Intelligent Design is exactly as if you were to say that the lightning is so powerful only a giant monkey in the sky could have thrown it.

When disaster strikes, we'll know why, right Pat?

"Breathtaking inanity." Damn.

"...utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

I like that part best.

Wot a smackdown!

The New Yorker had an excellent story on this trial a few issues back. It may be online, but I'm lazy...

They predicted this outcome, and this is no liberal judge.

Yay for common sense!

Although one liberal judicial activist has issued a biased pro-evolution ruling, some conservative judges realize evolution is a sham and deserves more critical thinking.

Link

"Judge Ed Carnes of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said that the lower court judge had misstated facts in his ruling, overstating the influence religious protests had on the school board's actions. He also said the words on the sticker are "technically accurate," and that the Cobb County school board was justified in singling out the theory of evolution for comment.

"From nonlife to life is the greatest gap in scientific theory," Carnes said. "There is less evidence supporting it than there is for other theories. It sounds to me like evolution is more vulnerable and deserves more critical thinking" than other subjects."

"breathtaking inanity"

I love it!

Make the losers pay for this frivolous lawsuit!

cld, tell me more about this giant monkey in the sky...

speaking of activism in the courts: someone should point out to the wingnuts that interpreting article II or the fourth amendment
as allowing for unfettered executive priviledge
in a time of war is about as activist as you can get. They're all orginalists when it comes to abortion, but spying on americans? lots of wiggle room there.

Conservatives lie to promote their partisan agenda?

Who would have thought it!

"It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy."

Yup. They are so fvcking mendacious. The funny thing is, though, that they seem to believe their own lies.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

OMG!!

I found a hero.

They're not originalists when it comes to abortion. Abortion was legal at the time of the constitution and no one would have thought otherwise.

aimai

Oh. And Bush and the radical right lose again.

It's becoming a pattern.

LOL in 2006.

The American people have seen the Bush administration and its lemmings unmasked.

And they don't find it a pretty sight.

Secret police.

Secret orders.

Secret laws.

Secret courts.

Secret prisons.

Domestic spying.

Torture as state policy.

Invasion of countries that have not attacked us.

Unfettered executive power.

Reminds one of Stalin, Hitler, and Saddam, now doesn't it.

This judge is clearly not a Bush appointment -- he's wise.

From nonlife to life is the greatest gap in scientific theory," Carnes said. "There is less evidence supporting it than there is for other theories. It sounds to me like evolution is more vulnerable and deserves more critical thinking" than other subjects."

Evolution does not address the origins of life. It is about the origin of species. Judge Carnes words tell us that he is an ignorant ass.

You “science sheep” have the wool pulled over your empirical eyes. In my day we called science “the scientific method”, or rather just another way to look closely at reality. You guys have taken science to another level that I would call religion. Science has taken us to the limits of absolutes in the Western world or just another level of ignorance. Keep your empirical eyes open not shut.

The Onion had a great piece last summer about Intelligent Falling. Down with gravity!

www.theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4133&n=2

This judge is grievously endangering our nation by not deferring to the president in a time of war.

In such a suit, the losers (school board) pay not only the plaintiffs' costs, but attorney fees as well. That punishes the community twice. The old board refused to rescind the policy. After they were thrown out, the new board presumably would, but have they taken power yet? Is there any way to make the losing individuals pay the fees and costs since their action was ultra vires (not within their power), rather than the school district itself? That would really have a salutary effect on this sort of thing.

"breathtaking inanity"

Wow, Al, you got a mention!!!

Heck, our in-house trolls are sufficient proof against Intelligent Design.

It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

It's not really a lie, if it's purpose is to promote and honor Christ ?! Yeah right! It's that what they were taught in their Church, to serve Christ by lying. What a religion! What has Christians become, a bunch of liars ?

The main problem with Judges such as this, obviously deluded leftist activist, type is that the public keeps electing soft headed Presidents who appoint them. For instance, this leftist, John E Jones III was appointed in 2002 by the President who was selected in 2000. Think people; stop electing or selecting these leftist Presidents and you won't have such inane decisions.

Golly, the excerpts of the judgement are bracing. Someone to cite these people for what they are: an embarassment to true religion. (note the lower case)

The main problem with Judges such as this, obviously deluded leftist activist, type is that the public keeps electing soft headed Presidents who appoint them

Yeah, last I read, he was appointed by none other than G.W. Bush, the King, himself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Jones_III

Wow! That is sooo cool!! Can we make a bumper sticker from that?

Evolution, the theory, is a work in progress, a path of inquiry. Inquiry has its disadvantages, though. First and foremost, it requires some effort. Second, it requires acceptance of uncertainty. Third, it requires patience and humility.

ID, on the other hand, is not a path of inquiry. It is a terminus for inquiry. And that is it's appeal.

The judge has set the tone of the conversation for future judges, I think.

The conversation will center around:

"... the only alternative offered is an inherently religious one, namely, ID."

And the proverbial "foot in the door" that the ID people will have is on the word "inherently". They will cite Flying Spaghetti Monsters as evidence - proof even - that ID is not *inherently* religous. And thus attempt to have the judge's ruling thrown overruled due to an error of fact.

There is a God!!

Enough little strikes against this plague in the WH and eventually we may get to the big 'I' word........ d.v.

Sounds interesting, but Bush haters should wait before they start celebrating. When all the facts come out, and I am eagerly waiting for them to do so, everyone will be surprised by what they see.

The decision that matters was already made over 12 months ago by the American people.

RE: my last comment at 12:26 pm.

Cooked chickens can indeed fly into his open mouths of idiots!

The decision that matters was already made over 12 months ago by the American people.

Popular sovereignty does not mean you vote once and that's the end of meaningful public involvement in the process of government.

What is it with the right wingers around here not understanding popular sovereignty?

Nice fake conspiracy nut and fake Flanders.

THE LIEBRALS ARE DESTROYING THIS COUNTRY. THEY HATE EVERYTHING THAT AMERICA STANDS FOR: CHRISTIANITY, CHRISTMAS, WAR AGAINST ISLAM, THE ABIlITY OF OUR PRESIDENT TO WIRETAP THE CITIZENS AT HOME AND ABROAD, SECRET PRISONS, TORTURE OF TERRORISTS DETAINED BY OUR PATRIOTIC SOLDIERS, DETENTION OF TERRORISTS WITHOUT ANY POSSIBILITY OF THEIR BEING RELEASED ON LEGAL NICETIES.

"The decision that matters was already made over 12 months ago by the American people."

What?

Patton -

rofl! Best satire ever!

Well, we needed some good news, although I'd gotten the sense that things were going to go that way, especially since even the Penntucky regions don't want to be mistaken for Kansas or anything.

But more importantly, those are the most concise and accurate tbrosz & conspiracy nut parodies of seen yet. Excellent work.

A judge I can agree with. Too bad he will be villified by righteous religious assholes.

The decision that matters was already made in the last local election when the constituents of the school district booted out the ill-informed faction from the school board.

Ugh... that should read "parodies I'VE seen yet." Hard to write with a regional dialect, but I somehow managed it.

Here's an alternative to ID

http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2005/11/the_other_id.php

craigie: "The New Yorker had an excellent story on this trial a few issues back. It may be online, but I'm lazy. They predicted this outcome, and this is no liberal judge."

It's from the December 5 issue, but it doesn't seem to be available online.

I like that the main predictor for which side a person is likely to take on ID is reading newspapers; i.e. the more you read newspapers, the less likely you are to be swayed by ID "arguments." Judge Jones was a noted newspaper reader (cue ominous music).

Are you saying that maybe the next tact is an attempt to ban newspapers? (lol)

Okay, there has to be one flamethrower in the crowd.

I disagree with everyone of you. I have always thought, even when being taught the theory, that a great deal of evolutionary proof is the coopting of the science of genetics. The utter interdependent complexity of the human body including emotional subleties undermines the theory of production through selection. As for similarities between species, that's as easy to explain as the similarities in Picassos. As one person of science put it. "Evolution is intelligence denying intelligence."

Sorry to ruin your party, guys.

I wonder if those support the patently unscientific theory if ID will learn anything from this decision.

Teach this bunk to your own kids if you like, but the schools run by the government are no place for it.

A more interesting case is coming down the pike in California, where a Christian high school in the outskirts of San Diego has sued the University of California system for not recognizing the faith based courses of the religious institution as equivalent to the courses taught in the public schools that are required for admission.

ELR, you are free to pursue your theory, provide observable, reproducable evidence and submit for peer review. It is going to take a little more work than writing four sentences, however.

And the proverbial "foot in the door" that the ID people will have is on the word "inherently". They will cite Flying Spaghetti Monsters as evidence - proof even - that ID is not *inherently* religous.

Wow, you know I would fully support teaching ID in science class if equal time were also given to teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

May you all be touched by His Noodly Appendage this holiday season!

Brian, I distinctly remember that peer pressure and ridicule were as important ingredients to building and maintaining evolutionary orthodoxy
as is your comment.

I think the case can be intelligently made that conjecture and proof found a ready audience in the Theory of Evolution.

Wow, you know I would fully support teaching ID in science class if equal time were also given to teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

Heresy!

It's turtles all the way down.

Wow, you know I would fully support teaching ID in science class if equal time were also given to teaching Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

Great thought, but remember, the preferred term is "Pastafarianism."

You'll learn why when you're intitiated into the 22nd degree, at which time you'll also be shown the secret handshake and receive a coupon for a free dessert at Applebee's.

Quaker in a Basement sum it up, very succinctly--"wot a smackdown!"

Today is a good day...

"The utter interdependent complexity of the human body including emotional subleties undermines the theory of production through selection."

Sez you. To make this claim is to utterly fail to understand the immensity of time involved in producing life as we know it on earth. We are used to throwing around numbers like "billion" and "trillion" like they are slightly more than a buck and a half. Did you know it would take you more than eleven days to count to a million if you count one number every second 24 hours a day? Do you have any idea how long 4 billion years is? I think not.

I think the case can be intelligently made that conjecture and proof found a ready audience in the Theory of Evolution.

What the hell does this sentence mean? That we shouldn't use proof when trying to prove a theory?

"Brian, I distinctly remember that peer pressure and ridicule were as important ingredients to building and maintaining evolutionary orthodoxy
as is your comment."
-ELR

Yeah, so many scientific theories are founded on nothing but "peer pressure and ridicule." The reason evolution is accepted is that is falsifiable and the available evidence supports it. That cannot be said for ID.

WE JUST DON"T KNOW, LIVE WITH IT.Oh and Everthing DIES.

From the NYT:

> "A thousand opinions by a court that a particular scientific
> theory is invalid will not make that scientific theory
> invalid," said Mr. Thompson, the president and chief
> counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, a public interest
> firm that says it promotes Christian values. "It is going
> to be up to the scientists who are going to continue to
> do research in their labs that will ultimately determine that."

Ahhh ... so when their attempt to cop the mushy relativist
language they oridinarily so despise failed -- when it is no
longer tenable to argue for "teaching the controversy" because
"evolution is only a theory -- one of many" -- now they're back
to accepting that science is a reliable bastion of objective truth.

What fucking contemptible intellectual whores these people are.

Of course, nobody's in any biology lab -- or ever will be -- testing
the hypotheses of Intelligent Design -- because there are none.

I predicted this outcome months ago. It is extremely satisfying :)

Bob

Are they saying ID is a Design of God or is ID the design of little green people from another planet?

The utter interdependent complexity of the human body including emotional subleties undermines the theory of production through selection.

Um, how? "Interdependent complexity" is observed in systems that are observed through random change and selection in completely controlled systems like software systems utilizing genetic algorithms and related technologies. Now, admittedly, the complexity there isn't on the order of that in the human body, but then the size of the systems are much smaller than Earth's biosphere, and the run times are much shorter than the entire history of life on earth.

This argument is pure B.S. designed to appeal to the ignorance of the audience. Those advancing it are either dishonest shills or ignorant dupes.

Redacted, Just in case you have never heard someone with my point of view say this--generally, persons who believe in ID do not believe the earth was created in a literal 24 hour day. The Biblical record is silent on this matter and uses "day" in various contexts and with various meanings. The age of the earth could certainly fall into the billions. Certainly, the Grand Creator could have used any number of methods to create initial pulsating life, but when those building blocks needed a connection, then design became a necessity. I just don't observe a building and assume there is no architect. But if you can replicate its complexity three more times without direct influence over every piece of the process, than I will listen more attentively to your argument.
Your peers will no doubt be impressed.

Windhorse:

I knew a Pastafarian once. He married a Hindon't :)

Bob

This brings back the old Blue eyes Brown eyes theory.And am I ever glad I have Blue eyes,Makes me Closer to God.

ELR-

Who is this man of science you quote as having said that "Evolution is intelligence denying intelligence?"

What is most mindboggling is that even the so- called intellectuals in our media , liberals and conservatives alike, let the nonsense like ID be protrayed as a legitimate viewpoint. No one calls on these idiots for their utter lunacy.

ELR:

The core argument of ID -- the Clockmaker Argument or the Aristotelian First Cause -- is one of the oldest arguments in support of religion.

It is indeed an extremely powerful intuition.

But it generates exactly zero testable propositions.

And besides which, I say this to the Clockmaker:

Who created *You* ???

Can't even *begin* to answer that one, can you ...

Bob

Intelligent design is inoperative. Any engineer, even Tbrosz, could design a better, more efficient human skeleton.

I've read the decision and it's quite good. Judge Jones got it exactly right.

By the way, the Winter Solstice is tomorrow, Wednesday December 21st, at 1:35PM EST.

The Solstice is "the reason for the season", literally. So celebrate.

And after the Solstice, the days start getting longer again. And that alone is plenty of reason to celebrate, as far as I'm concerned.

rmck1: It's worse than that, actually. Until the creationists can come up with a model, a definition of just what divine ex-nilho creation is supposed to be, and how it's supposed to work, then they aren't saying anything, testable or otherwise.

It's like they're saying that they don't accept the Theory of Evolution because they believe in the "flugendorf process", which they refuse to define, except to say that it's "not Evolution". Which is about a million miles away from sufficient, guys.

Re: Separate but unequal

In some ways I think the philosophers of the Middle Ages were far more enlightened than we. All sciences were science and a firewall between them was not considered essential to credibility.

>Brian, I distinctly remember that peer pressure and ridicule were as important ingredients to building and maintaining evolutionary orthodoxy

Yeah, Brian. You see, you've got the cool scientists (like Dawkins) who drive fast cars, get all the girls, and smoke cigarettes in the boy's bathroom, and then you have the Behe types with glasses taped together and pocket protectors. And every so often the cool scientists stick the ID nerds' heads in the toilet and flush while saying, "So, are swirlies intelligently designed? Huh? Huh? Nerd!"

It is only by such abusive tactics that the Darwinists have maintained their dominance in the academy.

SecularAnimist: Or, you could always say that "co-opting Saturnalia for the newly christianized Roman Empire" is the reason for the season. But how many fundamentalist christians do you know who know much actual history?

