Vox Day has noticed the same story about the possible cancellation of Darwin that we did:
It will be ironic if Charles Darwin is not ejected from his lofty status as a secular scientific saint by scientific and mathematical criticsm, but by the ignorant baying of the savage mob:
Vox Day, “Canceling Darwin” at Vox Popoli
One got the impression years ago that the Darwinians never really thought there was any chance it could happen to them. However, Darwin may not have been doing for others as much as he was doing for them and they never stopped to think about it.
Hat tip: Ken Francis, co-author with Theodore Dalrymple of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theatre of the Absurd
See also: Darwinian wonders: Will Darwin survive the purge? Carl admits that “Up until now, Darwin has been considered something of a hero on the political left… In short, all that dynamite (Darwin’s racism) was lying around, just waiting for someone to find it and make an issue of it—but the Darwinians didn’t want to deal with it themselves in case doing so complicated their culture war? Oh my.
I still don’t get the feeling it will just because I haven’t seen anything on the news about an angry mob attacking anything Darwinian
Except for when it involves sex if it involves male and female stuff, that’s when the crap hits the fan, It’ll really hit the fan if they start reading all the stuff about how racist much of its recent past was.
But we will see
His sexist remarks were as positive, man being in a “higher eminence than woman in deep thought, reason, or imagination “ … “and has ultimately become superior to women..”
Witch hunts always end up burning the people with lighters.
If schools, colleges and universities were based around education, we would not see the continual downward trend in areas such as critical thinking. They have been used as indoctrination for communism via socialism. Producing good minds has taken a back seat to producing good socialists who believe whatever lies they have been fed.
It has been an attack on western culture and just a matter of time before Darwin is burned at the altar in place of someone else.
The quote that Vox Day highlights in his article is from a recent article by Noah Carl who was a sociologist at Cambridge who got fired from his research position.
An editorial in The Times stated that his “main offence seems to have been to challenge the “woke” left-wing orthodoxy”,,,
It is interesting that the unforgivable sin for the woke left is racism. In fact, in Critical Race Theory it is held that any progress in race relations that has been achieved thus far “is largely a myth” and that “the founding of the United States (was) a project in maintaining and exploiting slavery”.
Thus, for the woke left, America has not made any gigantic strides in race relations, (i.e. the Civil War and Martin Luther King), but America itself is irredeemably racist since it was founded “as a project in maintaining and exploiting slavery”.
More interesting still, Critical Race Theory is at war with liberalism itself. In short, the woke left is actually at war with the traditional liberal left.
This can’t end well for the left.
BA77, Once we see critical theory of X we are dealing with cultural form marxism. That albatross around the neck tells us all we need to know. KF
F/N: Vox Day is an iconoclast who delights in making the most outrageous assertions. It is hard to know where satire shades into trollishness then into gasoline on the rhetorical fire. He is of part Mexican revolutionary and Amerindian ancestry, identifies with the latter. . . used to sport a Mohawk . . . and beyond that seems to defy categorisation. Apart from having his own views on just about any topic under the sun. So, to cite him as spotting a problem with the current past erasure panic is not at all to endorse his views in general. KF
I always thought that was his pet mink …
The question is, why does Darwin’s theory continue to dominate the biological sciences? It should have been ruled obsolete, except when it comes to explaining minor evolutionary change, decades ago. It persists for philosophical or worldview reasons not scientific ones. Nothing provides a hand and glove fit with atheistic naturalism and materialism like Darwin’s theory. That is because Darwin himself was deeply influenced by 19th century materialism.
Unfortunately as long as people are wedded to a naturalistic world view you’re going to have some version of Darwinian evolution. It’s the one thing that’s not going to evolve.
Have you considered the possibility that you’re wrong and a million scientists simply know better than you do? There’s no end to cranks who will insist that Einstein is wrong about Relativity, and their arguments are garbage, but they can’t understand that. Back in my teens I was a naïve fool and thought that Einstein was obviously wrong. After spending several years studying physics I realized there’s a reason Einstein is celebrated and I was not. Well it’s the same with Darwin. There’s a reason he’s celebrated, and Behe is not.
