Nobody comes to believe in a god without religious teaching.
Some dishonest ones pretend that their religious beliefs are scientific.
Which ones are you talking about? Examples?
Intelligent design redux
- Thread starter Pinball1970
- Start date
Correct. Being taught to believe that is religious teaching.
Put it this way: since the theory of evolution is foundational to modern biological sciences, it is very difficult to hope to make any meaningful progress in the biological sciences if one does not accept it. It's a bit like trying to get a job as a maths teacher if you don't accept that 1+1=2.
It's possible to become a scientist practising in some field other than the biological sciences, while being a nutty Creationist. For instance, you could become a physicist and probably get along just fine without ever having to admit to your religious dogmas in the course of your scientific work.
In practice, the vast majority of people who end up as professional scientists tend to pick up enough of the basics of the theory of evolution to recognise that it's a plausible and powerful explanation for how all life on Earth came to be how it is. There are, of course, always a few who allow their religious indoctrination to get in the way of their critical thinking about such matters.
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Depends what you're talking about. Which complex structures are you thinking of, and what evidence of the intelligence you mention do you have?
Are you saying the intelligence behind these complex structures is a natural intelligence, then? What is the intelligence to which you refer, exactly?
Mere assertion does not make something a fact. You know that, right?
What are your personal criteria for distinguishing "good" explanations from "poor" or "deficient" ones? I'm interested to find out.
The courts have found otherwise, in the case of so-called "intelligent design theory". This is also the general opinion in the scientific community. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but maybe you should consider reading a bit more widely on this topic. There seem to be many gaps in your knowledge.
About Behe's defences of "Intelligent Design", you mean? Yes, I think it would be fair to say that. Any serious scientist would do the bare minimum of research on Behe and/or his claims before backing them publically. Any scientist who failed to do that would be foolish and so could fairly be described as "not serious", I think.
Correct. There's no scientific evidence whatsoever for the design of natural structures by a supernatural Designer (or, indeed, by any other "intelligent" designer).
This is not counting the deliberate technological products of animals and human beings, of course, many of which are, indeed, intelligently designed, albeit by intelligent beings that have come to be through the normal natural processes of biological evolution.
You assume design in nature, you mean. It's not like you can just look and know. If we could do that, this thread wouldn't be necessary, would it?Obviously I see design in nature
The problem with your assumption is the same one you have with assuming God, in general: there's no objective evidence for it.
Oh, now you're going to refrain? We'll see.
You're doing this the wrong way around. Consider not starting with a pre-made world view. That's the wrong approach. When you decide on your preferred world view up front, what tends to happen is that you go looking for things that tend to confirm what you'd like to be true, while ignoring the things that suggest it isn't true. That is, you go in with a clear bias and then you become prone to errors in reasoning. You end up drawing a bunch of faulty conclusions that rest on unstable, shifting sands.
What you ought to do is to start with an open mind and follow wherever the data (from observation etc.) leads you. Note that an open mind, in this case, means a mind that doesn't start by assuming an all-powerful Creator. It's okay to start believing in an all-powerful Creator just as soon as there's enough evidence for it - just like everything else - but not before that.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
The whole basis of the Intelligent design movement which was just a rebranding of creationism. Something that has been explained to Trek in many different ways.
Huh? You mean, you've been posting all this time about how you think evolution is wrong and now you tell us you don't know what "evolve" means?
The bible is a religious text. Teaching that the Genesis stories are true is religious teaching.
What do you mean "in what way"? If one teaches using a core text of a religion, how could that not be religious teaching? What did you have in mind?
No, that's not a given. Don't overgeneralise.
You were taught that. Somebody taught it to you.
There's a long history of that. Try wikipedia. Get yourself up to speed and we can talk some more. Start by googling "attempt to teach the bible in science class", perhaps. That should produce a lot of material to get you started in your education on this.