(And yeah, I know that the solstice is the reason for Saturnalia in the first place. ;))

ELR: What "firewall" between the sciences are you talking about? Evolution is widely supportable across many disciplines.

Unless you're going to bring out the old chestnut about evolution violating the second law of thermodynamics. The only thing that argument does is reveal how little the speaker understands about physics.

Or were you thinking of something else?

"Intelligent design" -- let's separate out the "intelligence" and the "design".

"Intelligence" refers, paradigmatically, to certain behavioral and experiential capabilities of the human organism. It's important to realize that even in its pardigmatic usage, the term "intelligence" is not well-defined.

So the question as to "whether intelligence exists" in other contexts -- e.g. whether non-human animals "are" intelligent or whether non-animal life forms, ecosystems, or the Earth's biosphere as a whole "are" intelligent, or whether biological evolution "is" intelligent -- is really a question about whether it is helpful to our understanding of nature to think of such entities or systems or processes as intelligent, and to call them intelligent.

To say that "biological evolution, considered as a wholistic process and including all of its elements, is an intelligent process" is not to put forth a scientific hypothesis that can be tested like some proposition in physics. It is to propose a way of thinking about intelligence, and nature, and the scope and role of intelligence in nature.

As to the second part of "intelligent design", namely "design", I see absolutely nothing whatever in nature or in any natural phenomena -- which is to say, in any phenomena since I regard "nature" as synonymous with "all that is" -- that appears be "designed" or that remotely resembles things (such as buildings, the example given by ELR) that are designed by human beings. Nor to I see any evidence that there exists any "designer" separate from nature itself, and in fact that notion seems to me to be completely incoherent.

"Intelligent design is inoperative. Any engineer, even Tbrosz, could design a better, more efficient human skeleton."

Then be my guest which is exactly my point--you can't get it unless you design it.

Guys, I got into this because I thought it was good that you hear from someone who doesn't listen to American Family, never contributed to Pat Robertson and doesn't stare doe eyed at the Richard Land. You have and now I leave you to your opinions.

Take care.

Actually, I believe I reviewed the first paper that proposed that the 'flugendorf process' may explain biological development better than evolution.

ELR:

> Redacted, Just in case you have never heard someone with my
> point of view say this--generally, persons who believe in ID
> do not believe the earth was created in a literal 24 hour day.
> The Biblical record is silent on this matter and uses "day"
> in various contexts and with various meanings. The age of
> the earth could certainly fall into the billions.

Ahh, the ol' Agnostic Dodge. You know what I hate so much about
you guys? For alleged Christians, you're such shamelessly lying
sacks of shit. Notice you square this so-called agnosticism about
the "Grand Creator" (Is that like the Grand Poobah of the Fraternal
Order of Water Buffalo?) by saying that it doesn't contradict the
Bible. Whew! Not any other culture's creation stories, naturally.

> Certainly, the Grand Creator could have used any number of
> methods to create initial pulsating life,

"Pulsating life"? Do the producers of
ID tracts have a side business in porno?

> but when those building blocks needed a
> connection, then design became a necessity.

This partakes precisely of the same tautology that sunk
functionalist sociology in the 60s. A social behavior
exists because it serves a functional requisite.
It serves a functional requisite because it exists.

> I just don't observe a building
> and assume there is no architect.

I don't observe the sun and assume it won't rise tomorrow.
But that still partakes of the Inductive Fallacy and conflates
correlation with causation. It has *proven* nothing. It
has concretely demonstrating no hypothetical proposition.

> But if you can replicate its complexity three more times
> without direct influence over every piece of the process,
> than I will listen more attentively to your argument.

Any biologist who works with bacteria and viruses and noted
their propensity to adapt to changing environmental conditions
over time has observed the process of natural selection
through random mutations at work -- and in real time, too.

> Your peers will no doubt be impressed.

But not *nearly* as impressed as we are with you :)

Bob

MJ Memphis,

Good one. lmao, as the cool kids say.

Personally, I think stuff like ID is precisely why I believe in Unintelligent Design.

Or more to the point: We were created in God's image. As farked up as the human race is, that tells us a lot about this here God guy...

ELR: Guys, I got into this because I thought it was good that you hear from someone who doesn't listen to American Family, never contributed to Pat Robertson and doesn't stare doe eyed at the Richard Land.

And yet, all you've done is repeat their stale, disproven cliches. Must just be a coincidence, then.

You have and now I leave you to your opinions.

...having dodged every question asked of you, I notice. I'm shocked, I tell ya.

MJ:

Once again, as with the War (ratatatat! blam! boosh boosh!) on Christmas, you prove to be Political Animal's soul of whimsy :)

"Swirly? Was this swirly intelligently designed? Huh, huh, nerd?"

ROTFLMAO !

Bob

I am sure this judge made a correct decision based on facts and context. On the other hand, I am influenced by the Holy Spirit's messages on The Christian Prophet blog regarding the dictatorship of public schools and the dictatorship of judges. Just because ID is not a palpable theory is no reason to accept dictatorsip. But my spirits were lifted by a post on The Holy Inheritance blog which said we were all created by love.

Actually, I believe I reviewed the first paper that proposed that the 'flugendorf process' may explain biological development better than evolution.

:) Since the flugendorf process has a null definition, it can be used to prove anything. That's why it's such a powerfully convincing doctrine. :)

I'm a Christian, I'm a scientist, and I'm glad the ID got trounced.
Even though many posters here are demonstratably hostile to christianity, not all of us who follow Jesus are sandbagged in a bunker waiting for the apocalypse.
There is a battle within christianity, and, hopefully, sanity will prevail and common sense takes over again.
Till then, please be patient.

sheerakkahn:

If certain strands of politically ascendant Christianity weren't so hostile to erverybody *else* (including Christians like yourself -- the worst apostates of all), then ordinarily tolerant liberals like us wouldn't have our hackles up about it.

Bob

Sheerahkhan: I'm with rmck1. I'm not hostile to christianity - I'm hostile to the pretenders and con artists who use the term "christian" as a cover for all kinds of hateful, bullying, and quite frankly unchristian nonsense. Creationism as a political movement most definitely qualifies, and has, I'm aware, suckered in way too many actual christians. But the leaders of the Creationist movement have nothing to do with Christ. At all.

I'm a Christian, I'm a scientist, and I'm glad the ID got trounced.
Even though many posters here are demonstratably hostile to christianity, not all of us who follow Jesus are sandbagged in a bunker waiting for the apocalypse.
There is a battle within christianity, and, hopefully, sanity will prevail and common sense takes over again.
Till then, please be patient.

No kidding.

A lot of the ID-ists (such as the former Dover board and the Kansas BOE) has been drawing this as a Christian v. atheist battle/apocolypse/what have you.

If you think about, that's REAL insulting to the many, many, many Christians who are conducting evolutionary biology research. Not to mention the Christians who find no conflict between their religion and the findings of science.

What it comes down to is the science. It should always come down to that, since ID is claming that it is scientific. Is there evidence and research? Or not? And by their own advocates' admission, there is NOTHING for ID.

That should end it right there--except that it won't, and that the ID-ists/Dominionists are on some sort of Crusade/Jihad to remake every aspect of American society.

American Taliban is NOT inappropriate to use here.

ELR:

> Re: Separate but unequal

> In some ways I think the philosophers of the Middle Ages were
> far more enlightened than we. All sciences were science and a
> firewall between them was not considered essential to credibility.

This is one of the funniest thing I've ever read in cyberspace --
though of course it's not laugh-out-loud funny. It's certainly
not funny the way MJ's whimsical scenarios are freakin' hysterical.

How do I attack this (let me count the possible ways)?
There was no firewall between science and faith because
there was, properly speaking, no science. The philosophers
of the Middle Ages (ignorant Church bureaucrats who borrowed
all their most important knowledge from the Islamic libraries
of ancient texts) were metaphysicians who spent their days
arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Science arose in the Enlightenment and blasted all that crap to dust.

Or would you prefer alchemy over chemistry?

Bob

Now the Courts control local school boards??

I don't think that is a good idea.

"Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy."

A perfect rebuke to the Republican misuse of the term "activist judge."

GOPGregory:

1) You certainly don't mind federalizing school boards when it's NCLB.

2) The Dover school board was voted out on its ear after the lawsuit made the community a nationwide laughingstock. So the issue already *has* been decided in the court of public opinion and at the ballot box.

3) Expect the same fate in Kansas.

No school board likes to be captured by single-issue fanatics who are incompetent on every other facet of their duties, and who were egged on to run as "stealth Christians" by religious ideologues whose larger purpose is to destroy public education.

You're going to need a much better set of talking points ....

Bob

Just read the opinion -- all 139 pages.

And you are all correct -- Judge Jones was not amused and does not suffer fools gladly.

But the propaganda mill will produce the usual "activist judge" drivel and the echo chamber will dutifully repeat it.

And the usual guillible suspects will believe.

Argh, I hate the Building / Architect to Living Creature / Mystic Designer analogy.

First, I can get evidence of building designers.
They are people - some work just a few floors below me. I can talk to the guy who designed my building. I can even watch them as they design, see the rough drafts. Anybody else can do this, and find the architects.

None of these things can be done for the Mystic Designer in a repeatable manner. (You might get divine messages, but that's not scientific evidence)

Second, we can watch buildings being built by people. They do not self assemble, reproduce, or otherwise exhibit Life. Buildings would not exist without people constructing them. Life requires no external constructor.

Grrr

Just read the opinion -- all 139 pages.

And you are all correct -- Judge Jones was not amused and does not suffer fools gladly.

Well, as someone who was following the trial, this wasn't surprising.

When you had ID-ists who were make bald-faced lies in court, when you had ID authorities saying that you could easily teach astrology as science, when you had someone demonstrated that the ID-textbook publisher did a global cut and replace of "intelligent design" for "creationism" and when you had the leading ID scientist admit that he had done no research on ID since he devised the concept....well, even the fuzziest judge would have been left with little tolerance.

Now the Courts control local school boards??

Why not?? They already picked the President.

MobiusKlein:

Actually, I have a lot of respect for the First Cause argument. For myself, I can't refute it completely to my full satisfaction. It's why, in fact, I consider myself agnostic as opposed to etheist.

The kind of truth category in which it lies is intuition. It's certainly not a testable proposition, and thus it's scientifically meaningless. To inaccurately paraphrase physicist Wolfgang Pauli, it's such a bad theory "it's not even false."

What the ID folks are trying to do is leverage such a powerful intuition -- one I'm sure is shared by many, perhaps most, scientists (it doesn't even comment on darwinism, let alone challenge it) for the sake of attempting to undermine the elevated status of trans-observable truth.

The real ID Trojan Horse is in that innocent little statement they wanted to be read in biology classes. It redefines science itself to embrace explanations for the supernatural.

What's going on here isn't even a war on secularism. It's a war on epistemology.

Bob

Even though many posters here are demonstratably hostile to christianity, not all of us who follow Jesus are sandbagged in a bunker waiting for the apocalypse.

I don't believe that many posters here are hostile to Christianity (alright, except Don P) as much as they are hostile to people who pretend to be Christians as a cover for their hate, greed and narrow-mindedness and who use their religion as a cudgel to bash anyone different from themselves.

Christianity would be a good idea if anyone ever tried it....

Just don't forget that every time you had a Domino's pizza a few years ago, it went to funding the Thomas More Center and the ability to support stuff like this and the New Hampshire abortion case etc.,etc.,etc.

rmck1: Actually, I have a lot of respect for the First Cause argument. For myself, I can't refute it completely to my full satisfaction.

Buddha refuted it. Buddha taught that there is no first cause, but a web of causality in which all phenomena are both causes and effects of all other phenomena.

"All things that are arise from all that is."

I'm hostile to the pretenders and con artists who use the term "christian" as a cover for all kinds of hateful, bullying, and quite frankly unchristian nonsense.

How do you do? I am Hostile, and for similar reasons.

Or would you prefer alchemy over chemistry?

I saw a PhD Bio-Chemist professor from a prestigous college argue in favor of ID on a C-SPAN program. No one asked him if he teaches about the Philosopher's Stone.

gwangung:

Very very true. The ID folks really shot themselves in the feet in innumerable ways.

The first (as I noted upthread) is attempting to cop the detested language of liberal relativism. ID is "the next great paradigm shift" in biology -- a phrase lifted from Thomas Kuhn, whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is beloved by postmodernists who argue that scientific thought is socially constructed. "Teach the controversy" ... "evolution is only a theory" ... "darwinism is an orthodoxy and evolutionists are dogmatists." They did everything but call Charles Darwin a Dead White European Male :)

All of this is language copped from the postmodernist social-construction-of-everything crowd. Doubtless this language makes *many* conservative culture warriors highly uncomfortable.

And then to hear their lead lawyer saying that the issue will be properly decided in the laboratory like all science instead of in the court of public opinion, flatly contradicting their entire PR strategy -- well you just can't get any more delicious :)

What a total grind-into-the-dirt defeat.

Bob

>In some ways I think the philosophers of the Middle Ages were far more enlightened than we. All sciences were science and a firewall between them was not considered essential to credibility.

I, too, long for the days when learned astronomers were forced to fund their research by casting horoscopes for wealthy idiots. In these dark days, I doubt that many so-called "scientists" could even tell you what the effect would be of Saturn rising in the third house of Leo, much less give a learned discourse on the thirteenth "lost sign" of the zodiac, Ophiuchus. Truly, they are idiot savants who have lost the grand traditions of the Middle Ages.

That being said, I would love to see PZ Myers of Pharyngula cast a few horoscopes.

"Your highness, the stars indicate that you will be eaten by a giant squid."

I don't think PZ would have made it back in the good old days of REAL science.

SecularAnimist:

Buddha didn't refute it to my satisfaction.

Bob

>I don't believe that many posters here are hostile to Christianity

You know, lately I've noticed that the more likely I am to respect a particular branch of Christianity, the more likely they also are to be under government surveillance. Go figure.

"Domino's--we make you deliver"

The decision was rock-solid and the most sophisticated piece of judicial writing on the subject I have seen. It would be appeal-proof if someone were around to appeal it. But I don't think anyone will. The proponents of this nonsense were voted out and the new board will decide whether to authorize any appeal, or continue one if the current crop sneaks one in under the wire.
Unfortunately, unless the Dover school board does things differently fom most municipalities, the taxpayers or an insurer will be on the hook for what will no doubt be seven-figure legal fees and expenses, not the miscreants who caused all the trouble.

When I teach my Supreme Court class next semester, I'll use the Dover case as the perfect example of how not to choose a test case. Squirrely clients + dubious policy = bad place to make your stand. Nonetheless, I'm guessing that the Thomas More Law Center (how do you think More would feel about having his name attached to this entity?) will have no trouble using this case for fund-raising purposes.

Just don't forget that every time you had a Domino's pizza a few years ago, it went to funding the Thomas More Center and the ability to support stuff like this and the New Hampshire abortion case etc.,etc.,etc.

And I thought I wasn't buying their pizza just because it sucked.

