Jayjay4547 wrote:Miller was wrong but in a different way than say the equation 1=0 is wrong. A wrong equation is just a dead useless thing like a hammer made of peanut butter. But Miller was wrong in an active polemical way; what he claimed as the truth (that a “designer” of nature would be “incompetent”) does lead us along a path, but one that is only interesting in its being the polar opposite of an astounding truth.

The DNA in every animal is different from that of either of its parents;

(I object that this sentence needed any refinement. Different is fine.)

what has lasted isn’t a particular DNA pattern, it is DNA as part of a complex method for playing out an animal. The astounding truth is indeed that a billion years ago that method was adequate to play out an amoeba but it has turned out that the same basic coding system with its cellular support, can also play out a whale or a human being.

The continuous small changes in biological evolution contrasts with discontinuous jumps in technological evolution e.g. from steam engines that used condensation to pressure engines, then to steam turbines then to gas turbines. An incompetent human designer would have been stuck with the first ply- of course, he wouldn’t even have got that far. And a conservative designer who made only minor changes wouldn’t have got far either. But Nature has gone from algal mats to elephants using DNA; that’s a big progression in functionality.

Yes. It took quite a while though, on a planetary scale.

If Miller was hugely wrong he wasn't on his own; most of the points he made have been brought up many times on anti-creationist forums like this one: the alleged imperfection of the human backbone and appendix, the retina supposedly back to front, the mosquito. He bought into an existing set of attitudes that are distinctly anti the scientific method. If you want to find out more about the backbone, the eye, appendix or mosquitoes, the least promising start is to treat them as fuckups. Indeed this standardized polemical position involves the person being able to see at a glance how stupid the natural design is, without further investigation. You don’t need to be Einstein to see this pattern; it’s right in your face. And biologists in general are to blame for not calling it.

But I still don't see the point you're trying to make. It doesn't matter whether the retina is or is optimal or not. We (broadly speaking) are looking whether there is any merit in a position that says that evolution (or anything else) required some god's intervention to occur. Whether it is optimal or not doesn't prove things either way.

It’s important to this discussion that Kenneth R Miller is a devout Christian

To me that is utterly unimportant and uninteresting. What really happened is irrespective of his, your or my personal beliefs.

and he has taken some flak for that, e.g. from Richard Dawkins. The Christian response to evolution has been a failure in several ways, one of them being to uncritically buy into positions we shouldn’t have, almost as a display of fealty to the atheist owners of the theory. That’s where the Intelligent Design people like Behe are being useful: he isn’t cowed and he gives the rest of us space to question basics.

I contest the usefulness if they have trouble being honest and tried to remain factually correct? Otherwise, why would one listen to them let alone believe them?

Bert

Hahahahaha! The irony of you accusing anybody anywhere of intellectual failure is quite delicious.

You just keep on lying Jayjay.
Tell me, do you actually think you'll convince anyone with such disengenuous behaviour?

Jayjay4547 wrote: it may be not valid scientifically

There is no "may" about it JayJay. ID is not falsifiable and does not make useful predictions. It is NOT science.

Jayjay4547 wrote:but to say it’s lying shit

That's because it is lying shit. It is a lie, by religionists, created to try and give a scientific pretence to their belief that "goddidit."


Anyhow, about them Bees JayJay. I'm waiting.

Jayjay4547 wrote:ID tries to prove that evolution could not possibly have happened in the way Darwin described;

No, it makes knowingly disingenuous claims in order to help ignoramuses and religious bigots pretend that their fairy stories are at least as good as, and typically better than, actual science.

Jayjay4547 wrote:A particular court in the USA decided that ID was not scientific at base but rather came from a religious position and therefore should not be taught as a scientific subject in school. That doesn’t make it “legally invalid”.

It's worth noting that in the Dover trial, various ID proponents avoided the trial because they were rather less happy to be knowingly dishonest under oath than they are in their usual paid roles as ID promoters, and the judge cast significant doubt on the honesty of those who did give evidence.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Yes I agree; the scientific method works on that part of the world we can experiment with or own intellectually while we use the word “God” to grapple with the pole of what we can’t experiment with and which owns us.

That seems a perfect example of the arrogance of the believer feeling they are second only to a deity and they have ownership rights on anything 'lower', given them by some being who considers them special beyond anything else. The kind of arrogance which leads many people to consider that they can do what the hell they like with nature.

And, of course, it's complete bollocks, since there is no simple hierarchical order of what can experiment on or understand what.
Humans can experiment on and try to understand molecules or bacteria or societies, and can gain knowledge of weather systems, planets, solar systems, galaxies or the universe by using scientific techniques, since from a scientific point of view (as opposed to a parochial ego-driven religious point of view) there is nothing 'special' about humans in terms of the scale of things which can be examined and considered.

Oh this promises to be hilarious. Let's take a look at this shall we?

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote: Jayjay, Jayjay Jayjay, where can I start?

A good place to start would be not with fatuous condescension.

An even better place to start, would be to cease pretending that made up shit counts for more than verifiable fact.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote: First of all "Intelligent Design" has been exposed for the lying shit it is. It is NOT valid scientifically, legally or even theologically.

ID tries to prove that evolution could not possibly have happened in the way Darwin described;

No it doesn't, it merely asserts this. Then demands that its unsupported assertions be treated as fact. Oh wait, where have we seen this modus operandi before? Oh that's right, it's been standard creationist operating procedure, ever since arch-charlatan and professional liar for doctrine Henry Morris launched modern American corporate creationism.

