The ID creationists are having one of those ludicrous “Darwin vs. Design” conferences, in which they rehash assertions and nonexistent evidence and practice propaganda and rhetoric, at Southern Methodist University this week. They seem a little nonplussed at the opposition they’ve encountered. Hey, it’s Southern Methodist University — it’s got a religion in its name! — and it’s Texas, aren’t they all ignorant bible-thumping yahoos down there who ought to chow down happily on any Design story they spin? No, they aren’t, and good, legitimate scientists are on the staff at SMU, and suddenly, the creationists are getting criticized.
Advocates of intelligent design at the Discovery Institute have been rattled by the strong showing of scientists at Southern Methodist University who called their bluff, and questioned SMU for hosting an ID conference this week. SMU’s officials pointed out they were just renting out facilities, and not hosting the conference at all.
The ID conference, with special religious group activities preceding it, is scheduled for April 13 and 14 at SMU. It is a rerun of a similar revival held in Knoxville, Tennessee, last month. The conference features no new scientific research, no serious science sessions with scientists looking at new research, or new findings from old data.
It always makes me happy to see sensible people standing up to creationist lies and staring them down. Creationists are basically all cowards; they get so accustomed to arranging friendly audiences for their meetings, stocking auditoriums with friendly faces who will shout out “Amen!” rather than awkward questions that they always look bewildered when someone dares to argue with them.
Note the other common trick. Universities have these nice big lecture halls that they like to see used, so they’re usually quite open to allowing outside groups to use them in off-hours, especially if a student group supports it. Creationists love to rent auditoriums in science buildings (they do this same stunt at the University of Minnesota campus) because then they can have flyers that state that the presentation will be in the PHYSICS building at the UNIVERSITY … even though the university and the physics department have absolutely nothing to do with the event. Said flyers will be distributed to local churches, of course, to get that friendly audience in attendance.
John West and Bruce Chapman of the Discovery Institute have published an opinion piece in the Dallas News to confront the critics. There are no surprises there. As usual, even the title is a loaded slur: Are the Darwinists afraid to debate us? We aren’t “Darwinists”, guys. They are also whining about how the SMU scientists’ repugnance at being associated with ID quackery is “censorship.”
Unfortunately, would-be censors are trying to get the conference banned from campus by ludicrously comparing intelligent design proponents to faith healers or even Holocaust deniers.
Faith healers and Holocaust deniers are not on the faculties of reputable universities. Scientists who support intelligent design are.
Uh, Arthur Butz, holocaust denier and tenured professor at Northwestern. The Center for Spirituality and Healing at UM (and similar organizations at a surprising number of universities).
I’d like to pretend that affiliation with the faculty of a credible university bestows instant legitimacy and infallibility, but it’s not true. There are a small number of crackpots nestled into every faculty group, especially so when they utter opinions outside their discipline. You can find crackpots in just about anything on university faculties. Alien abductions? John E. Mack, Harvard. Bigfoot? Grover Krantz, Washington State University. Life after death? Gary Schwartz, University of Arizona. If you want the stamp of approval for any scrap of lunacy found by tying it to a Ph.D. on a university somewhere, it isn’t hard—there are a lot of professors, and all you need to do is select from the tiny percentage (which is still a lot of individuals) who are certifiable.
This is exactly what the DI has done. They have assembled a roster of fringe believers from university faculty, and they do love to pretend it gives them academic clout … while at the same time, they dismiss the expertise of the majority of qualified faculty. Oh, well — inconsistency and hypocrisy are prerequisites for being a practicing creationist.
West and Chapman protest even more that practicing scientists don’t respect them.
Various science professors at SMU have called on their university to ban our conference, and more recently some of them have declared that they “have a duty as practitioners of science to speak out” against intelligent design.
But if they truly believe that they have a duty to “speak out,” why not speak out by engaging intelligent design scholars in a serious discussion?
This is precisely why it is a bad idea to debate creationists. It’s what they want. They are not scholars, they are frauds and incompetents, but by sharing a stage with real scholars they can pretend that they are equals. There will be no serious discussion, because they will lie and distort and confuse, and the scientist up there will have to spend her time trying to clean up the nonsense her opponent has spewed. And there will be no engagement, because the creationist strategy is to gallop through a superficial collection of nonsense and evade any attempt to discuss any topic in depth.
We have a duty to expose these charlatans and clowns from the Discovery Institute. We should not allow them to leech off our credibility while doing so. What I urge people to do in these situations is to schedule a parallel set of presentations, trying to schedule them at compatible times, where real scientists present real evidence for evolution. Don’t try to share a stage with the creationist; all that will happen in that case is that, for instance, a serious developmental biologist will be ordered by a creationist to explain the age of the earth, biogeography, paleontology, population genetics, microbiology, and anything other than development to the audience, and what you end up with is a scattered mess danced to the tune played by the fraud, and that gives the wrong impression. And wrong impressions are exactly what the Discovery Institute relies on.
How many of those fringe believers are named Steve?
(italics mine) I love the way these clowns just can’t stop themselves from publicly contradicting, in both word and act, all the DI soft soap about how ID really isn’t religious, nosirree, it’s all about the “scientific” “evidence”!
What a sorry bunch.
Will they ‘teach the controversy’ within their own ranks about the age of the earth ?
Well, to be fair, the ‘special religious activities’ line comes from the SMU faculty’s criticism. Not that it’s probably not accurate, but just to be clear.
Cheers.
Design is Evident
For many decades now it has been claimed by Darwinists that living things only appeared to be designed – that “man is the result of a meaningless and purposeless process that did not have us in mind.”
