Yet another chink in the tinfoil armor of that mystical nonsense.
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“Intelligent Design” Stumbles Again
April 5th, 2006
31 Comments
Oliver Willis
Like Kryptonite To Stupid
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Aren’t you mistaking ID for young earth creationism?
2 down, a bajillion to go. “Proof.”
Frankie must not believe in gravity; after all, gravity is a theory.
Frank, who’s saying ‘proof?’ It’s just more evidence. The point is MORE, not less evidence.
Jademold: Gravity (which is no theory, clown) is mathematically measurable.
Don’t you feel stupid calling a grown man, nearly twice your age, “Frankie”?
I’d love to hear from Tom, this week’s wannabe therapist, why he thinks that’s so.
Which reminds me, Jademold, you used to love analying me.
Why don’t you apply those skills to yourself. If you can stop this juvenile, stupid “name – change” operation, you might not get banned from so many conservative blogs.
Gravity may be a force, but there are only “theories” to explain it. Did they not teach physics at Bob Jones University?
Gravity is a theory- I belive in “intelligent falling” God’s hand is holding me down.
And I’m with Rounds on this one. Two is more than zero. I have seen no empirical evidence that supports creationism.
ZOMG! Frank typos how Jademold loves analying him – doh! Is that possible over the internets?
Force is measurable and tactile feature of the universe. Any “theory of gravity” proceeds from the mind. I’ve always thought that Oliver’s blog could use a few more debates on epistemology.
Frank is into having his analyst give him therapy. He calls it “analrapy.”
But have you been touched by His Noodly Appendage?
While unlikely to actually affect the attitudes of the Creationists very much, it’s always cool to see more transitional fossils.
If people evolving backwards within their own lifetimes is evidence of evolution, I think you’ve got all the evidence you need right here in this thread.
zappa: That’s so easy to say when the thread devolves into a juvenile, petulant, flamefest aimed at someone else.
come on – if you can’t laugh at people in the internets what use is it anymore? I would argue that I was never very evolved to begin with…
I thought that was why you came here – to flame and be flamed? Or did you come her to change others views or enlighten the heathens or debate serious subjects thoughtfuly and truthfuly or flame and be flamed?
I also think fart jokes are funny.
The Onion’s Intelligent Falling:
Did you guys watch the Sopranos on Sunday? There was this once scene when Tony was in the hospital and that religous guy (not sure his title) comes in and says that people mistakenly assume that dinosaurs and humans never lived together at the same time. He says something along the lines of, evolution is the work of the devil. Haha, sounds familiar doesn’t it. Chris busts out with a pretty fuunny line saying,
“No way. T Rex in the Garden of Eden? Adam and Eve would be runnin’ all the time, scared shitless. But the Bible says it was paradise. “
“Frankie must not believe in gravity; after all, gravity is a theory.”
“This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being… All variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God.” Sir Isaac Newton
The reason you don’t see evidence supporting Creationism or ID is that they are either unfalsifiable (pure undisguised Creationism) or so vague and negativistic that there’s no way to provide evidence for them (ID).
ID is an interesting case in point. Michael Behe and William Dembski (two of the ID movement’s luminaries) marshal mind-numbing detail and pseudo-mathematical hand-waving in support of a revamped Argument from Ignorance (”I can’t imagine a way in which X could have happened according to Y; therefore, X could not have happened according to Y”).
ID rests on the idea of irreducible complexity – some biological or biochemical system is irreducibly complex if it won’t work at all minus one or more of its pieces – and makes the (unsupported) leap to the idea that there is no way an irreducibly complex system could have come about through random processes. When someone says that “X” is possible, they are almost certainly right. When someone says that “X” is not possible, they are almost certainly wrong. It is completely possible that life could have arisen without there being a guiding hand sculpting it this way and that. It is also possible that there was a designer involved, but since that introduces a host of other questions (”What did the designer look like? Flesh-eating bacteria? What was the designer thinking? and so on), it’s a much less useful idea for getting reliable answers.
And since the supernatural creator would be by definition beyond our reckoning, it gives those of very little brain a lot of room to cheat.
A glance at the history of the Catholic Church versus science will show that from Copernicus to Galileo and beyond, when religious orthodoxy meets empirical science orthodoxy eventually loses. And say what you will about the Catholic Church, they at least learn their lessons. That’s why they came out in support of evolution and against “intelligent design”.