Buddha refuted it. Buddha taught that there is no first cause, but a web of causality in which all phenomena are both causes and effects of all other phenomena.

There is a difference between unsupportable contrary teaching and refutation, particularly when the contrary teaching requires an assumption at least as enormous as a first creator, that the arrow of time is completely irrelevant to the direction of causality.

Hey Alberto,

Yeah, I know I appointed the SOB, but you figure out some way we can impeach that bastard. God damned Ashcroft, he told me that he was a made man.

Yours truly,

George W

> that the arrow of time is completely irrelevant to the direction of causality.

Actually, I believe this is one of the assumptions under which Thai taxi drivers (who virtually all have spent at least a year as a Buddhist monk) operate under while driving. Traffic signals are also completely irrelevant to the direction of causality.

rmck1: Buddha didn't refute it to my satisfaction.

Well, empirically speaking, the burden is on those who maintain that there is a "first cause" to show that it exists.

Buddha was an empiricist. His teaching that there is no "first cause" is based on his empirical observation that no such thing as a "first cause" is found anywhere in nature or experience.

You may have an intuitive sense that there must be a "first cause", but this is just an idea about how things are, or might be, or must be -- not unlike the intuitive sense that there must be a "creator" -- not an empirical demonstration that a "first cause" exists or ever did exist.

cmdicely:

I don't think the Buddha is saying in that little snippet above that there's no arrow of time and thus no cause and effect.

Only that all causes are both causes and effects of other causes.

My probem with it is that it's mushily metaphysical, not that it's illogical prima facie.

Bob

SecularAnimist:

I never put my contention into the realm of the testable.

Empirically speaking, the great modern (and only worthwhile) metaphysician Immanuel Kant demonstrated to my logical satisfaction that the extistence of god cannot either be ruled out or ruled in.

Just saying that it can't be true because we don't empirically observe it in our day-to-day existence really says, well, not a whole lot.

Bob

I don't think the Buddha is saying in that little snippet above that there's no arrow of time and thus no cause and effect.

I think SecularAnimist correctly relates (at least, it matches how others have related to me) the teaching that all events are the both the cause and the effect of all other events. Necessarily, this makes time irrelevant to causality.

Now, I don't think that is illogical -- there is nothing illogical about considering that the perception of temporal sequence aligning with causal sequence we have is an artifact of our perception of time, and that if causality flowed equally in the opposite direction we would never notice it because our perception in time would still suggest the earlier effect as the source of the later cause rather than vice versa.

Of course, this model is more than "causality is sometimes contrary to the arrow of time" but "all events cause all other events" which ends up being circular and making every event both an indirect cause and an indirect effect of itself. This would seem to contradict a common fundamental assumption of the nature of causality, but that isn't illogical, it just suggests that if its true, our common assumptions about the nature of causality are wrong in several ways -- kind of the way non-euclidean geometries contradict what every high-school student "knows" about geometry.

cmdicely, you might consider the implications for the Buddhist teaching about a web of causality with no first cause, of a universe that has no beginning -- a universe that is ever-changing, but that always has existed and always will exist.

On the other hand, you might be interested in this.

cmdicely:

> I think SecularAnimist correctly relates (at least, it matches how
> others have related to me) the teaching that all events are the both
> the cause and the effect of all other events. Necessarily, this makes
> time irrelevant to causality.

Waitaminute ... did you say "all"? If all events are both the cause
and the effect of all other events, that renders the notion of cause
and effect utterly meaningless. If there's no hierarchy of causes,
there's no causal chain. Even a "web of causality" is tendentious.

> Now, I don't think that is illogical -- there is nothing illogical
> about considering that the perception of temporal sequence aligning
> with causal sequence we have is an artifact of our perception of time,

So argued Kant, that time and space
arise necessarily from perception.

> and that if causality flowed equally in the opposite
> direction we would never notice it because our perception
> in time would still suggest the earlier effect as the
> source of the later cause rather than vice versa.

Which is just flipping the definition of cause and
effect in a way that looks perfectly tautologgical.

> Of course, this model is more than "causality is sometimes
> contrary to the arrow of time" but "all events cause all
> other events" which ends up being circular and making every
> event both an indirect cause and an indirect effect of itself.

If you can't separate cause from effect, then the concept
is meaningless. Which is not to say, of course, that effects
can't be later causes and causes effects of earlier causes.

The concept of linear time seems essential to this concept.

> This would seem to contradict a common fundamental
> assumption of the nature of causality, but that isn't
> illogical, it just suggests that if its true, our common
> assumptions about the nature of causality are wrong in several
> ways -- kind of the way non-euclidean geometries contradict
> what every high-school student "knows" about geometry.

Just as it doesn't violate logic to imagine a world
where the sun didn't rise tomorrow, as Hume demonstrated.

But a "web of causality" doesn't seem to be a very
useful concept if no clear attributes -- temporal
or otherwise -- distinguish cause from effect.

Bob

Just be careful around them Brown eyed people.

Anybody know the refrence in the Bible about how man was created. Could his breath be blowing across a clay petry dish.

By the way, retrocausality at the quantum level ("micro-retrocausality") has been demonstrated in the laboratory.

rmck1 wrote: If there's no hierarchy of causes, there's no causal chain. Even a "web of causality" is tendentious.

Consider all -- and I mean all -- the events, conditions, circumstances and elements that "caused" you to come into existence.

Consider then that all of those events, conditions, circumstances and elements that "caused" your existence, were themselves "caused" by myriad other events, conditions, circumstances and elements, and on and on, as far as you can see.

Does it look more like a "chain" or more like a "web"?

What we are talking about here is not "reality" -- no need to talk about that after all, since you are experiencing it directly at this very moment.

What we are talking about is our concepts, our ways of thinking about experience.

The value of thinking of experience in terms of a web of causality is the appreciation that everything is interconnected with everything else.

This appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things has implications for how we choose to live.

The first (as I noted upthread) is attempting to cop the detested language of liberal relativism. ID is "the next great paradigm shift" in biology -- a phrase lifted from Thomas Kuhn, whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is beloved by postmodernists who argue that scientific thought is socially constructed. "Teach the controversy" ... "evolution is only a theory" ... "darwinism is an orthodoxy and evolutionists are dogmatists." They did everything but call Charles Darwin a Dead White European Male :)

But doesn't the PoMo crowd take issue with Kuhn's idea of the inevitablity of scientific progress? According to Kuhn: Better obeservation methods > Emerging disconnect between theory and empiricism > Improved paradigm emerges and is contested > * > Weight of evidence decides in favor of new paradigm. According to the PoMos the linkage breaks at * because orthodox faculty keeps the new paradigm from gaining a foothold in academia. So the ID-crowd is on the side of the anti-Kuhnian PoMos rather than the pro-Kuhnians.

Here's my favorite part of the decision:

Plaintiffs accurately submit that the disclaimer mimics the one
that the Fifth Circuit struck down as unconstitutional in Freiler
in two key aspects. First, while encouraging students to keep an
open mind and explore alternatives to evolution, it offers no
scientific alternative; instead, the only alternative offered is an
inherently religious one, namely, ID. 43 Freiler, 185 F.3d at
344-47 (disclaimer urging students to "exercise critical thinking
and gather all information possible and closely examine each
alternative toward forming an opinion" referenced "Biblical version
of Creation" as the only alternative theory, thus "encourag[ing]
students to read and meditate upon religion in general and the
"Biblical version of Creation" in particular.) Whether a student
accepts the Board's invitation to explore Pandas, and reads a
creationist text, or follows the Board's other suggestion and
discusses "Origins of Life" with family members, that objective
student can reasonably infer that the District"s favored view is a
religious one, and that the District is accordingly sponsoring a
form of religion. Second, by directing students to their families
to learn about the "Origins of Life," the paragraph performs the
exact same function as did the Freiler disclaimer: It "reminds
school children that they can rightly maintain beliefs taught by
their parents on the subject of the origin of life," thereby
stifling the critical thinking that the class's study of
evolutionary theory might otherwise prompt, to protect a religious
view from what the Board considers to be a threat. Id. at 345
(because disclaimer effectively told students "that evolution as
taught in the classroom need not affect what they already know," it
sent a message that was "contrary to an intent to encourage
critical thinking, which requires that students approach new
concepts with an open mind and willingness to alter and shift
existing viewpoints").

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Notice how utterly disingenuous this is. They start out by
wanting the students to "retain an open mind" and "exercise
critical thinking" ... for the sake of "reminding school children
that they can rightly maintain beliefs taught by their parents
on the subject of the origin of life" which has the effect, Jones
notes, "contrary to an intent tto encourage critical thinking,
which requires that students approach new concepts with an open
mind and willingness to alter and shift existing viewpoints."

War is peace, freedom is slavery, discouraging
critical thinking is having an "open mind."

All that BS relativistic rhetoric in the so-called interest of
teaching critical thinking skills was just a way to leverage
doubt about evolution, so kids could retain the pre-conceived
absolute notions their parents and pastors drummed into them.

These people really have a lotta nerve calling themselves Christians.

Bob

ogmb:

Good point. To the more flaky Po-Mos, Kuhn is a scientific imperialist :) But -- his book came out in the early 60s and caused a huge stir, which helped to jumpstart the whole issue of the social construction of scientific truth which Foucault and others so ran amok with.

Kuhn was a structuralist, not a post-structuralist, and as you correctly note makes no fundamental break with the idea of scientific progress -- just its assumed historical linearity.

But it's not like these Dover school board people or even the legal team that devised the strategy were in any influenced in a deep way by these kinds of ideas. All they were doing was attempting to use some of the superficial rhetoric of secular doubt to sew those seeds (which they believe destroy everything in its path) against evolution.

All this did was appear blatantly (indeed deceptively) disingenuous to Jones, as my quote above from the decision makes apparent.

Those seeds of secular doubt do indeed destroy everything in its path -- including, in this case, Intelligent Design :)

Bob

ogmb:

What they didn't figure on is that the scientific method is the single best bulwark against the corrosiveness of secular doubt. Science destroys astrology and leaves evolution pretty much intact. Fancy that :)

They were hoist by their own petard. They tried to ju-jitsu liberals with our own rhetoric and it backfired in their faces, thanks to the non-relativistic nature of scientific truth.

SecularAnimist:

Cause and effect breaks down at the Planck length. Quantum mechanics, absolutely.

I understand the point that you're getting at. If we believe that we're all interconnected in a cosmic web of some kind, it carries entirely different implications than, say, the radical individualism implicit in Free Will Protestantism.

But to me, the idea of a "web of causality" levels the difference between cause and effect so radically as to render the whole concept kind of meaningless, at least in the rational discursive realm.

You have to be able to meaningfully separate out cause from effect (which is so much the project of scientific endeavor) in order for those concepts to retain their cogency.

Bob

All they were doing was attempting to use some of the superficial rhetoric of secular doubt to sew those seeds (which they believe destroy everything in its path) against evolution.

We could always just let them have their way and then in true liberal fashion take it to the next level by insisting we honor all the potential Designers: the Elohim, the Annunaki, Odin, Raven, Coatlique of the Aztecs, Ulen Tenger of the Mongolians, Ungamambikula of the Aborigines, the list goes on.

"Class, today's lesson will cover how Euronyme coupled with the giant snake Ophion to create the known universe. Everyone take out their calculators...."

That would help flesh out whether the proponents of ID theory are as unbiased as they claim, and measure how relevant they really believe it is to scientific inquiry.

Windhorse:

Don't forget Ronzonor, the great many-tentacled incarnate demiurge of the Pastafarians, or Vishnude, the Hindon't twelve-clitorised fertility sprite ...

Bob

Windhorse:

*My* Designer would *never* have a pocket protector with ink stains.

Bob

I have a long blog post which lists most of Judge Jones’ most telling comments, indexed by page number in the PDF.

Let’s put it this way: If Jones is telling Behe he doesn’t even have a firm grasp on his own centerpiece of ID, the idea of “irreducible complexity,” ID now has zero credibility. Period.

Bob,
While I am quite happily secular, this Vishnude of whom you speak sounds like a most worthy divinity.

What does a person who believes in ID do with it?
Natural selection gives us an approach for attempting to understand the evolution of life. ID is an empty shell of an idea. It fails to stimulate or enlighten. The dogma and cosmogony of no religion bears up to rational scrutiny; ID is just a pathetic method of covering up that damning fact.

*My* Designer would *never* have a pocket protector with ink stains.

Bob,

Your Designer would also never create a universe that allowed for songs that were less than six minutes long, and that didn't include at least three movements, intricate harmonies, heavy synth, multiple time signatures, and a pan flute or harpsichord for good measure.

i happen to be pregnant at the moment, and i'm very much of the opinion that morning sickness is a pretty good argument against intelligent design.

i happen to be pregnant at the moment, and i'm very much of the opinion that morning sickness is a pretty good argument against intelligent design.

i happen to be pregnant at the moment, and i'm very much of the opinion that morning sickness is a pretty good argument against intelligent design.
Posted by: jessica j on December 20, 2005 at 10:31 PM

Morning sickness, it is suggested, is an extreme sensitivity to chemicals that could be toxic to the vulnerable fetus and is therefore a naturally selected adaptation.

OK, I will take you all on, because you are all arguing from a blindly dogmatic position without acknowledging the amazing depth and opacity of your blindness.

Forget the words "Intelligent Design." Has it ever been proven that the material universe is an unintended accident, that all the bio-chemical precursors which so fill the universe are random molecular accidents, and that the complexity of life could only come about through natural selection making the most of fortuitous accidents driven by chance?

No, such claims have not been proven. But they are taught AS IF they have been proven in every public school in America, using tax dollars to do so.

Modern science assumes that chance exists because of certain a priori assumptions made about the nature of time. I'm not trying to win an argument by getting murky--the reality is that what we call "probability" is our analysis of statistical patterns after the fact.

Probability theory in itself is an enormous assumption, because for all we know no aspect of existence is an accident nor ever has been. In fact, a lot of modern physics would make more sense if we just assumed that spacetime is pre-existing, frozen and endless, and only our consciousness moves along, seeing this or that portion of a tableau that can't change and has no "accidental" part of it.

The notion of cause and effect are also arbitrary assumptions in this view, because everything that is or ever was are only chains of apparent effects.

It is a lot easier to understand how time-reversed light and particles being equivalent to their anti-particles traveling backwards in time can work if we just assume that "chance" is an illusion of the human consciousness.

For all the above reasons, those proponents of I.D. like myself who believe that the universe is 14.5 billion years old, that humans and apes have a common ancestor, and that no chemical reaction has ever been an "accident" will just keep up our spirited attacks on the official science dogmas of the public education system.

Time is bound to prove us right, especially if we humans do not come across any other examples of complex intelligent life in this vast universe. Anything that just falls out of the playbook of chemistry should do so not just once, but again and again, especially given the vastness of space and the 14.5 billion years we mentioned. The universe ought to be crawling with life.

If the universe is not positively crawling with life, that would be the largest and most stunning "accident" of all!

