Oooh, those evil, evolutionist, tent-makers.

We should sleep under the stars, as the Unnamed Designer intended! Teach the Controversy!

Bob

Except that god ordered us to fish (albeit for men, cruising, anyone) and make tents, i.e., the tabernacle. Since god and his kids seem to be absoloutly silent as regards biology and physics (at least in ways that aren't laughably ignorant), it seems possible that honest inquiry may be, in fact, more irreligious than both of the aforementioned hobbies.

As for your example, I'm not going to take the bait. You're asking me to play a game: "Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position." ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it's not ID's task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering."

— Dembski

A lot of posts have been about Egnor lately. Egnor this, Egnor that... methinks the Panda's Thumb crew is a bit jealous.

To think that you've spent years discrediting the IDists and formulating logically and scientifically sound arguments to refute what has been spewed from their mouths when suddenly, out of nowhere, this n00b comes along and in such a short period of time manages to do a better job than you ever could and have ever done...

For the sake of your health I think it would be wise to just admit that he is better at refuting ID than you have ever been and will ever be, and move on.

Faraday and Maxwell, were particularly devout Christians who inferred design everywhere in nature. They believed that God designed everything --- including electricity. Their approach to science was pure design inference, undiluted by atheism or materialism.... They worked entirely from the design inference."

A few nights ago, I put myself mentally into the place of an American citizen requiring some kind of corrective neurosurgery. I imagined my now-seemingly-usual routine of waking up and imbibing caffeine whilst reading my list of various morning websites. I then imagine returning to my hypothetical hospital bed, then being greeted by the surgeon assigned to my procedure.

... I imaging reading the name "Egnor" on the name tag.

... I haven't yet managed to imagine successfully what my reaction would be. Something like dragging myself out of bed afterwards to see the hospital administrator and begging him, on my knees, to reassign a different surgeon.

... I don't say this to be specifically mean. Just a little mental role-playing. Kinda like what I wonder what would happen if I ever got to meet Dembski face-to-face.

Then I consider myself extremely lucky (legally, at least) that they're not sufficiently interested and I'm not sufficiently cashed up to make the antipodean crossing.

(... I seem to be making a habit of double-posting lately, sorry...)

A thought struck me: all this Egnor, the DI, Behe, SMU conference nonsense... why not host a big, cross-campus, inter-state travelling science show? Something with a name hopefully not so legally risky, but as inflammatory as "D.I. Lie"?

Put a spin on its publicity along the lines "Why are the DI lying to you? HOW are the DI lying to you? And would you like to see how we KNOW the DI are lying to you?"

... I mean, the publicity would take care of itself! How many fundies would come screaming out of the woodwork to ban the place? How many rebellious and/or otherwise curious kids and teenagers be wondering why their parents were screaming so loudly about this utter sinfulness?

I swear I'm not (just) trying to be smartassy... could this not be, in any way whatsoever, an even vaguely workable concept?

Egnor confuses "description" with "design". Yes, design means description, but description doesn't automatically mean design.
Design is a description which precedes the existence of the system. If you describe an existing system, you cannot infer the existence of this description prior to the system. Who says that he sees a design, he only sees a description and assumes that somebody else had the same description in his mind before. But this is an additional assumption, not an inference.

This is entertaining because it's precisely what Orac spuriously suggested in his rebuttal of Egnor's earlier claim that Watson and Crick were using a design inference when they 'reverse engineered' DNA:

"In fact, if you take Dr. Egnor's apparent view to its logical conclusion, the whole of science is nothing more than the "reverse engineering" of all of nature, and all scientists, whether they know it or not, whether they admit it or not, must implicitly be using the "design inference," even if they delude themselves into saying that they are not--and that goes double for those Darwinists!"

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/04/dr_egnors_deviously_clever_plan_to_destr.php

Egnor has now taken over every regularity in nature and used it as evidence of God. That would actually be fine with me, because "God" would then give exactly the same predictions as "No God," and scientists could ignore the whole question and get back to doing experiments.
The trouble is that the IDists want it both ways. Egnor is essentially saying, "God has designed a regular universe. Glory be to God. Except, sometimes He wants to blow off all those regularities and stick a flagellum on a bacterium, just to see it roll around on its little wheels. And sometimes He wants to torment people by putting tumors in their brains (sort of like shriveling ants with a magnifying glass.) And sometimes He gets really POed and hurls lightning bolts out of a clear, blue sky. In fact, you never know what the #@%*$ He's going to do. So hang it up all you scientists, and go back to making tents.
Oh, and praise the Lord thy God. (Hard to do, if you're the one with the tumor.)

Unfortunately for Egonr, ligntning is the perfect example of an area where supernatural explanations were tried and failed and natural explanations were used successfully. You can see design all you want, but when it comes down to it only natural explanations really get you anywhere.

By the way, a world class neurosurgeon really should't argue that brain tumors are beneficial, he could talk himself right out of a job.

