"Common Sense in Intelligent Design" (mythology, Islamic, bible)
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And yet, NIKK, many do claim to understand Him, to the extent of providing us with exact interpretations and absolutestatements of what His intents were, and of how He's proven things to us. It's the basis for their beliefs; that interpretation by The Church, and they certainly claim inerrancy in their interpretations.
My Point: If the ID folks choose to engage in a discussion of our existance on a point-by-point intellectual level, you must necessarily come to the logical problems I carefully listed for discussion in my OP.
Rather than discussing my points, NIKK, you have just gone directly to the default position: His spirit & abilities are so far above ours, we cannot (should not?) think about them, and we are not here to discuss or try to understand Him. You also default to the idea that He came in human form, somehow different vrom his own, and yet, we're also told, we were made in His image. and he's pictured often as "the hand of god", white beard and all.
You've evaded the critical and logical discussion entirely.
No rifleman, you did not read what I wrote. God is spirit and is not bound by physical atributes that we have. You went into silliness attempting to determine the size of his head that God would require. The size of his head?!!
I am not saying you cannot discuss God, just that you are talking about something other then God when you discuss physical attributes like this. Next you may try using that false arguement of "God creating a rock so big that he can't lift it". This reasoning puts God into his own creation and limited by physical attributes. So it is an illogical arguement. God can create very big things, look at the universe! Or what about the arguement "if God can do anything, can he lie." The answer is that God can do anything, but he has chosen to have his character align with truth, and goodness. So, can God lie? He would not want to! End of story no but, but, but.
We are made in God's image. We are a tri-part being having a body, soul and spirit. That means when you look at a female, you are looking at the image of God. When you look at a male you are looking at the image of God. Because all of us as a tri-part being look like him.
God took female out of man, because God is Love (Love is not God). The Father, Son and Spirit are in a Love relationship and have communication. This is not a narsisistic love. So, God wanted to show his love that he IS and took woman out of man so that his creation would be able to experience and represent the social interation that represented himself in the Trinity.
No rifleman, you did not read what I wrote. God is spirit and is not bound by physical atributes that we have. You went into silliness attempting to determine the size of his head that God would require. The size of his head?!!
Fair enough, but with equal silliness, the Intelligent Design argument is, inherently, rather silly in itself: that it's all so complex (to our simple and incapable human mind), thereforethat somehow means, absolutely, that God had to have done it.
And that there's no possible other explanation, and the admittedly partial and so far incomplete evidence that has nonetheless been gathered in support of a Godless Big Bang origin somehow means nothing!
THE VAST POWER OF PREDICTION
I hasten to point out that when an hypothesis, no matter how irrational it might seem to be at first, makes PREDICTIONS that are then found, one after another after another, to be true, what are we to reasonably conclude about that hypothesis?
In such a situation, (where the discovered evidence was accurately PREDICTED by the hypothesis) will you not grant at least the tiny possibility that the hypothesis might just be correct?
If not, and by comparison you hold to an alternate philosophy that can produce NO predictable evidence, what do we conclude about:
1. The validity of your hypothesis, and
2) Your ability to investigate without bias?
Fine. On the one hand, the universe so complex that it defies logic to assume it happened by some process other than a Godly one (notice I didn't say it arose from NOTHING, as is often stated by the ID people to be the atheist's position. We've never said that; that's just deflective theatrics).
The "So God musta donnit!" is just an assumption based on the limits to our human intelligence. We're easily astounded.
But then, as a follow-up, we are treated to a vast repertoire of Godly accomplishments, the physical fabrication of a woman via a man's rib, the crowding of the now-known 30 million species (X 2 for those who breed sexually) X 10 to allow for ecological rules of extinction (just 2 of anything won't cut it; sorry), onto an Ark, and all the other physical concepts that arise out of our limited human mind.
Well, then, by that same intellect and logic, I'm saying the Universe, even the micro-micro part of it that we have discovered, cannot have been accomplished instantly by any reasonable intelligence. He would have to have applied some sort of power, some sort of physicalness to the obvious physicalness of the physically existing physical universe. It can't all be magic and ether, unless we're just a figment of our own imaginations?