By the way, you should get a copy of on the origin of species and read it. It’s amazing to watch a person 150 years ago sort out often contradictory evidence and find the glimmer of truth of what was happening. Reading that book will really impress upon you how hard it is to do cutting edge science, and how half the evidence seems to contradict the other half. Wallace, too, deserves some credit. He had the same basic realization, at approximately the same time, which is almost always how it goes in science.
Retired Physicist, perhaps instead of off-handedly comparing Darwin’s theory to Relativity, you should actually produce some evidence? I would think someone who refers to himself as “Retired Physicist” would have enough integrity to produce actual evidence instead of rhetoric.
As to the oft repeated claim from Darwinists that “evolution is as certain as gravity”. Granville Sewell traced the origin of that particular claim to Joseph Le Conte in 1897.
In fact Le Conte not only claimed that evolution was as certain as gravity but that evolution was “far more” certain than gravity.
Dr. Sewell even quotes Le Conte again, in a fuller context, at the beginning of his newly updated video which he just uploaded on YouTube a few days ago
As to the claim that evolution is as certain, or even “far more certain”, than gravity, Dr. Berlinski rightly regarded that claim as preposterous,
Darwinism simply has nothing to offer in comparison.
In fact, Winston Ewert recently found the dependency graph (Intelligent Design) model to be “far more certain” than the common descent (Darwinian) model. Dr. Hunter termed the Darwinian model to be “incredibly inferior” to the Design model.
For any other theory in science, this level of falsification would simply be completely devastating to the theory. Indeed, with such a decisive level of falsification, the theory would be rightly relegated to such erroneous beliefs as the moon is made of green cheese. But alas, Darwinian evolution gets a free pass when it comes to falsifying evidence no matter how badly the evidence falsifies the theory.
To repeat what I’ve stated many times before, Darwinian evolution is not a testable science, but a unfalsifiable pseudoscience, even a religion, for atheists.
RP:
Nice bluff. No one uses evolution by means of blind and mindless processes for anything.
Why is Darwin celebrated? His ideas have yet to bear any fruit. Natural selection has been a total bust as a designer mimic.
“On the Origins of Species…” isn’t even scientific. He had no idea how to test his claims. That problem remains to this day. Obviously RP is a KoolAid drinker
John_a_designer @ 10
The other question is why are ID/creationists so obsessed with Darwin? Yes, his seminal work was a breakthrough in biology but the science has moved on considerably since his day. We don’t see the same amount of effort devoted to discrediting “Newtonism” for example.
Could it be that it’s not so much the science itself as the threat that science is felt to pose to the core religious beliefs of some? Darwin’s achievements are acknowledged and greatly respected but he is not worshipped. Worship is for the faithful not atheistic naturalists.
Unfortunately, I suspect human beings are going to be wedded to their religious beliefs – there are a lot more than one, you know – for the foreseeable future, although they may evolve over time. Is the Christianity of the 21st century exactly the same as that of the first century or the tenth century? Perhaps it is not the theory of evolution you should fear so much as the natural process itself.
seversky:
We aren’t. It’s just that he is still the only one to propose a mechanism that alleges design without a designer.
Yes, science has moved on and nothing has supported Darwin’s ideas. Yet his main concept, ie design without a designer, remains. And it remains untested and untestable.
It also remains that there isn’t any scientific theory of evolution. Why is that?
Sev
How could you come to that conclusion?
Creationism ===> Scientific Creationism ===> Intelligent Design.
It’s not like there is any draft of an ID text book that shows a clear cut-and-paste of Creationism to Intelligent Design. Is there? 🙂
Ed George:
ID explains the origin of the universe, the Big Bang or whatever else may have happened, the laws of physics, the existence of math, origin of life and various species. You are on the side of magic. The universe magically created itself out of nothing and magically put the laws of physics into place. You are on the side that does not believe something should be witnessed and the results replicated to be considered science.
Acartia Eddie:
Except for the FACT that ID was here first, of course.
Acartia Eddie is just a willfully ignorant troll. It is too stupid to grasp that telic thinking, ie ID, started with Plato and Aristotle.
