Well, we’re all smarter than anyone who subscribes to ID. ID has nothing to bring to the debate. There is nothing to debate and as ID examples of irreducible complexity keep getting knocked down by evolutionary explanations (the classic one being the eye) leaving ID’ers to come up with lame ‘well this new example sure proves it then’ responses then God of The Gaps is a perfect term for it.
It’s religion masquerading as science in an attempt to sneak into schools through the back door, wilfully playing on ignorance of science and it and it’s champions deserve every gram of scorn heaped upon it and them.
Pardon me if I’m not boo bloody hooing about the poor defenceless little things. It’s a joke and a scandal that any nation in the 21st century takes this sort of thing seriously and i’m pretty pissed that it’s sneaking into religious run but state-funded schools in the UK thanks to Blair.
Too bad that wasn’t really the point I was making though, isn’t it? :dubious:
Then why not start the thread in IMHO and be done with it? What, are we pursuing dignitas by starting one-sided debates in GD?
Too bad you ducked my question about Newton then, isn’t it?
And IMHO would be the place for it, unless anyone’s got steamed up enough to take it to the Pit.
Oh, you’ll have to search the market-place by lamplight at noon to find anyone with a lower opinion of Our Glorious President (Or Wishes He Was) than me, trust me on that.
However, Malacandra has a point that building an enormous strawman to burn in effigy does nothing to actually address the question in the OP.
I suspect that the answer that Michael Behe would provide for the OP’s question would be identical to the answer provided by Richard Dawkins or Stephen J. Gould. Several of the ID proponents accept the basic thrust of the Theory of Natural Selection, they simply call for a re-examination of the Theory when it encounters a number of discrete events that they feel they need a god of the gaps to explain. On day to day matters of general development and descent, Behe does not argue against neo-Darwinian Natural Selection.
Now, it is possible that Dembski would have a different explanation; I can’t wade through his stuff far enough to see whether he opposes Natural Selection in the general or in the particular.
Philip Johnson would not have any explanantion, but as a lawyer arguing against Natural Selection on the philosophical grounds that he fears that it is too materialiastic, he is not in a position to propose scientific explanations (and I doubt he would choose to try).
So while it is amusing to make up tales about what others might believe when you (collectively) have not bothered to actually learn what they believe, it does not actually address the issue to simply make stuff up that is contradicted by their actual writings.
I would if I had much of an idea of what IDers are actually saying, and was wedded enough to the principle to be bothered to put that side of the argument; but I thought the point I was actually making was already clear enough. Circle-jerking to the mental picture of what idiots IDers are, without doing more than attributing a few dumb arguments to them, is not a debate of any magnitude, still less a “great” one.
Prating “God of the Gaps” as though our current state of knowledge is as a block of cement, with the air bubbles the only elements lacking, is less than intellectually honest in view of the possibility that what we actually know corresponds rather better to the bubbles; and as I say, at least Newton was honest enough to admit his ignorance.
Physical objects need a place to exist. That’s because they have spatial dimensions. There is no fundamental, philosophical reasons why a non-physical object would require a “place” to exist.
Well until I see something from ID that’s worth considering I don’t have to take it seriously. All I ever see are specious arguments and misrepresentations that deserve to be roundly mocked, put forward by people who deserve to be roundly mocked. Except for those who deserve to be called deliberate frauds.
I think I understand, but have you actually ruled out the possibility that IDer are idiots and that they make their own dumb arguments?
Certainly we should never be so arrogant as to say we know everything, or even that we know any significant proportion of what there is to be known, but I don’t find it at all unfair to describe ID as a god-of-the-gaps argument - the whole thing seems to hinge on design being the default hypothesis in cases where something cannot be otherwise adequately explained at the moment; sure, they don’t like to publicly admit that the designer they have in mind is the same entity they privately think of as ‘God’ (although I think it really is in nearly every case), but they’re certainly taking advantage of the gaps to posit the designer’s existence.
I think all that would happen is that if something can ‘be’ outside of the current boundaries of what we consider ‘physical’, the boundaries just get bigger to accomodate it; if it exists, it’s a member of the everything set.
I’m thinking you don’t know what “God of the Gaps” actually means. It does not mean “Nannny nanny boo boo, I’m smart and you’re dumb.” It means that when there is a gap in your knowledge, instead of admitting that you don’t know the answer, you automatically attribute the mystery to an act of the divine. For example, we don’t really know how life began on thi planet. Whereas a responsible scientist would say “I don’t know”, an IDer will say “Musta been an act of God.”
I never rule out the possibility of the existence of idiots in any circumstances, but the current debate would be better served by setting the best available ID arguments against the OP’s position, rather than offering a quaint parody of the worst.
Understood. I actually said that I found the “God of the Gaps” attitude itself hubristic. If you accept GotG as a reasonable line to take, you can argue that ID rests heavily on it, agreed.
However, I don’t see why the possible existence of a God should be viewed as inherently contemptible. It’s time enough to worry about that when the IDers make the leap that such a God must necessarily be identified with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, with all the inconvenient moral demands and strictures and so on. Meanwhile, abhorring ID because it might lead to big-G God being dragged in is tantamount to supporting evolution, not because we think it is true, but because we must keep God out. (This is not a new insight. Inevitably, I find myself channelling C. S. Lewis yet again.)
It’s a bit more than that, really, but not in any ways that will help an IDer in this debate.
The starting place is the same: one of attributing to divine action the things science can’t explain. But there’s a theological motive to that attribution: it’s to show that God is still an active, vibrant, involved God, rather than Newton’s watchmaker God, who started the whole thing running, but hasn’t done much since.
The result of this is that as science closes gaps, it undermines this case for an involved, relevant God. It’s a theology that allows science to dictate to faith and shut it down - because if you say, “look, here’s where God intervenes in our world,” and most such instances are found to have perfectly mundane scientific explanations, then the fallback theological positions are that God either invervenes in minute, unimportant ways, or not at all.
I’m not familiar with the state of play on IDers offering up examples of what they consider irreducibly complex biological phenomena, and scientists presenting what they claim to be refutations of their irreducible complexity. But if scientists are able to steadily chip away at IDers’ examples of irreducibility, then ID will be demonstrated to be another God of the Gaps game.
Evolution says nothing about the existence or otherwise of God. It just says God is not needed to explain the development of species.
ID says God IS needed to explain same and keeps pointing to gaps where God is needed and each time that gap is closed by an evolutionary mechanism they point to another so-called gap.
ID is not a scientific theory it is theology and a piss-poor one at that, making God something you squeeze in between scientific facts.
However, the OP did not ask what was wrong with ID. The OP asked how an ID proponent would answer the question “why do men have nipples?” and all the snide remarks posted here fail to address the OP.