The universe ought to be crawling with life.

I think it is safe to assume that it is. How does this advance ID?

Your ramblings are incoherent. Reminds me of an old saying:

Never show a fool half of a job.

Michael Cook:

Everything you say is entirely speculative, based on what you feel are the most intuitively confortable assumptions.

Which is, you know, fine. I can't answer the question definitively of where life comes for myself, either -- let alone for anyone else.

Your dissing of probabilistic physics is very silly. Einstein tried much harder than you did and all he got for it was a lousy cosomological constant :)

Neo-metaphysical mumbo pocus based on opinions of empirically well-demonstrated theories is precisely why Intelligent Design has failed to win many adherents in the scientific community -- even many who buy the central intuition that we had to have been created.

Bob

What the Cookmeister is saying is that until science can create a perfect replica of the universe, he's going with the ouija board. Those scientific hucksters arent going to pull one over on him.

Hey Bob, probalistic physics hit the wall with the double slit experiment results. Splat! A lot of physicists are real quiet on this issue because they don't want to get tarred with the "mumbo pocus" brush, especially with regard to I.D.

But it is still inescapable that you have to assume that accidents exist before you can assume that the universe is an accident. That's not neo-metaphysics, its just logic.

Be all that as it may, you didn't comment on the "Where is E.T.?" problem. Every stats-based argument I have seen concludes that if life can happen it all, it is almost a "forced" condition of the universe. If our world contains the only examples of life in the vast Cosmos, that would be such an improbable occurence as to give the lie to our concepts of "improbability."

Michael Cook,

Whoa. Are you saying that there is reason to believe the universe is not teeming with life? What makes you think that way?

Are you assuming that if life is common across the universe that we would necessarily have evidence of this? The universe is a big place, you know. Big in space, big in time. We be little in space, little in time. Potential for big miss!

And, if I may repeat myself, ID is not a path of inquiry. It doesn't seek answers. On the contrary, what ID seeks to do is put an end to questions by substituting a one-size-fits-all answer for critical thinking and observation.

ID does not follow from observation. It follows from a craving for security and consolation.

Michael:

Science isn't, you know ... palace intrigue. Scientists don't "keep quiet" about something for fear of "being tarred." They establish hypotheses, test them and publish their results in peer-review journals or cyber equivalents thereof. If you have some good reason to doubt probability (which would mean the whole of quantum theory), well then -- spell it out, man.

Sitting on it while dropping vague hints can't help but futher the neo-metaphysical mumbo pocus factor :)

The "ET hypothesis"? Well, it's very strong intuitively. I'd say there was a high probability that the universe was teeming with life, also. Probably most astrophysicists would as well. Old news.

But the question is -- will we ever know about it? Just because there very well might be life out there doesn't mean that it's necessarily in the form of a super-advanced civilization that could master the art of, you know, faster-than-light intergalactic travel :)

So if there was life out there -- assuming Einstein's constant holds -- how would we ever know?

Strikes me as we wouldn't.

Bob

Hey Bob, probalistic physics hit the wall with the double slit experiment results. Splat!

Mr. Cook, can I interrupt you for a moment to ask what the hell you're talking about here? The fact that random results show patterns (interference patterns, in this case) rather than being uniformly distributed doesn't make them any less random.

Besides, evolution doesn't (necessarily) have anything to do with quantum randomness. Mathematical chaos is as close to randomness as you need to supply the variation side of evolution - and of course as you well know (if, that is, you know anything about evolution), selection isn't random at all, quite the contrary.

i happen to be pregnant at the moment, and i'm very much of the opinion that morning sickness is a pretty good argument against intelligent design.

Not to mention that if there was an intelligent designer, women would have zippers on our abdomens...

The constitutional separation of church and state is a bullwark against sectarianism -- but the constitution doesn't prohibit the acknowledgement of a deity per se. While ID is a pretty shitty way to teach (non) science, teaching this batty theory clearly doesn't violate the US constitution. I expect this activist judge's ruling to be overturned either in the near future, or in the fullness of time, via the increasingly conservative judiciary. Right-wing judges, of course, are made possible because of the political success of the religious right, which in turn occurs largely because of the backlash created by the absurd and unnecessary hubris of the secularist left as embodied in such foolish court decisions. This is a pyric victory at best both for the forces of reason and for progressive politics. A far better solution would be to allow backward locales to luxuriate in their medieval ways until lack of investment and prosperity eventually and inevitably guide them to sounder judgements about who to elect.

PB:

Wow. The ignorance you display about this case is truly remarkable. Try reading the post at least, if you don't wish to read all the thread comments before offering your .02.

And you do this allegedly on behalf of progressives, too. Dude, please -- don't do us any favors.

Everything you say about this case is prima facie wrong. First, the Dover school board was already unanimously tossed out on its ear by the voters. Second, the judge was conservative. Third, the legal reasoning was extremely good, the case failed entirely on the merits (you looked at none of it, obviously), there's nothing remotely "activist" about the decision (the judge concludes with words on that very subject) since the ID supporters were funded by a well-off outside legal group and no novel theories were required.

Fourth, this case is not exactly beloved of cultural conservatives, who were wincing every time they heard the defendants mouth mushy liberal platitudes about "teaching the controversy" because "all theories are valid." The strategy *collapsed* bro -- because it was built on lies.

If you can't get behind this decision, then you might want to check why you bother to call yourself a progressive at all ...

Bob

Well, SETI not finding any radio signals so far, though if there were such signals they would have to be incredibly powerful. A more compelling argument is the lack of spores coming in the last four billion years from space. We see all the simpler organic molecules, maybe even sugars, floating in space, but nothing so far approaching the complexity of a living thing.

This is important because of the first living cell debate. Despite all you have heard about life being made in a test tube, it seems to surpassingly difficult to make chains of amino acids long enough to form a protein, or of nucleic acids long enough to form RNA. One problem is that both heat and water are murder on these chains. Another problem is that meticulously adding the acids to a chain has to be done randomly (the way nature would do it the first time) and only gets to about 100 units before the chains insist on making themselves shorter and simpler.

So, theorists have suggested first life must have come from outer space in a spore, since they can't think of an environment that would do the trick here (remember that life appeared VERY SOON after Earth cooled.) But if spores came down right at that golden moment, they should still be coming down every now and then. Where are they?

Quantum randomness is the ultimate randomness, so if it is an illusion, then all randomness is an illusion. Or, in other words, spacetime is fixed and all events are pre-destined. It is an artifact of spacetime that when we look at a multitude of events they appear to have obeyed statistical rules, but any particular observation in this view had only one pre-destined outcome. The Many Worlds interpretation is unimpeachable theory, but all we can ever see and test is this world and we can not prove by any test that this world is not completely predestined in every element.

Life arose because so many constants of the universe were marvelously fine-tuned to produce life. But, assuming that is the case, we would expect first life forms to be more prolific than they are--in fact, brand new life forms should still be happening or arriving with exotic structures like left handed RNA or something.

It seems strange that it all just happened once, when the Earth was brand new and still being pummeled with material from Mars and elsewhere. All the water in our oceans came from elsewhere.

Mathematician John von Neuman calculated it would take at least 140,000 units to produce the first "thing" that could be self-reproducing. It's kind of like imagining an infinitely long river from distant mountains. In the river logs,ores, mash together in eddies and whirlpools until finally components come together to make a steamboat. Lightning ignites a fire in the boiler and the steamboat starts back up river, against entropy, gathering in the supplies it needs to sustain itself and excreting waste over the fantail.

A riverboat actually is a good comparison in terms of complexity with the first prokaryotic cell. But now we get to the really hard part, the first "accidental" riverboat has to reproduce itself! To do so, it needs in itself a read only memory with a plan inside on how to build another steamboat that will be self-reproducing itself.

A big problem with the evolution debate is that the traditional Darwinist view and traditional religion are inherently antithetical in a profoundly uncompromising way. They literally can not be neutral. There are no "partially" mystical universes. If you come to believe that any supernatural or magical ouija board thing happens, you have to suspect everything may be riddled with the supernatural.

The Deist view really can't happen--a mysterious original creator can't logically create and fine-tune the incredibly fine-tuned universe we have, then hide somewhere. Random chances just don't exist in a universe with physical rules that are unaccounted for. Once a person becomes a "believer" in any type of paranormal or supernatural phenomenon whatsoever, they have already slapped Darwinism in the face. The Darwinists have to say that NOTHING can be supernatural, because if something is, then we can't be sure that blind random chance isn't being influenced by a hidden magic finger.

The blind watchmaker argument sounds good when you are visualizing a pocket watch with maybe 100 metal parts. A watch with 140,000 parts would take a team of blind watchmakers.

The last problem with Darwin I will identify is the 19th century insistence upon competition as the mechanism of natural selection. There is a lot of reason to think the Gaia concept of cooperation, even between living things and non-living things, better explains how life came to be as incredibly complex as it is. Phenomena like blood clotting come along naturally in Gaia type theories, but it is sure hard to see how selfish genes in a random accident world perform "just so" in order to generate such extraordinarily complex and delicately balanced chemical reactions.

The Deist view really can't happen--a mysterious original creator can't logically create and fine-tune the incredibly fine-tuned universe we have, then hide somewhere.

Posted by: Michael L. Cook on December 21, 2005 at 4:32 AM | PERMALINK

Why not? He created the universe, didn't he?

According to your world view, if evolution didn't equip you with the sensory apparatus to detect his existance. You couldn't find him.

And how hidden is he? Quite a lot of religious people in the world. Quite a lot of prayer.

Plus, at last check, the Big Bang is science and that's a pretty good fit for "Let there be light".

Michael Cook,

Good grief! You are one clotted mass of assumptions, crippled by ADD.

"Supernatural"??? You don't even take your own terminology seriously. You want to consider a meaningful application of that word? Click on Secular Animist's link, above, and read about retropsychokinesis. It's fascinating, it's cool, it's scientific AND it's "supernatural" in the colloquial sense of the word.

But, seriously man, are you advancing the notion that we live in a world governed by laws with the exception of certain "divine" events which are caused by an Intelligent Designer who can't resist the urge to puncture the sanctity of space-time and stick his/her big fat finger in whenever the whimsy strikes?

Your thinking is so scattered it is painful to watch.

***And McAristotle, priceless Fool that he is, butts in to spout off in opposition to the guy who is actually on his side!!!

Wow.

Why not? He created the universe, didn't he?

If you say so, Champ.

We can deduce that a first cause exists through circumstantial evidence, but no direct evidence exists so in that sense it is "hiding." The Anthropic Principle advances such deductions by totalling up all the ways the universe had to be fine tuned to support life.

The more we learn, the more it becomes clear that just "getting" the universe as we see it took a dauntingly complex and tortured pathway. I see that Stephen Hawking lately is opening up new ways of thinking of the big bang at the front end and the black holes at the caboose of the universe, in effect making those notions fuzzier and less distinct as terminal points.

I support manned spaceships to Mars and elsewhere because the advance of knowledge lately seems to be tending to an overload situation for all theories, hence the "death of science" books by Horgan and others.

The mechanistic theory of how humans evolved should have been advanced by the human genome being completely mapped, but instead we are seeing very mysterious new complications at work. Genes build proteins, but proteins are such handy little things that they can do up to dozens off different tasks depending on absolute time and place. Even worse, when an organism "needs" something it doesn't have, what used to be called junk DNA seems to be summoned forth to build special new proteins. Then there are trans-genic tricks, where a gene seems to occasionally be able to jump between species and maybe even for a purpose.

The whole concept of immunity conjures up miracles, because our bodies busy themselves throughout our lives taking little molecular hostages and holding them captive. When something new crops up, our defenders first run to our own internal prison system and check out the characteristic behaviors and weaknesses of the "prisoners." Natural selection can explain how such a complicated process arises, but increasingly the explanations ring hollow because there are literally so many complexities to everything, all going on at once, and all orchestrated so well and seemingly effortlessly (most of the time) in a healthy living thing.

Like I said, MC, never show a fool half of a job.

What--really--are you playing at, Sir?

On the one hand you're trying to impress by dropping names, theories and knowledge-bits. On the other hand you're arguing that "it's all so complex we have no other choice but to throw up our hands!!!"

The universe is complex so... there must be an Intelligent Designer!

Here, try this one: Human beings don't know everything, so there must be a Big Daddy who does.

There. Now I feel better.

Has it ever been proven that the material universe is an unintended accident, that all the bio-chemical precursors which so fill the universe are random molecular accidents, and that the complexity of life could only come about through natural selection making the most of fortuitous accidents driven by chance?

Um, no, and the scientific method isn't about proving the only way things could be. Its about developing hypotheses which make falsifiable predictions which can be tested so that the hpyothesis can be rejected if it does not prove to be a useful predictive model of reality.

No scientific hypothesis can ever be proven to be the only way things could be; indeed, I think an argument can be made that any set of observable facts necessarily has an infinite number of different models that could explain them.

No, such claims have not been proven. But they are taught AS IF they have been proven in every public school in America, using tax dollars to do so.

There may be deficiencies in the teaching of science in which certain well-accepted theory is presented as "fact"; alternatively, like the simplifications taught in many fields which are replaced at higher levels with less simplified explanations, this could be argued to be simplification with pedagogical purpose of reducing complexity ang getting directly to the point of the immediate subject matter, while the teaching of the scientific process, often done in parallel, is intended to provide the context and understanding that all scientific conclusions (not the direct observations underpinning them) are matters of tested predictive theory, not fact.

Modern science assumes that chance exists because of certain a priori assumptions made about the nature of time. I'm not trying to win an argument by getting murky--the reality is that what we call "probability" is our analysis of statistical patterns after the fact.

No, modern science posits chance exists and is involved in certain phenomenon in regular, predictable ways because that provides the most parsimonious, falsifiable predictive model explaining the relevant phenomenon.

Probability theory in itself is an enormous assumption, because for all we know no aspect of existence is an accident nor ever has been.

Its not an "assumption" at all, its a useful mathematical predictive tool. Many events which are modelled with probability are decidedly determined and known to be non-random, but exact inputs are not known with certainty; probability theory has been demonstrated to have predictive utility in determining the distribution of outcomes when their is uncertainty in the inputs.

In fact, a lot of modern physics would make more sense if we just assumed that spacetime is pre-existing, frozen and endless, and only our consciousness moves along, seeing this or that portion of a tableau that can't change and has no "accidental" part of it.

It might "make more sense" in a kind of aesthetic, philosophical sense. Science isn't about aesthetic appeal or making the most "sense", it is about producing useful and parsimonious predictive models for predicting observations that will be occur based on observations which have occurred.

For all the above reasons, those proponents of I.D. like myself who believe that the universe is 14.5 billion years old, that humans and apes have a common ancestor, and that no chemical reaction has ever been an "accident" will just keep up our spirited attacks on the official science dogmas of the public education system.

So far you've demonstrated that you don't know what the words "science" or "dogma" mean, but you certainly haven't presented any kind of substantive attack on the teaching of science, or any argument for where the collection of speculations known as intelligence design is in any way scientific.