As a Catholic high school student, I learned about mitigated evolution, long before there was any talk of Creationism as science or Intelligent Design. And, as far as I know, there are no Darwinian Catholics under house arrest at the present time.
Watch this blog for changes, though.
“Darwinian Catholics under house arrest”? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? As for mitigated evolution, it’s just as unsupportable as ID from a scientific perspective and is really only good as a strategic retreat designed to preserve the possibility of the “hand of God” working miracles if you pray hard enough. Allowing the hand of a creator to guide evolution is no different from embedding all of life in a supernatural matrix; it’s weak, and it leaves too much room for cheating.
There’s a reason we exclude the supernatural from scientific theories – it’s unquantifiable and untestable, and becomes an enormous fudge factor. If you want to postulate the hand of a creator, you have to define that hand and make it testable, and design an experiment or field observation to do that test. And then you have to compare that creator against all the other possible creators and figure out how to tell if any of them are present and had a hand in human evolution. And then if more than one fit the data (so to speak), you have to figure out which one is the simplest one.
And so on, and so on. By bringing the undefinable and unquantifiable supernatural you create way more problems than you solve. ID is new lipstick on the same old pig.
If you’re saying that religion and science are not compatible, that’s not news… You can take that up with the scientists who believe in God.
By the way, I’m not trying to “use science” to trick anyone into believe in God.
Neither am I an undercover missionary.
By bringing the undefinable and unquantifiable supernatural you create way more problems than you solve.
Please explain.
Have you never heard the story of Gideon?
Frank_D – religion and science are only incompatible when one tries to encroach on the other’s turf. It isn’t possible to come up with a science of the supernatural, nor is it possible to come up with an empirically-based theology.
Yes, I have heard the story of Gideon. “The sword of the Lord and Gideon!” and so forth. All that proves is that Gideon managed to psyche himself up to punk the Midianites into fighting with each other, which means that he was a talented strategist and tactician. The story of his humble beginnings and an army whittled down from 32,000 to 300 sounds like so much priestly PR to me; without independent evidence (from a party with no stake in the outcome) it’s not a reliable source of evidence. And it’s very off point anyway.
If you had read the link, Gideon asked for proof that it was really the Lord speaking to him through an angel.
Even when proof was provided, he still didn’t believe.
beerwulf, too arrogant to follow directions, he walks into a wall.
Typical liberal: I don’t have to read the Bible — I know what it says.
Just like Jesse Jackson calling Mary and Joseph, a “homeless couple”, with Mary “carrying a baby out of wedlock.” And he calls himself “Reverend.”
Liberalim über alles!
Frank_D – What directions? All you asked me was if I had ever heard of Gideon. Frank_D, too enamored of amateur theologian “gotcha” debate tactics to ask a clear question.
As for proof, magic tricks (burning up bread and mutton) and pranks (wet wool) hardly qualify. Gideon seems to have been a very credulous man.
I got your random arrangement of molecules right here.
beerwulf, you were anxious to get your silly comeback into black and white, you didn’t read the passage. You know it, I know it.
The point was a simple one: He was given proof, and he still didn’t believe. That’s all. Nothing eartshaking here, no “gotchas”, theological or otherwise.
The only thing you got “caught” doing was responding as if you knew what the story was all about, when you didn’t.
Even liberal anti – religionists make mistakes sometimes.
Frank_D: “Even liberal anti-religionists make mistakes sometimes”. Yes, we do. It’d been many years since I’d read the story and I’d forgotten the details, so I’ll give you that one. But we tend to go back and self-correct our mistakes, so I went back and reread the story. (For the uninitiated, it’s in the book of Judges beginning in Chapter 6). I read about the bread and mutton and the wet fleece. And I have to say that it sounded every bit the silly fable I always thought it was. All of that was easily doable by an amateur magician or trickster, even in Biblical times. The Greeks and Egyptians had very sophisticated conjurors that could have appeared godlike to the Israelites, and it’s not a stretch to think that the temple priests picked up a few tricks from them.
BTW, I got your random arrangement of molecules right here.
The point was a simple one: He was given proof, and he still didn t believe. That s all. Nothing eartshaking here, no gotchas , theological or otherwise.
I see your Intelligent Design, and raise you one.
Frank_D, he was shown some parlor tricks. If that’s proof in your world, I have some Enron long options to sell you.
How can they be sure that it’s a creature that wasn’t just naturally like that? How would science prove that exactly? Just a thought.