No matter what physical or etherial form your God takes, if he has the vast intelligence to do ANYTHING, no matter how spectacular, he must ergo have some measurable intellect. some presence, and to do all of that is, to me and many others, both irrational and illogical. Unless of course one just imagines and states it to be so, out of logicalnecessity and a complete lack of curiosity about alternate theories and research on same.
As in "It's all so vast, only He could have done it, and He can do anything, so therefore He did it!"And around and around and around and.....
I don't buy it. To quote Spock :"That, sir, is illogical."
Rifleman. I think you are misconstruing what I am saying. Upon reading it again I may have caused some confusion by saying "it has its own intelligence through evolution" rather than saying "it has gained its own intelligence through evolution" Other than that I never once in my entire post implied any sort of sequence as to when this macro-being came into existence. I think that for the most part the idea that life came from simple chemical reactions and grew over time is probably correct. What I am saying is that as things have stood with life for the past several million years nearly all life is interconnected to the point that in some sense it is similar to one living being. I.e. what is suggested by the Gaia hypothesis and the daisy world simulations. In that life as a whole will react to changing situations. It may not have always been that way, but that is the way it is now. As to intelligence. It can be argued that since humans have intelligence and whether or not we wish to acknowledge it or not we are part of this living being it has intelligence. A leg for example doesn't have an intelligence on its own nor does a liver, but when supported a brain does. Additionally a crystal may grow in a logical pattern and be void of intelligence and the ability to evolve, but a crystal is not life and since it is not life it cannot mutate, evolve and come up with something such as intelligence. That is the very nature of life that separates it from things like rocks and crystals. Additionally just because something is alive on a macro level does not mean it is immortal or cannot be killed. Yes if an asteroid or nuclear war destroyed the earth it would die that does not mean it is not alive.
All in all what I am saying is that life on earth in general, as it is now seems to be a macro-being with intelligence not that it is immortal, nor that it is somehow independent of its component parts.
I think you are putting a lot of meaning in my original post that I did not mean to imply.
Last edited by Randomstudent; 04-24-2009 at 04:16 PM..
Please, oh Grand Gaia, save us! Ignore the damage we do thee!
The secular Gaia theory is fun, a sort of whole-Earth cuddly thing sort of concept; "It loves you, so love it back!" kind of thinking.
Of course, the Earth, physically, does not have a complex brain center. It has systems which have evolved over its very long life, in response to opportunities, through quin-trillions upon quadri-zillions of adaptation experiments. Those systems can respond to the typical sorts of events that have and will continue to happen, up to and including meteor impacts (up to a certain kinetic energy level of course...).
If pushed significantly beyond those system capabilities, it will likely ( and frankly, it's sure to...) eventually fail. God will not intercede. Solar supernovae, macro-meteorite impact, a massive pandemic of a highly evolved virulent air-borne lethal pathogens, combative and openly hostile human interactions, Christianity run amok and allowed full Imperial Reign... etc. etc.
Any or all of these things will effectively terminate this particular experiment, but of course, given the uncountable numbers of other life-supporting planets, we are not alone out here, and others will eventually zip on by in their time/space warp drive machines and comment on our untimely demise.
Waaaayyyy tooooo immmmmmmense to have been designed and fabricated by any singular intelligence which is now also responsible to monitor and manage it all. Far far less sensible than the hypothesis that's evolving and meeting the hypothesis' predictions. That PREDICTABILITY success alone is quite the bit of convincing evidence, wouldn't you agree?
It's all predicted by evolutionary adaptation, not by Genesis, which was hampered by the frailties and inexperience of its original authors. Of course, it's being re-defined (badly) by them as we speak, to fit the theory, not the facts.
There's this famous little ditty, which, sadly, is so very correct:
In Science, if the facts don't fit the theory, toss out the theory.
In Religion, if the facts don't fit the theory, toss out the facts.
Gaia is a fictional planet described in the book Foundation's Edge (1982) and referred to in Foundation and Earth (1986), by Isaac Asimov. The name is derived from the Gaia hypothesis, which is itself eponymous to Gaia, the Earth Goddess.
Now this is fiction that is entertaining, and it makes as much sense than the creation theory.
Ockham: The Most Likely Option is Usually The Truth!
Quote:
Originally Posted by sanspeur
Gaia is a fictional planet described in the book Foundation's Edge (1982) and referred to in Foundation and Earth (1986), by Isaac Asimov. The name is derived from the Gaia hypothesis, which is itself eponymous to Gaia, the Earth Goddess.
