You may be right, Scott. If he had simply stated, off the bat, that he found ID appealing to his sense of asthetics and faith, while acknowledging it wasn’t a scientifically testable hypothesis, he would not have found an argument. Instead, he tried to support ID with pseudo-science and then became upset when his “science” was rebutted.
He then shifted into a scattershot defense of faith itself (which was never under attack) and even resorted to a prime motor apologia which confused us because it is a separate issue from evolution, and does not even contradict it.
I don’t know if he read the whole thread before he started, but he should have seen that no one here objected to theistic evolution. He also should have seen that he was, IIRC, at least the third poster to introduce Behe into the thread. Whoever starts the next evolution thread should just go ahead and debunk Darwin’s Box right in the OP and get it over with.
David B:
My apologies. I should not have allowed myself to become flustered to that point.
Lib:
I appreciate the sentiment, but I feel I am hardly qualified to argue anything on philosophical grounds (as I mentioned when you and I had a similar, though more comprehensible, discussion over at the Parlor). I am much more comfortable in the more tangible aspects of these sorts of debates (things like whale evolution, bird flight, and alleged reptile-to-mammal transitions ).
scotth:
I, too, agree with your interpretation of Dave A.'s perceived argument (such as it was). His continual introduction of strawmen into the discussion seemed to indicate that he was, indeed, arguing something entirely different from the points raised by everyone else.
I don’t see what the problem with “materialist” doctrines is.
Let’s say that some part of the universe is different from what we consider the normal world of “stuff” to be.
What is this “non-material” stuff? How does it work? How does it interact with the ordinary, “material” world?
We’ll eventually reach the conclusion that this mysterious stuff isn’t seperate from the material world, just an unusual and previously unrecognized form of matter.
If it can’t interact with material things, it isn’t real to them, and so it isn’t real to us. We readily accept that we interact with material things, and so we’re part of material reality.
To the extent that a person might look at the evidence of science and come to the conclusion that there is no Guiding Hand or Creator, that person has chosen a materialist view. This is upsetting to some people Group Alpha who perceive the world to be the obvious work of (a) God.
There are, indeed, some people Group Beta who conclude from their review of the physical world that gods are mere inventions and that the (lack of divine) evidence speaks against there being any deity. There are, however, others, who simply note that the evidence of the material world does not provide proof of the divine. In this latter group can be found both believers in the divine Group Gamma (who recognize that the proof does not exist, but still perceive the material world as divinely authored) and skeptics/agnostics/atheists Group Delta (who perceive that the science does not address the issues of the divine in any way). Generally, the first two groups (Alpha and Beta) enjoy doing battle with each other, but their arguments are often fought on the fields of scientific examination where the two second groups (Gamma and Delta) can agree on the science and politely disagree on the matter of the deity.
(The Gamma and Delta groups, of course, are quite capable of joining in a donneybrook over the nature or reality of the divine in other contexts, but when discussing the actual results of scientific investigation, they are able to set aside those philosophical differences to focus on the science.)
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