And Darwin’s finished and released raft of his book calls on Creator. By Eddie’s “logic” evolutionism is Creationism.
BobRyan: ID explains. . . the existence of math,
I’m not sure about that. Can you conceive of math being different that what it is?
@Ed 17: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
EG, a twisted, slanderous rewrite of history. First ID is ancient, the first design inference on record is in the teeth of evolutionary materialism and is cosmological, dating to 2360 BC, in the Laws Bk X, Plato. That Bible thumping fundy, NOT. It is only in C19 that by gradual imposition of a priori materialistic presuppositions, under cover of science that evolutionary materialism was able to gain a dominant position across C20. Creationism in the relevant sense, Biblical, is a different stream in history of ideas though there are intersections. The modern design theory movement simply does not fit the slanderous timeline portrayed by NCSE et al. the fine tuning issue camne up in the 1950s. By the turn of the 80’s the lifelong agnostic, Hoyle was openly raising design issues. By the 1982 – 4 frame, given the results from molecular biology, design inference on OoL and further Oo body plans put itself on the table. The book and cases you allude to are much later than that, it is only a hermeneutic of scapegoating that created the lying — yes, dfeliberately deceitful — narrative that you cite, which serves only to dodge central issues. Start with, from the 1950’s, it was realised that alphanumeric, algorithmic code was in DNA in the heart of the cell, which is a manifestation of language. Language is a key signature of design. KF
Kairosfocus, I have two questions for you.
1 who is called “the Father of Intelligent Design”?
2 Was he an ancient Greek?
RP- History and the facts say that telic thinking, ie ID, started with Plato an Aristotle. Your ignorance will NEVER change history nor the facts
JVL:
No, because it was intelligently designed to be the way it is.
And for the record: Phil Johnson was considered to be the father of the MODERN Intelligent Design movement.
Intelligent Design encompasses many things and its origin goes back to ancient times but was obviously not called that then. ID primarily has to do with origins. First the origin of the universe. then the origin of life, then the origin of complex forms of life. It also has looked at other origins such as the origin of Earth and consciousness, specifically humans
This goes back to the beginning of time when people speculated on various forms of creators who were responsible for these things. The Greeks, Romans and several ancient civilizations held these beliefs so essentially they were creationists. There have been thousands of different types of creationists since the beginning of time but none are necessarily what we call ID today, including modern versions of creationism.
If something has a plausible explanation as the result of natural processes, ID will usually not challenge it though some who endorse ID will. Because some who endorse ID will challenge the natural origin of entities does not mean that that ID does.
By the way Richard Dawkins endorsed ID in his interview with Ben Stein several years ago when he said if there was proof of some ancient intelligence in the universe it would explain life.
It is a mistake to conflate ID with challenges to Darwin or naturalized mechanisms that supposedly explain changes in life forms over time especially the origin of complex life forms. It is one aspect of ID and far from all it encompasses. In the above Dawkins and Stein were referring to origin of life issues.
ET,
And that’s where the wedge document and copy/paste errors come in. 😛
Copy/Paste errors?
No one in the world was convinced of ID because of “Of Pandas and People”. The book is irrelevant to ID. That ID’s loser critics keep bringing it up just exposes their ignorance and desperation.
Huh. I just looked it up. Looks like it was written by several Discovery Institute people.
F/N: Plato:
360 BC.
KF
Based on the reasoning of some of our regular interlocutors here I think understanding what ID’ists are really claiming is very relevant to the present discussion.
ID’ists do not reject the idea of natural causation a priori. Indeed, much of what we perceive in the natural world can be (indeed should be) explained “naturally.” What we do reject is that natural causes are the only kind of causes that could be used to explain the origin and evolution of life.
For example, in his book Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe asks,
Basically Behe is asking, if biochemical complexity (irreducible complexity) evolved by some natural process x, how did it evolve? That is a perfectly legitimate scientific question. Notice that even though in DBB Behe was criticizing Neo-Darwinism he is not ruling out a priori some other mindless natural evolutionary process, “x”, might be able to explain IC.