The only trouble being, of course, that the number of peer reviewed papers containing intricate documentation of experiments demonstrating that Darwin was right, runs into the tens of thousands. But of course the professional liars for doctrine who tried to push ID into classrooms, were hoping no one would either notice or mention this.

Jayjay4547 wrote:it might well be wrong

It is wrong. Which is why it doesn't belong in science classes.

Jayjay4547 wrote:and it may be not valid scientifically

"Magic Man did it" doesn't rise to the level of competence required to be worthy of a point of view. Apart from the fact that the mere existence of this entity is itself an untestable, and therefore useless, assertion, so is the assertion that said entity was purportedly responsible for bringing the biosphere into existence. Plus, there's the little matter of those tens of thousands of papers demonstrating that Darwin was right, and that as a direct corollary, the professional liars for doctrine at the Duplicity Institute are all wrong, not to mention the open admission by said professional liars for doctrine in their own documents, that what they're really out to sell is religious mythology.

Jayjay4547 wrote:but to say it’s lying shit that isn’t valid legally or even theologically is just flowery nonsense.

Bollocks. It's OBSERVABLE FACT, JayJay. Observable fact that was brought into sharp relief at the Dover Trial. Where Judge Jones exerted the diligent effort to produce a 139 page executive summary of said trial, in which he noted that [1] the ID movement was demonstrably nothing more than an attempt to smuggle religious creationism into science classes via a sneaky back door, in violation of extant legislation in the USA prohibiting this, and [2] the propensity for members of the ID movement to lie through their teeth whenever they thought they coiuld get away with it. Judge Jones openly stated in that executive summary, that he regarded numerous IDist as having perjured themselves on oath during the trial.

Oh, and you might want to familiarise yourself with the fact that the world's two largest Christian denominations, the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, both regard ID as at best an aberration, at worst a heresy. You might also want to familiarise yourself with the intellectual paucity of the "god of the gaps" argument which is central to ID propaganda, and which no less a person than Dietrich Bonhoeffer subjected to an exquisite demolition in his final writings, prior to his execution by the Nazis. Indeed, there's a nice article on this in Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, b]14:(4): 203-220 (4th quarter of 1971). Here's the essential meat of his demolition, as covered in that article:

Bube, 1971 wrote:The Key: God-Of-The-Gaps

In his letter of May 25, 1944, Bonhoeffer indicates the key to his developing conceptions of man come of age and religionless Christianity [Italics mine].

Weizsacker's book Das Weltbild det Physik is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to us use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. ... God is no stopgap; he must be recognised at the centre of our life, not when we are at the endof our resources.

Bonhoeffer makes the connection between the fallacy of the God-of-the-Gaps in physical science with the fallacy of the God-of-the-Gaps in all of life.

There is a long history of the attempt by Christians to prove or at least defend their belief in the existence and activity of God by proposing that it is God alone who acts in areas in which mani is ignorant of any natural mechanism. The argument runs this way: man may now know much about physics, chemistry, biology and the like, but there remain certain key physical mechanisms, chemical mechanisms, or biological mechanisms, which must forever elude him because such mechanisms do not in fact exist. These gaps in natural description are filled only by the recognition that God acts in these gaps above and beyond any physical, chemical or biological mechanism. In this interpretation, God remains the Great Mechanician, and the possibility of a complete physical, chemical or biological description - even in principle - is forever ruled out by the very existence and activity of God.

Newton invoked the God-of-the-Gaps when certain irregularities in the motion of the planets could not be explained by his concurrent theory of gravitation; since the mechanics of gravity couldn not explain this irregularity, Newton concluded that it must be a dieect manifestation of the intervention of God. Newton was wrong: subsequent analysis of the details of the planetary system provided a natural mechanism for these irregularities. An evidence for the activity of God was lost.

The list of phenomena invoked by Christians to defend the God-of-the-Gaps is long indeed and still very much present with us. Only God can heal the sick or bring the rain. But soon men could also heal the sick and even bring the rain. Evidence for the activity of God was lost. Today one still hears that there could be no natural mechanism for the origin of life - only a supernatural intervention of God would be adequate. What will be said when men produce life from non-living matter in the laboratory? Only God can determine the sex or personality parameters of a foetus; what will be said when men control some or many of these characteristics?

The continuous chain of evidence in the physical and biological sciences is so compelling that most knowledgeable Christians today recognise the fallacy of the God-of-the-Gaps argument. They see that such an advocacy results in the paradox of less and less evidence for the existence and activity of God resulting from more and more knowledge of His creation. They emphasise the importance of seeing God in all phenomena, the natural as much as the supernatural, and of recognising that the very existence of the material universe depends moment-by-moment upon the sustaining activity of God [My note here: unsupported assertion]. This growing consensus can be summarised in the words of Malcolm Jeeves:

God, to the theist, while being the cause of everything, is in the scientific sense the explanation of nothing.

Today many Christians are willing to admit that a complete description in phsyical and biological categories may well be possible, at least in principle, without the God-hypothesis supplying an missing mechanism in these categories, but they do not conclude that this invalidates descriptions in other categories as well.

With these conclusions recognising the fallacy of the God-of-the-Gaps, Bonhoeffer was quick to agree. But it seemed to him only part of the picture to limit the discussion to the physical and biological sciences. If the concept of a God-of-the-Gaps was insufficient, and in fact destructive of true Christian witness, in the case of the physical and the biological, could it be expected to be any less insufficient and destructive in the case of the religious? If the search for the reality of God in the gaps of man's ignorance in physics and biology were doomed to failure, is it not likely that the search for the reality of God in the gaps of man's ignorance in religious matters is likewise doomed? Bonhoeffer maintains that the situation is quite analogous.