1) The opinion is quite good. I heartily recommend reading it.

2)The Judge noted that even ID adherents admit that ID is not a scientific theory if by that you mean a hypothesis that can be subjected to experiment and disproven if the observed facts contradict the theory. (That, of course, is what scientists mean by scientific theories. See, e.g., S. Hawking, "A Brief History of Time.") The Judge reviewed evidence showing that the ID proponents had instead sought to change the definition of the scientific method to include theories based on untestable faith and supernatural causes. As Lincoln once said, you can say a dog has five legs but that doesn't make it true.

3) I guess what troubles me most about ID, apart from the fact that it represents a direct assault on the scientific method, is that it represents a very narrow religious point of view. ID is based on a narrow reading of the Book of Genesis, one that is not shared by most Jews or, for that matter, by most Christians. Isn't that exactly the type of particular religious doctrine that the Founders sought to prevent the Government from establishing?

obscure:

Stop thwacking Mr. Cook here. It makes you look a little threatened and defensive. I had my doubts the first couple messages, but our friend Mr. Cook is definitely *not* a wanker and seems to know a good deal about science. He's read a lot more recent stuff than I have. One of the reasons I'm agnostic is that I try to avoid dogmatic assertions about things I'm not fairly certain about.

Michael:

Very iotriguing posts. I've read to some degree about all the extraordinary hurdles that life would have to jump through with the mechanisms of blind chance and natural selection. The first biggest are simply the nuclear constants. None of these numbers are elegant.

I must assert that there are local situations where random mutations and competitive natural selection have been confirmed over and over in the laboratory, such as with bacteria and virus cultures. We see evolution at work every time someone forgets to finish his antibiotics and the infection re-emerges more virulently and resistant to the original antibiotic. Most of the germs were killed; the ones that survived did so with resistances they must have evolved.

Your speculation have done a good job to challenge some of the evolutionary assumptions at the macro level. I'm wondering if you're not leading up to something; it is much easier in a scientific framework to poke holes in hypotheses than it is to construct new ones in their place. So -- are you leading anywhere? Do you propose a god which has planned this from the beginning? And if so, what alternative evolutionary scheme to you propose?

In a spirit of scientific curiosity,

Bob

cmdicely:

Very good job on Mr. Cook's first message, which smelled a bit
funny to myself as well. His last two, however, are not quite
so easy to rebut. The guy seems to have done his reading ...

> MLC: "In fact, a lot of modern physics would make more sense if we
> just assumed that spacetime is pre-existing, frozen and endless, and
> only our consciousness moves along, seeing this or that portion of
> a tableau that can't change and has no "accidental" part of it."

Well, this is Newtonian (Cartesian) spacetime. Einstein definitively
destroyed it with General Relativity. Space is a function of gravity.

If our consciousnesses drift across a pre-existent tableau in an
arrow of time that is an epiphemonenon of perception, then why is
time not perceived subjectively save in relativistic situations as a
function of non-local velocity? Why are we all right now in *exactly
the same place* on this moving conveyor belt of temporal perception?

> It might "make more sense" in a kind of aesthetic, philosophical
> sense. Science isn't about aesthetic appeal or making the most
> "sense", it is about producing useful and parsimonious predictive
> models for predicting observations that will be occur based on
> observations which have occurred.

I adore the first proposition of string theory -- that all
particles are vibrational functions of one single stuff. It
fine tunes and accounts for all the nuclear constants.

The devil, however, is in the rather inelegant details :)

Bob

Michael L. Cook mentioned the "Anthropic Principle".

I prefer to call this idea the Animistic Principle, to eliminate the anthropocentric implication that "mind" or "consciousness" equates to, or is instantiated only in, human beings.

There are two forms of the Animistic Principle:

1. The Weak Animistic Principle asserts that conditions that are observed to exist in the universe (e.g. the "laws of nature", basic forces and constants, etc) must be such that they allow the observer to exist -- and generalized, must be such that they allow sentient life to exist. This form of the Animistic Principle appears to be little more than a truism or tautology. Obviously, we do not expect scientists to announce one day that they've discovered that the laws of nature make the existence of sentient life impossible.

2. The Strong Animistic Principle asserts that conditions that are observed in the universe must be such that they make the existence of sentient life inevitable. A universe in which sentient life -- "the observer" -- never comes into existence cannot, by definition, be observed, and as such it cannot be said to exist in any empirical or "scientific" sense.

The import of the Strong Animistic Principle is that the presence of mind -- the capacity for subjective experience, for observation -- the eventual appearance of sentient beings in the universe at some point it its history -- is the "first cause". Our observation of the universe now is what causes it to come into existence some 14 billion years ago.

The Strong Animistic Principle implies retropsychokinesis on a cosmic scale.

We can deduce that a first cause exists through circumstantial evidence, but no direct evidence exists so in that sense it is "hiding."

I actually don't think, using the word "deduce" properly, this is true; such deduction, at least that I've seen, tends to rely rather heavily on mistaking analogy for equivalency and thereby engaging in equivocation.

The Anthropic Principle advances such deductions by totalling up all the ways the universe had to be fine tuned to support life.

The anthropic principle validly does nothing useful except serve as a reminder that results which are inconsitent with the observed presence of human life must, ipso facto, be rejected as demonstrably false, given the observation that we exist.

The more we learn, the more it becomes clear that just "getting" the universe as we see it took a dauntingly complex and tortured pathway. I see that Stephen Hawking lately is opening up new ways of thinking of the big bang at the front end and the black holes at the caboose of the universe, in effect making those notions fuzzier and less distinct as terminal points.

Stephen Hawking has made a career of opening up new ways of thinking about such elements of cosmology, though my understanding from the summaries I've seen on his recent work on the big bang is quite the opposite, that itmakes it more concrete as a terminal point, requiring no "first cause", and further undermines the speculation often attached to discussion centering around the anthropic principle that the physical constants necessary for life are remarkable and rather improbable by chance.

I support manned spaceships to Mars and elsewhere because the advance of knowledge lately seems to be tending to an overload situation for all theories, hence the "death of science" books by Horgan and others.

Could you explain more what you mean by an "overload situation for all theories", and what on earth it has to do with the utility of manned space exploration in particular.

The mechanistic theory of how humans evolved should have been advanced by the human genome being completely mapped,

Are you arguing that it has not been?

but instead we are seeing very mysterious new complications at work.

The discovery of "mysterious new complications", and the advances in the explanatory power of theoretical models as they are revised to explain those mysteries is exactly how scientific advances are made.

The whole purpose of a project like the HGP is to discover mysterious new complications.

Genes build proteins, but proteins are such handy little things that they can do up to dozens off different tasks depending on absolute time and place.

Well, no, genes don't build proteins, they cause other things to build proteins. But, yes, proteins can serve multiple functions. So can water. So what? This isn't a discovery emanating from the HGP, as this was well and widely known long before the HGP was completed.

Even worse, when an organism "needs" something it doesn't have, what used to be called junk DNA seems to be summoned forth to build special new proteins.

Given that the creation and replication of DNA takes resources, the presence of DNA with absolutely no function would seem to be an evolutionary disadvantage, so the fact that DNA that previously had no known function turns out to have a vital function is not, in any way, a challenge to evolutionary theory.

Then there are trans-genic tricks, where a gene seems to occasionally be able to jump between species and maybe even for a purpose.

Since "species" are fairly arbitrary (and sometimes hotly contested) human-imposed categorizations, and since DNA is, well, DNA, this is not all that surprising. It certainly doesn't challenge evolutionary theory (though it may, in some cases, challenge a particular, overly species-centric interpretation of it, but then, as Richard Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene, among other places, there are many respects in which the proper units of evolutionary analysis are not species or individuals, but genes; the former two being mere proxies -- and sometimes misleading ones -- for the last).

The whole concept of immunity conjures up miracles, because our bodies busy themselves throughout our lives taking little molecular hostages and holding them captive. When something new crops up, our defenders first run to our own internal prison system and check out the characteristic behaviors and weaknesses of the "prisoners." Natural selection can explain how such a complicated process arises, but increasingly the explanations ring hollow because there are literally so many complexities to everything, all going on at once, and all orchestrated so well and seemingly effortlessly (most of the time) in a healthy living thing.

This has got to be one of the worst arguments I've ever seen. Aside from the excessive indulgence in anthropomorphic metaphor, you acknowledge that this whole thing is well explained by the processes of natural selection, but suggest that the explanation rings hollow because, well, it just seems really complicated, and because, ignoring the times when it doesn't work, it works.

It is purely an aesthetic rejection of an explanation with proven explanatory power in favor of speculation which adds nothing of use.

The Strong Anthropic (or "Animistic", if you prefer) Principle would be a better basis jumping to other conclusions if there were practical means of falsifying it short of discovering the complete set of actual physical laws and determining whether or not they made life inevitable.

But even ignoring that problem, it requires neither retropsychokinesis nor even, more broadly, retrocausality, in any form. The fact that the laws of nature make an effect certain does not mean that that effect caused those laws of nature, it means that the laws of nature completely determined -- caused absolutely -- the effect.

cmdicely & ML Cook:

> "We can deduce that a first cause exists through
> circumstantial evidence, but no direct evidence
> exists so in that sense it is "hiding.""

> I actually don't think, using the word "deduce" properly,
> this is true; such deduction, at least that I've seen,
> tends to rely rather heavily on mistaking analogy for
> equivalency and thereby engaging in equivocation.

Actually, the "hypothetico-deductive," or scientific, method
proceeds deductively from a testable generalization, which
is modified as necessary dependent on the empirical findings.

Michael illustrates the Inductive Fallacy -- that you can
"deduce" an a-prioi generalized assumption from specifics.
This is not scientific because a-prioris are not testable.
What you're doing is attempting to induce from specifics a
pre-ordained general conclusion that can be no other way.

Kant persuasively positied that there is a small handful
of irreducibles involving space, time and perception
that properly-speaking count as genuine a-prioris. Cause
and effect is one of them. We cannot concretely demonstrate
their existence with empirical evidence, only infer them.

I think that's what Michael is trying to say.

Bob

cmdicely:

Nice work on Michael's immunity argument :)

Bob

cmdicely: The fact that the laws of nature make an effect certain does not mean that that effect caused those laws of nature, it means that the laws of nature completely determined -- caused absolutely -- the effect.

The Strong Animistic / Anthropic Principle is stronger than that. It doesn't merely claim that the laws of nature happen to make the existence of sentient life inevitable; but that they must make sentient life inevitable. It says that the laws of nature cannot be other than those that will inevitably lead to the existence of sentient observers.

A number of writers, including scientists, have noted that the basic parameters of "physical" reality -- the "starting conditions" of the universe at the time of the Big Bang, including basic constants, etc -- seem "precisely tuned" to bring about the eventual existence of life, and that had any of these basic parameters been even slightly different, life would not and could not exist in the universe.

Some see this as evidence of a "creator" who set up the universe to produce life, arguing that these parameters don't have these precise values by chance, but by the "intent" of a "creator". (I believe that was the point that Mr. Cook alluded to.)

The Animistic Principle sees this differently: The cause of the precise conditions and parameters at the beginning of the universe having the exact values necessary for life to come into being is our existence as sentient observers in the present.

Of course the basis of the apparent paradox of the Strong Animistic Principle is the notion that the observed universe and the observer, the "objective" and the "subjective", are two different and separate things. As I've written previously, and unfortunately don't have time to elaborate on now, they are not. "Objective" and "subjective" are merely categories of thought that we apply to our experience, classifying some aspects and elements of experience as "objective" and "physical" and others as "subjective" and "mental."

Mr Cook's line of reasoning seem's to be a bit convoluted.

He notes that since the universe isn't teeming with life that spports ID, yet on the other hand he dismisses evolution because life is so complex that a single "blind watchmaker" couldn't possibly produce it. If the universe is necessarilly teeming with life it's also necessarily teeming with "blind watchmakers."

He also seems to believe that since the universe isn't syncronized to the extent that it has produced what we recognize as life close enough to us, within the infitesimally short period of time that we have be looking is proof that random processes could produce life. What part of random doesn't he understand?

Its pretty clear that his religious beliefs do not allow him to even consider the possibility that the universe is mind bogglingly huge, and that relative the existance of Man the universe is mind bogglingly old.

Within the constraints he allows, his line of reasoning is consistant and evolution is not. But there are many people out there that have a grander view of what is possible than he has, and within that grander view evolution is possible.

SecularAnimist:

> The Animistic Principle sees this differently: The cause of
> the precise conditions and parameters at the beginning of the
> universe having the exact values necessary for life to come into
> being is our existence as sentient observers in the present.

Well this is just flat-out kooky, Secular. To posit this requires
invoking wooly-minded notions of retrocausality for which Occam's
Barbershop exists precisely to properly groom. Get thee a shave :)

I mean, if you wanna believe this -- fine. But please don't
then cast aspersions on scientists who use the weaker forms of the
anthropic / animisic principle as a powerful if untestable intuition
upon which to found their religious faith. It certainly sits better
with common sense than to contend that human sentience created life.

> Of course the basis of the apparent paradox of the Strong
> Animistic Principle is the notion that the observed universe
> and the observer, the "objective" and the "subjective", are
> two different and separate things. As I've written previously,
> and unfortunately don't have time to elaborate on now, they
> are not. "Objective" and "subjective" are merely categories
> of thought that we apply to our experience, classifying
> some aspects and elements of experience as "objective"
> and "physical" and others as "subjective" and "mental."

Right. And I know what you had for breakfast this
morning and what you dreamed about last night because
there's no existential firewall between subjective
and objective. I see you exactly as you see yourself.

Glad we cleared this up.

Bob

The Strong Animistic / Anthropic Principle is stronger than that. It doesn't merely claim that the laws of nature happen to make the existence of sentient life inevitable; but that they must make sentient life inevitable. It says that the laws of nature cannot be other than those that will inevitably lead to the existence of sentient observers.

Did I say something contrary to that? The principle that some intelligent life must be guaranteed to occur by whatever the physical laws exist does not mean that the particular intelligent life that does exist from those laws is the cause of those laws. It does not, IOW, imply retrocausality of any kind whatsoever.

It is, of course, a bunch of even conceptually untestable metaphysical speculation, anyway, so while perhaps interesting in the same sense that other similarly non-scientific metaphysical postulates may be, it has little scientific validity or utility (though its not so bad as the Final Anthropic Principle, that posits further that not only must the physical laws of the universe guarantee the emergence of intelligent life, they must guarantee that once it emerges, it will never die out entirely.)

A number of writers, including scientists, have noted that the basic parameters of "physical" reality -- the "starting conditions" of the universe at the time of the Big Bang, including basic constants, etc -- seem "precisely tuned" to bring about the eventual existence of life, and that had any of these basic parameters been even slightly different, life would not and could not exist in the universe.

There are a number of fundamental errors in the analysis that underlies the usual arguments here; more validly, what is found is that in a universe mostly like ours with very small changes in key constants, you can't get life that works with the biochemistry that the life we are familiar works with.

