No wonder they ran out of pom poms. Everyone wants to be a “science writer”

24 Replies to “No wonder they ran out of pom poms. Everyone wants to be a “science writer””

1. 1
   keith s says:

   November 22, 2014 at 5:41 pm

   Denyse,

   No wonder they ran out of pom poms. Everyone wants to be a “science writer”

   Everyone including you. Correct?
2. 2
   Mung says:

   November 22, 2014 at 7:24 pm

   Denyse is a science writer. That escaped you somehow?

   Troll
3. 3
   bornagain77 says:

   November 22, 2014 at 7:42 pm

   OT: per Behe

   Structural diversity of bacterial flagellar motors – 2011
   Excerpt: Figure 3 – Manual segmentation of conserved (solid colours) and unconserved (dotted lines) motor components based on visual inspection.
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f3/
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC3160247/
   =======
   Figure 1 – Flagellar motor structures obtained by ECT and subtomogram averaging.
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f1/
   Figure 2 – Structure of the common core and its comparison with an earlier cryoEM single-particle reconstruction.
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f2/
   Figure 3 – Manual segmentation of conserved (solid colours) and unconserved (dotted lines) motor components based on visual inspection.
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f3/
   Figure 4 – Structure of the export apparatus.
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f4/
   Figure 5 – Symmetries in the stator region.
   http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....figure/f5/
4. 4
   Robert Byers says:

   November 22, 2014 at 8:34 pm

   if science is difficult then it could only be that a science writer is a jack of all trades and master of none.
   If a master then the money wouldn’t be there to survive.
   Anyways if science writers don’t smell evolutions demise and ID/YEC rise then what good are they!
   missing the story of the century!!
5. 5
   Me_Think says:

   November 22, 2014 at 8:53 pm

   Anyways if science writers don’t smell evolutions demise and ID/YEC rise then what good are they!
   missing the story of the century!!

   Without an alternate (even tentative) mechanism, ID is not going anywhere. “ID just detects design” and nothing else is not going to take ID far.
6. 6
   bornagain77 says:

   November 22, 2014 at 9:00 pm

   Me_Think as to:

   “Without an alternate (even tentative) mechanism”

   Actually you, as an atheist, are the one without a mechanism,,, ‘laws’, whether they be hidden laws or in your face laws, have never ’caused’ anything to happen in this universe. The following Professor, who is a former atheist, gets this point across more clearly than anyone else I have heard:

   A Professor’s Journey out of Nihilism: Why I am not an Atheist – University of Wyoming – J. Budziszewski
   Excerpt page12: “There were two great holes in the argument about the irrelevance of God. The first is that in order to attack free will, I supposed that I understood cause and effect; I supposed causation to be less mysterious than volition.
   If anything, it is the other way around. I can perceive a logical connection between premises and valid conclusions. I can perceive at least a rational connection between my willing to do something and my doing it. But between the apple and the earth, I can perceive no connection at all. Why does the apple fall? We don’t know. “But there is gravity,” you say. No, “gravity” is merely the name of the phenomenon, not its explanation. “But there are laws of gravity,” you say. No, the “laws” are not its explanation either; they are merely a more precise description of the thing to be explained, which remains as mysterious as before. For just this reason, philosophers of science are shy of the term “laws”; they prefer “lawlike regularities.” To call the equations of gravity “laws” and speak of the apple as “obeying” them is to speak as though, like the traffic laws, the “laws” of gravity are addressed to rational agents capable of conforming their wills to the command. This is cheating, because it makes mechanical causality (the more opaque of the two phenomena) seem like volition (the less). In my own way of thinking the cheating was even graver, because I attacked the less opaque in the name of the more.
   The other hole in my reasoning was cruder. If my imprisonment in a blind causality made my reasoning so unreliable that I couldn’t trust my beliefs, then by the same token I shouldn’t have trusted my beliefs about imprisonment in a blind causality. But in that case I had no business denying free will in the first place.”
   http://www.undergroundthomist......theist.pdf

   C.S. Lewis humorously stated the point like this:

   “to say that a stone falls to earth because it’s obeying a law, makes it a man and even a citizen”
   – CS Lewis