So already, we have one major theologian who, on the basis of the above analysis of his work, and the manifest appeal by ID to the fallacy of the God-of-the-Gaps, would be led naturally to reject ID.

So much for your assertion that the entirely proper description given above of ID, and its combination of tendentious dishonesty and intellectual paucity, purportedly constitutes "flowery nonsense". But then reality has a habit of not supporting your fantasy fabrications, JayJay, and this is another case in point.

Moving on ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:A particular court in the USA decided that ID was not scientific at base but rather came from a religious position and therefore should not be taught as a scientific subject in school. That doesn’t make it “legally invalid”.

It certainly makes it legally invalid in a nation with a specific constitutional provision forbidding religious favouritism in public institutions. What part of this elementary concept do you not understand, JayJay? ID was found to be a violation of the Establishment Clause, and wherever that Establishment Clause holds, it is legally invalid as a result.

Jayjay4547 wrote:And as to “theologically invalid” theology is hardly monolithic enough to support that.

See above. Apart from the two largest Christian denominations on the planet, there's the little matter of how, as I've just demonstrated above, Bonhoeffer would be merely one of a number of respected theologians who would reject ID, because ID involves a simplistic gap view of your god, one that is incompatible with any proper academic treatment of the subject.

Of course, at this juncture I have to issue the caveat that theology is pretty much a data-free enterprise, when it comes to the matter of establishing that any god-type entity actually exists, and no rigorous procedure for determining the answer to the existence question has arisen from the world of theological activity, despite having had several millennia's worth of head start on science. This in itself is likely to be informative to inquiring minds, but I digress. But even within these severe limitations of the entire supernaturalist enterprise, the above paper I've presented shows that people such as Bonhoeffer were at least trying to give the subject some serious treatment, even if they were doing so whilst operating within a manifestly handicapped endeavour.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote: Scientific models are procedurally agnostic. If someone had a valid way to include god[s] in scientific models they would have done so. So far, these efforts have not succeeded.

Yes I agree; the scientific method works on that part of the world we can experiment with or own intellectually while we use the word “God” to grapple with the pole of what we can’t experiment with

Again, all you're doing here is revealing that you're operating at the level of gap theology. Bonhoeffer above would like a word with you.

Jayjay4547 wrote:and which owns us.

Unsupported assertion. Got any genuine evidence for the existence of this entity?

Pausing to deal with this for a moment:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:Science works by making descriptive models of natural phenomena, and testing the predictions of those models to destruction. if we can't destroy them, we accept them, not as truth, but as working models, because we don't know if or when some further evidence will destroy a scientific model or oblige us to change it. There is no ideology involved.

JayJay will almost certain summarily dismiss this entirely proper analysis, and resurrect his "atheist ideology" bullshit, because not treating his ideological presuppositions as fact, even when reality points and laughs at them, is too much of a personal affront for him to bear. He's manifestly so wedded to the tinselly holograms inside his head, that he routinely adopts the all too familiar position we see from creationists: "if reality and doctrine differ, reality is wrong and doctrine is right", or variations upon that theme. He's been doing this for years, and no amount of schooling by people who paid attention in class will sway him.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:Science is an intellectual and practical tool. Done properly it is no more ideological that a knife, a saw or a teapot.

And once again, let's see how long it takes JayJay to resurrect his "atheist ideology" bullshit, whenever science doesn't genuflect before his fabrications and fantasies.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:Indeed, the warped pseudo-genetics of Lysenko, motivated by socialist dogma in the new defunct Soviet Union, put Russian science back by decades.

A delicious irony being, of course, that the ideology involved resulted in evolutionary biologists being sent to Gulags. Not quite the script that creationists like to wave in front of people's faces, when peddling the usual drivel that their ideas are being "expelled" and all the rest of it. They like to posture as being some valiant band of persecuted visionaries, the sole heirs to The TruthTM, hoping no one will notice how many lies they have to peddle in pursuit of their version of The TruthTM.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:All real scientists agree. including Ken Miller, that you leave you faith and beliefs and prejudices outside the lab door. You do that or risk doing poor science or even pseudo-science. Nearly everyone understands this except you. [And other creationists].

But creationists have a vested ideological interest in wilfully ignoring this elementary fact. That vested ideological interest arising from their desperate need to seek hegemony for their ideology at all costs, no matter how much they have to lie and cheat on behalf thereof. And it's precisely because they have a manifest ideological agenda, that they have to erect dishonest fabrications about the pursuit of science, whenever its entirely proper paying attention to data instead of ideological presuppositions, leads to conclusions that don't conform ideologically to the creationist agenda. The whole "atheist ideology" bullshit is gross and dishonest misrepresentation from start to finish, and it's long overdue that JayJay drops this bullshit and lies. He won't of course, because he's determined to push his own ideology, even when reality is playing him a heavy rock concert power ballad with the amplifier turned up to Spinal Tap 11, telling him that his fabrications and fantasies are deluded, retarded nonsense.

Back to the main course ...

Jayjay4547 wrote:You misunderstand what I understand.

You don't "understand" anything here, you merely assert. Which is why so much of your output is so farcically incompetent.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The issue I was raising is that some scientists for example Miller make extraordinary statements which they haven’t “tested to destruction”, quite the opposite;

Bullshit. Oh wait, how often in his presentations on relevant subjects, as seen in various YouTube videos, does Miller reference the contents of peer reviewed papers? In fact, you can see the papers being referenced, being displayed on the screen behind him, in many of those instances.

