the effectiveness of mathematics for understanding reality: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - Eugene Wigner Excerpt: The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html Granville Sewell, Professor of Mathematics at the University of El Paso, reveals that mathematics actually governs reality, not just passively describes reality, here; Finely Tuned Big Bang, Elvis In The Multiverse, and the Schroedinger Equation – Granville Sewell – audio http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4233012 At the 4:00 minute mark of the preceding audio, Dr. Sewell comments on the ‘transcendent’ and ‘constant’ Schroedinger’s Equation which governs the basic actions of the universe; ‘In chapter 2, I talk at some length on the Schroedinger Equation which is called the fundamental equation of chemistry. It’s the equation that governs the behavior of the basic atomic particles subject to the basic forces of physics. This equation is a partial differential equation with a complex valued solution. By complex valued I don’t mean complicated, I mean involving solutions that are complex numbers, a+bi, which is extraordinary that the governing equation, basic equation, of physics, of chemistry, is a partial differential equation with complex valued solutions. There is absolutely no reason why the basic particles should obey such a equation that I can think of except that it results in elements and chemical compounds with extremely rich and useful chemical properties. In fact I don’t think anyone familiar with quantum mechanics would believe that we’re ever going to find a reason why it should obey such an equation, they just do! So we have this basic, really elegant mathematical equation, partial differential equation, which is my field of expertise, that governs the most basic particles of nature and there is absolutely no reason why, anyone knows of, why it does, it just does. British physicist Sir James Jeans said “From the intrinsic evidence of His creation, the great architect of the universe begins to appear as a pure mathematician”, so God is a mathematician to’. Granville Sewell PhD. i.e. the Materialist is at a complete loss to explain why this should be so, whereas the Christian Theist ‘naturally’ presupposes such ‘transcendent’ control of our temporal, material, reality,,, John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. of note; ‘the Word’ is translated from the Greek word ‘Logos’. Logos happens to be the word from which we derive our modern word ‘Logic’. In this following video, Dr. Richards and Dr. Gonzalez reveal that the universe is ‘suspiciously set up’ for scientific discovery: Privileged Planet – Observability/Measurably Correlation – Gonzalez and Richards – video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5424431 The very conditions that make Earth hospitable to intelligent life also make it well suited to viewing and analyzing the universe as a whole. - Jay Richards Extreme Fine Tuning of Light, and Atmosphere, for Life and Scientific Discovery - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/7715887/ This following video is in the same line of thought as the preceding videos: We Live At The Right Time In Cosmic History – Hugh Ross – video http://vimeo.com/31940671 But, as impressive, suspicious, and persuasive, as the preceding ‘hints’ are that the universe was created by the Mind of God and can be understood by the mind of man, since we are made in God’s image, the deepest correlation, of our mind to the Mind of God, finds its most concrete proof of correlation from looking at consciousness itself through the lens of quantum mechanics. There are many famous quotes that throw a little light on just how surprised people are when the first encounter quantum mechanics. Here are a few. Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. Neils Bohr “The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks” Albert Einstein And indeed, the reason why quantum theory has looked so ‘silly’, to so many top scientists, is that consciousness is found to be integral, even central, in many of the experiments of quantum mechanics. This following quote nicely sums up exactly why consciousness would throw someone, who is used to thinking of reality in materialistic terms, for a complete loop, after looking at some of the experiments of quantum mechanics: What drives materialists crazy is that consciousness cannot be seen, tasted, smelled, touched, heard, or studied in a laboratory. But how could it be otherwise? Consciousness is the very thing that is DOING the seeing, the tasting, the smelling, etc… We define material objects by their effect upon our senses – how they feel in our hands, how they appear to our eyes. But we know consciousness simply by BEING it! Moreover, because of the correlation of our mind to the Mind of God, we can develop a very strong argument for God from consciousness, and even provide strong empirical proof for the argument: The argument for God from consciousness can be framed like this: 1. Consciousness either precedes all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality. Here is the empirical proof for the argument; Dr. Quantum – Double Slit Experiment & Entanglement – video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4096579 Wheeler’s Classic Delayed Choice Experiment: Excerpt: Now, for many billions of years the photon is in transit in region 3. Yet we can choose (many billions of years later) which experimental set up to employ – the single wide-focus, or the two narrowly focused instruments. We have chosen whether to know which side of the galaxy the photon passed by (by choosing whether to use the two-telescope set up or not, which are the instruments that would give us the information about which side of the galaxy the photon passed). We have delayed this choice until a time long after the particles “have passed by one side of the galaxy, or the other side of the galaxy, or both sides of the galaxy,” so to speak. Yet, it seems paradoxically that our later choice of whether to obtain this information determines which side of the galaxy the light passed, so to speak, billions of years ago. So it seems that time has nothing to do with effects of quantum mechanics. And, indeed, the original thought experiment was not based on any analysis of how particles evolve and behave over time – it was based on the mathematics. This is what the mathematics predicted for a result, and this is exactly the result obtained in the laboratory. http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/basic_delayed_choice.htm “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Eugene Wigner (1902 -1995) from his collection of essays “Symmetries and Reflections – Scientific Essays”; Eugene Wigner laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. Here is the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries: Eugene Wigner Excerpt: To express this basic experience in a more direct way: the world does not have a privileged center, there is no absolute rest, preferred direction, unique origin of calendar time, even left and right seem to be rather symmetric. The interference of electrons, photons, neutrons has indicated that the state of a particle can be described by a vector possessing a certain number of components. As the observer is replaced by another observer (working elsewhere, looking at a different direction, using another clock, perhaps being left-handed), the state of the very same particle is described by another vector, obtained from the previous vector by multiplying it with a matrix. This matrix transfers from one observer to another. http://www.reak.bme.hu/Wigner_Course/WignerBio/wb1.htm i.e. In the experiment the ‘world’ (i.e. the universe) does not have a ‘privileged center’. Yet strangely, the conscious observer does exhibit a ‘privileged center’. This is since the ‘matrix’, which determines which vector will be used to describe the particle in the experiment, is ‘observer-centric’ in its origination! Thus explaining Wigner’s dramatic statement, “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” bornagain77