   The following ‘doodle video’ is also excellent for getting this point across:

   “In the whole history of the universe the laws of nature have never produced, (i.e. caused), a single event.”
   C.S. Lewis – doodle video
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_20yiBQAIlk

   Can Law Make Worlds? – Joshua Youngkin July 2, 2012
   Excerpt: Filippenko apparently wants a first cause of some sort, but not a personal first cause, not a mind, not an agent. So he subtly turns physical law into a mind-independent reality, something that is self-sufficiently “there” at the beginning, something that can thus be filled with world-creating agency and power. But what would you call “law” that lives nowhere in particular yet could of its own accord decide when, where and how to apply itself? In seeking to identify such a strange power, the one name we cannot give it is “law.”
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....61551.html

   In other words, law or necessity does not have causal adequacy within itself. i.e. Law is not a ‘mechanism’ that has ever ’caused’ anything to happen in the universe but is merely a description of a law-like regularity within the universe. The early Christian founders of modern science understood this sharp distinction between law and lawgiver quite well,,,

   Not the God of the Gaps, But the Whole Show – John Lennox – 2012
   Excerpt: God is not a “God of the gaps”, he is God of the whole show.,,, C. S. Lewis put it this way: “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature and they expected law in nature because they believed in a lawgiver.”
   http://www.christianpost.com/n.....how-80307/

   Perhaps the most famous confusion of a mathematical description of a law and the causal agency behind the law is Stephen Hawking’s following statement:

   “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.The universe didn’t need a God to begin; it was quite capable of launching its existence on its own,”
   Stephen Hawking
   http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_.....wking.html

   Here is an excerpt of an article, (that is well worth reading in full), in which Dr. Gordon exposes Stephen Hawking’s delusion for thinking that mathematical description and agent causality are the same thing.

   BRUCE GORDON: Hawking’s irrational arguments – October 2010
   Excerpt: ,,,The physical universe is causally incomplete and therefore neither self-originating nor self-sustaining. The world of space, time, matter and energy is dependent on a reality that transcends space, time, matter and energy.
   This transcendent reality cannot merely be a Platonic realm of mathematical descriptions, for such things are causally inert abstract entities that do not affect the material world,,,
   Rather, the transcendent reality on which our universe depends must be something that can exhibit agency – 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. This is what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.” Anything else invokes random miracles as an explanatory principle and spells the end of scientific rationality.,,,
   Universes do not “spontaneously create” on the basis of abstract mathematical descriptions, nor does the fantasy of a limitless multiverse trump the explanatory power of transcendent intelligent design. What Mr. Hawking’s contrary assertions show is that mathematical savants can sometimes be metaphysical simpletons. Caveat emptor.
   http://www.washingtontimes.com.....arguments/

   Moreover, the same type of confusion arises when atheists’ appeal to ‘random chance’ as a causal agent instead of merely a description.

   When people say that something ‘happened by chance’ they are not actually appealing to a known causal mechanism but are instead using chance as a ‘placeholder for ignorance’ as to an actual causal mechanism. Stephen Talbott puts the situation like this,,

   Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness – Stephen L. Talbott – Fall 2011
   Excerpt: In the case of evolution, I picture Dennett and Dawkins filling the blackboard with their vivid descriptions of living, highly regulated, coordinated, integrated, and intensely meaningful biological processes, and then inserting a small, mysterious gap in the middle, along with the words, “Here something random occurs.”
   This “something random” looks every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle. It is the central miracle in a gospel of meaninglessness, a “Randomness of the gaps,” demanding an extraordinarily blind faith. At the very least, we have a right to ask, “Can you be a little more explicit here?”
   http://www.thenewatlantis.com/.....randomness

   In other words, when people say that something “happened randomly by chance”, usually a mishap, they are in fact assuming an impersonal purposeless determiner of unaccountable happenings which is, in fact, is impossible to separate from causal agency. i.e. ‘every bit as wishful as the appeal to a miracle’
   Although the term “chance” can be defined as a mathematical probability, such as the chance involved in flipping a coin, when Darwinists use the term ‘random chance’, generally it’s substituting for a more precise word such as “cause”, especially when the cause, i.e. ‘mechanism’, is not known. Several people have noted this ‘shell game’ that is played with the word ‘chance’..