Behe is simply claiming that at the present there is no known natural process that can explain how irreducibly complex mechanisms and processes originated. If he and other ID’ist are categorically wrong then our critics need to provide the step-by-step-by-step empirical explanation of how they originated, not just speculation and wishful thinking. Unfortunately our regular interlocutors seem to only be able to provide the latter not the former.
Behe made another point which is worth keeping in mind.
In other words, a strongly held metaphysical belief is not a scientific explanation.
Ds/EG/RP, actually, no. The first founder was Fred Hoyle and the second was a research circle, Thaxton, Bradley, Olsen, in The Mystery of Life’s Origin. The time was C1980 – 84. Denton was a parallel development, 1985. Johnson came along later, pulling together people and arguing about reasoning. Behe, Dembski and co were later still. But fundamentally the decisive issue dates to the 40’s and 50’s, fine tuned cosmos sets stage and on it we find alphanumeric, algorithmic code in the heart of the cell. Language. Game over. KF
Alphanumeric? What on Earth are you talking about?
Oh heck. I just learned about cdesign proponentsists. Wow. Well, that explains why ID hasn’t gone anywhere.
KF,
Whatever the ultimate origins of ID are, the current incarnation is certainly blessed with a colorful cast of characters. 🙂
RP, kindly see 32 above on key history of ideas. KF
Earth to Retired Physicist- Intelligent Design is still the only viable scientific explanation for our existence. You have to be a desperate moron to think ID hasn’t gone anywhere due copying errors in a ROUGH draft of a book
And it still also remains that “Of Pandas and People” was not responsible for anyone converting to ID. It is irrelevant to the ID of the 21st century.
RP, protein assembling, edited and sometimes interwoven code, fed into Ribosomes as transfer machines using tRNA position-arm devices, with start, elongate in particular ways, stop, then fold etc. KF
daves:
At least we ain’t a bunch of desperate, pathological liars that our opponents are.
Kairosfocus, creationism accomplishes nothing. If you just rename creationism it’s still scientifically barren. I can name you individual scientists who published more last year than the intelligent design movement. That’s not a successful research program. The Intelligent Design movement publishes approximately the same number of papers as the astrologers do. The father of intelligent design was a creationist lawyer who came up with a legal strategy to try to get creationism in the classroom. It failed.
“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.”
-Philip Johnson
RP:
That is your ignorant opinion, anyway.
They did NOT publish anything that supports blind and mindless processes ability to create specified and complex structures.
It still remains that the claims of ID remain unrefuted. And all it takes to refute ID’s claims is for someone to step up and demonstrate blind and mindless processes can produce it.
There is a reason why there still isn’t any scientific theory of evolution.
By RP’s logic evolutionism = atheism because Dawkins says so- Will Provine also said it.
Evolution by means of blind and mindless processes accomplishes nothing. No one uses it because the premise is untestable and as such outside of science. It doesn’t produce any testable hypotheses. It doesn’t produce any predictions beyond change and stasis. It doesn’t help any research.
So why do people still adhere to it?
RP, I have only mentioned Creationism in the context of a distinction that needs to be recognised but has been deliberately obscured for illegitimate ideological reasons, exploiting media access. Creationism, relevant sense, is about Biblical interpretation taken as report of One who was there, God. The design inference issue — which is where my interest has been — is different, inherently inductive and evidence based: are there intelligible, observable signs of intelligently directed configuration as key causal factor for entities, systems, networks, processes? This can be and is investigated scientifically all the time, e/g. signal/noise metrics are key in communication systems. The issue is, on origins, we were not there and so infer a more or less plausible to us model on traces we can observe. To do so we need to have an observational and analytic base for causal factors and their traces. We have that, and machine code with associated molecular nanotech execution machinery have been manifest in cell biology for decades. Alphanumeric code, algorithms, execution machinery in the heart of life. Language. Decisive. Where, lies . . . yes, lies . . . about re-labelling Creationism only tell me about the ideological, deceitful nature of those who concoct such tales then use them to poison minds and distract from what is actually decisive. Alphanumeric, linguistic, algorithmic code. In the heart of the cell. Signature of design. KF
PS: here is the book you need to see: https://www.krusch.com/books/evolution/Mystery_of_Lifes_Origin.pdf
You think there is an alphanumeric code inside cells???? You think there are little As, little Ts, little Gs, little Cs in there??? Those are labels for chemicals dude there aren’t any little tiny letters and numbers in there. Wow.