If we take Trek at face value, it seems he is largely ignorant about what intelligent design is. Of course, he won't be able to continue to plausibly feign ignorance for much longer. Not after so many people have helped to point him towards the correct information.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
This is what is bothering me. I struggle to believe that a modern intelligent person has to have these concepts explained.
Anyway I hope he will...
Read the Dover trial summary.
Read some of my references outlining consensus on TOE.
Read one of my TOE definitions.
Read at least some history on Creation science, ID and links to religion, Christianity specifically.
Looked at my reference to the Discovery Institute, ID link and unscientific mission statements.
Realise that teaching a Biblical 6 day creation, animal "kinds" intelligent designer, first man, man separate from animals and Jesus creating everything IS teaching religion.
The "word" in John one IS Jesus. I don't know he may not actually have realised that one. It is important because it is a NT claim that Jesus is the creator "with" god.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
I suspect Trek is a fraud. The way he talks comes straight from the ID playbook, even as he feigns innocence about it. The mention of complex specified information, which is an ID core concept, is highly suspicious, to my mind, as is this disinformation about scientists feigning acceptance of evolution to keep their jobs, which he has notably failed to substantiate.
If he were simply arguing that one can believe in an intelligence behind the cosmos without believing in a supernatural creator god, there would be no need to go anywhere near either of the above. So I think we’ve got a cdesign proponentsist on our hands.
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
I will tell you what I think of your motivation so far because I think posters including myself recognise some of your angles, this is not our first Rodeo as they say.
Creationists like yourself never seem to be concerned that much with Quantum mechanics which is far stranger than speciation so why pick on Evolution?
Why are the religious so scared of Evolution? Why is it so important to try and put an alternative in there?
The bottom line is that Evolution shows that we are NOT separate from animals, we are animals.
We not only descended from ancestral apes we ARE apes.
There were no created "kinds" life on earth is all via common descent.
We share a common ancestor with chimps from around 7 million years ago.
We evolved from populations of great apes over millions of years some of those populations died out completely, some may have interbred like later human populations.
Not all mechanisms and branches are known but the frame work is absolutely sound.
This flies in the face in of all the creation myths (since they all the same right?)
So no creation, no Adam and Eve therefore no original sin or need for a redeemer in Jesus.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
Moderator note: This thread was split from the following thread, on why people believe in God:
---Why do people believe in God?
I think we can dispense with our earthly gods without much fuss. Why are there 5.8 billion people who believe in a god and only 16 % of the world's population is atheist?www.sciforums.com
Here is an example of how the scientific community regarding Evolution as opposed to an intelligent design.
It is no exaggeration to claim Nobel prize winners in science are among the brightest people who have ever lived on our planet. Past winners include, Curie, Bohr, Einstein , Feynman, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Dirac.
Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Nobel Laureates Initiative. This organization has 38 Nobel laureates, who wrote a letter calling upon the Kansas Board of Education to reject intelligent design.
That looks like they are trying to set up an argument from authority.
"Logically derived"? Do any of our Nobel winners really believe that if we begin with fossils, comparative anatomy or even comparative genomics, that the conclusion of biological evolution by natural selection can be produced with deductive certainty, simply by turning the crank of logical deduction? I sense that the word "logically" is being misused once again merely as an honorific, as it so often is. (It's consistent with an argument from authority though, essentially the boast that 'We're logical, our opponents aren't'.)
What we have here isn't logical deduction. Nor is it induction. It appears to me to be some sort of 'inference to the best explanation'. That's probably the most common kind of inference used by scientists, even if it isn't well understood by logicians. In particular we need to understand its strengths and weaknesses, what kind of presuppositions are built into it, and what kind of warrant it confers on conclusions. (Probabilistic at best, in my opinion.)
I'm not sure that I believe that either. (I sort of do and sort of don't.) The evidence of life on earth suggests that variation is anything but random. I'm not suggesting that if variation isn't random that it must be the result of guidance by divine intervention.