   “To personify ‘chance’ as if we were talking about a causal agent,” notes biophysicist Donald M. MacKay, “is to make an illegitimate switch from a scientific to a quasi-religious mythological concept.”

   Similarly, Robert C. Sproul points out: “By calling the unknown cause ‘chance’ for so long, people begin to forget that a substitution was made. . . . The assumption that ‘chance equals an unknown cause’ has come to mean for many that ‘chance equals cause.’”

   Thus, when an atheist states that something happened by chance, we have every right to ask, as Talbott pointed out, “Can you be a little more explicit here?”
   In conclusion, contrary to how atheists imagine reality to be structured, they, in their appeal to random chance and law as to being causally adequate within themselves, have, in reality, appealed to vacuous explanations for a ‘causal mechanism’ that are far more properly grounded in agent causality. ,,,
   ,,,”vacuous explanations for a causal mechanism” reminds me of Lawrence Krauss’s argument against God from a few years ago in his book ‘A Universe from Nothing’,,

   Not Understanding Nothing – A review of A Universe from Nothing – Edward Feser – June 2012
   Excerpt: A critic might reasonably question the arguments for a divine first cause of the cosmos. But to ask “What caused God?” misses the whole reason classical philosophers thought his existence necessary in the first place. So when physicist Lawrence Krauss begins his new book by suggesting that to ask “Who created the creator?” suffices to dispatch traditional philosophical theology, we know it isn’t going to end well. ,,,
   ,,, But Krauss simply can’t see the “difference between arguing in favor of an eternally existing creator versus an eternally existing universe without one.” The difference, as the reader of Aristotle or Aquinas knows, is that the universe changes while the unmoved mover does not, or, as the Neoplatonist can tell you, that the universe is made up of parts while its source is absolutely one; or, as Leibniz could tell you, that the universe is contingent and God absolutely necessary. There is thus a principled reason for regarding God rather than the universe as the terminus of explanation.
   http://www.firstthings.com/art.....ng-nothing

   To put what I consider the main philosophical arguments for God more simply, (at the risk of irritating more than a few philosophers), atheistic materialists do not have a causal mechanism to appeal to to explain how the universe originated, nor do they have a causal mechanism to explain why the universe continues to exists, nor why anything in the universe continues to exist in the universe, nor do they even have a causal mechanism for explaining how anything, any particle in the universe, moves within the universe!
   Here are a few notes along that line:

   The Kalam Cosmological Argument (argument from the beginning of the universe) – video
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CulBuMCLg0
7. 7
   bornagain77 says:

   November 22, 2014 at 9:01 pm

   God Is the Best Explanation For Why Anything At All Exists – William Lane Craig – video
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjuqBxg_5mA

   Aquinas’ Third way (argument from existence) – video
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V030hvnX5a4

   Aquinas’ First Way – (The First Mover – Unmoved Mover argument) – video
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmpw0_w27As

   “The ‘First Mover’ is necessary for change occurring at each moment.”
   Michael Egnor – Aquinas’ First Way
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....first.html

   As to the ancient first mover argument of Aquinas in particular, the double slit experiment is excellent for illustrating that the ‘unmoved mover’ argument is empirically valid.
   In the following video Anton Zeilinger, whose group is arguably the best group of experimentalists in quantum physics today, ‘tries’ to explain the double slit experiment to Morgan Freeman:

   Quantum Mechanics – Double Slit Experiment. Is anything real? (Prof. Anton Zeilinger) – video
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayvbKafw2g0

   Prof. Zeilinger makes this rather startling statement in the preceding video that meshes perfectly with the ‘first mover argument’::

   “The path taken by the photon is not an element of reality. We are not allowed to talk about the photon passing through this or this slit. Neither are we allowed to say the photon passes through both slits. All this kind of language is not applicable.”
   Anton Zeilinger

   If that was not enough to get Dr. Zeilinger’s point across, at the 4:12 minute mark in this following video,,,

   Double Slit Experiment – Explained By Prof Anton Zeilinger – video
   http://www.metacafe.com/watch/6101627/