I would think that when the DI or Egnor come up with results that anybody, Xian or non-Xian, can understand as correct because of the evidence, that they'd then have sufficient cause to invoke the names of Maxwell and Faraday.

Indeed, Faraday and Maxwell (presumably) did want to find out about God through "His creation", which is why they sweated the details, produced predictions which were borne out, and in a word, did science instead of trying to redefine apologetics as science. If there is a Jesus up in heaven watching His followers, He no doubt is proud of Faraday and Maxwell, while being more than a little disappointed at the legal and intellectual misrepresentations of the DI (CSC) bunch.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o

The trouble is that the IDists want it both ways.

— hoary puccoon

There seems to be only one testable prediction that ID makes clearly and consistently; that standard evolutionary theory will fail. Sometimes they even change it, daringly, to standard evolutionary theory has failed. Unfortunately for the IDists, not only has natural selection turned out to be one of the most robust and fertile hypotheses in the history of science, but the reduced cost of studying entire genomes seems to be ushering in a golden age for standard evolutionary theory. If the IDists were real scientists, they would admit their own hypothesis failed, and move on. Things work slightly differently in the world of con artists and scams....

Your comments completely misrepresent Egnor's position. The debate is- can an intelligent design perspective lead to scientific advance. Egnor was responding to a critic who claimed such a perspective would lead to attributing lightning to Thor. Egnor pointed out that the scientists who deciphered the nature of electricity, magnetism and lightning did so by approaching the subject from a design perspective. The common attack on intelligent design usually claims it is not scientific and leads nowhere. Since scientific advances usually assume a logic and a purpose, most scientific advances occur from a design position. Science is based on a system of laws. It owes its existence to an assumption of order and law that owes its own existence to a faith by early researchers that there were laws to be uncovered.

Except it wasn't "faith."

It was informed observation.

Science is based on a system of laws. It owes its existence to an assumption of order and law that owes its own existence to a faith by early researchers that there were laws to be uncovered.

Your comments completely misrepresent Egnor's position. The debate is- can an intelligent design perspective lead to scientific advance. Egnor was responding to a critic who claimed such a perspective would lead to attributing lightning to Thor. ... The common attack on intelligent design usually claims it is not scientific and leads nowhere. Since scientific advances usually assume a logic and a purpose, most scientific advances occur from a design position.

— Davmos

There seems to be only one testable prediction that ID makes clearly and consistently; that standard evolutionary theory will fail

What Faraday and Maxwell gave us were the principles of electromagnetic induction, which is the production of a voltage in either (1) a conductor moving through a stationary magnetic field, as in a generator, or (2) a stationary conductor in a changing magnetic field, as in an AC transformer or an ignition coil. Lightning is generated by a completely different mechanism. The principles of electromagnetic induction cannot be discovered by reasoning and they are based on observed events. Electromagnetic induction is thus a bad comparison to evolution theory, which is based on reasoning about evidence of unobserved past events.

Electromagnetic induction is thus a bad comparison to evolution theory, which is based on reasoning about evidence of unobserved past events.

I wrote my own take-down of this a few days ago:

http://www.sunclipse.org/?p=38

So many of the attacks om Intelligent design misrepresent it that you should be ashamed. ID only claims that many feature of life can best be explained by intelligence. It is not a new position. It is only new because the only other explanation for these features is Darwin's random variations and mutations shaped by natural selection. This has been unable to explain the purposefulness of life and many features only recently uncovered. It has failed over and over. Most scientists throughout history have approached their work by assuming a designer. Only desperate Darwinists have fought this. Darwin failed when artificial selection by breeders could not breed new organs, It failed when experiments radiating fruit flies could not achieve new organs. It failed when 150 years of fossil hunting could not bridge the gaps between crustaceans and arthropods. It failed when the new forms that appeared 530 million years ago had no reasonable links to the prior life. It especially failed when DNA was found to be a true code of several billion units. It failed when many features of life were found that could not arise by Darwin's mechanism.

>>"Egnor pointed out that the scientists who deciphered the nature of electricity, magnetism and lightning did so by approaching the subject from a design perspective."

Please explain how you think Faraday and Maxwell's experiments would have differed if they had done what you claim they didn't, and approached their investigations from a naturalistic angle.

It seems to me, from what I know of the two gentlemen, that - whatever they believed about the Christian God, and whatever conclusions they thought they could draw about him from the results of their work - they arrived at those results using exactly the same methods any halfway decent atheist scientist would have used. Or an agnostic scientist, Jewish, Buddhist, Zoroastrian... Where am I wrong here?

ID only claims that many feature of life can best be explained by intelligence.

Where am I wrong here?

It failed when 150 years of fossil hunting could not bridge the gaps between crustaceans and arthropods.

It failed when the new forms that appeared 530 million years ago had no reasonable links to the prior life.

It failed when many features of life were found that could not arise by Darwin's mechanism.

I realize that Egnor has made some stupid comments recently and Panda's Thumb justifiably took him to task for those claims. But this thread is totally uncalled for. And many of the commenters here either miss the point of his latest remarks or are willfully and dishonestly ignoring that point.