Of course, no one has the modelling power to predict what else that is not currently possible -- including different forms of life -- or that is currently possible but not observed in our experience in terms of alternative biochemistries could exist in such universes.

And recently, according to some sources (I haven't seen the original source) Stephen Hawking has published results apparently demonstrating that, in a universe created by a Big Bang, results within the range required for life are extraordinarily likely.

The Animistic Principle sees this differently: The cause of the precise conditions and parameters at the beginning of the universe having the exact values necessary for life to come into being is our existence as sentient observers in the present.

Well, perhaps the Animistic Principle sees it that way, but that's certainly not what the Strong Anthropic Principle states, so you shouldn't claim that the former is just your preferred name for the latter. Though both are non-predictive metaphysical conjectures of the same general class.

Of course the basis of the apparent paradox of the Strong Animistic Principle is the notion that the observed universe and the observer, the "objective" and the "subjective", are two different and separate things.

Well, no, this isn't "of course" true, in fact it doesn't make any sense. First, because retrocausality isn't really paradoxical at all, its a simple and logically consistent concept, though of course it doesn't accord well with the usual intuitive interpretation of experience. Second, because equating the observed universe and the observer doesn't simplify anything that the Animistic Principle you've suggested puts forth -- indeed, if it has any effect at all (I'm not sure it does, even equating the observer with the universe doesn't prevent you from talking about the causal relationship between states of the universe at different times, or from saying that the state at T1 where life exists is, in the retrocausal explanation you put forth, the cause of the state at T0 or, in the more conventional interpretation, its effect) it just makes talking about cause and effect nonsense, since the thing posited as the cause becomes the same as the effect. You can hardly say that the source of a paradox is an "error" of interpretation that, if avoided, does not resolve any paradox but indeed makes the entire conjecture incoherent.

"Objective" and "subjective" are merely categories of thought that we apply to our experience, classifying some aspects and elements of experience as "objective" and "physical" and others as "subjective" and "mental."

I think it is rather more precise to say that all experience is inherently subjective, but the existence of some category of reality which is "objective" is a common assumption.

cmdicely:

> I think it is rather more precise to say that all experience
> is inherently subjective, but the existence of some category
> of reality which is "objective" is a common assumption.

Well, it's more than a common assumption, if you take "assumption"
to mean an unprovable a-priori or a garden-variety intuition.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it leads to phenomenalist solipsism.
I mean, you'd be a *lot* more difficult of a bot to program than,
say, Alice or McStupid, but how do I know you even exist, Chris? :)

And you don't even want to go *near* the political implications ...

How do we get beyond nihilistic radical skepticism to believe in
the concrete reality of other people? Science and the scientific
method -- the accumulation of a corpus of trans-observable
truth -- is our sturdiest bulwark against extreme subjectivism.

Bob

Let's put it this way: I am trying to teach a god-forsaken biology class to high school sophomores the last period of a sunny spring day.
Someone asks me: "Does anything about the scientific support for Darwin's evolution prove that either Intelligent Design or outright creationism are not rational theories?" I.E., is the argument that both the existence of the universe and the development of life were accidents that have proceeded by random chance the only allowable "rational" way to look at things?

I would respond that the claims that the universe and life itself are merely accidents are not a testable propositions. Those theories may be very popular among people with scientific and technological degrees, but they are not falsifiable. They are the essence of a priori assumptions. Therefore, I would tell the students that the creation story according to Darwinists and other secular pooh-bahs is not rational either.

If rational people can question whether quantum randomness is really random, they can probably question whether the Big Bang was an accident, and question whether it was only our good luck that Homo Sapiens supplanted Neanderthals and not the other way around. How does one falsify a basically philosophical statement about what happens the instant before the Big Bang?

I am not really arguing that I.D. doesn't belong in philosophy class, but I am saying that's exactly where all the anti-I.D. arguments belong as well. You folks don't have a single experiment that prove one way or the other that a prokaryotic cell can form spontaneously by accident, or even as a consequence of a long series of accidents. You have some assumptions that you like to berate everyone with in the most dogmatic manner possible.

ML Cook:

> Let's put it this way: I am trying to teach a god-forsaken
> biology class to high school sophomores the last period of
> a sunny spring day. Someone asks me: "Does anything about
> the scientific support for Darwin's evolution prove that
> either Intelligent Design or outright creationism are not
> rational theories?" I.E., is the argument that both the
> existence of the universe and the development of life were
> accidents that have proceeded by random chance the only
> allowable "rational" way to look at things?

Wow, what a deeply pernicious straw-man argument. First
of all, "rationality" has nothing to do with it. The
metaphysical tripartite schemes of Thomas Aquinas are the soul
of rationalitity. All being "rational" means is being internally
and/or logically consistent according to a pre-defined scheme.

> I would respond that the claims that the universe and life
> itself are merely accidents are not a testable propositions.

And you'd be correct. It's an implication of Darwin, not a theory.

> Those theories may be very popular among people with scientific
> and technological degrees, but they are not falsifiable. They
> are the essence of a priori assumptions. Therefore, I would
> tell the students that the creation story according to
> Darwinists and other secular pooh-bahs is not rational either.

Boy, this is a really ugly twisting of what the controversy's
about. Darwin's book is called "The Origin of Species," not
The Origin of Life. If some commentators want to take the
*implications* of natural selection and run with them -- whether
into cheesy 19th century status quo-justifying social theories
or absolute moral nihilism -- that's not Darwin's lookout. What
Darwinisn has done is demolish the literal reading of creation
stories of most world religions, but it cannot even address the
question of the First Cause. The idea that we arose from nothing
but chance is a logical implication of natural selection, but
the only people who seem to pretend that this is has become
conflated into an atheistic dogma of scientists are the
very religionists who cast aspersions on evolution.

Scientists freely admit the untestable. If they want to argue
that random mutation is the *most likely* scenario, then they're
on the same grounds as the religionists and they're entitled.

Ask the biology faculty of Southern Methodist University --
nothing in modern evolutionary theory precludes religious belief.
This is why ID is only a controversy when ideologues decide to
fund lawsuits with the broader purpose of fighting "secularism."

> If rational people can question whether quantum randomness
> is really random, they can probably question whether
> the Big Bang was an accident, and question whether
> it was only our good luck that Homo Sapiens supplanted
> Neanderthals and not the other way around.

Once again, you're ranting at straw men. Who has ever argued that
it's mere "good luck" that Homo Sapiens beat out Neanderthals?

> How does one falsify a basically philosophical statement
> about what happens the instant before the Big Bang?

One doesn't. Sheesh, enough with the rhetorical flailing already.

> I am not really arguing that I.D. doesn't belong in
> philosophy class, but I am saying that's exactly
> where all the anti-I.D. arguments belong as well.

The anti-ID arguments were aired in a courtroom and rejected by a
conservative judge -- who offered zero opinion on the intuitive
kernel of ID, that life implies a creator. Since ID purports to be
a critique of darwinism, it is entirely legitimate for scientists
to question and refute the effectiveness of such a critique.

> You folks don't have a single experiment that prove one way or the
> other that a prokaryotic cell can form spontaneously by accident,

But there are plenty of laboratory proofs
of microbal evolution by natural selection.

> or even as a consequence of a long series of accidents.

It's in public health policy: Finish taking your TB meds or else
the infection will come back much worse and we'll have to put you on
a different drug. Happens to homeless people at clinics regularly.

> You have some assumptions that you like to berate
> everyone with in the most dogmatic manner possible.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Bob

ERRATUM:

The anti-ID arguments were aired in a courtroom and *affirmed* by a conservative judge.

Bob

But my point is that in too many classrooms at the lower levels the whole debate is presented exactly as if I.D. arguments are automatically not "rational" and Darwinist arguments are. In fact, that's almost exactly what the judge said.

In any event, the Intelligent Design advocates are not going to apologize and slink away. In fact, we are going to come on stronger arguing the metaphysical points, buoyed by the fortuitous tendency of theoretical physics to always be tipping over into metaphysical realm.

And better yet, every year that goes by with no sign of life in the rest of the universe and no witnessing of life spontaneously generating from requisite chemical components will fuel our rhetoric. And even better yet, continued progress in genetic science seems, to me at least, to point toward all life forms cooperating in ways far beyond Richard Dawkin's ideas. If we can blur the line between animate and inanimate material (as Roger Penrose has been tempted to do) I think we I.D. people are there as far as being able to claim intellectual legitimacy in every sense.

Oh, Bob, it was the late Stephen J. Gould who began ruling out "red in tooth and claw" type explanations as to why some hominid species or races prosper and some don't. Gould was very uncomfortable with the idea of different groupings of humans having any functional differences whatsoever in intelligence or athletic capabilities, so he started ascribing "luck" as the critical element in whether human tribes prosper or perish. Gould's followers seem to be extending that kind of political correctness to other species as well.

ML Cook:

> But my point is that in too many classrooms at the lower levels
> the whole debate is presented exactly as if I.D. arguments are
> automatically not "rational" and Darwinist arguments are.
> In fact, that's almost exactly what the judge said.

*sigh* ... Once again, it's not about "rational." Science destroyed
whole mountains of ornate Latin manuscripts of perfectly rational
self-contained systems of metaphysics. But this is *not* "almost
exactly" what the judge said. The judge said that the arguments to
promote ID were specious, deliberately deceptive and scientifically
vacuous. Once again, he offered no commentary on ID itself; he
had no objection to it being taught -- just not in a biology class.

> In any event, the Intelligent Design advocates are not
> going to apologize and slink away. In fact, we are going
> to come on stronger arguing the metaphysical points,
> buoyed by the fortuitous tendency of theoretical physics
> to always be tipping over into metaphysical realm.

Oh goody. So you're going to become, what, the life-sciences
equivalent of string theory? Do you know how much string theory
has become despised by theoretical physicists who actually, you
know, work for a living (as in work in labs testing their theories)?
String theory has become the new metaphysics. But I'll say this
for it: at least string theory has whole mountains of theoretical
math just waiting for the computer power to develop to run the
equations. All you guys have is a few untestable assertions
and a bunch of critiques of existing theories that might be more
profitably developed within those fields attempting to falsify them.

> And better yet, every year that goes by with no sign of life in
> the rest of the universe and no witnessing of life spontaneously
> generating from requisite chemical components will fuel our rhetoric.

Rhetoric. Exactly. What self-respecting scientist would crow about
having fueled-up rhetoric? And you sound exactly like those mongos
who claim that, because we haven't had a terrorist attack since 9/11,
that proves the validity of domestic spying. The post hoc, ergo
propter hoc fallacy. We don't know that spores would *necessarily*
drift down from ET land, nor do we know the precise conditions out of
which the primordial soup went miraculously beyond chemical affinity.
But because we don't understand doesn't insist on *your* contention.

This is what I don't get. You're a highschool biology teacher, right?
You have said you accept the basic premises of naturalistic evolution;
the age of the earth, the simian common ancestor. Although you have
explicitly rejected the Deist absentee landlord, you don't at all
strike me as a Creationist in drag. What's your theological agenda,
then? What is *your* conception of this universal creative force?

What I don't understand is that evolutionism spends very little
time in delicious little nihilistic shudders at the randomness
of it all. Evolutionary theory is about species differentiation,
puzzing out the fossil record, genetic mutations -- things which
can be studied in a laboratory. You anti-evolution folks seem to
think it's just atheism by other means. Many, maybe most believing
biologists simply do not let naturalistic evolution bother them.

> And even better yet, continued progress in genetic science
> seems, to me at least, to point toward all life forms
> cooperating in ways far beyond Richard Dawkin's ideas.

Selfish gene, altruistic gene -- either one works. The strong
Gaia hypothesis doesn't challenge the idea of natural selection.
If cooperation furthers survival, cooperate! Lords know, there's
more to evolution than preening alpha males and submissive harems.

> If we can blur the line between animate and inanimate
> material (as Roger Penrose has been tempted to do)

Or Alan Turing, for that matter.

> I think we I.D. people are there as far as being
> able to claim intellectual legitimacy in every sense.

"Intellectual legitimacy" is a seat on a Fox News panel show.

Scientific legitimacy is a prize far more worthy of attainment.

Bob

ML Cook:

> Oh, Bob, it was the late Stephen J. Gould who began ruling
> out "red in tooth and claw" type explanations as to why some
> hominid species or races prosper and some don't. Gould was
> very uncomfortable with the idea of different groupings
> of humans having any functional differences whatsoever
> in intelligence or athletic capabilities, so he started
> ascribing "luck" as the critical element in whether human
> tribes prosper or perish. Gould's followers seem to be extending
> that kind of political correctness to other species as well.

Ever since The Origin of Species hit the bookshelves, people have
been using darwinian evolution as a palimpset over which to write
the essentialism du jour. In the 19th century, it was Spencer and
Sumner doing the Dr. Pangloss thing for the Gilded Age robber barons.
A generation later, Thorstein Veblen, the "bard of savagery," used
somw of those same anthropomoric analogies to mock the very people
that Social Darwinism celebrated as victors in the war of survival.

Gould, unsurprisingly, comes up with a countervailing theory,
doubtless to compensate for the stereotype of brutality found
in earlier paleoanthropological writings. Is he more correct?
I don't know; I have no background in anthropology or animal
behaviorism. What I do know is that the truth of the matter
need to be determined in the field and in the laboratory, and not
by anybody's essentialist assumptions about the state of nature.

Bob

Here's the K-12 school science curriculum I would be happy with: WE TEACH
1) the universe is 14.5 billion years old
2) the Earth is over 4 billion years old
3) life can be found on Earth very soon after it cooled
4) if life arose spontaneously on Earth in some type of unique, suitable incubator, we have no idea what that environment was like and can not duplicate it. It apparently did not happen again in the 4 billion years since and if life came down from elsewhere there is no evidence of that happening again since. There should be such evidence, because meteor remains containing tracs of the precursor molecules of life are found all the time.
5) since life appeared on Earth, it has been continually changing (and it has changed the Earth as well!)
6) because all RNA and DNA strings are well sheltered within cells, the best candidates to cause alterations of nucleic acid codes are very high velocity molecules which come to us (astronomers now think) from the very edge of the universe, which is long ago in time.
7) some people think that the mutations thus caused then get tested by nature. It is controversial whether some mutations confer a survival advantage to the changed species or some species prosper and others fail because of dumb luck.
8) most species can be altered quite a bit without needing mutations caused by collisions by high speed particles. Selective breeding can cause an amazing amount of change by simply tinkering with protein expression. Be that as it may, the vast majority of all mutations are useless failures.
9) creating an entirely new species has to be a pretty tricky business, mainly because the gestation period of the creature has to be altered to accomodate changes in constructional activities on the fetus, be it in an egg or a womb. For some reason fossil evidence indicates that new species tend to come forth in bursts. This is termed punctuated equilibrium and no one understands it.
10) 99.9 % of all species that ever were are extinct and more join them every day. The Earth made need another round of punctuated equilibrium pretty soon.
11) the theory of Intelligent Design should be taught in a science history or philosophy class, along with all the creation stories that every religion has generated. But so should the secular materialist assumptions that the universe was an accident and life is the ultimate unintended, unwanted accident. These latter assumptions are the product of an outlook that used to accompany "old" science.
12) although the concepts of chance, probability, and statistics are very useful in many branches of science, there are quite reputable thinkers who suspect that "chance" is an illusion, particularly when it comes to random quantum events.
13) the elimination of chance or accident as gating mechanisms in scientific explanations may be traumatic to believers in free will, but science can survive with an outlook of perfectly mechanistic, absolute determinism in everything. Indeed, it has tended that way before.
14) humans are a part of the changing mosaic of life and we have common ancestors with other primates. Nevertheless, humans are undeniably something very special among animals. Probably this is related to our manipulation of abstract symbols inside our skulls that represent things in the outer reality. This ability gives birth to abstract reasoning, found a great deal in textbooks and blogs.
15)two great mysteries thus emerge about life: ONE, why don't we see it spontaneously arising more often and why isn't there a greater variety in the fundamental building blocks, i.e. why don't we see life based on molecular chains other than amino and nucleic acids, and why not, ever, DNA with a different handedness? TWO, why don't we see abundant evidence of life in the outer universe, most particularly spores in meteors, radio waves, or even probes sent by E.T.? Sure, a lot of people assume that it is there. We can also assume that many E.T. species would have an enormous head start on us in terms of development, so you think they would be making waves out there.
16) even if we do contact E.T. and start a conversation, that will not be the end of the evolution debate. E.T. will undoubtedly have its own creation and evolution stories, which may or may not assign a prominent role to chance. We will have to sort that out.