   Professor Zeilinger states,,,

   “We know what the particle is doing at the source when it is created. We know what it is doing at the detector when it is registered. But we do not know what it is doing in-between.”
   Anton Zeilinger

   or as Dr. Egnor succintly put the argument,

   “The ‘First Mover’ is necessary for change occurring at each moment.”
   – Michael Egnor

   Supplemental quote:

   “Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, once posed an interesting question to the physicist Neil Turok: “What is it that makes the electrons continue to follow the laws.” Turok was surprised by the question; he recognized its force. Something seems to compel physical objects to obey the laws of nature, and what makes this observation odd is just that neither compulsion nor obedience are physical ideas.,,,
   Physicists since Einstein have tried to see in the laws of nature a formal structure that would allow them to say to themselves, “Ah, that is why they are true,” and they have failed.”
   Berlinski, The Devil’s Delusion pg. 132-133

   Verse and Music:

   Acts 17:28
   For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

   Britt Nicole – Gold
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9PjrtcHJPo

   Of related interest:,,, as Stephen Talbott has clearly pointed out, a major problem with Darwinian explanations is how to describe the complexities of life without illegitimately using terminology that invokes agency,,,

   The ‘Mental Cell’: Let’s Loosen Up Biological Thinking! – Stephen L. Talbott – September 9, 2014
   Excerpt: Many biologists are content to dismiss the problem with hand-waving: “When we wield the language of agency, we are speaking metaphorically, and we could just as well, if less conveniently, abandon the metaphors”.
   Yet no scientist or philosopher has shown how this shift of language could be effected. And the fact of the matter is just obvious: the biologist who is not investigating how the organism achieves something in a well-directed way is not yet doing biology, as opposed to physics or chemistry. Is this in turn just hand-waving? Let the reader inclined to think so take up a challenge: pose a single topic for biological research, doing so in language that avoids all implication of agency, cognition, and purposiveness1.
   One reason this cannot be done is clear enough: molecular biology — the discipline that was finally going to reduce life unreservedly to mindless mechanism — is now posing its own severe challenges. In this era of Big Data, the message from every side concerns previously unimagined complexity, incessant cross-talk and intertwining pathways, wildly unexpected genomic performances, dynamic conformational changes involving proteins and their cooperative or antagonistic binding partners, pervasive multifunctionality, intricately directed behavior somehow arising from the interaction of countless players in interpenetrating networks, and opposite effects by the same molecules in slightly different contexts. The picture at the molecular level begins to look as lively and organic — and thoughtful — as life itself.
   http://natureinstitute.org/txt.....ell_23.htm

   This working biologist agrees completely with Talbott:

   Life, Purpose, Mind: Where the Machine Metaphor Fails – Ann Gauger – June 2011
   Excerpt: I’m a working biologist, on bacterial regulation (transcription and translation and protein stability) through signalling molecules, ,,, I can confirm the following points as realities: we lack adequate conceptual categories for what we are seeing in the biological world; with many additional genomes sequenced annually, we have much more data than we know what to do with (and making sense of it has become the current challenge); cells are staggeringly chock full of sophisticated technologies, which are exquisitely integrated; life is not dominated by a single technology, but rather a composite of many; and yet life is more than the sum of its parts; in our work, we biologists use words that imply intentionality, functionality, strategy, and design in biology–we simply cannot avoid them.
   Furthermore, I suggest that to maintain that all of biology is solely a product of selection and genetic decay and time requires a metaphysical conviction that isn’t troubled by the evidence. Alternatively, it could be the view of someone who is unfamiliar with the evidence, for one reason or another. But for those who will consider the evidence that is so obvious throughout biology, I suggest it’s high time we moved on. – Matthew
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....nt-8858161
8. 8
   Me_Think says:

   November 22, 2014 at 9:16 pm

   bornagain77,

   Actually you, as an atheist, are the one without a mechanism,,

   Why not declare all those mechanisms officially that you pointed out to ? Why say ID is just design detection and nothing else? As I have repeatedly asked “How is ID any different from CSI if it just stops after detecting design ?”
9. 9
   bornagain77 says:

   November 22, 2014 at 9:43 pm

   Me_Think, good grief, do you even read for comprehension? What you use to imagine to be causally adequate mechanisms with law and chance are now shown to you to be nothing of the sort. Agent causality is, by far, and contrary to what you believed, the best causally adequate ‘mechanism’ going. Indeed, Agent causality, with a capital A, is the very ‘mechanism’ by which Newton inferred the law of Gravity in the first place.