Fortunately with the advancement of microbiology, we have strong evidence that this is not the case. Living organisms contain immense and irreducible complexity and complex specified information that cannot be accounted for by the mechanism that Darwin proposed. Furthermore, life requires vast quantities of biological information proceeding the beginning of reproducible life – so Darwinian mechanisms are not the cause for this effect.
Natural selection is supposed to proceed by small undirected modifications, but the living cell has turned out to be a maze of molecular machines and information storage and retrieval systems…something quite unknown to Darwin. In many of these machines, the parts interact in such a way that unless all of them are present at once, the machine either doesn’t work correctly or doesn’t work at all. There is no selective advantage to have one or several parts when these molecular machines do not function at all until all parts are present and assembly is complete.
Darwin wrote that “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
This being the case, with and advancement of technology and our knowledge of the cell and biochemistry, by Darwin’s own criteria, his theory has absolutely broken down. This is not to say that mutations never occur or that natural selection does not exist. One can conceive of a faster cheetah out surviving a slower one. But this is quite different than accounting for the complexity and diversity of life that exists today.
Interestingly, even if this knowledge had not been discovered, the Darwinian mechanism or neo-Darwinism does not explain where life came from in the first place.
Even if it did, it still wouldn’t explain where the universe came from.
And even if it did that, it doesn’t explain why the universe is quite finely tuned creating an environment that allows life.
Those opposed to ID don’t like to recognize facts like this, at least not publicly. But Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist and atheist Fred Hoyle did just that:
From 1953 onward, Will Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy Level in the nucleus of 12C to the 7.12 Mev Level in 16O. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar mucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you would have to fix and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? Following the above argument, I am inclined to think so. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.
To say monkeyed with by a superintellect is synonymous with saying designed.
This “design” conclusion can be avoided, but would a rational mind see these attempts as logical?
Attempt 1) Some have put forth that extraterrestrials must have seeded the earth with DNA. But this leads to in infinite regress as we then ask, “Where did the extraterrestrials come from?” Also, it’s not enough to seed the earth with genetic insta-grow, we would also need to believe in ET’s ability to monkey with the laws of physics.
Attempt 2) Others have admitted the odds are against life arising by chance, but then say that if given enough time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. There are numerous problems with this “infinite monkey – infinite typewriter” scenario, such as, chance is not a cause. Chance has been shown to not have the capability to generate complex specified information which is necessary for DNA that authors life.
Attempt 3) If having infinite time won’t let the impossible become possible, the next step is to propose an infinite number of universes. Given an infinite number, life would surely pop up somewhere…wouldn’t it…please. While we are supposing, we might as well suppose universes with different physical laws. It doesn’t matter that we have no evidence for multiple universes.
Hopefully to some readers this now seems a bit outrageous. For the purposes of denying design (which we have evidence for), we are asked to believe in an infinite number of universes – which we have no evidence for. Occam’s Razor is denied in favor of stories that begin to sound like green eggs and ham.
Before we consider multiple universes, why not ask why should even one universe exist? It doesn’t have to. And why should there be any laws of physics? These laws don’t have to exist either, nor do they explain themselves or create themselves. Anything that begins requires a cause. (Try to think of an uncaused beginning) The universe had a beginning. It’s expanding, yet not infinitely spread out, so it began and is not infinitely old. Physicists tell us the universe is also dying a heat death, but not dead yet, so again it is not infinitely old. Since it began, it had a beginner or a cause. We could say the cause of the universe is another contingent being, but that sets up an infinite regress. For the regress to end we must eventually reach a being, a designer, that is not contingent but necessary. This necessary being is uncaused.
To cause the universe and the physical laws, this necessary being or designer can’t not be, this designer must exist.1
Open minded attention to the nature of the universe, physical laws, life and its diversity makes the existence of a designer evident. A trite phrase like, “Intelligent Design is not science” is rather meaningless when one considers the evidence that comes from empirical observation and then differentiates between that evidence and the possible implications which many simply don’t like because they are theologically friendly. But to deny the evidence because one doesn’t like the implications…that is simply not science!
Here are two examples of evidence that many scientists are unaware of or choose to denying today:
1) Discovery Institute Bibliography w/ peer reviewed articles which challenge evolution http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1127
2) Discovery Institute list of peer reviewed articles which support ID http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&program=CSC%20-%20Scientific%20Research%20and%20Scholarship%20-%20Science%20-%20MainPage&id=2640
1 J. Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know, Spence Publishing
Will they ‘teach the controversy’ within their own ranks about the age of the earth ?
They won’t have a controversy. While Behe claims he believes in an old earth, etc., you’ll never catch him taking a young earth creationist to task on the evidence. That’s a big clue you’re not dealing with science. If these guys were scientists, given their disparate beliefs, there would be a heated ongoing debate about the mechanics and timing of creation. Instead, heck, I don’t even know what Dembski believes about the age of the earth.
“Interestingly, even if this knowledge had not been discovered, the Darwinian mechanism or neo-Darwinism does not explain where life came from in the first place.
Even if it did, it still wouldn’t explain where the universe came from.
And even if it did that, it doesn’t explain why the universe is quite finely tuned creating an environment that allows life.”
Yeah? Well, the Bible doesn’t explain how my car’s engine works. So it’s obviously false and useless. :p
The point is there are multiple lines of evidence that point to the falsehood of materialism.
Darwinism is often sold in biology books as a slam dunk for materialism.
Pennick nicely enforces the point that ID creationists rather not discuss any one particular aspect in depth. Like for example this claim:
“Chance has been shown to not have the capability to generate complex specified information which is necessary for DNA that authors life.”
Somehow they cite it like it’s from some kind of peer reviewed source. Oh well. Ignore the troll I say.
Why, oh why, does every creationist who shows up here turn out to be a cut&paste plagiarist? You can find that mess of boilerplate here — it’s from an IDEA center collection o’ quotes.