Here are some quotes reflecting that prevalent Judeo-Christian worldview present at the founding of modern science: To know the mighty works of God, to comprehend His wisdom and majesty and power; to appreciate, in degree, the wonderful workings of His laws, surely all this must be a pleasing and acceptable mode of worship to the Most High, to whom ignorance cannot be more grateful than knowledge. Nicolaus Copernicus "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being. … This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called “Lord God” ??????????? [pantokratòr], or “Universal Ruler”… The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite, absolutely perfect." Sir Isaac Newton - Quoted from what many consider the greatest science masterpiece of all time, his book "Principia" Even Albert Einstein, although he was certainly not thought of as a particularly religious person, reflects how the Judeo-Christian worldview influenced his overall view of reality in this following quote; “I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.” Albert Einstein But a more mysterious question to the issue, is the fact that this seemingly foreign, even outrageously bold, proposition of the rational intelligibility of the universe, that could even be dared to be comprehended by mere human minds, should be so successful as a proposition of thought. For why should it be that mere human minds, human minds who happened to have the audacity to believe that their minds were, of all things, created in the image of the Being Who had created the entire universe, would be so successful as to establishing a solid foundation for modern science, unless this seemingly outlandish idea of being made in God’s image were actually true? In other words, why should science be so successful unless the seemingly outrageous propositions underlying the foundation of modern science were actually true? Dr. Meyer reflects on the success of that outrageous proposition here in this video: Epistemology – Why Should The Human Mind Even Comprehend Reality? – Stephen Meyer – video (notes in description) http://vimeo.com/32145998 Moreover, modern science has actually revealed that this outrageous proposition, (that the universe was created by a rational Mind, and that our mind is created in the image of that rational Mind, and that therefore we can comprehend the universe to a deep level), is confirmed on many levels by science. Here Eugene Wigner reflects on the effectiveness of mathematics for understanding reality: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - Eugene Wigner Excerpt: The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html Granville Sewell, Professor of Mathematics at the University of El Paso, reveals that mathematics actually governs reality, not just passively describes reality, here; Finely Tuned Big Bang, Elvis In The Multiverse, and the Schroedinger Equation – Granville Sewell – audio http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4233012 At the 4:00 minute mark of the preceding audio, Dr. Sewell comments on the ‘transcendent’ and ‘constant’ Schroedinger’s Equation which governs the basic actions of the universe; ‘In chapter 2, I talk at some length on the Schroedinger Equation which is called the fundamental equation of chemistry. It’s the equation that governs the behavior of the basic atomic particles subject to the basic forces of physics. This equation is a partial differential equation with a complex valued solution. By complex valued I don’t mean complicated, I mean involving solutions that are complex numbers, a+bi, which is extraordinary that the governing equation, basic equation, of physics, of chemistry, is a partial differential equation with complex valued solutions. There is absolutely no reason why the basic particles should obey such a equation that I can think of except that it results in elements and chemical compounds with extremely rich and useful chemical properties. In fact I don’t think anyone familiar with quantum mechanics would believe that we’re ever going to find a reason why it should obey such an equation, they just do! So we have this basic, really elegant mathematical equation, partial differential equation, which is my field of expertise, that governs the most basic particles of nature and there is absolutely no reason why, anyone knows of, why it does, it just does. British physicist Sir James Jeans said “From the intrinsic evidence of His creation, the great architect of the universe begins to appear as a pure mathematician”, so God is a mathematician to’. Granville Sewell PhD. i.e. the Materialist is at a complete loss to explain why this should be so, whereas the Christian Theist ‘naturally’ presupposes such ‘transcendent’ control of our temporal, material, reality,,, John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. of note; ‘the Word’ is translated from the Greek word ‘Logos’. Logos happens to be the word from which we derive our modern word ‘Logic’. In this following video, Dr. Richards and Dr. Gonzalez reveal that the universe is ‘suspiciously set up’ for scientific discovery: Privileged Planet – Observability/Measurably Correlation – Gonzalez and Richards – video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5424431 The very conditions that make Earth hospitable to intelligent life also make it well suited to viewing