   Why would anything else matter to you after being shown that you were so foundationally wrong in your presuppositional thinking???
10. 10
    William J Murray says:

    November 22, 2014 at 10:01 pm

    bornagain77 @6&7:

    Great stuff. Materialism was effectively disproved long ago.
11. 11
    Me_Think says:

    November 22, 2014 at 10:50 pm

    Me_Think, good grief, do you even read for comprehension? What you use to imagine to be causally adequate mechanisms with law and chance are now shown to you to be nothing of the sort. Agent causality is, by far, and contrary to what you believed, the best causally adequate ‘mechanism’ going.

    ID detects design and then fixes all knows improbable processes( pretty much everything – protein folding, 2 point mutations, searching new functions, metabolism ATP synthesis etc) by capital ‘A’ Agency ‘Agent causality’. ? Now it’s so much more clear why ID wouldn’t go beyond detecting design.
12. 12
    Me_Think says:

    November 22, 2014 at 11:07 pm

    bornagain77,
    What is more, if you preclude an omnipotent designer, you will need thousands of designers to guide evolutionary process. If you consider that just 30,000 process (against the actual billion process (in millions of organisms) – like protein folding, 2 point mutations, searching new functions, metabolism – pretty much everything which ID claims is improbable with unguided process), needs to be fixed in a given time frame, Binomial calculation shows:
    the minimum number of ID agents that can provide a 90% probability of getting service (attention to processes) for just 30,000 process is 3,069. IOW, Minimize the capacity required for Binomial Distribution with n = 30,000 p=0.1
    For a 99.9% ‘service’ probability, minimum 3,162 agents will be required. Imagine how much will be required for a billion process !
13. 13
    bornagain77 says:

    November 23, 2014 at 6:44 am

    Of semi related note to time: As to the Time Dilation of relativity,,,

    Albert Einstein – Special Relativity – Insight Into Eternity – ‘thought experiment’ video
    https://vimeo.com/93101738

    Time dilation
    Excerpt: Time dilation: special vs. general theories of relativity:
    In Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, time dilation in these two circumstances can be summarized:
    1. –In special relativity (or, hypothetically far from all gravitational mass), clocks that are moving with respect to an inertial system of observation are measured to be running slower. (i.e. For any observer accelerating, hypothetically, to the speed of light, time, as we understand it, will come to a complete stop).
    2.–In general relativity, clocks at lower potentials in a gravitational field—such as in closer proximity to a planet—are found to be running slower.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

    Time Dilation | Einstein’s Relativity – video
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-R8LGy-OVs

    There was a discrepancy found by Godel in the time dialation of relativity:

    THE GOD OF THE MATHEMATICIANS – DAVID P. GOLDMAN – August 2010
    Excerpt: Gödel’s personal God is under no obligation to behave in a predictable orderly fashion, and Gödel produced what may be the most damaging critique of general relativity. In a Festschrift, (a book honoring Einstein), for Einstein’s seventieth birthday in 1949, Gödel demonstrated the possibility of a special case in which, as Palle Yourgrau described the result, “the large-scale geometry of the world is so warped that there exist space-time curves that bend back on themselves so far that they close; that is, they return to their starting point.” This means that “a highly accelerated spaceship journey along such a closed path, or world line, could only be described as time travel.” In fact, “Gödel worked out the length and time for the journey, as well as the exact speed and fuel requirements.” Gödel, of course, did not actually believe in time travel, but he understood his paper to undermine the Einsteinian worldview from within.
    http://www.firstthings.com/art.....ematicians

    That discrepancy, found by Godel with relativity, was dealt with in the following study. the following study, through a fairly ingenious thought experiment, challenged the assumption of length contraction as being valid for ‘photon clocks’. In doing so, they cleared up some loose ends in relativity concerning time’s relation to space. Loose ends that had been ample fodder for much of the speculation of time travel being possible in relativity:

    Physicists continue work to abolish time as fourth dimension of space – April 2012
    Excerpt: “The rate of photon clocks in faster inertial systems will not slow down with regard to the photon clocks in a rest inertial system because the speed of light is constant in all inertial systems,” he said. “The rate of atom clocks will slow down because the ‘relativity’ of physical phenomena starts at the scale of pi mesons.”
    He also explained that, without length contraction, time dilation exists but in a different way than usually thought. “Time dilatation exists not in the sense that time as a fourth dimension of space dilates and as a result the clock rate is slower,” he explained. “Time dilatation simply means that, in a faster inertial system, the velocity of change slows down and this is valid for all observers.,, Our research confirms Gödel’s vision: time is not a physical dimension of space through which one could travel into the past or future.”
    http://phys.org/news/2012-04-p.....space.html

    Of supplemental note: The Time Dilation of Relativity is VERY friendly to the Theistic concept of eternity:

    “I’ve just developed a new theory of eternity.”
    Albert Einstein – The Einstein Factor – Reader’s Digest – 2005

    “The laws of relativity have changed timeless existence from a theological claim to a physical reality. Light, you see, is outside of time, a fact of nature proven in thousands of experiments at hundreds of universities. I don’t pretend to know how tomorrow can exist simultaneously with today and yesterday. But at the speed of light they actually and rigorously do. Time does not pass.”
    Richard Swenson – More Than Meets The Eye, Chpt. 12

    It is also very interesting to note that this strange higher dimensional, eternal, framework for time, found in both special relativity and general relativity, finds corroboration in Near Death Experience testimonies:

    ‘When you die, you enter eternity. It feels like you were always there, and you will always be there. You realize that existence on Earth is only just a brief instant.’
    Dr. Ken Ring – has extensively studied Near Death Experiences

    ‘Earthly time has no meaning in the spirit realm. There is no concept of before or after. Everything – past, present, future – exists simultaneously.’
    – Kimberly Clark Sharp – NDE Experiencer

    ‘There is no way to tell whether minutes, hours or years go by. Existence is the only reality and it is inseparable from the eternal now.’
    – John Star – NDE Experiencer

    ‘In the ‘spirit world,,, instantly, there was no sense of time. See, everything on earth is related to time. You got up this morning, you are going to go to bed tonight. Something is new, it will get old. Something is born, it’s going to die. Everything on the physical plane is relative to time, but everything in the spiritual plane is relative to eternity. Instantly I was in total consciousness and awareness of eternity, and you and I as we live in this earth cannot even comprehend it, because everything that we have here is filled within the veil of the temporal life. In the spirit life that is more real than anything else and it is awesome. Eternity as a concept is awesome. There is no such thing as time. I knew that whatever happened was going to go on and on.’
    In The Presence Of Almighty God – The NDE of Mickey Robinson – video
    https://vimeo.com/92172680

    “Regardless, it is impossible for me to adequately describe what I saw and felt. When I try to recount my experiences now, the description feels very pale. I feel as though I’m trying to describe a three-dimensional experience while living in a two-dimensional world. The appropriate words, descriptions and concepts don’t even exist in our current language. I have subsequently read the accounts of other people’s near-death experiences and their portrayals of heaven and I able to see the same limitations in their descriptions and vocabulary that I see in my own.”
    Mary C. Neal, MD – To Heaven And Back pg. 71
14. 14
    Joe says:

    November 23, 2014 at 7:45 am

    MT:

    What is more, if you preclude an omnipotent designer, you will need thousands of designers to guide evolutionary process.

    We don’t need any designers to guide evolution. Programmers are not required to guide their programs.