Now this is fiction that is entertaining, and it makes as much sense than the creation theory.
And yah gotta love it, don't you?
NIKK wrote:
No rifleman, you did not read what I wrote. God is spirit and is not bound by physical atributes that we have. You went into silliness attempting to determine the size of his head that God would require. The size of his head?!!
I am not saying you cannot discuss God, just that you are talking about something other then God when you discuss physical attributes like this. Next you may try using that false arguement of "God creating a rock so big that he can't lift it". This reasoning puts God into his own creation and limited by physical attributes.
______________________________________
No, NIKK, it's you who does not read nor understand what I wrote. Christian apologists, forced to defend ancient text as inerrant and literal, regularly reference the vast physical abilities of their god as proof of his existance. But those ancient authors had no knowledge of the vast Universe that surrounded them, so they did not know they were really "stepping into it" with their pronouncements.
Ditto, for another example, with their hugely limited understanding of just how many animals would have to be accomodated on the Ark. You think they knew about all 30M of the currently known and counted, so far, organisms on our planet? X 2, for those breeding sexually? X 50, to account for known ecological facts about survivability of tiny populations? What, all on that one boat? God surely works in oddball ways!
My once-friend's insistence, for example, of god's physical and constant monitoring of each and every sub-atomic particle is irrational. It's fine to say the good old fall-back position:
"We cannot ever know the true capabilties of our God, for they and he are vastly beyond description by our limited abilities"
Handy deflection, ...and yet, page after page, he's thusly described in the bible, by ancient and scientifically illiterate prophets, and we are asked to believe in his various and supernatural physical capabilties, which would, one way or another, require some sort of physical ability to accomplish.
So, back to my point, for one sentient being to have "accomplished" all of this Universe's existance and management at the "sa particle" level is too outlandish. Rather, it's chance occurrence, and the physical interactions between those sub-atomic particles, is a far more rational explanation, even if it's not yet complete.
But, like Evolution's now-proofs, it will likely be uncovered more in future careful research, and the old myths will die off, just as have those embraced by the Mayans, etc.
Fair enough, but with equal silliness, the Intelligent Design argument is, inherently, rather silly in itself: that it's all so complex (to our simple and incapable human mind), thereforethat somehow means, absolutely, that God had to have done it.
And that there's no possible other explanation, and the admittedly partial and so far incomplete evidence that has nonetheless been gathered in support of a Godless Big Bang origin somehow means nothing!
THE VAST POWER OF PREDICTION
I hasten to point out that when an hypothesis, no matter how irrational it might seem to be at first, makes PREDICTIONS that are then found, one after another after another, to be true, what are we to reasonably conclude about that hypothesis?
In such a situation, (where the discovered evidence was accurately PREDICTED by the hypothesis) will you not grant at least the tiny possibility that the hypothesis might just be correct?
If not, and by comparison you hold to an alternate philosophy that can produce NO predictable evidence, what do we conclude about:
1. The validity of your hypothesis, and
2) Your ability to investigate without bias?
Fine. On the one hand, the universe so complex that it defies logic to assume it happened by some process other than a Godly one (notice I didn't say it arose from NOTHING, as is often stated by the ID people to be the atheist's position. We've never said that; that's just deflective theatrics).
The "So God musta donnit!" is just an assumption based on the limits to our human intelligence. We're easily astounded.
But then, as a follow-up, we are treated to a vast repertoire of Godly accomplishments, the physical fabrication of a woman via a man's rib, the crowding of the now-known 30 million species (X 2 for those who breed sexually) X 10 to allow for ecological rules of extinction (just 2 of anything won't cut it; sorry), onto an Ark, and all the other physical concepts that arise out of our limited human mind.
Well, then, by that same intellect and logic, I'm saying the Universe, even the micro-micro part of it that we have discovered, cannot have been accomplished instantly by any reasonable intelligence. He would have to have applied some sort of power, some sort of physicalness to the obvious physicalness of the physically existing physical universe. It can't all be magic and ether, unless we're just a figment of our own imaginations?
No matter what physical or etherial form your God takes, if he has the vast intelligence to do ANYTHING, no matter how spectacular, he must ergo have some measurable intellect. some presence, and to do all of that is, to me and many others, both irrational and illogical. Unless of course one just imagines and states it to be so, out of logicalnecessity and a complete lack of curiosity about alternate theories and research on same.