and analyzing the universe as a whole. - Jay Richards Extreme Fine Tuning of Light, and Atmosphere, for Life and Scientific Discovery - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/7715887/ This following video is in the same line of thought as the preceding videos: We Live At The Right Time In Cosmic History – Hugh Ross – video http://vimeo.com/31940671 But, as impressive, suspicious, and persuasive, as the preceding ‘hints’ are that the universe was created by the Mind of God and can be understood by the mind of man, since we are made in God’s image, the deepest correlation, of our mind to the Mind of God, finds its most concrete proof of correlation from looking at consciousness itself through the lens of quantum mechanics. There are many famous quotes that throw a little light on just how surprised people are when the first encounter quantum mechanics. Here are a few. Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. Neils Bohr “The more success the quantum theory has, the sillier it looks” Albert Einstein And indeed, the reason why quantum theory has looked so ‘silly’, to so many top scientists, is that consciousness is found to be integral, even central, in many of the experiments of quantum mechanics. This following quote nicely sums up exactly why consciousness would throw someone, who is used to thinking of reality in materialistic terms, for a complete loop, after looking at some of the experiments of quantum mechanics: What drives materialists crazy is that consciousness cannot be seen, tasted, smelled, touched, heard, or studied in a laboratory. But how could it be otherwise? Consciousness is the very thing that is DOING the seeing, the tasting, the smelling, etc… We define material objects by their effect upon our senses – how they feel in our hands, how they appear to our eyes. But we know consciousness simply by BEING it! https://uncommondescent.com/neuroscience/another-atheist-checks-out-of-no-consciousnessno-free-will/comment-page-1/#comment-411601 Moreover, because of the correlation of our mind to the Mind of God, we can develop a very strong argument for God from consciousness, and even provide strong empirical proof for the argument: The argument for God from consciousness can be framed like this: 1. Consciousness either precedes all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality. Here is the empirical proof for the argument; Dr. Quantum – Double Slit Experiment & Entanglement – video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4096579 Wheeler’s Classic Delayed Choice Experiment: Excerpt: Now, for many billions of years the photon is in transit in region 3. Yet we can choose (many billions of years later) which experimental set up to employ – the single wide-focus, or the two narrowly focused instruments. We have chosen whether to know which side of the galaxy the photon passed by (by choosing whether to use the two-telescope set up or not, which are the instruments that would give us the information about which side of the galaxy the photon passed). We have delayed this choice until a time long after the particles “have passed by one side of the galaxy, or the other side of the galaxy, or both sides of the galaxy,” so to speak. Yet, it seems paradoxically that our later choice of whether to obtain this information determines which side of the galaxy the light passed, so to speak, billions of years ago. So it seems that time has nothing to do with effects of quantum mechanics. And, indeed, the original thought experiment was not based on any analysis of how particles evolve and behave over time – it was based on the mathematics. This is what the mathematics predicted for a result, and this is exactly the result obtained in the laboratory. http://www.bottomlayer.com/bottom/basic_delayed_choice.htm “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Eugene Wigner (1902 -1995) from his collection of essays “Symmetries and Reflections – Scientific Essays”; Eugene Wigner laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. Here is the key experiment that led Wigner to his Nobel Prize winning work on quantum symmetries: Eugene Wigner Excerpt: To express this basic experience in a more direct way: the world does not have a privileged center, there is no absolute rest, preferred direction, unique origin of calendar time, even left and right seem to be rather symmetric. The interference of electrons, photons, neutrons has indicated that the state of a particle can be described by a vector possessing a certain number of components. As the observer is replaced by another observer (working elsewhere, looking at a different direction, using another clock, perhaps being left-handed), the state of the very same particle is described by another vector, obtained from the previous vector by multiplying it with a matrix. This matrix transfers from one observer to another. http://www.reak.bme.hu/Wigner_Course/WignerBio/wb1.htm i.e. In the experiment the ‘world’ (i.e. the universe) does not have a ‘privileged center’. Yet strangely, the conscious observer does exhibit a ‘privileged center’. This is since the ‘matrix’, which determines which vector will be used to describe the particle in the experiment, is ‘observer-centric’ in its origination! Thus explaining Wigner’s dramatic statement, “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” bornagain77