.
Being a materialist ideologue is truly the easiest of all things, is it not?
Materialists can happily claim this and that without material evidence, and the very first thing you get to ignore is documented physical evidence and recorded history to the contrary. Too easy.
RP, strawman. . We have a machine code based on 64-state trisymbol elements expressing a prong-height system, quite similar to Yale type Locks. BTW, von Neumann in conceptualising self-replicators, had suggested a prong height system in 1948. The ACGT representation is a transliteration into somewhat human readable code, but in informational terms the system in the cell is just as alphanumerical, using 4-state elements in two complementary pairs [corresponding prong heights] in triplet “syllables” that give the 64 state system. Alphanumerical codes use symbolic elements that function in string data structures with meaning coming from the sequence of the chain; here start, elongate, stop. It is particularly to be noted that the tRNS AA-holding tip is a universal joint, CCA. Physically, any AA can be loaded to any tRNA, it is the loading enzymes that use the overall configuration (not just the anticodon) to determine which AA goes where. And BTW, in recent years, stop codes (there are three) have been used to bring in extra AA’s. KF
The evidence is clear for all to see. The modern ID “movement” was an intentional rebranding of scientific creationism In an attempt to give the perception that it doesn’t have religion as its foundation. And scientific creationism was an attempt to lend credibility to creationism.
Before ET does his best impersonation of that moronic and abusive Joe Gallien, Just because the modern ID “movement” has a theistic origin doesn’t mean that it is wrong.
.
Ed,
The material evidence of design in biology was recorded in the literature by physicists and biologists regardless of their metaphysical leanings, That whole line of thinking is part of the sociopolitical hustle.
Physical evidence doesn’t care what you call it.
If you can global search and replace two words they’re either pretty synonymous or irrelevant. If there’s a book about Patton, and you global search and replace Patton with General Patton, that might work. If you global search and replace the word Patton with the word Grant, That might work for a sentence or two, but it’s not going to work for the whole book. So I just read the history of this pandas book and some DI people were working on it and while they were writing drafts the supreme court ruled that creationism wasn’t science, and they literally changed the creationisms to intelligent designs etc for the whole book. Come on. How did anyone think that scam was going to work????
EG, I seldom have to draw this conclusion, but you have now made yourself a poster child for slanderous liar. Please, reverse that course. It may serve rhetorical advantages to stigmatise, brand and marginalise but it reveals want of accountability to either truth or fairness or both and points to trollishness. You should be a lot better than that. KF
RP, if you are searching for more apt language and find it then use it, that speaks to intent. It is those looking to accuse and applying a wholly improper hermeneutic of unwarranted accusatory suspicion who would then try to force into that sort of conclusion. Just above, for example you tried to suggest that I imagine that little ACGT script is in the cell. Where on earth could such a notion have come from? Is there not a very obvious point that as UNICODE exemplifies, alphanumeric code . . . now including emoticons, playing card symbols and more . . . might mean broader things than our Latin alphabet and a few other associated symbols? If Mahjong tiles can have a code range there is no reason why codons don’t, save we commonly use GCAT for them, and context gives enough. Where, digital does not mean binary digital. Alphanumeric code speaks of a recognisable list of standard symbols chained in string data structures to convey meaning. Personalise-polarise-stigmatise rhetoric games notwithstanding, it remains that in the heart of the cell we have machine code deployed in string data structures with start, elongate and stop, sometimes with interwoven code. Algorithms are inherently goal-directed and codes like that (among other coding possibilities) are of clearly linguistic character. Symbolic, verbal language, of course, is a decisive sign of intelligence in action. That is central and sideslips, dodges and toxic evasions are duly noted for what they imply. KF
.