As in "It's all so vast, only He could have done it, and He can do anything, so therefore He did it!"And around and around and around and.....
I don't buy it. To quote Spock :"That, sir, is illogical."
I think you have missed the point of ID. You put the limitations by ID on the human mind to understand the vastness of the universe. Where I have never heard any IDer say "we just can't understand the universe, so god musta dune it". The main arguement they use is irreducable complexity. That is the individual mechanisms cannot be reduced any further and still have a working system. The human blood clotting is an example of this. Many systems require the entire organism to be functioning with all the parts working in order for it to live. So, if this is the case, then we cannot have abiogenesis, these organism had to be fully functioning organisms before natural selection and mutations could occur.
Riffleman with all of your scholar background I am amazed that you keep falling into the strawman arguments which you hate so much and accuse others of doing.
Even, bringing up the ark/species arguement is ridiculous. The ark never contained Species of animals. Species is a poor classification system (just to reitterate). The ark contained kinds of animals, like the horse kind (imagine every type of horse species) or the dog/wolf kind. In total we are looking at aprox. 1600 kinds of animals. That would be 1600 pairs or 3200 individual animals, not the millions number you make up in your head to give impetus to your stawman arguement.
God is intelligent, but it is not his intelligence that he used to create this world and universe. It says that God spoke everything into existence. By his word is all things made and by his word does he uphold his creation.
Even, bringing up the ark/species arguement is ridiculous. The ark never contained Species of animals. Species is a poor classification system (just to reitterate). The ark contained kinds of animals, like the horse kind (imagine every type of horse species) or the dog/wolf kind. In total we are looking at aprox. 1600 kinds of animals. That would be 1600 pairs or 3200 individual animals, not the millions number you make up in your head to give impetus to your stawman arguement.
Well that "kind" argument is ridiculous as it infers evolution to today's known species at a rate greater that the ToE and thus we should under such accelerated evolution have seen this in the last 500 years of recorded history.
Your theory flies in the face of known biological constraints not to mention where the beasties got their groceries after the "waters receded" after over a year being submerged.
...The main arguement they use is irreducable complexity. That is the individual mechanisms cannot be reduced any further and still have a working system. The human blood clotting is an example of this. Many systems require the entire organism to be functioning with all the parts working in order for it to live. So, if this is the case, then we cannot have abiogenesis, these organisms had to be fully functioning organisms before natural selection and mutations could occur.
Riffleman with all of your scholar background I am amazed that you keep falling into the strawman arguments which you hate so much and accuse others of doing.
Even, bringing up the ark/species arguement is ridiculous. The ark never contained Species of animals. Species is a poor classification system (just to reitterate). The ark contained kinds of animals, like the horse kind (imagine every type of horse species) or the dog/wolf kind. In total we are looking at aprox. 1600 kinds of animals. That would be 1600 pairs or 3200 individual animals, not the millions number you make up in your head to give impetus to your stawman arguement.
God is intelligent, but it is not his intelligence that he used to create this world and universe. It says that God spoke everything into existence. By his word is all things made and by his word does he uphold his creation.
1. Watch Bill Maher's video clip. Listen. Despite his obvious sarcasm (he is, after all, a comedian) he, like most folks who have arrived in this 21st Century, accept what the objective self-policing and strenuously vigorous methodology of Science has provided us. To wit:
2) a VAST and co-supportive body of evidence that I would just bore you with, even if I were to summarize it to the most kindergarten level of layman's instruction. You wouldn't listen anyways.
3) the calm realization, as one objectively and dispassionately reviews all this geological, paleontological, biological, genetic, cosmological, biochemical, nuclear-physical and every other "-ical" there is, that it all happily comes together absent an ancient mythology. These facts, suitably proven, are now also fully agreed on by the Catholic, Anglican, Islamic , buddhist and many other religions. They are not stupid nor blind, after all....