DrREC in his infinite atheistic wisdom states:: 'ID is scientifically meritless, but not because the supporters of ID are Christian.' Really???, well let's take a closer look at how 'meritless' the ID position really is: Why should the human mind be able to comprehend reality so deeply? Science and engineering, as foreign as it may sound to some people, was born out of a purely Judeo-Christian worldview. To be certain, other cultures, during the history of the world, have given fits and starts to science and engineering, but never did these foreign cultures bring science and engineering to a robust maturity through a sustained systematic development. It was only in the Judeo-Christian worldview, and in that worldview alone, that modern science was brought to the sustainable level of maturity that it has now reached. Several resources are available that document this seemingly mysterious, yet undeniable, fact of history. Here are a few. Jerry Coyne on the Scientific Method and Religion – Michael Egnor – June 2011 Excerpt: The scientific method — the empirical systematic theory-based study of nature — has nothing to so with some religious inspirations — Animism, Paganism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Islam, and, well, atheism. The scientific method has everything to do with Christian (and Jewish) inspiration. Judeo-Christian culture is the only culture that has given rise to organized theoretical science. Many cultures (e.g. China) have produced excellent technology and engineering, but only Christian culture has given rise to a conceptual understanding of nature. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/06/jerry_coyne_on_the_scientific_047431.html The Origin of Science Excerpt: Modern science is not only compatible with Christianity, it in fact finds its origins in Christianity. http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/a/science_origin.html Christianity Is a Science-Starter, Not a Science-Stopper By Nancy Pearcey http://www.pearceyreport.com/archives/2005/09/post_4.php Founders of Modern Science Who Believe in GOD - Tihomir Dimitrov http://www.scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/viewFile/18/18 A Short List Of The Christian Founders Of Modern Science http://www.creationsafaris.com/wgcs_toc.htm Christianity and The Birth of Science - Michael Bumbulis, Ph.D Excerpt: Furthermore, many of these founders of science lived at a time when others publicly expressed views quite contrary to Christianity - Hume, Hobbes, Darwin, etc. When Boyle argues against Hobbe's materialism or Kelvin argues against Darwin's assumptions, you don't have a case of "closet atheists." http://ldolphin.org/bumbulis/ Christianity Gave Birth To Each Scientific Discipline - Dr. Henry Fritz Schaefer - video http://vimeo.com/16523153 Several more resources are easily available on the internet, and through Amazon, for those who would like to learn more about the Judeo-Christian founding of modern science and engineering. But the main thing I want to focus on in this article is on the particular question of ‘exactly why should it be that the Judeo-Christian worldview is so fruitful to science and engineering, whereas, in the other cultures in the history of the world, science and engineering were stillborn?’ I think Dr. Koons does an excellent job of summing up exactly why the Judeo-Christian worldview is so fruitful to modern science and engineering: Science and Theism: Concord, not Conflict* – Robert C. Koons IV. The Dependency of Science Upon Theism (Page 21) Excerpt: Without the faith in the rational intelligibility of the world and the divine vocation of human beings to master it, modern science would never have been possible, and, even today, the continued rationality of the enterprise of science depends on convictions that can be reasonably grounded only in theistic metaphysics. http://www.robkoons.net/media/69b0dd04a9d2fc6dffff80b3ffffd524.pdf As well, Dr. Plantinga does a very good job in summing up exactly why the Judeo-Christian worldview is so fruitful to modern science and engineering here: Philosopher Sticks Up for God Excerpt: Theism, with its vision of an orderly universe superintended by a God who created rational-minded creatures in his own image, “is vastly more hospitable to science than naturalism,” with its random process of natural selection, he (Plantinga) writes. “Indeed, it is theism, not naturalism, that deserves to be called ‘the scientific worldview.’” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/books/alvin-plantingas-new-book-on-god-and-science.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all bornagain77

