[QUOTE=Voyager]
The biologists on your list would hardly make up the authorship list of one paper. [/QUPTE]
There were eight biologists on that brief list alone, including at least three professors at at least one well-known author. Your statement is a gross exaggeration, to say the least.
It is also irrelevant to your claim.
Again, that’s irrelevant to your claim – namely, that hardly anyone in the ID movement has the necessary educational background. It appears that you are now desperately attempting to change the topic.
Let’s not talk about him. First of all, you’re not even sure that it’s the same guy. And second, even if it were, that still would not substantiate your claim that hardly anyone in the ID movement has the necessary educational background.
You know what? Throughout this discussion, you have been repeatedly changing the topic and shifting the goalposts. This is yet another example thereof. Knock it off.
In which case, your criticism of the kalam cosmological argument falls short. Moreover, even if your criticism were valid,* it would ultimately be irrelevant to the topic of this thread*.
You’re the one who started it.
I never said it was a scientific proof. You’re not paying attention,.
I have repeatedly, *repeatedly, **repeatedly ** * said that theists do not typically offer scientific proof of God’s existence? In fact, I explicitly cited this as an example of a **philosophical ** argument. It is, however, a philosophical argument that is predicated on scientific evidence (e.g. the Big Bang). This demonstrates that theists can and do use scientific evidence to support their claims, without claiming to have scientific proof.
What you actually said was "We have no such evidence - there is nothing in our Bible that could not have been written by people living 2700 years ago. Thus, the divine creator is not evidence of Christianity, and in fact is evidence against it, since Christianity got a very important piece of evidence wrong. "
Attack Christianity all you want, but this does not prove your claim against theism in general – especially since not all theists purport to have a specific creation story.
Which is one reason why your claim is overly broad… and even if it weren’t, it would be irrelevant to (a) your claim that IDers are motivated solely by religious belief, and (b) the original subject matter of this particular thread.
The topic of this thread was whether or not god was bigger than the universe, and if the speed of light limited affected god. I think that got cleared up fairly quickly.
Whoosh.
I never, ever initially use the term “scientific proof.” There is no such thing, and using it shows a basic misunderstanding of science. I also never claimed theists attempt to do scientific proofs.
mrrealtime claimed that some theist said there was scientific proof of god, and you said they did not. I have never claimed they did.
Christianity was just an example. After all, those making the KCA seem to be Christians, (like Craig) so saying even a successful KCA does not demonstrate Christianity seems very relevant.
As for theisms without a creation story, if they do not claim their deity created the universe (and after all Zeus didn’t) they cannot use a cosmological argument, can they?
So, how does the KCA support the existence of any particular god again? That’s the one point you keep evading.
How many people are in the ID movement? I mean, with the Discovery Institute and all the churches and all? Eight is hardly any - both in the movement, and in the area of biology in general. If the percentage of biologists supporting ID matched the percentage of the population that does, there would be thousands.
And I take it you haven’t seen the author lists of many biology papers. They’re huge, and as a computer scientist I’m outraged. But there are hundreds of journals, and thousands seeking tenure, so the lists grow.
As I said, it’s just a small sampling thereof. I never said that these eight were teh ONLY biologists in the movement. Most of those names were taken from just a brief sampling of the senior scientists within the Discovery Institute, and there were many more whose names I didn’t get around to researching.
Now, if you’re goign to include all the CHURCHES, plus all the employees within the Discovery Institute, then that’s just an unfair sampling. Most of those people would admittedly not have an educational background in molecular biology, but they are hardly the driving forces behind intelligent design.
Besides, you’re the one who said, "Have you seen the list? Very few - almost none, have degrees in relevant fields. " Are you now suggesting that this list includes all the laypeople within all the churches that support ID? Are you saying that you were able to research the educational backgrounds of all these people, who must number in the hundreds of thousands? Somehow I doubt that was your original intent.
BTW, Voyager, can you please reproduce this list of ID proponents that you mentioned – you know, the one “with the Discovery Institute and all the churches and all”? In addition, can you please tell us how you arrived at this list, as well as how you determined the educational backgrounds of all these individuals?
Or was that not really the list to which you were referring originally?
Whether you used it “initially” or not is irrelevant. You asked “How does the cosmological argument have anything to do with scientific proof?” – even though I explicitly said that it was NOT scientific proof.
But you did ask what the cosmological argument had to do with scientific proof. That’s asking me to defend a position that I have repeatedly disavowed.
Which is precisely why that line of reasoning is fallacious. You cannot argue against theism in general by attacking one subgroup thereof as a mere example – even if your example turns out to be valid.
Not at all. They can claim that the universe had a beginning (again, using the Kalam cosmological argument, for example) without having to craft a narrative about how this beginning occurred.
I never said that it supported the existence of any particular God. I’m not evading the question; rather, you’re asking me to defend a position that I have never advocated within this thread (a persistent and annoying habit, I might add).
The KCA points to the existence of a Creator. Whether this Creator is the Judeo-Christian God or some other entity is simply beyond its scope.
Not pertaining to physics but there’s a good article in today’s Chicago Tribune, here, about advances in cellular biology that are picking apart more of the ID claims for irreducible complexity.
