Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

This has got to be the stupidest anti-ID article ever written …

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The Huffington Post

John Blumenthal, Novelist, screenwriter, and former “Playboy” magazine editor
informs us,

If the design had been more adept, life might be a painless, disease-free frolic, brought to a humane close. Think of how many hours we might have used for more pleasant pastimes than perusing ancient copies of golfing magazines in an internist’s waiting room.

You mean, like H.G. Wells’s beautiful, useless Eloi in The Time Machine? At least Wells had the good sense not to pretend that they were an improvement.

Yup, Darwin was right and Bachmann (who is 55) is wrong. We are nothing more than products of random evolutionary mutation. The design of the human body might seem pretty grand if you’re 20, but for the over-50 group, it could have used a rewrite.

Surprisingly, in real life, many over-50s are perfectly happy with their bodies; one thing about being older is that you know your body much better than you did when you were young.

But we must hope Blumenthal writes way, way more of this stuff.

Comments
Oh, he thought he was being funny, alright. But he was clearly expressing what he thought was a cogent argument against ID with the stupid and juvenile "bad design" line of reasoning. Ah, yes. Darwin's tradition lives on . . .Eric Anderson
November 1, 2011
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Maybe a bunny was the real writer. I think playboy folks should leave alone the higher things of mankind morally and intellectually. For the record the bible says design was messed up. We were to be perfect. For cime/sin we lost that. pLayboy is case in point.Robert Byers
November 1, 2011
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I think Professor Sewell has his own nomination for the dumbest argument ever against ID:
"More Philosophical than Scientific": Parsing a Rationalization - Granville Sewell October 31, 2011 Excerpt: Some readers will by now have realized that there is something terribly wrong with the whole concept of "compensation," as used by Styer and Bunn and many others [3 (p366),4,5 (p160)]. There are different kinds of entropy, and poker entropy has very little to do with thermal entropy. If you want to show that evolution does not violate the second law, you cannot simply say, sure, evolution is astronomically improbable, but the Earth is an open system, so there is no problem as long as something (anything!) is happening outside the Earth that, if reversed, would be even more improbable.,,,, Of course no one on either side believes my article was withdrawn because it was "more philosophical than mathematical," it was withdrawn because it supported the wrong philosophy. The article was perceived as being supportive of intelligent design (ID), and it was discovered that I am a known ID supporter (see In the Beginning...8). But in fact, this article did not mention ID or make any appeal to the supernatural, and did not even conclude that the second law has definitely been violated by what has happened on Earth. It only concluded that if you want to believe it has not, you have to argue that, thanks to the influx of solar energy, it is not really extremely improbable (in the sense of footnote 4 there) that the four forces of physics would rearrange the basic particles of physics into spaceships, nuclear power plants, computers and the Internet. But you cannot hide behind the absurd compensation argument made by Styer, Bunn, Asimov and many others. On a topic of less philosophical importance, arguments with such grotesque errors of logic as those made by Styer and Bunn could never be published in a physics journal, yet these errors go almost unchallenged to this day. Articles that are more philosophical than scientific are welcomed by many science journals, as long as they support the right philosophy. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/10/more_philosophical_than_scient052441.html
Further note:
"The laws of probability apply to open as well as closed systems." Granville Sewell - Professor Of Mathematics - University Of Texas El Paso “Darwin’s theory is easily the dumbest idea ever taken seriously by science." Granville Sewell - Professor Of Mathematics - University Of Texas - El Paso
bornagain77
October 31, 2011
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Richard Dawkins' Best Argument Against God is the Worst Argument in Western History - Dr Craig Videos http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U7Zwju9vAMbornagain77
October 31, 2011
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I think that HuffPo article was intended to be humor, rather than to be taken as serious criticism.Neil Rickert
October 31, 2011
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