    And just because ID is about the detection and study of design, oops the study of means we do not stop after detecting design- that alone proves MT is empty- that does NOT prevent anyoine from asking or trying to answer the questions that come after design is detected. MT is proudly ignorant.
15. 15
    Joe says:

    November 23, 2014 at 7:47 am

    MT:

    Without an alternate (even tentative) mechanism, ID is not going anywhere. “

    Design is a mechanism by definition. And it is just as detailed as natural selection and drift- or any differing accumulations of genetic accidents. Intelligent design is OK with mutations. So buy a vowel and stop being so ignorant already
16. 16
    Me_Think says:

    November 23, 2014 at 8:26 am

    Design is a mechanism by definition. And it is just as detailed as natural selection and drift- or any differing accumulations of genetic accidents.

    Design can’t be a mechanism unless the mechanism is nature.
    A dam can’t produce hydroelectricity with out use of the gravitational force of falling or flowing water, a windmill can’t produce wind mill without wind.
    So by accepting design is the mechanism, what you really are accepting is Evolution is a Natural mechanism though it looks designed for you.
17. 17
    Me_Think says:

    November 23, 2014 at 8:29 am

    a windmill can’t produce wind mill electricity without wind.
18. 18
    Joe says:

    November 23, 2014 at 8:36 am

    MT:

    Design can’t be a mechanism unless the mechanism is nature.

    That is incorrect. Design is a mechanism by definition- deal with it or remain willfully ignorant.

    So by accepting design is the mechanism, what you really are accepting is Evolution is a Natural mechanism though it looks designed for you.

    What you are saying is that you cannot handle reality and are forced to try to change it.
19. 19
    Mung says:

    November 23, 2014 at 11:24 am

    Without an alternate (even tentative) mechanism, evolution is not going anywhere. “It just happened, that’s all” and nothing else is not going to take evolution far.
20. 20
    Cabal says:

    November 23, 2014 at 11:47 am

    I beg to differ wrt the claim that design by itself is a mechanism. My experience with design tells me that a design needs to be implemented, and something/somebud to perform the implementation.

    Please show how it is done.

    You are not saying that all the car designs out of Detroit were just designed and poof! out of the assembly lines they rolled? I am waiting for the next phase of ID theory explaining how species rolled out of the design studio.

    BTW, I agree that “ID is deceptively repackaged Creationism in a cheap tuxedo” is not a nice thing to say. It would look much better wtihout the reference to a cheap tuxedo.

    I know all about cheap tuxedo’s, I once owned a BMW 700LS!
21. 21
    awstar says:

    November 23, 2014 at 12:36 pm

    Cabal #20

    I beg to differ wrt the claim that design by itself is a mechanism. My experience with design tells me that a design needs to be implemented, and something/somebud to perform the implementation.

    Please show how it is done.

    Would it possibly that it is done by a mind (or agent of a mind) choosing one design option to the exclusion of all the possible design options? Then encoding the instructions for that design, in say, chemical molecules, to be implemented by another mind (or agent of a mind) which understands the code used by the first mind? Then that second mind (or agent of that mind) could read the decoded design and implement it. That seems to be how it’s done. Now where might we find examples of that mechanism? where, oh where?

    If this is indeed the mechanism used, then there is a whole big field of study that is waiting to be reaped — if scientists weren’t being handicapped by ruling philosophers posing as scientists.
22. 22
    Joe says:

    November 23, 2014 at 2:09 pm

    Cabal, feel free to try to change the definitions of “design” and “mechanism”. But until you do design is a mechanism by definition:

    design:
    : to plan and make (something) for a specific use or purpose

    Note the “and make” part

    and the noun:
    : a plan or protocol for carrying out or accomplishing something (especially a scientific experiment); also : the process of preparing this

    mechanism:

    : a process or system that is used to produce a particular result

    To build something per a plan is to build it by design.
23. 23
    velikovskys says:

    November 24, 2014 at 3:01 pm

    Joe:
    Cabal, feel free to try to change the definitions of “design” and “mechanism”. But until you do design is a mechanism by definition:

    Not the way ID uses design, design is a pattern of elements. If you want to use design as a mechanism then you need a designer. No designer no design mechanism.
24. 24
    Joe says:

    November 24, 2014 at 3:31 pm

    velikovskys:

    Not the way ID uses design, design is a pattern of elements.

    It’s both.

    If you want to use design as a mechanism then you need a designer. No designer no design mechanism.

    I am pretty sure Intelligent Design is OK with an intelligent designer.