The value, of course, of this whole rhetorical bit (on display yet again and again) is to allow the materialist to avoid the recorded material evidence.
Oldies but goodies.
UB, sadly, yes. Red herring distractor b–> strawman caricature soaked in ad hominems –> set alight to cloud, confuse, poison and polarise the atmosphere. This all too common “trifecta fallacy” political and rhetoriocal strategy is inherently dishonest. KF
Anyone think this looks like the inside of a machine or a computer?
Okay, so let’s say we concede that the genetic code could be evidence of intelligent design. Then what?
Kairosfocus @ 57
Yup, oldies but goodies.
Seversky @58:
Had engineers built something like that they would have felt like the masters of the universe.
That didn’t happen. Sorry.
🙂
.
Sev suggests we ignore measurement and be guided instead by his reaction to an image..
More rhetoric.
Sev, you build a computer using smart polymer molecular nanotech then come back and tell me to ignore 70 years of multiple Nobel Prize winning evidence. KF
seversky:
What else could it be evidence for? We don’t have any observations, experiences or knowledge of nature producing coded systems.
Acartia Eddie (meaning Ed George does a great impersonation of the pathological liar and sociopath Acartia Bogart/ William Spearshake):
That’s your ignorant opinion, anyway. The modern ID movement is NOT and never has been, dependent on the Bible.
It’s more credible than atheistic/ materialistic evolutionism.
Look, it is obvious that all you clowns can do is flail away at ID with your belligerent ignorance. Which is very telling as the way to refute ID’s claims is for you to actually step up and demonstrate blind and mindless processes can account for it.
That you choose your cowardly tactic just further exposes you as willfully ignorant and insipid trolls.
Acartia Eddie (meaning Ed George does a great impersonation of the pathological liar and sociopath Acartia Bogart/ William Spearshake):
The best ID can do is make it so that you can be an intellectually fulfilled theist. ID doesn’t say anything about worship. Nothing about the who, how, where and when to worship. It doesn’t have any of the hallmarks of religion. It doesn’t fit any of the definitions.
Just because the modern ID movement was founded, somewhat, by a Christian, that doesn’t make it a Christian or theistic enterprise
Creation is based on the Bible. ID is not. Creation is a SUBSET of ID. A specific subset. That is what has ID’s detractors so confused. The really don’t grasp set theory. 😛
This is not appropriate. Maybe a better description would be a Venn diagram where the two overlap on somethings. ID says nothing about origins except some look Like the product of an intelligent design as opposed to the product of a natural process
Young Earth Creationists have certainly glommed onto ID. But that does not make the two anywhere close to the same. To conflate the two is a rhetorical trick played all the time as we see on this thread. You notice that those who push the creationist equivalencies don’t use the term YEC but that is what they mean.. But there are numerous forms of creationism. Anyone who believes in a God that created the universe is a creationist.
Also I maintain ID is not a science but more rather like a subset of logic that leads people to better conclusions. Materialism is a straight jacket predetermining a certain set of conclusions. ID expands this but doesn’t eliminate any conclusion a materialist would validly make. Just that they are unlikely and sometimes extremely unlikely.
Because of their begging the question constantly, the materialist often makes inferior conclusions. They continually speculate and often their speculation then becomes conclusions because of their self constrained set of possible conclusions.
They by definition practice inferior science. Those that except ID are actually practicing better science. It’s just that 99:9% of the topics in science don’t relate to controversial origins.
That is the “big tent” we used to hear about. If Creation is true then ID is true. But ID can be true and Creation be false. There are also different forms of Biblical Creation(ism). YEC is only one of those.
And seeing that ID makes testable claims, that would put it within the realm of science. I also submit that materialists don’t reach valid conclusions. They don’t even know how to test the claims of materialism.
What is also false is limiting ID to origins. If the OoL was intelligently designed we would infer it was so designed with the ability to adapt and evolve. Evolution by means of intelligent design. “Built-in responses to environmental cues” ala Dr Spetner “Not By Chance” 1997.
UB @ 56,
Indeed, we keep covering the same ground with the same people over and over again.
