I’m beginning to think that Ex Machina is the new Scott Plaid.
What is contradictory is that you are positing both A and Not A. You saying that the emergence of life is unremarkable, given what you seem to perceive as the nearly infinite potential for it to emerge, while at the same time saying that the emergence of life is remarkable, given a designer upon whom you’ve placed the deontic burden of simplicity. Nevermind that fifteen billion years or so is hardly infinite time. You seem to think that amazement predisposes one to a belief in God. But were our resident physicalist, Sentient Meat, present, he would tell you all about how he came from stars and how amazing that truly is. Frankly, I can see no more simple a plan for an eternal being to effect the creation of biological life than to collapse the wave of a massive singularity — the eventual emergence of carbon is practically guaranteed. All that aside, it is hardly necessary that God created the universe anyway. It serves His purpose all the same. God isn’t about mass and energy; He is about morality.
And while I’m at it, let me just say that nothing quite so assists the arguments made by IDers than hysterical non sequitur accusations that they are stupid, and can’t grasp the truth. It sounds like something Jerry Falwell would say.
I’m going to be lazy and link to the Wikipedia articles on Intelligent Design and Theistic Evolution.
The problem that I have with Intelligent Design is that it seeks to assert as a principle that we can discern a transcendant God through scientific activities. It leads to rather silly errors such as Behe’s “Irreducible complexity” in which he claimed that he had found several “designs” in nature that could not have evolved because there were steps leading to those designs that required all the parts of the designs to have already evolved. In every case that Behe found a “gap” in the evolutionary theory, subsequent research has demonstrated that Behe simply lacked the imagination to see how the evolutionary process could have bridged his gap and that the “designs” that he claimed could not have occurred through the trial and error of natural selection actually did occur in exactly that way. (The phrase “god of the gaps” refers to the places in evolutionary process where we currently have a gap and a person with limited imagination simply declares “God did it.”) (Behe is mentioned part way down the Wikipedia ID article.)
Intelligent Design arose as an emotional overreaction. There have long been atheists and skeptics who have pointed to the absence of God in the scientific record and made the philosophical choice to conclude that God does not exist. Darwin’s younger protege, Thomas Huxley, was a strong opponent of religion and frequently tried to enlist science as an “ally” against “god.” More recently, Richard Dawkins has made similar arguments. (So have several posters on the SDMB.) Philosophically, such battles can be fun. However, if Dawkins ever tried to submit a peer-reviewed paper “disproving God,” he would be laughed out of the editor’s office. Such philosophical discussions are not amenable to scientific exploration. While one may choose to battle such arguments in the realm of philosophy, people are wrong to try to enlist science to “prove” God, and ID advocates (such as William Dembski and Phillip Johnson) are behaving in a silly fashion when they attempt to argue against scientific discovery by using philosophical arguments.
(There is a Philosophy of Science that is a legitmate forum for challenging scientific method, but these guys are generally not engaging in those discussions, preferring to have a “nature of god” fight under the guise of scientific criticism.)
The point is that while one may choose to do battle over “god” or “humanism” or any number of other issues, it is not the domain of science to discover “truth.” When Dembski and his ilk attempt to get ID inserted into biology classes, he is doing a disservice to the science of biology and he is belittling philosophy and religion that should not be tied to the evidentiary basis of science.
I have no idea what you are talking about here.
What **Tomndeb ** said, and…
Intelligent Designers, as I understand them, basically believe that “science shows” God intervened *at a very specific point in time * - . i.e. God actively created DNA and the simplest proteins - the simplest life.
There are logical holes in their reasoning so big you could drive a convoy through them, and Tomndeb mentioned the major one, “irreducible complexity.” But another big one and favorite of mine is the idea that since DNA carries “information” it must be evidence of intelligence, since all media that we know of that carry information are designed by intelligence.
Basically their m.o. is to find examples of biological phenomena that are either a) not fully understood, or b) which are understood but are difficult for the laymen to grasp. They then overwhelm the reader or listener a barrage of such “evidence” and hope that quantity will bury quality. They can sound quite knowledgable and persuasive and will toss up dozens of electron micrographs and whatnot but the logic is always the same: if you can’t immediately explain “X” that means God must have done it.
Only Wilt Chamberlain can… 
I think this is just that you find it impossible to imagine a boundary to time or space, not that you really can grasp the enormity of time and space, it just seems simpler to you to say that they’re really really vast, than to imagine a boundary. Right?
Here’s what an etymologist could tell you about mosquito:
An entomologist might tell you something different.
Oops. Sad thing is that I know that. Thanks.
Too bad, since it actually is what you were talking about.
Here is an interesting article from Wired magazine about the “Intelligent Design” movement. It’s actually more objective than I would’ve expected Wired to be about the topic, and it gives some insight into the political machinations of ID proponents.
Thanks to tom~ for the introduction to Theistic Evolution; I’d been wondering what the term was for the belief that evolution and a deity are compatible. As a freshman in college, I made the mistake of telling my anthropology professor that I was a creationist before understanding what the term really meant and all its connotations. Once I found out what the “creationists” were selling, I was embarrassed and never had the chance to recant!
I read somewhere, and sorry no cite :(, that IDers consider the push to include ID in schools is a ‘wedge’ strategy. IE its the first step in pushing creationism into the classrooms.
Not to worry. If the slope is really that slippery, then we’ll be right back to evolution in no time.
With a smidgeon of Clothahump?
The odd comment, here and there, is going to get by, but if someone needs to make a serious comparison of posters and styles, it should be taken to MPSIMS (if it is general) or The BBQ Pit (if it is going to get insulting).
[ /Moderating ]
** Ex Machina**, you have it backwards. There are some people who believe in I.D. who are otherwise intelligent. They, however, don’t make the news.
The people who want to put I.D. in textbooks don’t want to do so because they really think that evolution is a bad idea. Frankly, they don’t think at all. Rather, they would prefer that all the text books in all the land should reflect Christianity, and they seek to make up excuses why it should be so. The “reasons” given are simply smoke screens for what they really want, and if you defeat their arguments, they will simply pull out new ones.
Hey!!! Is this a question?? {sigh} I knew it wouldn’t last.
No, the bet ended yesterday.
Scott’s agreement expired yesterday. By the way, Scott’s sentences in this post are actually comprehensible English, suggesting that he proofread it. If so, the pitting had a beneficial effect.