And Design doesn’t explain anything. Postulating a superbeing for which you have no evidence and of which you refuse to discuss even its properties is not an answer — it’s an exercise in mindless buck-passing.
Penick, I’m warning you. You can discuss ID as long as you engage your own brain and present your own thoughts in your own words; you can cite the kind of stuff you brought up here as a link. But if you do another big, sloppy cut&paste, it will be disemvowelled. Keep it up, and you’ll be banned. Don’t be stupid.
Such as? Name one.
Also, for the above linked list: I wouldn’t trust it. They often lie about the contents of the articles. Pick one and tell me how it goes against evolution.
Penick.
Just one question.
If the laws of physics where different, would we exist as we are now?
Answer to rhetorical question: No. We wouldn’t. We would exist in a form more suited to the different laws of physics. Therefore, we exist as we are because the laws of physics are what they are. If they where different, we’d be different.
God is dead, get over it.
Penick:
Perhaps you could clue us in to:
1) where this alleged superintellect performed this interaction – in space? on Earth? some other dimension?
2) when this alleged interaction was performed – billions of years ago? millions of years ago? 6000 years ago? last Thursday?
3) how this superintellect perfomed this interaction – what methods were employed?
4) some basic idea of the origin of the superintellect – did it have a beginning? if not, why not?
5)some explanation of how the origin of life (abiogenesis) has anything to do with invalidating our best present explanation of the diversity of life (evolution)
Bonus question – if you can in any way establish the existence of this superintellect you posit, then produce and explain any evidence that any religion relates to this superintellect in any meaningful way.
Show your work. Assumptions and assertions are not useful.
What about debating creationists with a stipulation that the discussion only cover one specific point? Select one of the favorite canards, and spend time unspooling the scientific arguments that refute it. (Possible topics: mutation and gene duplication, gaps in the fossil record, etc.) That way, scientists can go into some depth about the topic, and the creationists will be prohibited from skipping around and be forced to engage actual data in front of an audience.
Woe unto all ye heathens.For it is written that it is designers all the way down!
You expect professional liars to adhere to ground rules??
Wow, Penick. You’ve managed to cram just about every single flawed argument relating to IDC that there is floating around: irreducible complexity, information creation before life is possible, abiogensis, worship of gaps, anthropic principle (both planetary and cosmological), randomness and “undirected” nature of development…
These have been very ably dissected and disposed of by much more knowledgeable people than myself. I suggest you read them. Even if reading Dawkins gives you hives, I’m sure that there are many others who have dealt with these, including this blog.
Even if you don’t mind putting forth already-discarded arguments, that’s one thing. I might want to suggest, though, that you not pursue the “infinite regress” or “Anything that begins requires a cause” threads when you’re in the process of proposing a “Designer” (and we all know what that means) who is in violation of that very argument. If there is a “Designer”, then where did they come from, what was their beginning? I would suggest that including an argument against your central tenant in your argument itself is not a good practice for persuasion.
(Re-)read chapter 4 of The God Delusion, or one of many books out that address the problems with DI. (anyone want to suggest a good one for Penick?) Otherwise, you’re probably not going to get much engagement here since there’s nothing new or original or particularly compelling about what you’ve written. It’s all been done, and dealt with many times and it’s become quite old to many here.
Anyone have a FAQ that addresses these very same old and tired arguments? Panda’s Thumb perhaps? It would be useful when Penicks come along and spout the same things we’ve heard a thousand times. I’ve seen one for theists who wish to argue with atheists (another topic with the same old arguments coming round and round again), but not one for IDC.
Just thought someone ought to say something so Penick didn’t feel like we were “afraid” or choosing to deny the evidence that is so obvious to him. I just don’t have the time or energy to try and respond to each and every part of his screed.
ANF
PZ, your comment about Pennick’s comment was good enough to post twice. But I also think you KNOW the answer:
Creationists aren’t told to think, they’re told to believe. The idea in religion is to regurgitate the party line over and over without challenging it or thinking about it. So these people can cough up a lot of quotes (many out of context or as here, long tracts written by some ‘religious leader’ supposedly in the know.) but what they can’t do is put this all in their own words, sort through the information for relevant answers to specific questions, or discuss with any reliability the credibility of their sources.
One of the problems is that we are talking to them (or finally now declining to talk) to them on human, thought-evoking terms. They are, after all, only Holy Parrots, without the thought to attach a great deal of meaning to the words they speak, outside of the pleasing sounds others in their flock make when they say them.
Why do these morons think that a need for and reliance on evidence is “wrong?”
Next, I bet this Pennick idiot will be saying that studying placoderms and trilobites promotes evil and idolatry, respectively.
Regarding the apparent irony of this debate taking place at Southern Methodist University, I’ll just note that SMU has also rejected W’s presidential library (IIRC both the Faculty Senate and the Student Senate voted against it)… so they stand as bastions of rationalism in my view, religious affiliation notwithstanding.
Now, if you want to find a truly fundy large university in Texas, you need to check out Baylor. As a yout’, I attended a summer debate institute there: Our only day off during the two-week session was a Sunday, and nothing was open in Waco. You could’ve fired a shotgun down Main Street and not disturbed a soul, never mind hurt anyone.
This is a bit peripheral to the to the main discussion here, but I knew Grover Krantz of Washington State University. In fact, I took a couple of classes from him, one on human evolution, the other on human races, Both were outstanding courses.
Bigfoot obsession or not, it may surpise you to discover that he was a terrific teacher, and that one of the most important things I got from him was a healthy lesson on skeptical thinking.
Why he had that one great gaping hole in his *own* thinking is beyond me, other than helping me to understand that even crackpots can be complex and surprising people LOL!