Bob, you will be relieved to learn I don't teach high school any more. I actually write rather liberal books about criminal justice. google search "Why the Innocent Plead Guilty..." if you are so inclined.

But my point is that in too many classrooms at the lower levels the whole debate is presented exactly as if I.D. arguments are automatically not "rational" and Darwinist arguments are.

I'm putting another 2 cents in because I think this is an interesting debate, if exasperating.

Dear Michael Cook,

Can you not discern a fundamental difference between the two sets of arguments you refer to? Can you see or can you not see that arguments for evolution (the best ones) refer to observable facts, where as arguments for ID start out with observable facts and inevitably drift into metaphysical speculation?

Are you saying that untestable, unfalsifiable speculation is of the same character and grade as falsifiable propositions about observable facts?

OF COURSE, ID is not rational! Good grief. It is not based on anything that has been or can be observed.

You sometimes sound like an intelligent person, but I just don't know...

And, Bob:

Stop thwacking Mr. Cook here. It makes you look a little threatened and defensive. I had my doubts the first couple messages, but our friend Mr. Cook is definitely *not* a wanker...

I'll thwack Mr. Cook if I want to, thanks.

Please allow that I never called him a "wanker", OK? At the same time I'll allow that, yes, people like Mr. Cook do threaten me at some level.

I am afraid of human ignorance. If you study history, you'll probably get an inkling of why.

Bob isn't the only one who is relieved.

ML Cook:

Here's your curriculum revision :)

> Here's the K-12 school science curriculum
I would be happy with: WE TEACH

> 1) the universe is 14.5 billion years old

Check.

> 2) the Earth is over 4 billion years old

Check.

> 3) life can be found on Earth very soon after it cooled

Check.

> 4) if life arose spontaneously on Earth in some type
> of unique, suitable incubator, we have no idea what
> that environment was like and can not duplicate it.

We have not duplicated it at this point in time, considering what
we currently know of those early conditions. This is not, however,
to imply that these conditions are inherently unduplicatable.

> It apparently did not happen again in the 4 billion
> years since and if life came down from elsewhere
> there is no evidence of that happening again since.

Check.

> There should be such evidence, because meteor remains containing
> tracs of the precursor molecules of life are found all the time.

Replace "should" with "may." Not having found any yet
does not, of course, close off the inquiry. Attempting to
definitively prove a negative is not scientifically fruitful.

> 5) since life appeared on Earth, it has been continually
> changing (and it has changed the Earth as well!)

Check.

> 6) because all RNA and DNA strings are well sheltered within cells,
> the best candidates to cause alterations of nucleic acid codes are
> very high velocity molecules which come to us (astronomers now think)
> from the very edge of the universe, which is long ago in time.

Check.

> 7) some people think that the mutations thus caused then get
> tested by nature. It is controversial whether some mutations
> confer a survival advantage to the changed species

I'm not knowledgable enough to comment. I'm willing to accept
your contention of controversy, pending further information.

> or some species prosper and others fail because of dumb luck.

False dichotomy. There could be other mechanisms
than either random mutations or dumb luck.

> 8) most species can be altered quite a bit without needing
> mutations caused by collisions by high speed particles.
> Selective breeding can cause an amazing amount of change
> by simply tinkering with protein expression. Be that as it
> may, the vast majority of all mutations are useless failures.

Check.

> 9) creating an entirely new species has to be a pretty tricky
> business, mainly because the gestation period of the creature
> has to be altered to accomodate changes in constructional
> activities on the fetus, be it in an egg or a womb. For some
> reason fossil evidence indicates that new species tend to
> come forth in bursts. This is termed punctuated equilibrium

Check.

> and no one understands it.

This needs further inquiry.

> 10) 99.9 % of all species that ever were
> are extinct and more join them every day.

Check.

> The Earth made need another round of
> punctuated equilibrium pretty soon.

"Need" is anthropomorphic projection and it assumes a
speculative telos. Don't include this on the final exam :)

> 11) the theory of Intelligent Design
> should be taught in a science history

False. Intelligent Design is not part of the history of science.

> or philosophy class, along with all the creation
> stories that every religion has generated.

False. ID and creation stories are not philosophy, either.
They belong in comparative religion or theology courses.

> But so should the secular materialist assumptions that the
> universe was an accident and life is the ultimate unintended,
> unwanted accident. These latter assumptions are the product
> of an outlook that used to accompany "old" science.

This is an egregious straw man, not even true in its own
terms (a secular materialist would consider whether life
on Earth was "wanted" or not a non-cogent anthropomophism).

It is also precisely the crux of the issue.

It is the boogie man under the bed that William Saletan points out
is why evolution controversies never seem to go away. It's the
issue that ID advocates strenuously tried to avoid discussing,
preferring to attempt to disingenuously cloak themselves in a
critique of darwinism, the better to teach critical thinking.

It's the idea that a universe created without manifest purpose
not only kicks the Judeo/Christian God off His throne, but renders
life meaningless and valueless, besides. Ateleological evolution,
"progress" with a planned direction or culmination, leads to ethical
relativism which leads to ends-justified morality which leads to
nihilism, the will to power and the pleasure principle run amok.

Science is thus viewed as antithetical not only to religion, but
to ethics as well. If evolution nullifies every page of the Bible,
that includes the pages that say don't mess with your neighbor.

This has never been anything more than a boogie man. We live in a
country where over 70% of people believe in the literal existence of
guardian angels. Scientists, being skeptical people by nature, tend
to have more atheists among them than the rest of us, but the majority
of them, like the public, are still believers. No doubt some of the
problematizations of classical evolution that you articulately set
forth, coupled with the anthropic / animistic principle and the
flat-out mystery of why we'd be here in the first place, helps
to bolster the religious faiths of otherwise orthodox darwinists.

But no doubt to a rural resident of Dover, these are the kinds
of visions of godlessness that dance through her head when she
contemplates the menace of teaching evolution in public schools.

Science isn't antithetical to religious faith or to sincere
believers, but it *is* antithetical to religious dogma,
because science tears through untestable metaphysics with
a chainsaw. You can poke holes in darwinism all you like,
but you have to fill those holes with something, and if it's
just bloviating metaphysical speculation, well, it doesn't
belong in a science class. That's why ID tried to change
the very definition of science and why you seem to be, too.

> 12) although the concepts of chance, probability, and
> statistics are very useful in many branches of science, there
> are quite reputable thinkers who suspect that "chance" is an
> illusion, particularly when it comes to random quantum events.

As cmdicely very cogently pointed out, probabilistic modeling is
just the most parsimonious tool required to yield a predictable
result given the available inputs. We look through a microscope
to see microbes, but that doesn't mean the microscope itself is
part of the conclusions we draw about them. I will say this,
though. While the statistical mechanics of quantum theory well
reflect more on epistemology than ontology, I have yet to hear
a good reason how it could be possible to know both the velocity
of a particle and its position (as per the Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle), seeing how the observation interferes with the phenomenon.

Teaching brand-new controversial theories that chance is an illusion
would seem to exceed the scope of a highschool biology class, though.

*singing* "Met-a-phys-i-cal blo-vi-a-tion ..."

> 13) the elimination of chance or accident as gating
> mechanisms in scientific explanations may be traumatic
> to believers in free will, but science can survive with
> an outlook of perfectly mechanistic, absolute determinism
> in everything. Indeed, it has tended that way before.

Well, I'm taking off my Mr. Science Propeller Beanie(TM) for a
moment to stare at this blankly. I haven't a clue where you got
the contemporary science to march boldly backwards into the 19th
century -- and I'm not sure if I even care -- but let's just focus
on the ethics of *this* one for a moment. Because if you think the
blue-haired ladies love darwinist materialism, they'll *adore* this.

The only thing ethically worse than a universe
without a telos is a universe *with* a telos.

Religiously, setting the clock back 300 years leads to dogmas that
make modern free-will fundies look like reasonable, tolerant people
in comparison. It leads to Calvinist Predestinarianism -- a finite
number saved, the rest damned. This is no vouchsafe of moral behavior,
because the saved are saved for all time, and they can thus act as
beastly as they'd like. If you think Calvinist antinomianism is a
quaint notion, go google the Dominionists. The get closer to power
every year. Bush isn't a Dominionist, but John Ashcroft is. Most
of the neocons aren't, but a few red state GOP Congresscritters are.

Some say that the well-funded stealth-Christian campaign for
Intelligent Design has all the earmarks of a Dominionist plot.

But if the religious flavor isn't bad enough, a secular "outlook of
perfectly mechanistic, absolute determinism in everything" is the
most pernicious, arrogant and loathesome worldview ever bequeathed
to mankind. It produced rotten, neo-metaphysical, overdetermined
science and led directly to Hitler and Stalin. Beginning with
Hegel's theory of absolute human progress, this outlook corroded
every emerging social science it touched -- history, economics,
sociology, anthropology, psychology -- and charged these fields
with a messianic mission to explain literally everything. It
reduced human culture to so much flotsam to be tossed aside in
order to get to the *real* driving elements underneath, whether
class struggle, sexual impulses, conditioned reflexes, social
homeostasis, the imperatives of a master race or just destiny.
It lent a nauseating "scientific" patina to the colonial era.

Thank the gods for Einstein and the boys from Copenhagen! Thank
the gods for relativity and quantum uncertainty! Thank the gods
for the existentialists, from Kierkegaard to Camus, who looked
straight into the howling maw, the meaninglessness underneath
the sham of Man-Imposed Meaning, and returned, heroically,
with their own values! Thank the gods for the humility and
irreducible wonder an indeterminate universe teaches us!

FUCK REDUCTIONISM !!!

> 14) humans are a part of the changing mosaic of life
> and we have common ancestors with other primates.
> Nevertheless, humans are undeniably something very special
> among animals. Probably this is related to our manipulation
> of abstract symbols inside our skulls that represent things
> in the outer reality. This ability gives birth to abstract
> reasoning, found a great deal in textbooks and blogs.

So I take it then you'll leave off the module on the human
language acquisition of chimpanzees and dolphin communication ...

You know, Michael, I'm beginning to get your number. You've
assiduously avoided making the smallest religious noise, even
after I asked you directly, and I'm still not sure. But now I
get the crack about Stephen Jay Gould's "political correctness."

You might be a political liberal in some of your judicial writings,
but in the field of science education you're a fucking reactionary.

> 15)two great mysteries thus emerge about life: ONE, why don't
> we see it spontaneously arising more often and why isn't there
> a greater variety in the fundamental building blocks, i.e. why
> don't we see life based on molecular chains other than amino and
> nucleic acids, and why not, ever, DNA with a different handedness?

The first one probably has to do with the time frame and the
fact that we haven't quite duplicated the exact conditions of the
primordial soup. The second might have to do with the parsimony
of nature -- why produce whole different templates when the one
commonly used works just fine? I've also seen somewhere that there
may in fact have been life built on entirely different molecular
schemes but it simply died out without a trace (Outcompeted? Less
efficient?) long before life migrated onto land. Life may have had
a long experimental phase that we just don't know anything about.

> TWO, why don't we see abundant evidence of life
> in the outer universe, most particularly spores
> in meteors, radio waves, or even probes sent by E.T.?

Why don't we have more terrorist attacks after 9/11? Let me guess ...
it's because Homeland Security only inpspects a fraction of cargo
holds and hasn't installed radiation detectors at shipping ports :)

It's a question, Michael, but it's hardly a definitive proof.

> Sure, a lot of people assume that it is there.

It's a logical assumption. I was hoping we
would have found life on Titan, but no such luck.

> We can also assume that many E.T. species would have
> an enormous head start on us in terms of development,
> so you think they would be making waves out there.

Only if you've read too much bad science fiction and/or have some
kind of essentialist notion about the evolution of sentience. It
may very well be that intelligent civilizations reach a point where
they stress the carrying capacity of the planet so much (look at us)
that they inevitably either don't survive a natural calamity (all
it would take is one nice Manhattan-sized meteor) or else they
bring on calamity themselves. Sentience doesn't necessarily
equate to wisdom. Maybe it only means instrumental control of
the environment driven by an irreducible selfishness that makes
adhering to limits psychologically impossible -- as in Kyoto.

I'd hate to think that we exemplify the sorts of intelligent life
you find out there, but hey ... which is it going to be two centuries
from now? Colonies on Mars or warfare to extinction brought
on by resource conflicts? Would you like to bet? I wouldn't.

> 16) even if we do contact E.T. and start a conversation, that
> will not be the end of the evolution debate. E.T. will undoubtedly
> have its own creation and evolution stories, which may or may not
> assign a prominent role to chance. We will have to sort that out.

Well, if your point is that chance is an epistemological epiphenomenon
and the ABOSLUTE STONE DETERMINATION OF EVERYTHING FOR ALL TIME is the
true ontological condition of the universe, then you had better march
into one of their gambling casinos take those li'l slimy green buggers
firmly by the tentacle and just set 'em straight once and for all :)

Bob

"I.D. is not based on anything that has been or can be observed, you say. . ."

I hate to fall back on the old rotary flagellum most commonly found on e coli, but a lot of I.D. people are really jazzed up about the artwork depictions of it, because, fuzz aside, that is how the atoms involved MUST basically appear. Most human beings look at it and exclaim: "How can a machine like that possibly be a biological accident?" More cogently, the rotor doesn't rotate without all of about a dozen special proteins being present and it is kind of hard to imagine those all showing up at once by accident to kick off a new, totally unproven feature.