I am suggesting that a great deal depends on where in the developmental process of organisms the variation occurs. If variation occurs in a human embryo very early, when it's just a few cells and things like the anterior/posterior, ventral/dorsal axes, and the basic germ layers are being established, the results would be catastrophic and the embryo would be spontaneously aborted. Yet it was probably precisely these kind of very fundamental variations when simple multicellular animals were first appearing in the Ediacaran biota that produced the great range of animal body-plans that we see suddenly appearing in the Cambrian explosion.
So as life history unfolds, variation seems to concentrate in the latest stages of an organism's development while it is increasingly suppressed in earlier stages, since more gross variation at those stages would adversely impact the survival of already highly-adapted organisms.
Yes, that's very true. Of course a hypothesis being "fundamentally unscientific" (because it's inconsistent with science's methodological naturalism) doesn't imply that the unscientific hypothesis isn't correct. But it might indeed suggest that the unscientific hypothesis might be out of place in a science classroom, which I understand was the issue before this particular court.
That would depend on whether any religious or metaphysical tradition included empirically testable predictions. (I've seen no evidence of that.)
The problem that I see there is that science seems to suffer from a similar defect, when it places mathematics and the 'laws of physics' into an explanatory role, and when it simply assumes that reason is the high-road to understanding reality. There's an argument to be made that whatever explains the fact that reality exists in the first place, and whatever explains the universe possessing the order that it is observed to display, must ex hypothesi be at least as orderly and rational as what it's being called upon to explain.
nsNS
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Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
Darwin used extant species, Island species, geographical distribution, experience from domestic breading to build his theory.
He had little fossil evidence and zero genome data to work off.
The "logic arriving at the conclusion" is due to the mountain of evidence.
Trek
Registered Senior Member
I’m only interested in finding out so called “religious teachings” disguised as science, and why is “intelligence” regarded as supernatural.
I’ve no business in arguing about Darwinian evolution, or Intelligent design.
It’s a no brainier for me, just as it is for you
It's "unguided" and "unplanned" in the sense of not falling out of thought, and lacking some recreational human goals that float on their own without having to do with responding to environmental situations and personal survival or persistence. But evolution certainly isn't unregulated or wholly random[1].
- Richard Dawkins: To this day, and in quarters where they should know better, Darwinism is widely regarded as a theory of 'chance'. It is grindingly, creakingly, crashingly obvious that, if Darwinism were really a theory of chance, it couldn't work.
You don't need to be a mathematician or physicist to calculate that an eye or a haemoglobin molecule would take from here to infinity to self-assemble by sheer higgledy-piggledy luck. Far from being a difficulty peculiar to Darwinism, the astronomic improbability of eyes and knees, enzymes and elbow joints and the other living wonders is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve, and that Darwinism uniquely does solve.
It solves it by breaking the improbability up into small, manageable parts, smearing out the luck needed, going round the back of Mount Improbable and crawling up the gentle slopes, inch by million-year inch.
Only God would essay the mad task of leaping up the precipice in a single bound. And if we postulate him as our cosmic designer we are left in exactly the same position as when we started. Any Designer capable of constructing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent and complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable - and therefore demanding of explanation. --Climbing Mount Improbable
- - - footnote - - -
[1] Randomness is even a killer of free will, since it is a lack of any governing organization and adherence to pattern whatsoever. (No will at all.) Though a minimal degree of randomness is compatible with will or does not undermine it -- though not essential for it or its putative "freedom", either.
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Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
Which has been explained to you. If you simply cannot understand it or are completely dishonest and pretend you cannot read links and comprehend simple English the posters can decide. I have decided.
Same as above. Stop pretending. No one is just referring to general intelligence.
Ok, it was the " How do you know the scientific community accept Evolution, perhaps they are pretending" that through me.
What is?
Pinball1970
Valued Senior Member
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
True, but it is a regularly used creationist canard. You know, that “tornado in a junkyard” crap.
The statement isn't asserting that anyone did, either, though.
It's a clarification, since some anti-Evolutionists contend it is a purely unregulated process._