I have a *very* fond place in my memory for Grover.
Lynn
spartenrider said –
I hate these f*&%$ing retards always saying that the world is on the back of designers all the way down. Anybody with any sense KNOWS it’s turtles all the way down. How can we live in a time when people still question the existence of the turtles? I’m just going to go kill myself now!
Lots of colleges are nominally religious — it reflects their founding and history, but not necessarily the views of the faculty. It takes a lot of active filtering to keep secular creep out of a university.
Materialism… “Intelligent design” creationists are punning when they use this word. They know that lay people think materialism means greed and obsession with material objects of status. They are equally unaware that materialism has a specfic meaning within science.
So that provides them a sympathetic ear. After all, who wants to be a known as a materialist, ie a materialistic bastard who cares about the size of his/her car, having a third house in the Hamptons? Therefore, via the pun, materialism in the scientific sense is rhetorically weakened.
Re crackpots on University Faculties.
In addition to those whackjobs listed by Mr. Myers, one might add the following individuals.
1. Vitamin C cures cancer – Linus Pauling, California Institute of Technology.
2. Africans are intellectually inferior to Caucasians – William Shockley, Stanford University.
3. HIV doesn’t cause AIDS – Peter Duesberg, Un. of California
4. Extra Terrestrials are visiting the earth – J. Allan Hynek, Northwestern University.
5. PK, ESP, and cold fusion are real phenomena – Brian Josephson, Cambridge University.
Lynn wrote
I had Krantz for a course at the U of Minnesota (so there, PZ!) before he went west, and second Lynn’s remarks.
Penick said,
Disclaimer from that ID link provided…
You can find crackpots in just about anything on university faculties. Alien abductions? John E. Mack, Harvard. Bigfoot? Grover Krantz, Washington State University. Life after death? Gary Schwartz, University of Arizona.
Ivory Billed Woodpecker? John Fitzpatrick, Cornell
Maybe the conference needs to be flash mobbed.
http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/04/london_ipod_fla.html
Wouldn’t take much to organize the enlightened students of SMU to do something like this. It’s a fun way to show solidarity and convey how ID lacks any seriousness.
There’s a very simple solution. Why don’t the Creationists write research papers and have them published in mainstream, reputable scientific journals? There is also the opportunity in many journals to comment on published papers and to respond to comments. Such a mode of “debate” would be taken much more seriously than the tent-revival styles of debate Creationists currently advocate. Editors and reviewers can keep the materials on topic and within accepted scientific credibility. But offhand, I cannot think of and papers on Creationism that have been published in a reputable scientific journal (well, except for that one snuck in by a Creationist editor), nor can I think of any comments arguing from a Creationist perspective.
In their DMN op-ed piece, Chapman and West repeat that old nonsense [Darwinists] …show through their comments that they know very little about what it [ID] actually proposes.” How true, but the difficulty lies with the DI and the high priests of ID not with its critics. IDiots have yet to offer any proposals derived from ID, scientific, rational or testable that would shed light on what ID actually is other than a dislike of evolution. Without that the world will be eternally ignorant of what ID has to offer.
It looks like a lesson plan in how to pad a list. Let’s count the ways:
.
List some references as “Featured Articles” first, and then list them again in a full listing.
.
List a book, and then separately list chapters from that book.
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Get together with your pals, call each other “peers”, and churn out a “peer-reviewed” book.
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List as “peer-reviewed” books for which the peer-review process consisted of a 10 minute phone call with a professor of vetinarian medicine who has never even seen the manuscript.
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List books whose metholdology and conclusions were so laughable that they have since been denied by their own authors.
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Even though it is a list of “Peer-reviewed and peer-edited scientific publications,” go ahead ald list books and papers on philosophy.
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List papers so bad they have been disowned by the governing board of the relevant journal.
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List papers which show that, if you use an inappropriate mathemodical for some evolutionary mechanisms while ignoring the rest, the bacteria in a ton of dirt could still evolve complex features.
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List books about ID and education, while denying that your belief tank has ever advocated the teaching of ID.
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List apologetics articles with titles like “God, Creation and Mr. Davies” while insisting that your “theory” has nothing to do with religion.
.
I probably missed a few, I’m not as adept at it as the Discovery Institute crew.
Thnk y fr th knd wrds Dr. Myrs,
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Y wrt: “nd Dsgn dsn’t xpln nythng. Pstltng sprbng fr whch y hv n vdnc nd f whch y rfs t dscss vn ts prprts s nt n nswr — t’s n xrcs n mndlss bck-pssng.”
thrs wld sy tht pstltng n ntllgnt cs dtrmns th cs tht s bhnd th ffct. nd syng thr s n vdnc fr n ntllgnt cs s smply nt tr r scntfc, s dscssd blw…
Hr’s qstn, Cn Yr vws tlrt Nn trnl nvrs?
s y knw, ntbl scntsts hv prvdd mpl vdnc tht th nvrs s nt trnl. t hd bgnnng, wht scntsts cll th “Bg Bng.” nstn rchd ths cnclsn wth hs Thry f Rltvty, whch shwd tht tm, spc nd mttr r ntrdpndnt; n cnnt xst wtht th thrs.
Scntsts rn Pnzs nd Rbrt Wlsn dscvrd th csmc bckgrnd rdtn frm th Bg Bng by ccdnt n 1965.
NS strnmr Grg Smt nd hs tm bsrvd rppls n th tmprtr f tht bckgrnd rdtn thrgh th Csmc Bckgrnd xplrr “CB” stllt. Th rppls wr s prcs tht thy llw glxy frmtn wtht csng th nvrs t cllps n tslf. “f y’r rlgs, t’s lk lkng t Gd,” Smt wld dscrb th fndngs. H dscrbd thm s, “Th mchnng mrks frm th crtn f th nvrs nd th fngrprnts f th mkr”.