3) My point, again, is the exact opposite of your proven-ludicrous "irreducible complexity" argument (straight out of AiG, with all the veracity & value of THAT valuable scientific source). In other words:
The Universe, including this fly-speck called Earth, is all far too complex for any single intelligent being to have purposefully put together, and then monitor on a sub-atomic particle level. Not to mention the uncountable quintrillions of other life-supporting, evolving planets out there. Why, one asks, would someone of such power waste his time in such an endeavour? To what rational end? To prove his endless love for us? Why, indeed, did He evolve, and from what? and who, of even more vast intelligence, designed and created Him? Or do we conveniently stop the logic at Him and look backwards no further, mumbling "God works in mysterious ways!"?
That concept speaks of such a vast arrogance about our importance in the greater scheme of things that it makes me want to go find the restroom for a moment. Only in the primitive mind of a man-species who has suddenly awakened intellectually, looked at his image in a mirror and said: "My god, I'm self-aware, and soo magnificent, and soooo special!!! I must have been made in God's Image! We're so important. This entire Universe is "about us!".
As to your argument about the Ark, I can see your understanding about the requirements for speciation or even re-population need some basic ecology class-level of instruction before you venture again into a discussion of same. "Species" = "type" BTW, it's certainly not limited to the layman's interpretation requiring "dissimilar-looking animals"; it also includes those with radically different enzyme / digestive systems, for example.
FYI: "species" is our definition, not yours. Not the Church's, never AiG's, but ours. Because it's deep implications go far beyond a kindergarten-level of understanding, you'll just have to accept that. Of course, if you don't we also don't care. But just remember: you'll be wrong if you persist with your current level of understanding. This is not my arrogant ramblings: you proved it yourself by the vastly incorrect statements in your own post.
"The ark never contained Species of animals." I'm assuming, then, that Evolution, which you say can't and thus didn't happen, accounts for the known other 30 M species we've counted. So Far.
Again, any first-year ecologist knows that a mere two of any single "kind" of animal will not be able to sustain the regeneration of a viable functioning population. What if one is killed by a predator, or did your special god suspend the predator-prey relationships we see virtually everywhere? How about disease, infertility, and a host of other problems typical of a normal animal's life cycle? And to do all this in a world that has been spoiled by saturation under 25,000 feet of salt water?
Let's get real, shall we? All of the Arkists were Vegan? Even those T-0Rexs and Velociraptor? What lengths will you guys go to in warping the facts to fit your "theory"?
Was everything, a polar bear, or sabre-toothed tiger, for instance, forced to migrate south to gnaw on southern grasses with their carnassial teeth (google it, for heaven's sake... geeeeez.. do I have to explain EVERYTHING?). Such after-the-fact revisionism is rank in the apologist's ever-more-expanding and ever-more-fantastic theories about the origins of all God's creatures.
Such purely carnivorous predators as Bengal or sabre-toothed tigers, African lions, cheetahs, jaguars, grizzly, black and polar bears; wolves, African bush cats, weasels, sea lions, seals, sharks (a shark trying to exist on seaweed...) T-Rexs. eagles (a grass-eating eagle: this is hard to take on a full stomach, really....sheesh!).
One the one hand, we have the obvious staring at us, including reems of transitional species in both fossil and currently living forms, and on the other, a increasingly fanastical fairy tale, which, to the utter amazement and amusement of most in this world, the tellers fully believe.
and what do you do when we present you with those obvious transitionals, including you, if you look in the mirror? Do you even know what "transitional" means, absent AiG to tell you what to say? I sincerely doubt it. Why don't you tell us, NIKK, what, exactly, a "transitional" is? Campbell34 won't venture there. We know why.
Amazing. It's utterly amazing.
Your complete reliance on others to do the thinking and pronouncements about how things work in the ecosystem shows, I'm afraid. No, I certainly don't know everything, (matter of fact, I'm rather dim on a whole lot of subjects) but I'm also not afraid to learn, to read, to re-consider, to evaluate the situation dispassionately, to talk to those who have "been there" on the Serengetti Plains, or to rely on my own experiences in the Arctic, in various unspoiled places.
And, apparently, I'm sorta alone on these posts in being a practicing bioscientist. Of course, I have the spare time to engage you guys; my full-time working cohorts think I've gone loony to try to even pry your minds open a tad bit.
Perhaps it's all a kind of big evolutionary experiment?
In those special places I've been, where the mind-crushing presence of any imagined God figures has yet to invade, I can assure you: The hand of your God is conspicuously absent. And unnecessary.
Thank god; it would only ruin things!
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The Power of PREDICTION
