CSI and Design

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reply by Wounded King
Haven't we already had a couple of millenia pass already with a distinct lack of the always much anticipated rapture? Maybe when the next one comes round three Jesus's will turn up at once. Or perhaps your suggestion of confirmatory proof in a couple of lifetimes was about something else.

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At the point of physical death, each of us will either have our view of the universe confirmed, corrected or made irrelevant via oblivion. Either that or the theorised rapture will occur. In any case, none of us will ever be able to see/experience the conjectured goo-to-you-ism of evolution as it is forever beyond our potential.In that sense at least, one of the theories is verifiable and one is not. You choose what you wish to beleive, but at least be honest enough to recognise it as a point of faith, rather than hiding behind philosophy falsly packaged as science.

You folks here may not like the creation model, but the same argument is applied to goo-to-you-ism. Both models attempt to explain the world around us in terms of a foundational assumption of either "the record of events in the Bible" or "universal naturalism", depending on your bias.God didn't choose to leave us a revelation of events beyond our experience. We DO have such a revelation in the form of the Bible, and since it stands up to the tests of history and acrheology where we are able to verfiy it, then it stands to reason that it is a faithful and true record of those events that are inherently non-verifiable (singularities, miracles, special intervention, whatever you want to call them).

But GOD most certainly DID leave us a revelation of events beyond our experience. It's not the Bible. That has been shown to be wrong on almost every instance related to Science or History. It's the world and Universe itself. And there we see Evolution.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

But it's a method that relies on a priori conclusions that a designer exists in the first place.If you try to turn that method around to detect a designer, it's circular, because the method itself relies on the assumption that a designer exists.Until you have a test that can always distinguish between stuff that was designed and stuff that just looks that way, ID will never be science, because science doesn't reject known, testable mechanisms for unknown, untestable ones.

Sure. Let's look at those two worldviews, shall we?In the 400 or so years we've been running under universal naturalism, we're living longer lives than ever before, we're conquering disease, eliminating starvation, travelling to other planets, seeing backwards in time, and educating the masses at a rate never before seen.But there was a time when we did it your way, for about 1600 years. What do we call that time? Oh, yeah, the "Dark Ages."Look, if you want to try to paint this as a conflict between two equivalent worldviews, then that's fine. But you should be warned; your worldview, which is contemporary with over a millenium of disease, warfare, and ignorance, doesn't come out the victor on balance. That doesn't even begin to make sense. I can verify that coal exists. That doesn't mean that Santa Claus is real. Individual claims stand or fall on their own merits, not on the merits of other claims they may share a page with.

it's acceptable, sure.but if i were designing an eye, i could have easily have done away with the blind spot, while keeping all the features of being inside out.but then again, i mean, god only had six days, you can't really expect perfection from him.This message has been edited by Arachnophilia, 06-11-2004 01:19 AM

darwin was a practicing catholic. he also didn't recant on his death bed. however, unfortunately for you point, the opinions of the creator have little to do with the accuracy of a theory. it either correctly describes and predicts things, or it does not.darwinian evoluton does. even if darwin was fire-breathing hellspawn, he was still right.

how about the you-to-god-ism of genesis? the first chapter says, with correct verb moods, that we are being created towards the image of the gods.

No, it isn't simply a point of faith. To say that the fact we cannot observe the whole of evolution as it occurs means we cannot demonstrate evolution is a ludicrous argument. There is a very large and continuously growing body of evidence for evolution while all you offer is the idea that we'll find out, or not, when we die.TTFN,WK

So basically what I said was true. Nothing I said was dependant on the validity of Darwinism in any form (let alone a "pure Darwinian model" which was superceded by the neo-Darwinian New Synthesis before I was born). My post simply pointed out that it was false to claim that Dembski's method was widely used (almost never used would be more accurate). Even if Darwinism were as false as you believe it would not contradict my conclusion or the supporting reasons I offered in any way. It simply does not follow that if Darwinism were false then any argument that *could* be used to attack Darwinism must be true.So we have established that your claimed reason for rejecting my conclusion is false. In fact you wished to support a claim that could be used to support an anti-evolutionary argument regardless of whether it were true or false - we can tell this because you offered nothing to support the original claim nor any rebuttal to the arguments raised against it. Instead you made the false claim that I rejected the original assertion simply on the grounds that I disliked it - even though you knew full well that I had raised arguments against it that you could not dispute, and that it was your post that was motivated by dislike rather than the truth.In short your reply to my post was both dishonest and hypocritical, and your further reply only demonstrates a refusal to discuss the issues I raised in favour of bringing up assertions that are entirely irrelevant to the actual issue supposedly under discussion.

Arach:
but if i were designing an eye, i could have easily have done away with the blind spot, while keeping all the features of being inside out.John Paul:
Funny that "blind spot" doesn't seem to affect a baseball player hitting a 95 mph fastball. However you don't design the eye you design the code that allows the vision system to develop. The eye/ vision system does not translate down to the genome. It is the other way around.

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Funny that "blind spot" doesn't seem to affect a baseball player hitting a 95 mph fastball. However you don't design the eye you design the code that allows the vision system to develop. The eye/ vision system does not translate down to the genome. It is the other way around.

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Evidence please.

it would if the ball and the pitcher never left the blindspot, and the batter only had one eye.this is, of course, evidence that blindspot is not neccessarly grounds for natural selection to wipe it out, as it's really a weakness that predators could prey on for example.however, the point still stands. that's not the only way to design an eye. if it's better to have a membrane over backwards rods and cones, do that, and attach the optic nerve to the other side. or distribute tiny little blindspots all over the retina instead of having all the connections in one spot.i'm intelligent, and i can figure out a better way to design an eye. neither does the bacterial flagellum, the blood clotting system, or cilium. all of these are products of genes.

I disagree. It seems to me that this is more likely an example of a situation where you "can't get there from here". That is, once the evolutionary pathway has gone in one direction it has no viable pathway to some other configurations. Once the retina was formed fromed as it is then there aren't any viable pathways to the octopus like eye.

i might disagree, but i'll go with that for now.but anyhow, i was referring to the original development of the eye's retina. it was not sufficiently inefficient to be weeded out by the natural selection process.