Jayjay4547 wrote:their claims are always presented as being immediately obvious to a casual human observer;

Er, no. That's why he's referencing the scientific papers. Because some of the work involved isn't being presented as "immediately obvious to a casual human observer", instead, Miller is taking time out to make non-obvious science accessible.

Jayjay4547 wrote:the chordate retina is back to front; the human backbone has “imperfection of design”, the human appendix serves only to make us sick, there is nothing to brag about in the design of the mosquito.

Oh wait, what part of "the DATA tells us this" do you not understand?

Jayjay4547 wrote:These claims are presented to counter ID but they should create alarm about the implied hubristic status of the claimant;

Bollocks. Oh wait, when the DATA, as reported in the peer reviewed papers being referenced, tells us something, taking note thereof isn't an act of hubris. Do learn the fucking elementary concepts, JayJay, and drop the fantasy fabrications.

Jayjay4547 wrote:they aren’t the kind of thing a student of nature should say, because they frustrate study into nature.

Bollocks. Once again, what part of "the DATA tells us this" do you not understand?

Only a creationist could possibly regard paying attention to the data as "frustrating the study into nature". As opposed, of course, to the creationist business of making shit up, then pretending that said made up shit dictates how reality works, and telling us all that when reality disagrees, it's reality that's wrong.

Jayjay4547 wrote:As I argued before the elephant in the room is just how deeply into the functionality of nature it has been possible to reach, in the belief that it does make sense.

Oh wait, how much of this depended upon mythological fantasies, again? Oh that's right, NONE of it.

On the other hand, how much of this depended upon paying attention to the data? Oh that's right, ALL OF IT.

Seeing a pattern here are you, JayJay?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Counter arguments come from people who actually have looked more deeply into nature, as in this topic’s original issue about the eye

Bollocks. Most of the so-called "counter-arguments", or more correctly, counter-assertions, comes from people making up apologetic shit whilst warming their armchairs with their voluminous backsides. Usually involving quote mining the science.

Jayjay4547 wrote:but those positions are tarnished by implied association with ID

No, they're tarnished because the're manifest apologetic bullshit. They're manifestly made up by stormtroopers for religious ideology.

Jayjay4547 wrote:and as in this thread, they are scorned.

They're scorned because they're easily exposed as made up shit.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote: ID is simply not predictive. This is what Ken Miller and other scientists and posters here have demonstrated here time and again.

In some of his popular books [not his scientific papers or textbooks], Ken Miller sometimes ponders how the god he believes in can interact with the universe. When he does this however, he freely admits he is just pondering and not following scientific procedures or methods. He imagines half way through "Finding Darwin's God" that god may interact at the quantum level to influence things like life evolution. This is fair enough from a theological perspective. It maybe even be true. Miller may be right. Or he may be wrong. We just don't know, and scientifically, the idea is untestable.

Miller, like Behe, is looking for God in the wrong place.

How do you actually know this, JayJay, as opposed to merely treating yet more unsupported assertions as fact? Do you have any actual data to work with here, or are you merely working with yet more apologetic fabrications?

Jayjay4547 wrote:The general direction that God lies in is in what we are a part of, what has shaped us, what we can protect, show loyalty towards, rationally sacrifice ourselves for.

Where's the data, JayJay? I'm still waiting to see real data that points to an unambiguous 'yes' answer to the existence question, and for that matter, I'm still waiting to see something resembling a rigorous means of determining the answer to start with. It's not as if supernaturalists have lacked time to come up with the goods: we've been seeing assertions of this sort coming from supernaturalists for 5,000 years. But that's the trouble - assertions is all they've ever produced.

Jayjay4547 wrote:God is beyond all nations, but He in in that general direction. God is beyond the biosphere, but He is in that direction.

Got data, have you?

Jayjay4547 wrote:God is not to be found tinkering with the world at the quantum level. There is absolutely no bar to experimenting at the quantum level but we strain to objective insights into even the adjacent parts of society and ecology.

Some of us put in the effort to find out.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Where are we going to be with climate change in a hundred years? Nature is too complicated to work that out? Balderdash. In a hundred years a school child will be able to explain what did happen- assuming there are still schools and children.

Funny how schoolchildren can also recognise that much of your output is fantasy fabrication.

Jayjay4547 wrote:So I’m arguing that there has been an intellectual failure by scientific Christians like Miller And that part of their failure has been to uncritically go with established fashions that are basically atheist.

Bullshit. It's not about "fashions", JayJay, it's about fucking data. Learn this and stop posting lies and drivel.

Jayjay4547 wrote:One thing that is good about Behe is that he hasn’t bought into that fashion

HA HA HA HA HA HA!

He's bought into creationist fashion on a grand scale.

Jayjay4547 wrote:but has bravely held to the classic reverence for the Creation.

He's simply treated sad mythological fantasies as fact. Like everyone else doing the same, he needs to grow the fuck up. The idea that there's anything "brave" about his taking the Duplicity Institute's filthy lucre, in exchange for becoming a shill for a retarded ideology, is another of those fantasies only a creationist could regard as other than fantasy. Behe is on his own sad little interstellar voyage to the Fail Nebula, calling en route at the Planet Tard, and its orbiting moons Derp, Dork and Klutz.