Th nvrs s xpndng n ll drctns, whch sggsts pnt f rgn. Th vdnc tht th nvrs hd bgnnng, nd thrfr cs, nd s nt trnl, s vrwhlmng. f th nvrs wr nfnt n g, t wld hv sd p ll vlbl nrgy by nw nd ndrgn ht dth.
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S nstd f skng wh dsgnd th ntllgnt dsgnr, n shld sk, wht csd th Bg Bng? n n sns scntsts smply dn’t knw! n nthr sns thy knw tht ll tm, spc nd mttr bgn wth th Bg Bng, s smthng tsd f tm, spc nd mttr csd th Bg Bng. n shrt, t ws smthng tsd ntr, smthng prr t ntr, smthng tht “f nt ntrl” cld b clld sprntrl. .. smthng scnc hs dtrmnd s nt xplnd v mtrlsm.
strnmr Rbrt Jstrw, drctr f th Mnt Wlsn bsrvtry nd fndr f NS’s Gddrd nsttt f Spc Stds, sd n n ntrvw, “strnmrs nw fnd thy hv pntd thmslvs nt crnr bcs thy hv prvn, by thr wn mthds, tht th wrld bgn brptly n n ct f crtn t whch y cn trc th sds f vry str, vry plnt, vry lvng thng n ths csms nd n th rth. nd thy hv fnd tht ll f ths hppnd s prdct f frcs thy cnnt hp t dscvr. … Tht thr r wht r nyn wld cll sprntrl frcs t wrk s nw, thnk, scntfclly prvn fct.”
Jstrw, n dmttd gnstc, bsrvd tht th Bg Bng s vry smlr t th Bblcl ccnt f crtn n Gnss, n th sns tht th nvrs bgn sddnly n flsh f lght nd nrgy nd n dfnt mmnt f tm.
Thr r svrl thstc xplntns fr th cs f th Bg Bng, bt thy’v ll fld. Frst ws th Csmc Rbnd Thry, th d tht th nvrs s xpndng nd cntrctng frvr. Ths fll t f fvr bcs thr’s nt ngh mttr nd nrgy fr tht t hppn. Th nvrs s stll xpndng nd thr’s n vdnc tht t wll cntrct. Mrvr, vn f thr wr fnt nmbr f bngs, thr wld stll nd t b cs fr th frst.
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Th bttm ln s tht thr th nvrs s trnl r thr s n ntllgnt gncy tsd ntr tht csd th nvrs. Scntfc vdnc vrwhlmngly rgs gnst th trnl nvrs hypthss.
skng wh dsgnd th ntllgnt dsgnr cnfss th Lw f Cslty. Th lw stts tht vrythng tht hd bgnnng hs cs. f th nvrs ws crtd by n trnl gncy tsd f tm, t’s lkly tht gncy nvr hd bgnnng. ftr ll, th bg bng ws th crtn f tm, s th cs wld nd t b tsd tm s w knw t.
Rbrt Jstrw dscsss scntsts’ wllfl dnl n hs bk, Gd nd th strnmrs. H wrts, “Thr rctns prvd n ntrstng dmnstrtn f th rspns f th scntfc mnd – sppsdly vry bjctv mnd – whn vdnc ncvrd by scnc tslf lds t cnflct wth th rtcls f fth n r prfssn. t trns t tht th scntst bhvs th wy th rst f s d whn r blfs r n cnflct wth th vdnc. W bcm rrttd, w prtnd th cnflct ds nt xst, r w ppr t vr wth mnnglss phss.”
W s ths ftn s sm scntsts rg vry mtnlly gnst th vdnc fr dsgn n th nvrs. Bt rrttn ds nt jstfy spprssng vdnc nd dscssn, nr nclsn n crrclm whn pprprt.
f n s cncrnd tht stdnts wn’t prprly lrn th scntfc mthd f D s tght n th clssrm, thn prhps w shld cnsdr whthr rgn f Lf blngs n blgy crs t ll. N n hs bsrvd th rgn f lf r th vltn btwn typs.
Th qstn f wht hppnd n th pst dsn’t fll ndr th prvw f ntrl scnc, bt frnsc scnc. Prhps mcrvltn, D nd ny thr rgn-f-lf hypthss shld b tght n sprt crs n blgcl rgns, crs ndpndnt f blgcl systms.
Sm pps ntllgnt dsgn bcs t dsn’t xpln wh dsgnd th ntllgnt dsgnr. t’s mtphyscl bjctn. t dmnds n nswr tht scntfc bsrvtn nd xprmnttn cnnt prvd. t prsppss tht th ntllgnt Dsgnr ws dsgnd r hd t b dsgnd, nd tht t ws dsgnd by “wh”. Whthr t’s gd r gds, spc lns, r whtvr, D smply ds nt spclt n tht qstn.
n th pst, t ws rlgs thsts wh spprssd sm scntfc prsts bcs thy ddn’t cnfrm t crtn prsppstns. Nw th tbls hv trnd. ppnnts wnt t spprss D bcs t dsn’t cnfrm t thr mtrlst prsppstns. ‘m srry tht D prsnts scntfc vdnc n wy tht pts thsts r mtrlsts n n ncmfrtbl pstn, bt tht s nt n xcs t dny th scntfc vdnc tht xplns why mtrlsm s fls nd cnnt ccnt fr nn trnl nvrs.
s n t blv tht ntrl lw wnt bck n tm nd crtd tslf, bfr t vr xstd?
r tht ntrl lw cm frm nthng?