For example, Back in June 2018 I had this exchange with Seversky who I believe has been commenting on this site for at least 7 or 8 years. (Why? Who knows?)
In a response to an OP entitled, “As Astrology Goes Mainstream, Will Big Science Start To Accommodate It?” I wrote @ #1:
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/as-astrology-goes-mainstream-will-big-science-start-to-accommodate-it/#comment-660948
To which Seversky @ #2 replied, point by point:
Me: Atheistic naturalism/materialism provides no answers to mankind’s deepest spiritual and moral needs.
Seversky: “I agree. It can’t. But if you assume there is no God then we are forced to confront the reality that we are on our own, we are all we have so where do we go from here?”
Me: It is a morally, spiritually and intellectually bankrupt world view, yet many people irrationally and absurdly cling to it.
Seversky “If atheism, by definition, cannot provide moral and spiritual guidance then calling it bankrupt for not doing what it cannot do is unfair. That does not prevent us from constructing “worldviews” and moral codes that are atheist.”
Me: Why? They cannot give a rational explanation. They do not know but don’t even know they don’t know…
Seversky: “As I said, atheists can construct rational worldviews and moral codes. It’s just that they cannot appeal to the unquestionable authority of some deity to support them.”
Notice, that Seversky basically concedes each of my points.
Of course that brings up a number of other questions like: who is obligated to follow a moral code constructed by atheists? Does it apply to just them or everyone else (society)? Do any human constructed moral codes carry any kind of real morally binding obligations?
It’s because of irrational nonsense like this that I have said here many time before, “If I were an atheistic materialist, I would leave other people alone.” Why? Because atheistic materialism has nothing to offer as a world view and therefore nothing to offer to the world.
Mike Gene had this to say about ID, ID’s “critics” and religion:
The answer to that question is of course they can, and do.
Retired Physicist at 42, as well as other Darwinists in this thread and numerous places elsewhere, have repeatedly claimed that God has no place in the science classroom. This is an interesting claim coming from Darwinists since, number one, Darwinian evolution itself, since it is devoid of any real-time substantiating evidence,,,,
,,, since it is devoid of any real-time substantiating evidence, is heavily dependent on faulty theological argumentation in their supposedly scientific textbooks,
Darwinists, with their vital dependence on faulty theological presuppositions, instead of on scientific evidence, in order to try to make their case for Darwinian evolution are, as Cornelius Van Til put it, like the child who must climb up onto his father’s lap into order to slap his face.
It should not be surprising that Darwinists are heavily dependent on faulty theological argumentation in order to try to make their case for evolution, modern science itself was born out of, and is still crucially dependent on, presuppositions that can only be grounded within the Theistic worldview
Science it simply impossible without theistic presuppositions. As Paul Davies explains, “even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.”
As to Paul Davies’s observation that “physicists (today) think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships”. and that mathematics is not ‘contingent’ upon the Mind of God for its existence, is, philosophically speaking, a major step backwards for today’s physicist compared to the Christian founders of modern science.
For example, in 1619, Johannes Kepler, shortly after discovering the laws of planetary motion, stated,
Likewise in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton, after discovering the law of universal gravitation, (which has been referred to as the first major unification in physics),
Likewise in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton, after discovering the law of universal gravitation, stated that, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.,,,This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all;”
Likewise, Faraday and Maxwell did not view mathematics and/or lawfulness as “inert, abstract, logical necessity, or complete reducibility to Cartesian mechanism; rather, it was an expectation they attributed to the existence of a divine lawgiver.”
Similarly Max Planck himself stated that,
Moreover, both Einstein and Wigner are both on record as to regarding it as a ‘miracle’ that mathematics should be applicable to the universe in the first place. In fact, Einstein went so far as to chide ‘professional atheists’ in the midst of calling it a ‘miracle’
Thus for physicists today to view mathematics as “inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships” and for them to hold that mathematics, especially any mathematics that might describe this universe, is not contingent upon the mind of God for its existence is, to repeat, a major step backwards for today’s physicists.