"The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West’s greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences." Is that true or false? Many historians - regardless of theology, will agree with that point. In fact, that was one of Nietzche's main points, too. He felt he had to re-envision morality and society precisely because the concept of freedom, rights, and morality in Western Civilization is based on the imago dei. "Discovery Institute’s Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies." So what? As I said, the Humanist Manifesto is essentially the same thing from the other direction, and Eugenie Scott is a signer of it. However, as they declared in the same document, they plan to do it using scholarship, reason, and argument. How is that nefarious? You can disagree with their ideas, but they have said at the outset that their foundation will be with scholarship. Why not just engage them as scholars? It is at this point that the real ideologues come out. The ID movement wishes to engage others as scholars, while the signers of the humanist manifesto, do not wish to engage others as scholars. So, I agree that there are ideologies at play. However, it is clear from the behavior of the parties that it is the ID movement who wishes to engage using reason and scholarship, and it is the materialists who wish to engage using name-calling, political lobbying, and marginalization. johnnyb

Elizabeth, Does the Richard Lewontin quote need to be pasted (yet) again? Obviously, not everyone agrees with you. I’d say, very few, in fact.

You misunderstand, and it's important. Let me repeat exactly what you said:

At least not for being able to tell that many theists naturally gravitate to ID because it leaves open the possibility that there may be a God; this opposed to the standard Darwinian evolution adherents who shut the question out a priori.

In other words, you appeared to claim that "the standard Darwinian evolution adherents" shut the question as to "the possiblity that there may be a God" out, a priori. This is not true. What Lewontin said, essentially, was that when doing science, we cannot posit divine explanations. Actually, he was saying something much more complicated than that, but most people who quote Lewontin's review of Sagan's book don't actually read the review. But that is his point, nonetheless, and I agree with it. The a priori of science is that things are explainable - which is why, when we reach something we cannot explain, we say that "we do not know" the answer. And we continue to try to find out. But that is not the same as the a priori that there is no God. Far from it. You do not need to assume there is no God to do science. All you need to assume is that there is a bit of the causal chain you have yet to discover. As I pointed to vjtorley in a recent post: there is no way that science can rule out God's intimate involvement in every event in the universe, in every throw of every coin, as well as in every apple that falls to the ground. Even if we had a complete materialistic account of every event in the universe, it would not rule out God; it would simply indicate that, if God designed the universe, it was defined in such a way that unfurled according to a meticulous set of rules, both stochastic and non-stochastic, and ensured that the rolls of the relevant dice would produce his intended creation. In science we trust to the operation of those meticulous rules, because they are the only ones we know how to discover. That does not require the assumption that there is no God. It merely requires the assumption that we need not stop when we are stumped and say: God musta done that bit. In other words, to "let the Divine foot in the door" of science would kill enquiry. But that does not mean that we must assume that there is no Divine foot. Elizabeth Liddle

Does the Richard Lewontin quote need to be pasted (yet) again?