I wonder if you're actually comprehending the point tolman is trying to make. You're deliberately setting up a false comparison, and you're the only one that has introduced the idea of grand social experimentation and change.

The majority of those 'Great Experiment(s)' you list are/were social and/or political movements that were designed to achieve certain outcomes. They were emphatically not scientific experiments aimed at better understanding societies.

We can, and do, experiment socially and with societies large and small all the time. It's not a science experiment, it's people living life and trying to improve their lot. We change social mores and behaviours with rules and regulations. We forbid certain things, permit things, change the way things are done, let some traditions lapse and build others. Gay marriage was once illegal almost everywhere, and now its becoming legal. Smoking was legal almost everywhere, and now its becoming illegal in public area. If that's not social experimentation, what is?

And we can and do understand societies - there's a whole branch of science known as the social science. There's sociology, the study of extant societies and cultures, and anthropology, the study of ancient societies and cultures.

Large scale, top down social experiments are still in evidence. Look up Oportunidades in Mexico, or Bolsa Familia from Brazil.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Strong language. Can you support your claim of a “knowingly disingenuous claim” made by ID proponent? Being wrong isn’t the same as being a liar.

You've already been shown the transcript of the fuckwit you cite from the Dover trial. Yes, Behe is a lying cunt. Yes, Behe is a young-Earth cretinist. When he says otherwise, he's lying, just like you.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:ID tries to prove that evolution could not possibly have happened in the way Darwin described;

No, it makes knowingly disingenuous claims in order to help ignoramuses and religious bigots pretend that their fairly stories are at least as good as, and typically better than, actual science.

Strong language. Can you support your claim of a “knowingly disingenuous claim” made by ID proponent? Being wrong isn’t the same as being a liar.

Claiming that fossils support a global flood when it does no such thing.
Claiming ID is a scientific theory when they know it's not.
Claiming that there's an atheist ideology when they know there's not.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The “fairy stories” you refer to are doubtless found in Genesis but Behe (the most prominent ID proponent) , doesn't do that, according to the Wikipedia entry on him:

"Evolution is a controversial topic, so it is necessary to address a few basic questions at the beginning of the book. Many people think that questioning Darwinian evolution must be equivalent to espousing creationism. As commonly understood, creationism involves belief in an earth formed only about ten thousand years ago, an interpretation of the Bible that is still very popular. For the record, I have no reason to doubt that the universe is the billions of years old that physicists say it is. Further, I find the idea of common descent (that all organisms share a common ancestor) fairly convincing, and have no particular reason to doubt it. I greatly respect the work of my colleagues who study the development and behavior of organisms within an evolutionary framework, and I think that evolutionary biologists have contributed enormously to our understanding of the world. Although Darwin's mechanism – natural selection working on variation – might explain many things, however, I do not believe it explains molecular life. I also do not think it surprising that the new science of the very small might change the way we view the less small." Darwin's Black Box, pp 5–6.

So Michael Behe doesn’t give any direct support to New Earth Creationism or Bible Literalism.

He still asserts a goddidit without any evidence whatsoever and still makes asinine claims like the bolded bit.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:A particular court in the USA decided that ID was not scientific at base but rather came from a religious position and therefore should not be taught as a scientific subject in school. That doesn’t make it “legally invalid”.

It's worth noting that in the Dover trial, various ID proponents avoided the trial because they were rather less happy to be knowingly dishonest under oath than they are in their usual paid roles as ID promoters, and the judge cast significant doubt on the honesty of those who did give evidence.

That still doesn’t make ID “legally invalid”.

No, the fact that it's not a scientific theory does.
The fact that it's based on blind and assertions and the straw-manning of evolution does.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Speaking of “paid promoters”, Dawkins and Steven Jay Gould were both salaried; practically every authority on evolution has been salaried, often by a university -Darwin and Wallace being exceptions.

They're paid to do their job: teach students science and facts. Not to promote ideologies and fantasy like ID proponents are.

Jayjay4547 wrote: The role of universities in promoting evolution and their power as social institutions are big factors in the role the theory has played in Western societies.

They promote evolution in the same sense that they 'promote' gravity, chemistry, empiricism etc.
They promote sound science and rational thought. Unlike the Discovery Insitute.

Jayjay4547 wrote:The financial support given to the Discovery Institute must be relatively negligible.

Need I remind you that your tendency to preassume your desired conclusions hasn't served you well?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute#Funding
It receives millions each year.
Either way the point isn't how much money they receive, it's that they sell lies and misinformation.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Yes I agree; the scientific method works on that part of the world we can experiment with or own intellectually while we use the word “God” to grapple with the pole of what we can’t experiment with and which owns us.

That seems a perfect example of the arrogance of the believer feeling they are second only to a deity and they have ownership rights on anything 'lower', given them by some being who considers them special beyond anything else. The kind of arrogance which leads many people to consider that they can do what the hell they like with nature.

Nah, it’s nothing to do with arrogance of the believer.

It does. You blindly assert god as the answer instead of humbly and correctly admitting "I don't know".

Jayjay4547 wrote:I’m just pointing out, when people use the word “God”, objectively, in what direction are they pointing. They are pointing up and towards something “greater than themselves”.

In other words, they're using god as a cop-out instead of actually studying the issue or admitting they don't know.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote: And, of course, it's complete bollocks, since there is no simple hierarchical order of what can experiment on or understand what.

It might not be simple but the hierarchical order is pretty obvious.

Except that it isn't.
Your oncoming subjective assertions not withstanding.

