The bible..
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- gramme0
I too apologize if my initial sarcam offended you. Unfortunately, much is lost in the typed word that would otherwise be understood in face-to-face interaction.
- gramme0
Sandwiches look good, but I could sure as hell use a beer.
- mrdobolina0
I like the new guy.
- grunttt0
Sandwiches look good, but I could sure as hell use a beer.
gramme
(Oct 26 07, 11:06)surely someone in this thread can turn that water into wine.
- Mimio0
Yes, nice work.
- gramme0
I like the new guy.
mrdobolina
(Oct 26 07, 11:07)Haha, of course you do.
- mrdobolina0
I like the truth.
- flagellum0
Hi pandasthumb,
I have little confidence in the opinions of biologists, since it is a soft science; an extension of physics and mathematics which are hard sciences that actually make a difference in the world. Someone once likened Biology to somewhere between pippeting and stamp collecting. I would concur. My interest is much more in the research of the hard sciences. Having said that, I'll address some of your claims...
First, likening ID to creationism is dishonest unless you are just uninformed. There are both agnostic and atheist ID proponents (David Berlinski, Michael Denton to name a couple). There are countless others in that category too. Then you have Behe, who is a Roman Catholic (far from a Creationist). But this should come as no shock, since ID is simply design detection applied to biology and cosmology (you know, what archaeologists already do in their scientific field). Calculating the bits of specified information in biologica life can hardly be called "religion dressed up as science".
The flagellum: the hand-waving just-so stories that chance-worshipping darwinists tell, won't do. Saying that something has been debunked, does not make it so. Pointing to homology of components in the Type 3 system is rediculous since the system appears after the flagellum appears. Neither does it explain how a nebulous a-telic natural mechanism can construct intricate machinery (which baffles engineering PHD's) which requires all of it's components at once, to function at all. Tell me how Natural Selection actiong upon Random Variation can accomplish such brilliant engineering feats which require such planning and forethought. I'm guessing you don't stay up to date on this issue. Here are some papers that will help:
http://www.arn.org/docs2/news/wd…
http://www.arn.org/docs/dembski/…
http://www.discovery.org/scripts…As for Entropy: Second Law of Thermodynamics. Order moving to disorder. Loss of information. In a nutshell. And of course it cannot be demonstrated in a lab that there is a correlation between entropy and sin. It's just consistent with the Biblical account.
Nobody denies that evolution occurs. What people like myself question is it's limitations. One must be careful in how they define "evolution". I believe that evolution is a fact - things have changed over time. I believe that Darwin's synthesis of Natural Selection acting on Random Variation is likely a fact too. But that it is greatly limited. As has been experimentally demonstrated with thousands of generations of Malaria and E. Coli, in the labs. In short, Darwinian mechanisms are capable of accomplishing small scale, trivial adaptive change in existing species. So, the "staggering amount of evidence" demonstrates that bacteria can build resistance and that malaria can mutate... and that's with the worst of external selection pressures applied. So evolution is true, in this sense.
However...
It is given far too much credit by it's fundamentalists. For it has not been experimentally shown to generate any novel information with regard to cell types, tissue and body plans. To assert that it has, it to extrapolate from what we DO know experimentally. And this is a huge extrapolation. An unwarranted one. In contrast, what do we observe? We observe a fossil record which demonstrates saltation events: the abrupt appearance of novel body plans followed by long periods of stasis. We do not see the gradualistic model that Darwin predicted. We also see specified information in the form of DNA, at the core of life. So, rather than a Darwinian gradualistic record, we have one that, for all appearances, looks like a highly sophisticated algorithmic computer program executed functions over a long period time, at given intervals (setInterval() anyone? ..you're a biologist... forget it). So I would propose a mechanism of front-loading. All the information was present at the beginning and set to unfold either by external or internal cues. If it's confusing to you, chat with an engineer of programmer (the future of science, at least in the US).
Further, it is patently false that speciation events are "quite well defined, as are their mechanisms". Balderdash. The mechanisms which executed the generation of biological novelty in the past have never been experimentally demonstrated. Again, unwarranted extrapolation from trivial adaptive change (where the information was already present within, just waiting to be realised). Remember what Leo Grasse said over 50 years ago:
"Evolution is largely the unfolding of preexisting rudiments."
As for science "not allowing ID". Nonsense. Science should not be restricted to blind material causation. That is 19th century hogwash. I like my science unlimited in this regard. So are more and more people who don't have pathological commitments to materialistic philosophies.
"the diversity of life on earth can be explained perfectly well by naturalistic processes that we know to exist (i.e. organic chemical processes, genetic mutation, recombination and natural selection). "
HAHAHAHAHA!!! Sorry... but that is patently false. Again, see my above mention of Malaria, E. Coli and unwarranted extrapolations. What fails is this: Darwinian mechanisms as a viable explanation for biological novlelty - despite 150 years of trying to make it be an explanation. It is actually Darwinism which fails Occam's razor, ie. why assert a convoluted naturalistic explanation when engineering and code (what we see replete throughout life) can be easily explained by an engineer/programmer?
I have so much more to say, but I must get some other work done now.
- detritus0
"I have little confidence in the opinions of biologists, since it is a soft science; an extension of physics and mathematics which are hard sciences that actually make a difference in the world. Someone once likened Biology to somewhere between pippeting and stamp collecting. I would concur."
Wow. That's a particularly cretinously insipid personal attack, even for you.
I hope you remember this when, in later years, you have to rely on gene therapy to cure you of your ignora... of whatever ailment your god chooses to inflict upon you.
- flagellum0
granted, detritus. That was a tad off-sides and not a totally genuine statement. Biology does contribute to medical technology. What I should have said is that a specifically Darwinian framework doesn't amount to anything beyond Eugenics and nihilism.
- pandasthumb0
Thanks flagellum, that's a fairly dense response and will take me a while to refute, but I'll get back to you.