Not necessary. It's permanently burned into our screens from all the times that KF posted it. champignon

"It doesn’t mean that the ID movement cannot be science, nor especially that it cannot be correct in its observations/inferences." Did I say either of those things? Bariminology, old earth creationism or hindu cosmology all COULD be true, or turned into 'sciences' of sorts. ID is scientifically meritless, but not because the supporters of ID are Christian. However, given its history, current supporters, and the focus of its leaders and henchmen, I don’t have “irrational fears of creationist subterfuge” when I see "teach the controversy" or "Design Theory" being proposed as school curriculums. DrREC

"Or is it that you’re claiming that because the ID movement contains some Christians, it should be discarded? Because that’s exactly how your post reads." Then you've misread it. Here's what I said: "I’m using historical documents" which are fairly undeniable "and the current obsessions of this website" http://bit.ly/y1Hj2F http://bit.ly/Apg2iL http://bit.ly/yqEUQq to demonstrate that I don’t have “irrational fears of creationist subterfuge.”" DrREC

Elizabeth, Does the Richard Lewontin quote need to be pasted (yet) again? Obviously, not everyone agrees with you. I'd say, very few, in fact. Brent

DrRec, Barb just undermined the premise of your argument. Even if you have the documents, it doesn't mean that the ID movement cannot be science, nor especially that it cannot be correct in its observations/inferences. How would you respond if someone said that evolution could not be scientific because those who adhere to it are atheists? It's a simple non sequitur. Brent

"No Barb, I’m using historical documents, and the current obsessions of this website to demonstrate that I don’t have an “irrational fears of creationist subterfuge.” And you are absolutely sure about the current obsessions of this website...how? You can read the webmaster's mind? Or is it that you're claiming that because the ID movement contains some Christians, it should be discarded? Because that's exactly how your post reads. Barb

"Some do, but it isn’t at the heart of evolution."

And I offer you the same answer. Brent

BA@ 2.1.1.3.3 Your rant that "you very well know the implications of overturning the neo-Darwinian worldview would give you absolutely no rational basis for your nihilistic atheism:" and linking to the Institute for Creation Research only help to strengthen my point. DrREC

DrREC, then it is funny that you fight tooth and nail to protect the pseudo-science of neo-Darwinism if it means absolutely nothing to your atheism and you are merely an unbiased participant. No DrREC, the reason you fight so hard is that you very well know the implications of overturning the neo-Darwinian worldview would give you absolutely no rational basis for your nihilistic atheism: Here is an atheist professor who openly proselytizes his religion in his classroom: Dr. Will Provine - EXPELLED - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpJ5dHtmNtU Evolution Is Religion--Not Science by Henry Morris, Ph.D. Excerpt: Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion—a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality,,, Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today. Darwinian atheist Michael Ruse - Prominent Philosopher http://www.icr.org/article/455/ bornagain77

"Have you actually read the wedge document? Here’s an excerpt: “Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade.”" If you can read the wedge document, and take that home as the message, you have some insanely selective reading skills. Here's how the wedge document summarizes itself: "The proposition that human beings are created in the image of God is one of the bedrock principles on which Western civilization was built. Its influence can be detected in most, if not all, of the West's greatest achievements, including representative democracy, human rights, free enterprise, and progress in the arts and sciences. ... Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies." "I’m actually a big Phillip Johnson fan myself." DrREC

"You appear to be using these instead of reasoning ability." No Barb, I'm using historical documents, and the current obsessions of this website to demonstrate that I don't have an "irrational fears of creationist subterfuge." DrREC

