I really just can’t believe that such stupidity exists. I cannot make it any plainer than this:
The fact that Sagan, in his book, used the idea of intelligent design in a way that was not tinged with irrationality and religion, shows that there can exist forms of intelligent design that can be thought about in a serious manner. End. Done.
And as far as your comments about uselessness, I beg to differ. Descarte, Hobbes, Hume, and Nozick have all used intelligent design in useful ways that have provoked a lot of serious scholarship.
BTW, I am actually more educated than you. B.A. in liberal arts, or maybe a master’s in English Lit? Sorry, Charlie – unless you’re an MD, you have less education than I do. (And even then, Med School isn’t really big on philosophy.)
Same here. Although I read it when I was in college. It’s part of what got me interested in researching linguistics and cognitive linguistics when I was in grad school.
And yeah, Behe is a nebbish. My only point is that, to the degree that ID attempts to claim that it’s a theory of evolutionary biology rather than a specific anthropological/historical/whatever claim about aliens designing humans, that it’s some form or another of supernaturalism. It either devolves into turtles all the way down, or has to posit some sort of entity ‘outside’ of reality that acts via magic.
TBH, I’m not sure. I’ve read some of his other writings but I’ve never had the sheer masochism required to slog through his major stuff. Maybe I’ll dig up an ecopy… but I doubt it.
You can say EXACTLY the same thing about dragons. I’m writing a fiction book myself about ESP. (Including postulating a mechanism for it!)
You’d have to be a hell of a dipshit to think that being written about in a fiction book implies that the author of that book gives credence to the idea being true in real life. Which WAS your point, despite your attempt to move the goalpost to a slightly less retarded position here.
And let me tell you, it’s hard to take being called stupid by you as an insult. I mean, you clearly think you’re seven different flavors of brilliant, so you demonstrably couldn’t identify intelligence if it wore a sign around its neck.
Oh really? Like HOW? Let’s see this scholarship. (And then point out that just because a scholar has, once in his life, talked about a silly theory, doesn’t mean that that theory informed the rest of his work.)
I wasn’t talking about me, because you didn’t post that at me, you moron. Good lord, you’re dumb.
And I’m CompSci. Which is about as close to being liberal arts as you are to being an honest debater.
Where do you think the scientific method came from, dipshit? It just sprang up out of nowhere? Oh, wait… from philosophy. From Descarte, specifically. Who used an ID thought experiment to pose an answer to the question “How do we know what’s true?” And biology uses… the scientific method.
Of course, only incompetents are arguing that Nonrandomism somehow has to prove something about biology.
If you think that you are discussing “Intelligent Design” in this paragraph, you are mistaken. That is NOT the “Intelligent Design” of Behe, Dembski, or Phillips, and if you are not following those three, you are using a common term to discuss a totally separate thought process.
Each of those three insist on a Designer that interacts with the world at multiple stages of biological development.
What you have described is Theistic Evolution, a different belief. In Theistic Evolution, the Creator sets the rules and intitiates the process, then allows the process to move forth naturally on its own. This creator might be a Deist’s clockmaker or a Theist’s personal God, but in neither case does the Creator tamper with the process of natural evolution on anything resembling a regular basis. Now, there was an unfortunate incident a couple of years ago when the Discovery Institute coaxed the scientifically illiterate Archbishop of Vienna to write a piece for the New York Times in which he described Theistic Evolution, (as he understood it), while applying the term “Intelligent Design” throughout his article. This muddied the water quite a bit because a number of believers in Theistic Evolution who happened to share his lack of knowledge of biology, began to use the phrase “intelligent design” when they were actually discussing Theistic Evolution. When Cardinal von Schönborn originally published his little exercise in confusion, he was immediately corrected by the scholars at the Vatican. Unfortunately, the Discovery Institute folks had been successful in getting the phrase out in a misleading context. If one wishes to use the phrase “intelligent design” when discussing Theistic Evolution, it is more honest to acknowledge that one is not actually discussing the anti-scientific Intelligent Design proposals of Phillips, Behe, and Dembski.
Actual Intelligent Design, (note the capitalization), does require frequent interference by the designer in order to push evolution along. This is true in all the works of Phillips, Dembski, and Behe and any claim that Intelligent Design is merely another phrase for Theistic Evolution reflects a serious ignorance of the way that ID’s actual proponents use the word, themselves.
I do concede that I would indeed by a lot more interesting by shouting a lot of lies and false accusations and noise and stupidity. But you’re right - my education and self-respect restricts me considerably. I’m so uninteresting.
That remains a non sequitur when you still do not mention how useful it is to biology today.
What I get from your answer is that ID was somehow used (with no cites) to figure out the scientific method. That is nice, but Newtonian Physics are useful today in many disciplines today, not just in Physics.
So, once again, how is ID useful for today’s biology?
See post #76. Most people in this thread are referring to the version of intelligent design in the OP, which is reasonable.
As I said, ID would be a curious and little mentioned concept if it wasn’t for the religious nutters. Neither Behe nor Dembski is using ID as an interesting concept to investigate anything - they are positing that their flavor of ID is correct. And ID is not even remotely as true as Newtonian physics.
The fact is that ID as a term was created by religious ideologues to sneak creationist dogma into school curriculum. This is not me misunderstanding the term. It’s me knowing the history of the term. I am giving you information. It’s not even an argument. I didn’t even say you were wrong. I was just telling you that while you seem to be arguing for the legitimacy of some untestable scientific agnosticism towards a creator, the term ID is a loaded one.
You will not find anyone before very 1990 or so using the term “intelligent design.” It is not an old scientific idea (it’s not a scientific idea at all, but never mind that.) It was invented by writers of Christian-themed textbooks to replace “creation” following a supreme court decision to disallow creationism from being taught in public school. There’s a youtube video somebody linked to above that explains it. They literally searched and replaced “creation” with “instructional design,” leading to some howlers in the text (“cdesign proponentsists”) It helps to know that the text book they are talking about doesn’t just employ the term, it is one of the first known uses… they invented it. Any attempts at scientific legitimacy are half assed and after the fact.
Do you get what I’m trying to do now? I’m trying to tell you something that is actual information. It’s not evidence of my confusion. It’s just facts. You can look them up. You seem to think ID is some kind of long-treasured scientific premise. It is not scientific and it is not established historically, and you can actually find it’s source and track its usage. You need to let go of whatever abstract platonic idea you have as ID that transcends all known usage to grasp that the term was coined by ideologues and is rarely, if ever, used out of that camp.
I think you want to argue for some kind of scientific agnosticism, not from a true ID perspective, and so I was trying to explain why you are finding people so resistant. You are not likely to get much further, but there you go.
No, it was actually the heart of Meditations, and led directly to his attempted refutation of skepticism (by establishing his own version). It was also important in Anarchy, State, and Utopia.
Same here. Although I read it when I was in college. It’s part of what got me interested in researching linguistics and cognitive linguistics when I was in grad school.