Posted: Feb 11, 2015 3:56 am
Darwinsbulldog wrote: Jayjay, Jayjay Jayjay, where can I start?
A good place to start would be not with fatuous condescension.
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; it might well be wrong and it may be not valid scientifically but to say it’s lying shit that isn’t valid legally or even theologically is just flowery nonsense. 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”. And as to “theologically invalid” theology is hardly monolithic enough to support that.
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 and which owns us.
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. Science is an intellectual and practical tool. Done properly it is no more ideological that a knife, a saw or a teapot. Indeed, the warped pseudo-genetics of Lysenko, motivated by socialist dogma in the new defunct Soviet Union, put Russian science back by decades.
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].
You misunderstand what I understand. 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; their claims are always presented as being immediately obvious to a casual human observer; 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. These claims are presented to counter ID but they should create alarm about the implied hubristic status of the claimant; they aren’t the kind of thing a student of nature should say, because they frustrate study into nature. 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. Counter arguments come from people who actually have looked more deeply into nature, as in this topic’s original issue about the eye but those positions are tarnished by implied association with ID- and as in this thread, they are scorned.
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. 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. God is beyond all nations, but He in in that general direction. God is beyond the biosphere, but He is in that direction. 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. 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.
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. One thing that is good about Behe is that he hasn’t bought into that fashion but has bravely held to the classic reverence for the Creation.