Y r mn wth lrg fllwng, lk frwrd t yr thghts.
[if you’d rather not puzzle out the meaning of this comment, Penick took it from this source]
FLASH MOB AT SMU!
Who do we contact to mobilize?
“Some oppose intelligent design because it doesn’t explain who designed the intelligent designer. It’s a metaphysical objection. It demands an answer that scientific observation and experimentation cannot provide. It presupposes that the Intelligent Designer was designed or had to be designed, and that it was designed by a “who”. Whether it’s a god or gods, space aliens, or whatever, ID simply does not speculate on that question.”
Ahhhhh. Hahahahahaha. Phhhht. Too funny.
Ahem. Why not?
Because the Ineffable Cosmic Muffin says so, of course.
It’s like saying… the universe formed, but we don’t ask how.
PZ: Secular creep? Methodists, whether at SMU or elsewhere, have long esteemed reason as one of the ‘four legs of the Wesleyan table’ along with scripture, experience and tradition. Would it be too much to suggest that this commitment may well have contributed to the events at SMU that you found salutary?…SH
And yet you provide no evidence, and admit you refuse to discuss its properties.
Even granting the argument from Law of Causality, that doesn’t mean the cause was supernatural. And it most certainly does not lead to the idea that this cause is intelligent and meddles around in the genetic code of life on this planet.
ntllgnt Dsgn nd Crtnsm r dffrnt mthds, sng dffrnt tchnqs, lkng t dffrnt bds f vdnc…nd nd p trvlng dwn prlll pths t n mprtnt cnclsn.
ntllgnt Dsgn s bsd n:
• Scntfc stdy nd vdnc n csmlgy, th rth, nd blgy
• rrdcbl cmplxty n blgcl systms
• Knwng th csl hstry f cmplx spcfd nfrmtn,
• Dmnstrtng cmplxty tht xcds th prbblstc rsrcs tht chnc cn blndly ct pn
• s nt bsd n fth, rlgs txt, r dvn rvltn
D prvds strng vdnc tht thr s dsgnr, dsgnng ntllgnc tht ctd wth prps nd ntnt. t ds nt, hwvr, by scntfc mns, prvd th dntfy f th dsgnr.
Crtnsm s bsd n:
• Dvn rvltn
• Fth
• ncnt txt dmnstrtng:
Flflld prphcy,
ccrt hstrcl dscrptns cnfrmd by rchlgy,
Cnfrmtn by sclr hstrcl txts
Scntfc knwldg bfr t ws prt f th sclr bdy f scntfc knwldg t tht tm.
Crtnsm nd plgtcs prvds strng vdnc tht th dntfy f th dsgnr mtchs th dntfy f th Gd f th Bbl.
n smmry, dffrnt mthds (D nd Crtnsm) sng dffrnt tchnqs, nd dffrnt bds f vdnc, cm t th sm ntl cnclsn – tht thr s ndd dsgnng ntllgnc. ntllgnt Dsgn stps thr. Crtnsm nd plgtcs tk th ntl cnclsn frthr bcs f th dffrnc n th mthds sd nd th vdnc cnsdrd nd frthr dmnstrts tht th dntty f th dsgnr s th Gd f th Bbl.
Ths s vry shrt xplntn, bt y cn fnd svrl hndrd pgs f nfrmtn t bck t p n bk clld, ” dn’t hv ngh fth t b n thst”.
‘m sr y wll ht t, bt f y rlly wnt t dft ths wh sy thsm s ncrrct, y nd t knw th rgmnts nd hw t dft thm. Cllng smn n Dt flls shrt. Bt nm cllng ds brng bck plsnt mmrs f yth!
Pennick Wrote:
“The bottom line is that either the universe is eternal or there is an intelligent agency outside nature that caused the universe.”
You would do very, very poorly on the Logic section of the GRE.
Penick’s last pile of C&P BS from here:
http://ideacenter.org/tcw/page8.html
There has been no research done. There is no evidence that anything has been designed that evolution couldn’t produce.
Nothing.
No experiments have done to test the theory of ID.
ID is a negative theory. It starts by assuming that evolution could not produce the results that it does, then infers a designer. It never asks how a designer would implement changes or variation in an organism. Why? Because there’s no evidence of a designer.
ID is an attempt to dismantle evolution.
Oh brother.
“Others would say that postulating an intelligent cause determines the cause that is behind the effect. ”
No. It doesn’t.
“Jastrow, an admitted agnostic, observed that the Big Bang is very similar to the Biblical account of creation in Genesis”
Sure, if you turn your head and squint. Have the astronomers found that talking snake yet?
Jastrow: “And they have found that all of this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. ”
Says who? One could say that there are supernatural forces at work, but what does that really mean? If we did discover or understand, wouldn’t these “supernatural” forces become, by definition, natural? Suggesting that the mysterious supernatural forces are some anthropomorphized God character (which I’m sure is what you’re getting at) is a problem with your imagination, not that of the scientists.
“Asking who designed the intelligent designer confuses the Law of Causality. The law states that everything that had a beginning has a cause. If the universe was created by an eternal agency outside of time, it’s likely that agency never had a beginning. After all, the big bang was the creation of time, so the cause would need to be outside time as we know it. ”
Awfully convenient that you put that God where no one can find him. The reason scientists tend to chafe at this reasoning is not because they’re biased, but because it’s a cop-out.
“No one has observed the origin of life or the evolution between types.”
Types. Uh huh. Try to remember that you’re talking to actual biologists here.
“Some oppose intelligent design because it doesn’t explain who designed the intelligent designer. It’s a metaphysical objection. It demands an answer that scientific observation and experimentation cannot provide. It presupposes that the Intelligent Designer was designed or had to be designed, and that it was designed by a “who”. Whether it’s a god or gods, space aliens, or whatever, ID simply does not speculate on that question.”