Have you actually read the wedge document? Here's an excerpt: "Without solid scholarship, research and argument, the project would be just another attempt to indoctrinate instead of persuade." Hmmmm.... a strategy which bases itself on scholarship as the cornerstone. Yep, sounds like irrational fundy dogma to me. Note that this is the *internal* document. So, looking at how they speak to each other in private, we can see that their first objective is solid scholarship. That does sound menacing, doesn't it? I'm actually a big Phillip Johnson fan myself. While I haven't read Darwin on Trial, I have read many of his later works, and enjoyed them thoroughly. My two favorites are "Reason in the Balance" and "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds", especially the second one. In fact, I would suggest that perhaps what you need to do is to *stop* googling Phillip Johnson, and instead, read what he actually wrote, rather than what some irrational chickle littles wrote about him. "If you are religion neutral" I am not, personally, religion neutral. But does that automatically make my every move sinister? Does that mean that I can't be for academic freedom because it's a good idea? Shoot, let's pretend I'm for academic freedom because I have a mischevious end goal. Does that invalidate arguments for academic freedom? No, it doesn't. Most people forget that there is a difference between a *motive* and a *purpose*. Laws are required to have secular *purposes* not *motives*. As an example, most anti-slavery movements were religiously motivated. But that didn't invalidate their arguments or their proposed legislations, because those had secular *purposes*. As other people pointed out, the atheists are not religiously neutral either. Eugenie Scott is not religiously neutral - she's a signer to the Humanist Manifesto, which "recognizes nature as self-existing". Does this invalidate her work at the NCSE? I don't think it does. I think the NCSE is wrong, but I don't think that Eugenie's signing of the humanist manifesto is what makes her wrong, and, if she makes decent proposals, I'm not going to infer that they are really nefarious because she's a humanist. Instead, I'll treat her with the respect she denies to others. johnnyb

"Why do Darwinists trumpet atheism, and denounce theism?" Some do, but it isn't at the heart of evolution. Theistic evolution, Francis Collins, and so on. Historically and currently it is undeniable the goal of ID remains: "....the purpose of the Discovery Institute is plain. Phillip Johnson, a senior fellow at the Institute, stated last year on a Christian radio talk show that "Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit, so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." http://www.christianity.ca/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=2830 You won't see Francis Collins arguing the goal of evolutionary biology is to get atheism in the schools, now will you? DrREC

DrREC, it wouldn't matter if all IDists were born again Christians. It also wouldn't matter if all scientists were atheists. Science isn't determined by consensus, and you know that. There are logical fallacies where the argument is directed against the person and not the subject (ad hominem and tu quoque). You appear to be using these instead of reasoning ability. Barb

Oh, I'm not upset, nor do I have disdain for any deity. I'm quite apathetic about the whole thing, and certainly don't use science to advance atheism. I'm just pointing out that you, KF and others perfectly represent what ID is historically and currently about. DrREC

1) Sour grapes about not getting invited to the prom--seriously, one of the more significant legislations in the last few years, and you got ignored 2) The bill specifies "The curriculum for the course must include theories from multiple religions, which may include, but is not limited to, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Scientology" ... and that is not what the DI is about: 'The worldview of scientific materialism has been pitted against traditional beliefs in the existence of God, Judeo-Christian ethics and the intrinsic dignity and freedom of man." http://www.discovery.org/about.php DrREC

kf,

the issues of origins science are inextricably intertwined with worldviews and cultural agendas.

I can see how this is so. And yet how, when, and in which cases someone chooses to veer into those areas can make an impression. This is just my hopefully constructive $.02, since again, I'm just a user of this free site. But a first-time visitor who sees numerous references to religion and Republican US presidential candidates might wonder, at first glance, whether the content is aligned with certain political or religious views. Maybe it is and I'm just the last one to realize that. I just ignore it because I have no political alignment, and I only have myself to blame if I enter a religious discussion. Or whatever else I get myself into. ScottAndrews2

the standard Darwinian evolution adherents who shut the question out a priori.

By no means do all Darwinian evolution adherents "shut the question [that there may be a God] out a priori." In fact, I don't know any that do. Elizabeth Liddle

SA: Prob is, Dr REC is hardly to be described as a novice or newbie. And, there is a talking point agenda from objectors to ID that does tie into some pretty sordid history on subjects like those linked to eugenics -- "the self-direction of human evolution." Unfortunately, like or lump it -- and I do NOT like it -- the issues of origins science are inextricably intertwined with worldviews and cultural agendas. that6 is why, for instance something that should be unexceptional like the log reduction that yields Chi_500 = Ip*S - 500, bits beyond, is subject to hot and contentious debate. Similarly, when Lewontin, Coyne, Provine, Crick, The US NAS and the US NSTA line up on a point, that should not be a subject of hot and contentious, too often personality-laced debate, but the implications are such that never mind issues tracing back to Plato's remarks with the story of Alcibiades et al in mind, we are going to have a fight. As for the notion that it is a legitimate move to redefine science as seeking NATURAL[istic] explanations of empirical phenomena (and imply or assert that this is the longstanding -- centuries, plural -- self-understanding of science), that speaks for itself. So, let us hope that we can keep enough rubble of rhetoric clear that we can address significant issues, but let us realise that for instance when I put up Geno's guest posts, the discussion threads promptly began to veer off track, and not from the side supportive of design. KF kairosfocus