His point is that folks like Maxwell and Faraday (and I might add many others, such as Newton) were motivated by their beliefs about God, design and order, to dedicate their lives to investigating nature, thereby enabling themselves and the rest of us to see more profound manifestations of those views in the behavior of nature. Certainly Faraday (as a Sandamanian) and Newton (as a Deist) have explicitly indicated in their own words that this is indeed the case. (I am not sure about Maxwell.)

In this regard, Egnor is absolutely correct. As I argued in another thread, one can make a mighty case for the proposition that historically monotheism served as a powerful impetus for engaging in scientific work. (Today things have evolved differently and this is no longer the case.)

The fact that their efforts were productive did not flow from their beliefs but did flow from their dedication which, in turn, did flow from their beliefs. ID advocates today may share those beliefs but their efforts have as of yet not been productive. There are good reasons for this, but they do not detract from the correctness of Egnor's comments discussed here.

The fact that their efforts were productive did not flow from their beliefs

Davmos Darwin failed when artificial selection by breeders could not breed new organs,

It failed when experiments radiating fruit flies could not achieve new organs.

It failed when 150 years of fossil hunting could not bridge the gaps between crustaceans and arthropods.

It failed when the new forms that appeared 530 million years ago had no reasonable links to the prior life.

especially failed when DNA was found to be a true code of several billion units.

It failed when many features of life were found that could not arise by Darwin's mechanism.

They can't have it both ways. A universe running on rules? Proof of God. The rules appear to be broken? Proof of God.

What, one is forced to ask, would be evidence that didn't point to God? By that thinking, there is not and can not be any.

Therefore, ID is faith. Which in a liberal democracy is fine. Nobody's trying to outlaw any class of belief.

Promoting it as science, though, and attempting to change the way science is taught on that claim, is fraud, which is both illegal and against the moral code of many religions - including that held by the vast majority of IDers.

It's also, as has been shown, against the First Amendment in the US, a key constitutional component which exists to protect freedom of belief.

One defence would be that the nature of the I in ID is not yet known, and should no more be assumed to be God than anything else. Concomitent with that, though, would be an effort to ascertain that nature through scientific thought and work. To the best of my knowledge, no ID theory or thinking exists on that - which would make ID unique as a science - and in fact ID holds as dogma that such nature cannot be known.

This is all the oldest of hat. So when will ID fans address it?

R

Davmos,

Did "Darwin fail" when molecular phylogenetics was used to discover the basic structure of the tree of life with three major domains? Did "Darwin fail" when crustaceans were discovered to contain exactly the same mitochondrial gene order as insects? Did "Darwin fail" when plausible molecular mechanisms for changes in hox gene regulation were discovered that enabled the illucidation of pathways for changes in development that could generate the diversity we see today in arthropods? Did "Darwin fail" when exactly the same genetic mistakes were found in exactly the same genes in whales and their terrestrial ancestors? DId "Darwin fail" when hundreds of intermediate forms were discovered in the fossil record just as Darwin predicted?

Sorry man. Descent with modification has been one of the most successful guiding principles in the history of science. That is why there are so many new fields of study that rely on it. That is why there are so many technical journals devoted to the topic. How many are journals are there for ID? How long since they have published their own journals? Now just who is it that has failed?

They can't have it both ways. A universe running on rules? Proof of God. The rules appear to be broken? Proof of God.

Science is based on a system of laws. It owes its existence to an assumption of order and law that owes its own existence to a faith by early researchers that there were laws to be uncovered.

Sorry; that last bit should'be been:

If you think that the following is not taken on faith, kindly prove to me otherwise, without assuming it:
"Every time we performed experiment E, we obtained result r. Therefore, when we perform E tomorrow, we'll again obtain r"

To do science you have to take on faith that an experiment carried out in New York yesterday will produce the exact same result when carried out in Prague tomorrow (given that location and time was controlled for, etc.).

ahh, i wrote that at the same time you were writing your addendum.

150 years of fossil hunting could not bridge the gaps between crustaceans and arthropods.

Ah, good stuff. The kind that keeps you coming back for more.

Sir TJ --- It is not clear that David Hume would have agreed with you...

Sir TJ --- It is not clear that David Hume would have agreed with you...

Er, comment #171147, I meant.

If you think that the following is not taken on faith, kindly prove to me otherwise, without assuming it: "Every time we performed experiment E, we obtained result r. Therefore, when we perform E tomorrow, we'll again obtain r"

— GuyeFaux

Gerald Harbison --- Yes, that is the Bayesian point of view. I suspect that David Hume would counter with pointing out that you are then taking Bayesian reasoning on faith...

Re "It failed when the new forms that appeared 530 million years ago had no reasonable links to the prior life."

May I point out that among the oldest known fossils, there pretty much have to be some for which possible predecessors haven't been found? At the very least, the oldest known fossils won't have known predecessors.

Henry

noncommercial,kited quotient induce outwit:vertebrate palmed

Re Comment #172050

Huh?

this web site is GAY