So why the hell should we care what any of you have to say? You insist there must be a designer because of some questions that you find too hard to answer, then you say that we can’t ever know who or what he/she/it is. Sounds like an utter non-starter.
Isn’t there any way of conveying to this Pennick idiot the crucial fact that “GODDIDIT: and the Bible says so” is not a meaning scientific explanation at all in this dimension?
“So instead of asking who designed the intelligent designer, one should ask, what caused the Big Bang?”
You should only ask that if it has been proven that what caused the Big Bang was an intelligent designer. This hasn’t been proven so it is foolish to make that connection.
No, it comes from me, and I’m referring to the luncheon meeting of Dallas Christian Leadership group on April 12 featuring William Dembski (here’s a URL, on SMU’s server: http://www.smu.edu/dcl/event.html)
The religious connection is probably stronger than the DI would like to let on. This is the group that sponsored the meeting in the early 1990s to try to find the follow-on for creationism, where Dembski and Behe met, etc., etc., etc. The ties to this group are deep and long-lived — and they have somehow tended to exclude SMU scientists over the years, especially the good geologists and others who hunt Texas dinosaurs and write about Texas evolution.
I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt by calling it “special religious activities.”
Perhaps they’re intimidated by the amount of catching up they have to do. Try this Google Scholar search http://tinyurl.com/3du46s to see a sample of the more than 300 papers (by my calculation) published in evolutionary biology every single day – the vast majority of them reporting new data and published in refereed journals. What’s the lifetime total for ID so far? (Yes, I know Behe shows up on the first page of hits! but not for a refereed journal paper. I guess that just shows that Google isn’t censoring ID out of these results.)
‘Wesleyan’? You mean the John Wesley who wrote, “The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of the Bible.”
Sorry, the link I posted takes you to the 3rd page of the search. This one goes straight to the first page: http://tinyurl.com/yuasno.
Penick, I have never found that to be the case. Biology books don’t discuss materialism (that’s Clue One that you’re pulling this out of your anal library), biology textbooks don’t discuss “Darwinism,” and biology books rarely mention God or any philosophical impact.
Are you in a faith tradition, Penick? See if you can raise your ethics to the levels shown by atheists on this board, will ya? You’re giving faith traditions a bad name (difficult as that might be in a forum like this).
I strongly doubt that Creationists or IDiots are intimidated by the amount of papers to read.
More likely, Alec, they’re abiding by the 11th Commandment, which is “Thou Shalt Not Use Thine Own Brain For Fear of Upsetting the Lord for Some Strange Reason.”
Pennick writes:
“The universe is expanding in all directions, which suggests a point of origin. The evidence that the universe had a beginning, and therefore a cause, and is not eternal, is overwhelming. If the universe were infinite in age, it would have used up all available energy by now and undergone heat death.”
Not surprisingly, creatobabblers don’t understand Big Bang either. That the universe is expanding in all directions indicates the Univers has no center; because from any point in the Universe it will appear that the Universe is expadning in all directions. Thanks for this gem, Pennick, because it illustrates the shoddy scholarship put forth by you and your ilk. If you can’t handle rather elementary concepts like this one, why should anyone beleive you know what you’re talking when delaing with more complex matters?
Second, what do you mean by “The” universe. Can you prove there are no others? That the Universe had a beginning may well imply a cause. But not a creator
Google “ectopic Universe” or “chaotic inlfation”
Trying again … THIS one goes straight to the first page: http://tinyurl.com/yuasno
Which only demonstrates that Bigfoot cranks are not as crazy and disreputable as creationist/ID cranks.
Just going to comment on this one thing:
Umm. Not really. Some recent quantum physics experiments have shown that a) some things seem to happen without any *observable* cause and b) sometimes, in a few really weird cases, the effect can appear to happen “before” the cause. So, its no more reasonable for you to argue that some undefined designer made the universe than for me to argue that it just happened, or for someone else to insist that the universe exists because billions of years from now some vast intellect decided that the only way *it* could exist was to create the universe in the past, so it would have a place to exist in. None of these tell us a damn thing about evolution, which doesn’t have a damn thing to do with how life got here, just what happens after it exists. And we do have simulations that show very clearly that you don’t have to *design* something for it to become so complex that humans can’t figure out how the heck it does what it does, without any input after the initial creation of the simulation. That’s right.. Your “designer” could have set up the initial system, assuming there where grounds to even assume that much, and our own experiments using projects like Avida show that not only will life evolve to fit that environment, but once it starts evolving you can’t even control **how** it evolves. Even trying to kill genetically improved versions, like they did in the Avida simulation, in order to halt evolution, will just get you life that evolves to *look* like its dead when you are trying to decide whether or not to kill it.
Do you comprehend what I am saying here. Without **any** input from the people that created the artificial world the Avida creatures lived in, the moment they started trying to halt evolution in the system the “species” adapted a camoflage technique to hide that they *had* evolved, when being examined by the researchers. Did your intelligent designer pop in and go, “Man, this is going to be a great joke! Lets see how they react when the artificial life won’t let itself stop evolving!”
http://www.carlzimmer.com/articles/2005/articles_2005_Avida.html
Its fact like this that really make me wish people like you would get a fracking clue… And no, they don’t count as designed. Any more than *if* some space alien dropped a few microbes on the planet and, entirely without intervention, they produced butterflies, apes and elephants, never mind all the rest of the species. It still wouldn’t make evolution invalid, Intelligent Design correct or your creator, what ever that is, relevant to anything that happened past the moment when they sneezed on a rock, then went home to some other planet.