I think a much more balanced first look can be had here, and it makes a telling contrast with the presentation we can say find at Wikipedia's article on the same topic. kairosfocus

Not to be critical, as I'm just someone who enjoys this site for free, but the content about religion, atheism, and politics often sends a mixed signal. If someone heard about ID for the first time, including the controversy over whether it is religious, and then came to the site for the first time, could they be blamed for getting the wrong impression? It's a valid point that atheism, anti-religious sentiment, and quasi-religious views do permeate the message coming from mainstream science. That's just pointing out the pot calling the kettle black (even though neither is intrinsically "black" in whichever sense that it meant.) ScottAndrews2

I don't think you're morons, DrRec. At least not for being able to tell that many theists naturally gravitate to ID because it leaves open the possibility that there may be a God; this opposed to the standard Darwinian evolution adherents who shut the question out a priori. The science is not the problem, no matter how much you think it is. It's metaphysical presuppositions that cloud your judgement. But, by the same standards, I could ask you the same question, substituting atheism and Darwinian evolution. Why do Darwinists trumpet atheism, and denounce theism? Brent

Here you go DrREC:

From Atheism to Theism In Reverse http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=9C2E1MNU

further notes DrREC; https://uncommondescent.com/genetics/why-you-are-not-your-genes-and-even-your-genes-are-not-your-genes/comment-page-1/#comment-418320 bornagain77

DrREC, though I am certainly nobody and nothing as far as ID itself is concerned, and indeed am only a sinner saved by grace, why would it be that you are so upset with my links to Godtube? Why are you not equally upset with the many other references I cite from peer-review, and main stream science articles, many from neo-Darwinists themselves, that completely undermine neo-Darwinism from a purely evidential point of view? i.e. Why is it that you would specifically single out 'God' in your disdain of my posts? i.e. If you were truly unbiased in your investigation of this matter why should this be so?,,,, Unfortunately for you DrREC, it seems you have revealed you own personal underlying motives in your post. Motives which have nothing to do with the science but your irrational disdain for God. bornagain77

So how exactly does this: Discovery Institute Condemns Passage of Creationism Bill by Indiana Senate as Bad Science and Bad Education fit into your little conspiracy theory?

Come on man, do you think we’re morons?

Well... why would the Discovery Institute condemn a pro-Creationism Bill if that was their end goal? Perhaps an attempt at misdirection to achieve an even greater goal!! :) Sheesh come on man. Discovery Institutes Science Education Policy Stu7

Yes the origins of ID can be traced back to Aristotle and the ancient Greeks. Joe

"irrational fears of creationist subterfuge." Are you aware of the origins of "ID?" The wedge document? "cdesign proponentsists" Google Phillip E. Johnson for me before you reply. Or, hell, look at this site. If you are religion neutral, why the rants agains atheism? Why the testimonials to conversion by Gil...the endless bornagain links to godtube? Come on man, do you think we're morons? DrREC

DrRec - I think that you think this because you assume the worst motives behind the ID movement. If the opponents of ID didn't just baselessly assume the worst about the motives of everything any ID'er does, we might wind up finding a lot we agree about. But, sadly, every good idea that the DI puts out about science education is quashed by the NCSE because of their irrational fears of creationist subterfuge. johnnyb

Thankfully, there appears to be a gap between what the standards could let into the Texas classroom, and what is being practiced. So the answer to the title is *no* DrREC

OT: Dr Torley, you made it on a Dr. Craig video with your Vilenkin article: Worst Birthday Present Stephen Hawking Ever Received (or Sorry, but the Universe had a Beginning) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etSAvcslxag bornagain77