Jayjay4547 wrote: A child raised in a Skinner box would not have language rather languages are generated by communicating groups of young people- I’m thinking of the evolution of sign languages. So society is in some aspects our creator. No one can completely get their head around their society. In a real sense society owns one; it can make one do things and it can do things to one.

Only so long as you let it. There are people who ignore society.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

tolman wrote: Humans can experiment on and try to understand molecules or bacteria or societies, and can gain knowledge of weather systems, planets, solar systems, galaxies or the universe by using scientific techniques, since from a scientific point of view (as opposed to a parochial ego-driven religious point of view) there is nothing 'special' about humans in terms of the scale of things which can be examined and considered.

The point is, we can try to understand bacteria or societies, but we have less success figuring out society. And we can’t really experiment it. The Wiki entry on “Great Experiment” has this disambiguation:
• United States, The Great Republic Experiment.
• Confederate States, Great Experiment of States' rights.
• Soviet Union, The Great Socialist Experiment.
• Nazi Germany, The Great Nordic Experiment.
• Israel, The Great Zionist Experiment.
• Canada: The Great Experiment, a documentary

A lot of blood was spilled in some of those social “experiments”- which reflects that people have been passionately involved in achieving a particular end in them. And generally, the outcome didn’t remotely resemble the” research hypothesis”.

That's because none of these were scientific experiments.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Your examples of physically big things like galaxies, weather systems, planets, solar systems are irrelevant to my point about intellectual ownership. The hierarchy of intellectual ownership seems to be about whether the subject contains rich interactions and whether those involve the observer.

Pure gibberish.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Planets in a solar system interact weakly with one another, thanks to the overwhelming mass of their central star and the large separation between planets. So their motion can be accurately modeled without having to experiment in the sense of interfering with one group of planets. We can do less well but OK with modeling weather systems that are made of simply interacting parts- especially if we are Norwegian . But we are hopeless at modeling society which is richly interacting and engages our wills. And we are hopeless at modelling the biosphere, though previously that hasn’t bothered us much.

More rectal matter.

Jayjay4547 wrote:[i]"Evolution is a controversial topic,

This is a classic example of Behe "poisoning the well." There is no controversy about evolution amongst those who understand it. Religionists like to claim there is controversy as a very facile attempt to try give their assertions for supernatural entities some sort of legitimacy.

Only uneducated fuckwits buy into such nonsense.

Jayjay4547 wrote:
It might not be simple but the hierarchical order is pretty obvious.

Way to go in misunderstanding the point being made JayJay. Bravo.

Indeed, the only "controversy" surrounding evolution is the ideologically manufactured, synthetic "controversy" fabricated for ideological reasons by creationists. Amongst those of us who paid attention in science classes, there is no "controversy". Evolutionary processes demonstrably exist, demonstrably work, and the empirical support for this is colossal. The only individuals pretending otherwise, are those who prefer bad mythology to good, hard, scientific fact, or those who are hoping to persuade large numbers of gullible and uneducated people to do the same, in order to line their pockets with those other people's money.

For that matter, one of the more bizarre ironies arising from the observable facts, is the manner in which people who express in vocal terms suspicions about government taking money from them in taxes, exhibit no suspicion about the ignorance tax routinely levied by corporate creationism upon them, or the ignorance tax levied upon them by corporate religion in the form of "tithes". The same people who whinge and bleat about about having to hand money over to Teh Evil GubmintTM, composed frequently of politicians that they voted for, are completely and utterly silent when it comes to the manner in which corporate religion and corporate creationism bleeds money out of them via the religious protection racket, and lines the pockets of people who were never subject to any form of democratic selection.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:Let's take a look at this shall we?

JayJay, I really wonder at times what fantasy parallel universe you're occupying, because NONE of your assertions bears even the most tenuous connection to observational reality. The notion that Behe is some sort of intellectual gadfly stinging the rest of biology into seeing the light, is not merely fucking laughable, it's deranged, palsied, encephalitic, and bordering on the clinically insane. Behe is a failtard, he's a wank-break shill for a wank-break ideology, the pedlars of which are professional liars for doctrine without exception, and the idea that his vomitings rise above the level of chimpanzee shit flinging, is another of those deranged notions that only a totally blinkered creationist ideological stormtrooper could treat as being worthy of something other than scorn and derision.

Cali, don’t you ever consider that you might be going too far in your bad mouthing of people you disagree with? No governor on your tongue? You get hoity-hoity when I dare criticise the work of establishment scientists, (never their persons) you call that traducing. Yet you give yourself permission to vomit all over Michael Behe. It’s unseemly and it’s uninsightful. Behe is no gadfly he is just a scientist who marveled so deeply at the functionality of what he saw through the microscope as to disbelieve that it could have happened through trial and error. And he is a stubborn cove. Institutional science can put up with a few people like him.

I don’t myself think that Behe is on the money, but he may be onto something that can be turned upside down into truth by reexamining what we mean by human design of things; that it is an exploration of what is creatively possible: the creativity doesn’t subsist in the designer but in what is possible within that state or level of technology.

Anyway that wasn’t the point I wanted to make, I wanted to point to the value of skeptical courage; the problem with the Christian evolutionist Kenneth R Miller is that he uncritically accepts what he never should have, that a human observer can see imperfections in natural design , at first glance . One way or another that is hubris; the characteristic fault of the atheist.

Bullshjit jayjay.

You talk of skeptical courage? Skeptical courage also takes intellectual honesty to be of use to anyone.