And demonstrating yet again that Behe is just a tool.
I would say that neither of these arguments even gets to the point where the supposed employment of scientific principles actually gets the philosophical arguments any closer to being anymore convincing than they were before. In fact, in some ways, they make the arguments less convincing, because they both basically use scientific observations and methods to violate the conclusions and methodology of those very same observations: a rather craven form of special pleading.
The list you were referring to is well known, and was first published several years ago - actually back when I was reading talk.origins, before I came here. The ID proponents I was referring to can be deduced from various polls which show the widespread acceptance of ID in the US population. Hey, I don’t like it, but I can face the facts.
Now, the null hypothesis would be that the percentage of biologists accepting ID should track the percentage in the population as a whole. Care to hazard a guess what the percentage actually is?
But that isn’t very important, really. If ID proponents are not driven by religion, they should be driven by either secular ethical considerations or (preferably) by scientific considerations. I don’t see ethical considerations not driven by religion also - we can all agree that Social Darwinism and eugenics are wrong, without having to believe in ID or creationism.
As for scientific considerations, despite the constant claims of the Discovery Institute that ID is becoming more widely accepted, there are still no legitimate publications I know of (I have doubts about that Washington one.) I tend to think that Behe might have been working from scientific motives in his work, though they conveniently matched his religious ones. Others have gone as far out on the limb as he did for purely scientific reasons. Wells got his degree at the direction of the Unification Church, so he doesn’t count.
If there are non-religious, scientific motivations, where is the science?
Said because I couldn’t understand why you kept bringing up scientific proof - especially to me.
Oh? Do all theists have the same conception of god? Do all theists claim that this god said the same thing? How, even in principle, does saying something about god A imply anything about god B? Since theists posit gods, the only way to argue against it is to discuss that specific god, not some strawman god.
I lack belief in all gods, never having seen any evidence of any and actively disbelieve in some, based on their supposed characteristics. I can’t imagine being able to say anything about theism as a whole, though.
I’m sure most said the universe had a beginning from analogy to all things, which begin. You don’t have to be nearly so sophisticated. Since many, many religions state that the universe began, and have conflicting notions of god, we can’t use that simple belief as evidence of their correctness.
I’ve always said that the cosmological argument supports weak deism, not anything more. In fact it supports it rather well, since the only claim that weak deism makes about god is that he created the universe. Are you a deist? If so, we agree in the utility of the cosmological argument in supporting your position. If not, why bring it up?
Nah, he’s more interesting than that. He’s in a trap of a sort. He offered a hypothesis, for which the evidence is quickly vanishing. Lots of scientists do. In most cases the hypothesis is quickly forgotten. In his case, those with an agenda made him a hero and famous. With their support, he sells lots of books, gets interviewed a lot, no doubt speaks at lots of conferences. If he did the honorable thing and admitted that he was wrong, he’d go back to being a professor at a minor university. Given that, I’m sure it is easy for him to convince himself that he’s still right, just like the cold fusion people did.
I think he could do a lot of good if he spoke out firmly to the audience he has about evolution - which he does accept, mostly. Of course he’d never be invited back. Maybe that explains the curious fact that when he reviewed the ID textbook, he only reviewed the section he wrote. Perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to endorse the crap in the other sections, but also couldn’t write that they were crap. Just speculating here. I’ve been an expert review for manuscripts before publication, and what he did is not what the job requires.
I see Behe as a tragic figure, not someone who is evil.
Well, it doesn’t quite work out that way in practice though. The idea that it’s God pretty much become inevitable in the way the theory is generally raised: even the Christian God.
William Dembski:
“The fine-tuning of the universe, about which cosmologists make such a to-do, is both complex and specified and readily yields design. So too, Michael Behe’s irreducibly complex biochemical systems readily yield design. The complexity-specification criterion demonstrates that design pervades cosmology and biology. Moreover, it is a transcendent design, not reducible to the physical world. Indeed, no intelligent agent who is strictly physical could have presided over the origin of the universe or the origin of life.” - The Act of Creation: Bridging Transcendence and Immanence, 1998
“The job of apologetics is to clear the ground, to clear obstacles that prevent people from coming to the knowledge of Christ,” Dembski said. “And if there’s anything that I think has blocked the growth of Christ [and] the free reign of the Spirit and people accepting the Scripture and Jesus Christ, it is the Darwinian naturalistic view… It’s important that we understand the world. God has created it; Jesus is incarnate in the world.” – National Religious Broadcasters, 2000
““The world is a mirror representing the divine life…” “The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.” - with A., Kushiner, James M., (editors), Signs of Intelligence: Understanding Intelligent Design, Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2001.”
“I think at a fundamental level, in terms of what drives me in this is that I think God’s glory is being robbed by these naturalistic approaches to biological evolution, creation, the origin of the world, the origin of biological complexity and diversity. When you are attributing the wonders of nature to these mindless material mechanisms, God’s glory is getting robbed…And so there is a cultural war here. Ultimately I want to see God get the credit for what he’s done - and he’s not getting it.” - address given at Fellowship Baptist Church, Waco, Texas, March 7, 2004
“And another thing I think we need to be aware of is that not every instance of design we see in nature needs to be directly attributed to God. Certainly as Christians we believe there is an angelic hierarchy - it’s not just that there’s this physical material world and there’s God. There can be various hierarchies of intelligent beings operating, God can work through what can be called derived intelligences - processes which carry out the Divine will, but maybe not perfectly because of the fall.” - (Ibid.)