To quote Adami, “We were able to get them to evolve without fail,” he says. But when he stopped to look at exactly how the organisms were adding numbers, he was more surprised. “Some of the ways were obvious, but with others I’d say, ‘What the hell is happening?’ It seemed completely insane.”
Sounds a lot like real DNA to me, and nothing like the characture of DNA as some “perfectly designed system” that ID people babble about.
That’s two since I warned you, Penick. Next one will be the last time.
I find this infuriating. Some creationist simpleton shows up and can’t manage anything but to regurgitate the same old crap lifted from some other site, and expects the people here to put in the effort of making a sincere and thoughtful response, and they do respond with substance. The people on our side make an honest intellectual effort, and as Penick so clearly demonstrates, those on his side are unimaginative plagiarists and hacks.
Wake up and use your brain, Penick, or you will be out of here.
Hey! How come only the chairperson of chemistry at SMU signed the op-ed piece which appeared the newspaper? Were the other guys and gals busy teaching lab? Is there only one chemist at SMU? Wasn’t there enough room for more signatures? Or is SMU saturated with creationist chemists? Yikes!
Speaking as a chemist, I am very disappointed that everyone from chemistry didn’t sign on.
For many decades now it has been claimed by Darwinists who were up to no good that living things only appeared to be designed – that “Startin makin trouble in my neighborhood that did not have us in mind.” My mom got scared, she said ‘You’re movin’ with your auntie and uncle in bel Air’
Fortunately, I whistled for a cab and when it came with the advancement of microbiology, we have strong evidence that this is not the case. The license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror. Furthermore, if anything I can say this cab is rare – so Darwinian mechanisms are not the cause for this effect.
But I thought ‘Now forget it’ – ‘Yo homes to Bel Air’
Such delicious copypasta…
[scratching my head] The evidence (such as it is) for intelligent design is ALSO evidence for the falsity of materialism!?! Does anyone have any idea how the design inference is not just an inference to an intelligent cause, but an immaterial, intelligent cause? I really must have missed the truly cutting edge research these ID folk must be doing.
Penick:
Lewis Carroll:
Even if you replace the vowels, Carroll makes more sense.
Comstock: What makes you think that these dishonest liars and charalatans will keep their word?
Jesse: And why he doesn’t accept the first disjunct is beyond me, given that the other disjunction is metaphysically dubious, to say the least.
From the Dallas News article:
“They say scientific evidence exists to support intelligent design.”
So where is it? Is it like police evidence? Has it gone missing?
According to Wikipedia:
“During the [Kitzmiller] trial, intelligent design advocate Michael Behe testified under oath that no scientific evidence in support of the intelligent design hypothesis has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.”
Oh, well!
What is SMU’s President thinking? What a crappy legacy to give to a university – a Library honoring the worst President in American history, and now welcoming with open arms a conference of the I.D. pipsqueaks.
Get a clue, Gerald Turner.
Did gyre and gimble in the wade???
It’s wabe! Let’s get our technical terms right.
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
He took his vorpal blade in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought-
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood a while in thought
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh, Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Our snark is a boojum.”
–Roger Zelazny, in “Doorways in the Sand”
I could buy the argument that either the universe is eternal or something caused it. But where does “intelligent” come from? If we know nothing at all about the cause of the universe — and, again, I’m willing to cop to that — how can you possibly attribute “intelligence” or any human characteristic to it? And that’s what you’re doing, Penick — making a god in your image. Sounds like avodah zora (idol worship) to me.
Try again, Pennick, this time without attempting to move the goalposts. We’re all talking about evolution, which is to say, how life originated from a common ancestor and speciated from there, and you’re talking astronomy and cosmology. This is a biology blog, primarily. If you want to chatter on about astronomy, here’s an astronomy blog. What we’re discussing has absolutely nothing to do with the Big Bang, the beginnings and endings of the universe, the formation of stars and planets, or dark matter. All we’re concerned with here is life, and how it changes over time.
Gorry, trolls are tedious.
Completely unrelated note: You can sing JABBERWOCKY to the tune of GREENSLEEVES, and it works quite smoothly…
Off-topic pet peeve of mine:
Why do you believe you’re so important? The universe is at least as finely tuned to creating an environment that allows the maximal number of black holes. Maybe life is a byproduct that nobody needs.
Ironically, this brings us back to evolution — descent with modification by mutation and selection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
Off-topic pet peeve of mine:
Why do you believe you’re so important? The universe is at least as finely tuned to creating an environment that allows the maximal number of black holes. Maybe life is a byproduct that nobody needs.
Ironically, this brings us back to evolution — descent with modification by mutation and selection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
CalGeorge said:
Key words there: “under oath.”
In the Arkansas trial in 1981, creationist witnesses were each asked, under oath, whether they had any scientific evidence to back creationism. Under oath, each answered “no.” Asked about the basis for creationism — under oath — each answered that scripture is the basis for creationism.
SMU has a long tradition of testimony under oath. When it was revealed that the entire board of directors was in on the football wrongdoings and cover up, that they had all lied or tolerated lies about what went on, Texas Gov. Bill Clements told a newspaper that there was no particular reason to tell the truth, because “there wasn’t a Bible in the room.”
No one at the Discovery Institute dog and pony show at SMU this week will be under oath, and if there’s a Bible in any of the rooms, it’s accidental, and unknown to the speakers.
We hope for people who will tell the truth when it matters, without having to be threatened with perjury rules. But as we also saw in Kitzmiller, even perjury threats can’t stop the prevaricating.
If we could get ’em all under oath, we’d probably learn that when they say “intelligent design” they mean something along the lines of the old sitcom, “Designing Women.” It’s not about design, really; it’s about intent.
SMU FLASHMOB!
Someone get on it.