Let me give you an example of REAL character, real intellectual courage. Tutors at Murdoch university have to do an induction course. Among other things, there were lectures by Indigenous people on Indigenous matters.

I was sitting there listing to one of these lecturers and he started gobbing off about Social "darwinism". I could not believe such ignorance! I politely interrupted the speaker and said, first of all, that social darwinism [invented by Herbert Spencer] had nothing to do with Charles Darwin's biological theory. Second, I claimed, Darwin published on Natural Selection in 1858 [in a paper with Wallace] and in his 1859 book "Origins". How could Darwin therefore be responsible for the Pinjarra massacre and other pogroms.
You know what this MAN did, this excellent human being? He accepted the facts, and admitted his opinion was wrong. Later, during the tea break, he told me he had a "young creationist" educational background. His "fault" was in assuming his religious missionary teachers were being honest and giving him the facts. I also pointed out that the science backs up aboriginal claims on the land, whereas creationism does not. Because creationists only give an age to the earth in thousands of years [6 to 10K years], whereas scientific evidence clearly indicates that aboriginals were present in Australia at least 50,000 years ago, or even 60,000 years ago.

The gentleman now knows the facts, and was intellectually honest enough to accept them. He realizes that science is not his enemy, ignorance is. That is intellectual courage. To admit that he was wrong. This is a guy who has had his ancestors murdered by whites, has experienced prejudice and hardship from racism, he had every reason not to believe me. But he did. Why? Because facts are facts.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:Let's take a look at this shall we?

JayJay, I really wonder at times what fantasy parallel universe you're occupying, because NONE of your assertions bears even the most tenuous connection to observational reality. The notion that Behe is some sort of intellectual gadfly stinging the rest of biology into seeing the light, is not merely fucking laughable, it's deranged, palsied, encephalitic, and bordering on the clinically insane. Behe is a failtard, he's a wank-break shill for a wank-break ideology, the pedlars of which are professional liars for doctrine without exception, and the idea that his vomitings rise above the level of chimpanzee shit flinging, is another of those deranged notions that only a totally blinkered creationist ideological stormtrooper could treat as being worthy of something other than scorn and derision.

Cali, don’t you ever consider that you might be going too far in your bad mouthing of people you disagree with?

Once again, JayJay, the FACTS support my statements. Suck on it.

Jayjay4547 wrote: No governor on your tongue?

As opposed to no governor on your capacity to make shit up, and then pretend your made up shit equals fact?

Jayjay4547 wrote:You get hoity-hoity when I dare criticise the work of establishment scientists

Drop the blatant ideological bias, JayJay.

Jayjay4547 wrote:(never their persons)

Except that you're deliberately and wilfully suggesting that honest, hard working scientists are engaged in the same dishonest acts of fabrication we see all too often in your posts. An accusation that, given the evidence available, is manifestly defamatory.

Jayjay4547 wrote:you call that traducing.

What else does one call false accusations of this sort, JayJay?

Jayjay4547 wrote:Yet you give yourself permission to vomit all over Michael Behe.

That's because, once again, the evidence tells me he's a charlatan. Evidence such as his lame answers to questions put to him during the Dover Trial. Evidence such as his complete inability to understand basic concepts when writing anti-evolution screeds, such as the serial trials fallacy, or the ability of mutations that on their own have little observable phenotypic effect, to couple together and produce a significant phenotypic effect when acting together. An inability which is the direct product of him choosing to view the world through supernaturalist blinkers, and decide a priori that a magic man must have done it, and if the evidence says otherwise, then reality is wrong.

The fact that you are also unable to recognise the epic level of fail endemic to his output, is also a sign of your ideological preference for fantasy over fact. It comes with the territory, we keep seeing this in every creationist we come across, the same yawn-inducing uncritical fanboy worship of everything that comes out of the mouths of assorted creationist heroes, whilst in the next breath inventing all manner of specious apologetic fabrications to try and tell us that Nobel Laureate level scientists have got it all wrong, just because they don't treat the diseased scribblings of piss-stained Middle Eastern nomads as The TruthTM. The aetiology has been documented here time and again.

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s unseemly and it’s uninsightful.

Bollocks. It exposes the vacuity and intellectual bankruptcy of the entire corporate creationism enterprise for what it is, a corrupting and perverting influence that encourages people to make shit up and peddle lies. Behe could have put his talents to proper scientific use, and built himself an illustrious career, but instead, he chose to take the corporate creationism shilling, and pissed his integrity down the toilet in doing so. He's now nothing more than yet another pedlar of apologetics.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Behe is no gadfly he is just a scientist who marveled so deeply at the functionality of what he saw through the microscope as to disbelieve that it could have happened through trial and error.

This, despite the fact that the empirical evidence for it all being the product of trial and error, is mountainous.

Jayjay4547 wrote:And he is a stubborn cove. Institutional science can put up with a few people like him.

Hey, guess what? It put up with Stanley Prusiner for over a decade. But the difference is, Prusiner performed the proper scientific act of finding real evidence for his hypothesis. As a corollary, when he did so, and did so in a spectacular manner that simply couldn't be ignored by the scientific community, what did that scientific community do? Oh, that's right, they gave Prusiner a Nobel Prize.

This is how it's done, JayJay, not by making up bullshit apologetics to try and tell the rest of the world that people of Prusiner's calibre have ll got it wrong, just because they don't treat mythology as fact. Now fucking learn this once and for all will you?