We’ve already discussed the predispositions of the Discovery Institute (which interestingly changed the names of a lot of suspciously Christian-sounding). One major problem for ID in getting too far away from Christianity is that most of its chief financiers are not only evangelicals, but YECs. As Johnson, the founder of the modern ID movement, saw it, ID is basically a movement whereby creationists of all stripes agree to simply ignore for the time being anything with which they might any of them disagree on (like the age of the earth) and focus solely on attacking evolution. Carefully concealing the activist Christian nature has been part of the project of helping to get better PR, but it’s not been all that successful.
The IDEA movement, one of the largest activist ID organizations has also followed this pattern of trying to coneal its predispositions. It originally demanded that all officers of the club be Christian Bible believers. Then it simply demanded that they adhere to the more obscure mission statement… which said that they had to believe that the ID was the Christian God of the Bible. Currently, their mission statement page is “under construction.”
I agree there is a difference, but in terms of ID, it’s a rather small one, and in terms of how almost every major ID figure aside from Behe (who’s more coy), it’s clear that this is exactly what they feel they are doing.
Would you agree that if you frame a debate so that there are only two choices: God or evolution, then if you eliminate evolution, you’ve proven God? Well that’s how most ID proponents frame the case, at least when they are talking to friendly audiences and not the press. It rapidly becomes very hard to justify the “ID isn’t about God/Jesus” claim as anything other than a PR ploy when you look at the actual history of the modern movement and what its cheif lights have to say about it. Heck, put forth a designer (like aliens) who isn’t god, and you’re more often than not simply going to be asked who created the aliens.
I find it immensely amusing that EVERY one of those intelligent design advocates are a Christian of some kind. That says more about the struggle to reconcile belief to science than it does about evolution. In my religion, the theology is perfectly clear: God cannot be proved scientifically; he can only be felt (Mool Mantar), S/he (God being neither male or female) IS woven into the fabric of the all of creation, not just this universe; and it is not God per se but his/her Hukam-- ie, set of laws-- that this particular universe follows. In other words, the rules are set up and the universe follows the rules.
Notice I said theology and not cosmology. If there was such a thing as “intelligent design”, then the designer wasn’t too bright when it came to things like our current spine for upright walking.
Everyone else has made good points. Maybe I can add something else. Yes, it’s not a physics question. However, I think some physics-related boundry conditions might be put on the more rash theologies.
I see in your OP that you parallel “God” as a giant Homo Sapien with cellular hands, compound eyes, etc… I definitely think that if you go in that direction, you’re just going to be disappointed – it won’t work… At worst, you end up worshipping some guy named Vernon Wayne Howell and commit mass suicide to preserve “what you are1”.
If you want to believe in ID, and try to dispute the size of the universe, I suppose you could delude yourself for a while, but ultimately, with lots of observation and calculation, most are led to the realization that we are but a tiny spec in a much much larger universe [from the total perspective vortex: “I’m a really terrific and great guy. Didn’t I tell you, baby, I’m Zaphod Beeblebrox!”] and the speed of light cannot be a limitation on the God of the Christian bible, lest the infallability of “God” would certainly be called into question.
[QUOT E=mrrealtime]I think it could tell us a lot about the programmers world. This is a different comment though, because a lot of what the Bible says about God, his character, his power, his actions, his desires, all relate to a physical realm. In order to truly accept what the bible says about God, you really are forced to try to reconcile the physical limitations of existence with the magnitude of his size. Now that we (Science) knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the universe occupies such vast space that Light itself cannot span it, I believe it makes the job of reconciliation a lot more difficult, and therefore the position of any “Creation scientist” utterly impossible to defend.
[/QUOTE]
I think this hits closer to the mark than you may have intended.
I, for one, do not believe Science and Religion (note the caps) are incompatible at all, I think they merely use different references. Using the Bible (a collection of oral traditions, which has been re-written several times since Gutenburg) as a reference for physical data is a mistake. Those stories were written with the limitied scientific understanding fo their time. “Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke
Saying that God created the heavens and earth in seven days can be true, if one of God’s days is 17.4 billion of our years long. So the physical terms set out in the bible’s print are most likely based on the limited physical knowledge available at the time of writing, which makes them useless as tools for measuring the universe as we know it today.
The analogy of a programmer is a valid one, however. It is true that humanity has evolved in cycles, much like the iterations of a computer program. It is also true that each generation or cycle builds on the one that came before. A plausible argument can be made that Intelligent Design includes the organic growth we call evolution.
This has turned out to be an interesting thread, certainly didnt go the way I thought it would, but when do they ever?
Getting back to the original idea, could a dude the size of the universe actually be able to see like we do, or is light just too slow? Would the entire universe implode if he just poked it with his finger because of the gravity?