Similar arguments can be found about a lot of other biological wonders, such as blood clotting and how it could possibly evolve "gradually" when it is an extremely complex process that so far can not be reduced. In other words, an organism has to invest an awful lot to set up the mechanism to clot blood or make a flagellum rotate like a little propellor and there is no return at all (that we know of) until it works.

Of course, determined Darwinists can always come up with "just so" stories such as the explanation of how feathers evolved so as to keep dinosaurs warm, then just happened to be there when dinosaurs evolved into birds. An I.D. proponent might suggest that this sure looks like some force or other intended all along that dinosaurs would become modern birds and this force sub-contracted out the necessary parts in anticipation of bringing them together someday.

Pigs get cold too, but evolution did not equip them with feathers or we might see flying pigs.

If you would read any of the Intelligent Design books you might find that all kinds of observable phenomena are being cited in support of this theory, and the people doing it have professional careers in which they have managed to fool others into thinking they are "rational"

I am not really going to hang my hat on those kind of arguments, because I believe that the increasingly metaphysical mysteries quantum mechanics forces us to contemplate, plus the resounding absence of E.T. or any recent start-ups of life, plus some coming realizations about the way genes really work are going to strengthen the I.D. point of view much more than they hurt it.

Those are my predictions. If they are rational or not, we will see . . .

ML Cook:

There's nothing wrong with critiquing conventional darwinist evolution. Evolutionists argue about specific mechanisms all the time.

But the fundamental problem is that you can only doubt. You have nothing to replace genetic mutation in creating the e coli flagellum excapt for ... what, Michael?

What do you replace genetic mutation with?

You replace it with the hand of God. Does the Mighty Fingertip give the lit'l flagellum a twirl, just to start it rotating?

Would you like to see Michaelangelo do a painting of it, like touching fingertips with Adam? The glorious artwork of the e coli biological machine with glorious artwork of the Forearm of God and a His Holy Pinky, twirling a little propeller.

Would you like to teach that vision in a public highschool, too?

Bob

Michael

Less sardonically: Science isn't metaphyics. I wish you'd stop trying to conflate the two. They do not merge. There may be any number of highly speculative theories out there (especially in physics), but you don't get to choose which one helps your case, which one's prettiest -- and then turn around and go Ah ha! See! The most advanced quantum physicist is saying things which supports my view!

It doesn't work that way. Speculative theories don't become properly-speaking science until they've been tested and confirmed.

Now ... you have doubts about how a flagellum evolved through random mutation. You have *no competing hypothesis*. You have doubts about why dinosaurs evolved feathers. You claim that it's *as if* (note the similie) the Designer *subcontracted out* the evolution of feathers, knowing in advance that the next stage of evolution would need them.

But that's not a hypothesis, either. Just another pretty metaphor.

Why didn't God just do what he said he did in Genesis and created each species separately? If He exists and He's the Designer -- why did he hide his handiwork so thoroughly -- so that you support evolutionist contentions today (man evolved from monkeys) that no orthodox Christian would have believed 150 years ago?

Does *that* sound like an intelligent Designer to you?

Bob

Bob, perhaps unintentionally, you have framed the strong Darwinist view in a fashion that reveals how "secular" does not connotate metaphysical neutrality, but an inherently anti-God posture. You really do state it so as to force a believer to confess that there is absolutely no rational or scientific reason whatsoever to believe in God, ergo God can't really exist since we all know science to be infallible.

Suppose a person believes there is a Supreme Being. How does that Supreme Being not influence the creation of the Universe in some way, then not influence the development of life and the apparent tendency of life to develop intelligent life?

By "Supreme" Being I don't necessarily visualize an anthropomorphic entity that only deals in ideal perfection. We obviously all have funny monkey-like faces and a lot of vestigial animal features and characteristics. I mean a sort of driving force or ultimate imperative that has to work through existing physical, chemical, and biological rules to raise up an intelligent species. It was a delicate and excruciatingly slow job. Why didn't the Supreme Being make easier rules? Dunno, maybe that wasn't an option.

I don't think God intended to hide his handiwork at all, actually, nor do I think most of it is particularly hidden. You speak of not getting to pick and choose our evidence. Suppose I have a theory that gravity is repulsive half the time, not ALWAYS attractive. I start to get there if I find at least one instance of near objects under the influence of gravity racing apart. I will eventually find more instances, because as Einstein correctly deduced, gravity is only an "apparent" attracting force. General relativity actually is a theory of motion. Objects in elliptical orbits about each other spend at least half their time flying apart.

The Earth and Moon circle each other constantly, but they never come together and one day the Moon will leave us.

Every law of science we have is really probability based. The probability of a proton spontaneously decaying is extremely low, but researchers have watched patiently for years for such decay because if they see even one unambiguous case of the phenomenon it has enormous implications for all of physics.

*At one point in this debate I stated that if a person encounters even one phenomenon that they unanbiguously consider to be supernatural, mystical, paranormal, etc., they are forced by logic to assume that the universe is teeming with such stuff. There are no partially mystical universes. What we call normal reality is only the limit of our everyday perceptions. The fun part is that fantastic exceptions fudge the final conclusions.*

Bob, for one small demonstration concerning perceptions, count all the "f" letters in the last paragraph, between the asterisks. Tell me how many you count, and no fair using automated means. If you are familiar with this demonstration, try to appreciate what I am getting at.

If the term "rational" means anything at all, it means that you take into account all of the phenomena, which sometimes is a matter of perception. Global warming advocates often strongly imply that all glaciers are shrinking, but it turns out that some glaciers are actually growing. People who are anti-Kyoto accords get to wave their contrarian examples in the air. If you are able to do so, you can explain away their local examples. If you find just one that you can't explain away, the underlying global warming assumption maybe needs a great big caveat.

I do think you would be greatly amused to read the Intelligent Design "classic" books, and some of the newcomers. You might perceive why this point of view is picking up adherents despite all the scathing criticism.

ML Cook:

> Bob, perhaps unintentionally, you have framed the strong Darwinist
> view in a fashion that reveals how "secular" does not connotate
> metaphysical neutrality, but an inherently anti-God posture.

And you (perhaps unintentionally -- or perhaps with
concealed motives) have come up with another straw man.

"Metaphysical neutrality" is an inherent banishment of metaphysics
(save for the handful of a-prioris set forth by Kant in the Critique
of Pure Reason) from the realm of science. This isn't to say that
scientific truth is the only truth there is. It is to say that
science yields the only *objective* truth knowable to man.

Does ontology ultimately trump epistemology? Yes. But
not in a way that avoids endless philosophical speculation.

In terms of what's objective, of something-that-I-know-which-is-
exactly-the-same-as-what-you-know, epistemology rules the discourse.

> You really do state it so as to force a believer to confess
> that there is absolutely no rational or scientific

You keep conflating rational with scientific. Rational may
or may not map onto the objective. Science only attepts to
provide a trans-observable picture of the universe, and is
mute on questions that do not submit to trans-observability.

If that threatens believers, then perhaps
their faith isn't very strong to begin with.

Why does faith need objective confirmation anyway? Doesn't it rather
trivialize the whole notion of faith in God if you can just see His
face in a microscope? Isn't this why the Age of Miracles ended?

> reason whatsoever to believe in God, ergo God can't
> really exist since we all know science to be infallible.

There is science and there is scientism. Genuine scientists
know themselves and their vocation to be the very last thing
from infallible as the history of science so well attests.

You are making a cultural argument, Michael, based on the
success science has had at manipulating the environment through
technology, which endows science with pride of place in the
quest for human knowledge. It is a product of politicians,
commercial promoters and popular folklore, not scientists.

> Suppose a person believes there is a Supreme Being. How
> does that Supreme Being not influence the creation of the
> Universe in some way, then not influence the development of life
> and the apparent tendency of life to develop intelligent life?

I don't know, Michael. Do you? Does anyone?

> By "Supreme" Being I don't necessarily visualize an anthropomorphic
> entity that only deals in ideal perfection. We obviously all
> have funny monkey-like faces and a lot of vestigial animal
> features and characteristics. I mean a sort of driving force or
> ultimate imperative that has to work through existing physical,
> chemical, and biological rules to raise up an intelligent species.

And science is all about figuring out those rules. It doesn't allow
"black box" explanations, little one-time deus ex machinas that
"explain" something when the evidence doesn't yet exist to do so.

> It was a delicate and excruciatingly slow job. Why didn't the
> Supreme Being make easier rules? Dunno, maybe that wasn't an option.

And so now you're kludging theodicy by coming up with arbitrary
limits on the Supreme Being. How many angels dance on the head
of a pin, Michael? You could find a perfectly rational number.

Don't you understand why science seeks to avoid
this kind of open-ended speculation like the plague?

> I don't think God intended to hide his handiwork at all,
> actually, nor do I think most of it is particularly hidden.

It's damn well hidden, Michael, considering that the creation
story in Genesis amounts to a lie, only forgivable in the
context of incomplete human knowledge. At the end of the
day, Michael, that's all we're left with -- scientific theories
ever-contigent on growing data sets and endless speculation,
some of which generate new testable theories. Human knowledge.

But if you step back for a moment and stop considering darwinism
a direct attack on God, you'll see that all these gaps and aporias
you worry about illustrate only that -- incomplete human knowlege.

You can't re-insert God into science on the basis of some shiny
new (or dusted-off old) metaphysical principle, no matter how
commonsensical. You might be able to persuade people to believe
in the absense of evidence. Which is fine. It's just not science.
Which does *not* imply that science is anti-God, only that what's
provable is finite and contingent on ironclad rules of evidence.

> Every law of science we have is really probability based. The
> probability of a proton spontaneously decaying is extremely
> low, but researchers have watched patiently for years for such
> decay because if they see even one unambiguous case of the
> phenomenon it has enormous implications for all of physics.

Precisely. To assert otherwise is to invoke the Inductive Fallacy
-- to attempt to prove for all time a generality by citing specific
examples which cannot serve as a proxy for all cases. This is why
science tries so hard to avoid reasoning from untestible a-prioris.

Which is NOT to say that all untestible a-prioris are necessarily false.

The anti-evolutionists have tried to create a bogeyman by
conflating scientifically-tested results with Absolute Truth.
"Darwinism is only a theory." Well, duh. Even the most time-
tested stalwarts of the highschool lab, Boyle's Law and v = ir
are only contingently true until proven otherwise. Look what
happened to the once lapidary Newton. Which isn't to say that
Newton's laws of motion were proven "wrong," just that they
enccuntered conditions of space and velocity that Newton
couldn't have anticipated. The theory was supplemented.

News flash: Science will always remain mute -- absolutely mute --
on the fundamental nature of the universe removed from what can be
observed. Science deals not in ontological questions. If you want
interesting discussions of ontology, of "the thing in itself," check
philosophy. I'm thinking in particular of Heidegger and Sartre.
But these discussions will always allow room for contentious dispute.

> *At one point in this debate I stated that if a person encounters
> even one phenomenon that they unanbiguously consider to be
> supernatural, mystical, paranormal, etc., they are forced by
> logic to assume that the universe is teeming with such stuff.
> There are no partially mystical universes. What we call normal
> reality is only the limit of our everyday perceptions. The fun
> part is that fantastic exceptions fudge the final conclusions.*

> Bob, for one small demonstration concerning perceptions, count
> all the "f" letters in the last paragraph, between the asterisks.
> Tell me how many you count, and no fair using automated means.

I checked my answer three times and counted 8.

> If you are familiar with this demonstration,
> try to appreciate what I am getting at.

I haven't a clue. You thought I'd mistake
the "f" sound in "phenomenon" for an f? :)

> If the term "rational" means anything at all,

Well, as I've argued more times than I care to count at this point,
all "rational" means to an idea is internal logical consistency.

> it means that you take into account all of the
> phenomena, which sometimes is a matter of perception.

All phenomena, by definition, are a matter of perception.
You take perception into account; you try to compensate
for it, augment it, compare one perception against
another -- but you cannot rule it out of the equation.

But for a theory to have predictive and/or explanatory value, you
try to take into account all possible cases, yes. The more cases
a theory can explain, the stronger it is. Newton is very strong
but not supreme. Scientific theories can be ranked on this
gradient, and very few are absolutely perfect in that they
account for every conceivable manifestation of the phenomenoa.

> Global warming advocates often strongly imply that all
> glaciers are shrinking, but it turns out that some glaciers
> are actually growing. People who are anti-Kyoto accords get
> to wave their contrarian examples in the air. If you are able
> to do so, you can explain away their local examples. If you
> find just one that you can't explain away, the underlying
> global warming assumption maybe needs a great big caveat.

Well, I don't know about this. Global warming is not a theory
of glacier change; glacier change is a candidate for evidence for
or against global warming. Global warming is a comprehensive,
multi-factoral hypothesis that can only be proven true or false
in (literal) degrees over long stretches of time, the data points
for which can only be presented statistically. Climate is not
weather. If you went into a lab and compressed a gas to half its
volume and its temperature didn't rise, you repeated the experiment
to account for potentially malfunctioning equipment and tried
different gases and found this only happened with neon and propane
(but not xenon and butane) -- well, then, you'd have a severe
problem with Boyle's Law. Multi-causal hypotheses are different.

I read in the NYT that they pulled out core samples from
the Antarctic ice shelf and consistently found much higher
carbon levels starting from the industrial age. If you can
correlate atmospheric carbon levels with temperature (you
don't need to demonstrate cause and effect), this strikes
me as an argument that would trump some local glacier growth.

I am not, however, a climatologist; just thinking out loud.

> I do think you would be greatly amused to read the
> Intelligent Design "classic" books, and some of the
> newcomers. You might perceive why this point of view
> is picking up adherents despite all the scathing criticism.

Well, I enjoy reading Hal Lindsey; that doesn't mean I believe him :)
I dunno; I find the whole hidden moral agenda in ID pretty odious as
I argued last post. Watch how quickly the world becomes even *more*
ugly in a fully determined universe -- God or no God at the center.

The critiques of specific mechanisms of evolution are fine.
I'd probably appreciate them more if I was trained in biology.
But you have apparently given up on presenting them in good
faith to evolutionists -- which is a shame, because all good
scientists relentlessly hammer at their theories, trying as hard
as they can to falsify them. Instead, you show them to lay people
and go Aha! See! Only God could have done that! Lay people
fall for it because science education is so bad in this country.

"Reason" is never going to "improve" science. "Reason" is precisely
what science broke away from, when it created a model of trans-
observable truth-building based on material evidence, not rationalist
structures of thought, no matter how pretty or internally consistent.

Bob

count again, there are nine real "f's" between the asterisks no ph soundalikes

ML Cook:

You got me ... but I had to use the search/replace function in my text editor to finally see it.

Sheesh ...

Merry Christmas, btw,

Bob

It's a perception thing. Our brain sees "of" literally as "uv"

Don't feel bad, everyone gets drubbed by this. Sometimes authors put of in 2 or 3 times and people still miss every one.

Ah, but the great point is this: what else aren't we perceiving?