Physicists today, especially with the proof of Godel’s incompleteness theorems sitting right before them, simply have no basis for their belief that mathematics, all by its lonesome, can somehow function as a God substitute,
As the following article states, “Kurt Gödel had dropped a bomb on the foundations of mathematics. Math could not play the role of God as infinite and autonomous.”
Stephen Hawking himself, an atheist, honestly admitted that,
As well, Steven Weinberg, also an atheist, also honestly admitted that, “I don’t think one should underestimate the fix we are in. That in the end we will not be able to explain the world. That we will have some set of laws of nature (that) we will not be able to derive them on the grounds simply of mathematical consistency. Because we can already think of mathematically consistent laws that don’t describe the world as we know it. And we will always be left with a question ‘why are the laws of nature what they are rather than some other laws?’. And I don’t see any way out of that.”
In fact, there are an infinite number of mathematical theorems that could have described the universe but don’t, As Gregory Chaitin pointed out, “what Gödel discovered was just the tip of the iceberg: an infinite number of true mathematical theorems exist that cannot be proved from any finite system of axioms. ”
Mathematics, contrary to what the vast majority of theoretical physicists apparently believe today, simply never will have the capacity within itself to function as a God substitute.
As Dr. Bruce Gordon explains,
As to, “a mind that can choose among the infinite variety of mathematical descriptions and bring into existence a reality that corresponds to a consistent subset of them”, it is also interesting to note that ‘free will’, i.e. “a mind that can choose”, is now proven to play a fundamental role in Quantum Mechanics itself,
As Steven Weinberg explains,
In fact Weinberg, again an atheist, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave.
For instance, and as leading experimentalist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
The Kochen-Specker theorem undermines the deterministic worldview of atheistic materialists in the most fundamental way possible in that “it would not even be possible to place the information into the universe’s past in an ad hoc way.”
As well, with contextuality we find that, “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation”
Moreover, this recent 2019 experimental confirmation of the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment established that “measurement results,, must be understood relative to the observer who performed the measurement”.
On top of all that, although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence” and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:
And now Anton Zeilinger and company have recently, as of 2018, pushed the ‘free will loophole’ back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
Thus regardless of how Steven Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the universe to behave, with the closing of the last remaining free will loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are (indeed) brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Weinberg himself stated, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.”
Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level, as is now required by quantum mechanics, has some fairly profound implications for us personally.
First and foremost, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”. Here are a few posts where I lay out and defend some of the evidence for that claim:
To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the following recent article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts (34 trillion Watts) of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”
Thus in conclusion, although atheists constantly claim the God has no place in science, the fact of the matter is that modern science is crucially dependent of presuppositions that can only be reasonably grounded within Theism and that, when we rightly allow the Agent Causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as was originally envisioned at the founding of modern science, then science itself finds an empirically backed resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’.
Verse:
The materialists who show up here at UD are more dogmatic than the most dogmatic religious fundamentalist. As evidenced by their comments above all they are really doing is dogmatically doubling down on a logically fallacious argument:
Materialism could be true.
No one has ever proved that materialism is false.
Therefore, materialism is true.
However, the above is nothing more than a fallacious appeal to ignorance. It’s a textbook example of an Ad ignorantium argument (an appeal to ignorance).
Except that materialism cannot be true…
Jerry, 68: ID says nothing about origins except some look Like the product of an intelligent design as opposed to the product of a natural process
You mean they were created? 🙂
Anyone who believes in a God that created the universe is a creationist.
Would you include those who think the designer fine-tuned the universe?
Also I maintain ID is not a science but more rather like a subset of logic that leads people to better conclusions. Materialism is a straight jacket predetermining a certain set of conclusions. ID expands this but doesn’t eliminate any conclusion a materialist would validly make. Just that they are unlikely and sometimes extremely unlikely.
That’s an interesting view.
Because of their begging the question constantly, the materialist often makes inferior conclusions. They continually speculate and often their speculation then becomes conclusions because of their self constrained set of possible conclusions.
They by definition practice inferior science. Those that except ID are actually practicing better science. It’s just that 99:9% of the topics in science don’t relate to controversial origins.
Again, an interesting view. I wonder how many of the other ID supporters would agree with you?