Posted in Science & Religion at 7:41 pm by nemo
Intelligent Design People Don’t Get Theology, Either
If the guys at Discover are really pantheists, let them say so, and not fob it off on others to serve their agenda.
If the theory of evolution only appeared formally and scientifically with Darwin in the 19th century, and famously continues to evolve with burgeoning discoveries and nuances in our own time (the New York Times featured an entire section dedicated to the pullulating perspectives of evolutionary theory on June 28, 2007), perhaps religion can be forgiven a certain tardiness in catching up to the swiftly accumulating evidence. To be sure, St. Augustine already had a seminal theory of seminal causes within the potency of matter in the early fifth century. Also, Pope Pius XII already stamped his basic approval on the theory in his encyclical Humani Generis in 1951.
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Posted in Evolution at 7:32 pm by nemo
Principled (not Rhetorical) Reasons Why ID Doesn’t Identify the Designer.
This defense of ambiguity isn’t convincing, not at all. If you can’t prove the existence of a designer by getting specific, then it is better to drop the idea. This issue has taken over all the energy of the Darwin debate, and allowed Darwinists to simply disregard the basic critiques of natural selection.
Further, in a distinction between G-design (agent based, God?) and N-design (natural teleology), often made on this blog, we need to be very clear which we are referring to. The ID group is deliberately vague here, suspiciously so.
Why not drop this ambition to hijack the Darwin debate for theism, and simply concentrate on the exposure of a Social Darwinist Darwinism allowed free reign in society. One needs to travel light, and drop these metaphysical sleights of hand based on design.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in 1848+, Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 3:30 pm by nemo
Bad skin may have influenced Marx’s writings
Silliest ideological blurb of the week.
LONDON - Karl Marx, who complained of excruciating boils, actually suffered from a chronic skin disease with known psychological effects that may well have influenced his writings, a British expert said on Tuesday.
Sam Shuster, professor of dermatology at the University of East Anglia, believes the revolutionary thinker had hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) in which the apocrine sweat glands — found mainly in the armpits and groin — become blocked and inflamed.
“In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem,” said Shuster, who published his findings in the British Journal of Dermatology.
“This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing.”
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Posted in Evolution at 2:27 pm by nemo
Message to Behe: You may very well be an evolutionist.
Is this news? Granted that ID-ists might be confused evolutionists, but aren’t Darwinists confused selectionists?
Well, if Behe can call Miller an intelligent design proponent because of his Christian faith, showing that ID really is all about religion, then it seems that it is not more than fair that we call Behe an evolutionist for his acceptance of common descent, and his somewhat self-contradictory claim that after God set it all in motion, evolution could very well have played itself out via purely natural processes of regularity and chance. But if that is the case then ID, which is based on eliminating such natural processes to infer design seems to have lost its claim to it.
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Posted in Science & Religion, The Eonic Effect at 2:12 pm by nemo
D’Souza interviewed at Frontpage
Theism in general, and Christianity in particular, make so much more sense of the world than the doctrines of unbelief.
Actually, Christianity can’t make correct sense of its own Old Testament, and its claims for theistic action don’t make any sense. It makes much more sense to see all this in the context of the Axial Age phenomenon (and that in terms of the ‘eonic effect’)!
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Posted in Evolution at 12:42 pm by nemo
Richard Dawkin’s Weasel
Authors: Alex Tee Neng Heng, David G. Green
Since an entire civilization of rocket scientists can’t point out the fallacy here, we can get the ID gang to do it for us.
In his book, “The Blind Watchmaker”, Richard Dawkins uses the example of a child monkey Shakespeare to illustrate how natural selection can produce unlikely results. Could a monkey accidentally type the Hamlet line “methinks it is like a weasel”? The chances are virtually zero. But suppose that every correct letter becomes fixed. Then as the child taps away, more and more of the string will match the target, until an exact match is reached.
This demonstration shows the process in action. To use this model, just enter any text line and click GO. It is astonishing how the right line can evolve!
Links and References
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker. Norton & Company, Inc (1986). ISBN: 0-393-31570-3.
Wikipedia, Weasel program, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weasel_program&oldid=133080275 (as of June 4, 2007)
Wikipedia, Infinite monkey theorem, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Infinite_monkey_theorem&oldid=135768271 (as of June 4, 2007)
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Posted in Science & Religion at 12:35 pm by nemo
Darwin didn’t get God off the hook. It’s hard to see how monotheists are off the hook either.
Now, Miller and Ayala say that Darwinism gets God off the hook because it is an indirect process that works itself out through purely mechanical means. Therefore, by definition, no one can be said to have “intended” its results, such as the maleria parasite that kills millions.
The problem with this analysis is that it ignores three other levels of culpability. If God exists, then He must be a Being of supreme, indeed supernatural, knowledge and intelligence. Therefore, he must have known that it was practically certain that the mechanical process He set in motion would result in the consequences that have in fact resulted.
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Posted in Evolution at 4:04 pm by nemo
From review of Behe
It is clear that Behe is driven not by a truly scientific investigation, but instead metaphysics. He is obsessed with “randomness,” which he incorrigibly associates with “Darwinism” and cosmic purposelessness. This is one of many incorrect but blindly-held assumptions common with creationists. But randomness in evolution is no more metaphysically significant than randomness in weather systems. If creationists realized this, we might finally see the edge of creationism, if not the end of it. But if Behe is any indication, that won’t be any time soon.
These statements don’t add up. It is not metaphysical for Behe to expose the question of randomness in Darwinian theory. The evolutionary process can hardly be compared with a weather system. Behe’s weak point is his design argument. Short of that he exposes the real problems with the Darwinian theory.
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Posted in In the News at 2:29 pm by nemo
How Did Chemical Constituents Essential To Life Arise On Primitive Earth?
How Did Chemical Constituents Essential To Life Arise On Primitive Earth?
ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2007) — Experiments show that simple molecules can combine chemically rather than biologically to form the building blocks of DNA, the key component of all life forms. These processes might have taken place on primitive earth, but how they occur is an unsolved puzzle.
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