Jayjay4547 wrote:I don’t myself think that Behe is on the money, but he may be onto something that can be turned upside down into truth by reexamining what we mean by human design of things;

Except he, like every other pedlar of bullshit creationist apologetics, doesn't know what it takes to establish "design" even with respect to everyday entities. I'm also willing to bet you don't either. Care to rise to that challenge?

Jayjay4547 wrote:that it is an exploration of what is creatively possible: the creativity doesn’t subsist in the designer but in what is possible within that state or level of technology.

Wibble.

Oh wait, if we have a self-replicating system with a potentially infinite number of possible states, then this on its own makes possible a potentially infinite number of outcomes. The more states the system can generate, the more possibilities become extant by definition.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Anyway that wasn’t the point I wanted to make, I wanted to point to the value of skeptical courage

Something we've never seen coming from a creationist.

Jayjay4547 wrote:the problem with the Christian evolutionist Kenneth R Miller is that he uncritically accepts what he never should have

Bullshit. Once again, you're peddling a manifest, bare faced lie. The only thing Miller has accepted uncritically is the supernaturalist assertions attached to his religion.

Jayjay4547 wrote:that a human observer can see imperfections in natural design

Oh wait, we can do this, JayJay. It's called observation. As in taking notice of the observable evidence that our spinal columns, which spent 40 million years supporting quadrupeds before we inherited them, are less than optimal for supporting a biped. The number of working days lost to back injuries here in the UK alone testifies to this, which is one of the reasons that health and safety courses here in the UK, take time out to teach people appropriate postures for limiting back strain when lifting heavy objects. The mere fact that we have to think about such activities before we do them, if we're not going to end up in traction in a hospital bed, should be telling you something important here. Indeed, it's entirely typical of evolution, that we've now having to press into service as bipedal, terrestrial animals, a basic skeletal arrangement that was first launched to enable fish to swim, and which was launched in an environment where a surrounding dense fluid provided considerable support against the forces of gravity, of a sort completely absent on land.

But once again, you won't let actual facts such as this get in the way of your apologetic fabrications, JayJay, because you've never let them do so before.

Jayjay4547 wrote: at first glance.

And this is another bare faced lie you're peddling, JayJay. Statements about the sub-optimal nature of various anatomical constructs aren't a priori presuppositions, as you're misrepresenting them here, they're conclusions derived from the data. The only a priori presuppositions we see in this field come from creationists, particularly those who erect blind assertions about "perfect design", that are then flushed down the toilet by the data.

Jayjay4547 wrote:one way or another that is hubris; the characteristic fault of the atheist.

Bullshit and lies, JayJay. Bullshit and lies because [1] your strawman caricatures about us purportedly erecting a priori presuppositions are precisely that, as I've just expounded above (once again, do learn the elementary lesson that conclusions from data are NOT "presuppositions"), which on its own points to your above assertion being another fantasy apologetic fabrication on your part, and [2] all the evidence we see of people trying to tell us that their a priori presuppositions purportedly dictate how reality behaves, regardless of whether or not reality agrees with this, emanates from religious creationists indulging in this flawed and hubristic practice, not atheists. But we're used to creationist projection of their own flaws onto us here, it's another well-documented part of the creationist aetiology.

Jayjay4547 wrote:OK hackenslash, you call me a liar

No I didn't.

quote me on something which was a lie.

No problem:

OK hackenslash, you call me a liar

Too easy. In any event does the 'atheist ideology' bollocks ring any bells? You have repeated this despite repeatedly having been beaten about the head with why it's a lie.

You went a bit beyond even Cali, when you called Michael Behe a cunt. I’ll call you on that as well.

Feel free. He is a cunt.

Show me where in the transcript of the Dover trial, the judge said that Michael Behe had lied.

Of what fucking relevance is what the judge said? Does the judge not saying he lied mean he didn't lie?

He did say that several of the defendants had lied under oath- those were the school board members who had so incautiously tried to insist that teachers should say something in favour of Intelligent Design. The judge did cite where Behe had been stymied under cross-examination; that’s not the same as lying.

What the judge said is of exactly no fucking relevance. Behe lied about the existence of the peer-reviewed material regarding immunology and then, when beaten about the head with 58 peer-reviewed papers from the literature, insisted that they weren't good enough. He's a lying cunt.

It’s almost incredible that you claim as a fact that Behe is “a young earth cretinist”, when you are responding to a post where I pasted a direct quote in Wikipedia from Behe establishing that he isn’t. If there were some evidence that he actually denies the geological time scale, wouldn’t someone have edited that into the Wiki entry? How do you figure that someone could even manage to lie about that- to claim not to deny something, but to actually deny it?

Which bit of 'he's a lying cunt' is giving you problems here? You can tell when he's lying, because his lips are moving.

He also says intelligent design isn't creationism. He's lying about that as well.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

hackenslash wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:Strong language. Can you support your claim of a “knowingly disingenuous claim” made by ID proponent? Being wrong isn’t the same as being a liar.

You've already been shown the transcript of the fuckwit you cite from the Dover trial. Yes, Behe is a lying cunt. Yes, Behe is a young-Earth cretinist. When he says otherwise, he's lying, just like you.

OK hackenslash, you call me a liar, quote me on something which was a lie.

I have already repeataedly done so. Every single post where you keep banging on about the fantastical atheist ideology is a lie.
That you pretend that I have not done this, only demonstrates you haven't the slighest interest in discussing this topic with any degree of honesty.

Jayjay4547 wrote: You went a bit beyond even Cali, when you called Michael Behe a cunt.

So what? He is.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I’ll call you on that as well.

And? Want a cookie for that?