EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed - Science Under Attack

The field is called physics. Why not start a thread in the cosmology forum?

lol sorry dont have one. ill try to improve.

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keep your mind from this way of enquiry, for never will you show that not-being is
~parmenides

tried, the topic is awaiting a "great debate"but its relative to intelligent design in a way.

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keep your mind from this way of enquiry, for never will you show that not-being is
~parmenides

Then, for the moment, let's await the commencement of the Great Debate, so there is no unnecessary redundancy. If the GD falls through, we'll do it somewhere else.

ok

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keep your mind from this way of enquiry, for never will you show that not-being is
~parmenides

You don't have a word processing program like Microsoft Word on your computer?

no, in order to make an online game work on a shared dial up with available funds was to use windows 98 , the 98 winproxy is full of holes and allows the program to work online shareing a dail up connection without a router.long story..a any rate the win 98 program only has minimal programs, and to my dismay, no spellcheck.

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keep your mind from this way of enquiry, for never will you show that not-being is
~parmenides

Notepad and Wordpad are available for editing on Win98.For spellchecking, if you use Internet Explorer or Firefox, then Google Toolbar includes a spellchecker (Install Google Toolbar - Toolbar Help). Whatever you type into the message reply box is spellchecked when you click on the Google Toolbar spellcheck button.If you can use the latest version of Firefox with Win98, it automatically spellchecks everything you type into the message reply box.--Percy

in the inevitable case of random spatter by the negligence in the understood quantum levels of configuration and enhancement and religious dribble involved in supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the case of the non-spelling fool has been resolved!thanks Percy =)

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keep your mind from this way of enquiry, for never will you show that not-being is
~parmenides

YES!. A sincere & hearty welcome back, NWR! I hope you will bless us as as you use to do, both in adminstrative efficiency and general membership role. Edited by Buzsaw, : No reason given.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Another good one is 1-Click Answers. Just hold down the alt key, click your mouse on any word anywhere on your screen, and a window will pop up with the definition. Including supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!--Percy

Return of the prodigal son. Somebody fetch the fattened calf!Welcome back. Okay, well thanks for your critique. Speaking about gaps in the biological/fossil record is not the topic of this thread, so I won't delve in to why I disagree. But you have to consider that just because they say there are gaps doesn't make it so, just like you saying there aren't doesn't make it so.The demonstration of said gaps is required.As for ID when it comes to filling in gaps, no one uses God as a filler, unless it used generically. I mean, when someone mentions God, it is ambiguous. God could mean so very many things. I don't see that at all. I see it as a natural deduction. It boils down to a contingency vs necessity.If something is attached to necessary conditions, then that existent property isn't attributed to anything other than itself to explain its causation.But if something is contingent, then it is subject to probability. The profundity of it is that it ultimately means there is no actual reason why a contingent thing should exist -- or if it does exist, then its cause has to be found outside of itself.And from these basics, we come to deterministic law.For face value, given the sheer size of the universe, along with other planetary systems that do not maintain life, it is a good assumption to think that we are here by dumb luck. We just happened to have been situated in such a way, not only to contain life, but for it to flourish abundantly.But this begs an important question.All of the fundamental laws of the universe, as they apply to physics, are interdependent upon each other, so that one cannot exist without the other.Moreover, one has to question why any such laws exist at all, and of them, how did such a thing come to be when one needs the other to necessitate its own existence? This is the crux. And we are always at this paradox with the chicken/egg problem -- how do you have a chicken without an egg, and how do you have an egg without a chicken? Which came first? These are eternal questions, and science is no more equipped to answer it now than in Plato's time.There seems to be a consensus that the earth is fine-tuned to maintain life. The only objection is its ultimate cause. If a possible variable to explain that ultimate cause is denied, but it is the only correct answer, then why should it be stricken from debate?See, I agree that there should be a neutrality within science. But it isn't neutral at all! Its lopsided to being completely secular.

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“First dentistry was painless, then bicycles were chainless, and carriages were horseless, and many laws enforceless. Next cookery was fireless, telegraphy was wireless, cigars were nicotineless, and coffee caffeineless. Soon oranges were seedless, the putting green was weedless, the college boy was hatless, the proper diet -- fatless. New motor roads are dustless, the latest steel is rustless, our tennis courts are sodless, our new religion -- Godless” -Arthur Guiterman

and almost all of the remainder of your post is off-topic.But I see that my summary was too brief. I was not referring to gaps in the biological record. The "gap" mentioned by my summary was an alleged gap in evolutionary biology, the one where Behe claims that there is irreducible complexity.The rest of your post consisted of nonsense about "natural deduction", "probability", "deterministic law", "fundamental laws of the universe", "fine-tuned to maintain life" - all of which you have newly introduced to the thread, and none of which seems to be related to the topic of this thread.If you care to start a more appropriate thread, and move that new material to the new thread, I will comment there.Edited by nwr, : No reason given.

That's kind of a silly objection don't you think, because anyone could just say that evolution was caused by God, giving the impression of capriciousness?If that is the sole qualifier for (un)falsifiability, then I hardly see the objection. I'll tell you this much: The way to advance the evolutionary model is to advance shared genetic mistakes. Similarities between genes of a species begs the question. But showing that organisms share the same insertions/deletions would do so much more, because otherwise it is totally subjective. Categorizing organisms with similarities is like finding people who look alike, arranging them in a specific order, and saying, "Aha, they are related." Obviously, it begs the question. But sharing mistakes is almost a surefire way of getting around then subjectiveness. Food for thought.It is the only real convincing argument I've ever heard from the evolutionist camp. Well, for me, I know there has been an evolution of sorts. I have no doubt about it. Looking at different breeds of dogs can quickly and unambiguously support that. My contention is that attempting to trace it down to an amoeba, with all of the links in between, remains totally unconvincing to me. Its held together by a general assumption -- one that is totally exclusive to anything other than capriciousness. Sure, but that would mean that evolution isn't guided by chance + natural selection. Obviously they object to the supposed falsifications. You would all but have to concede the point that for centuries upon centuries mankind assumed an Intelligence beyond itself. Why did they come to that conclusion? Because life sure as heck, in almost every way, appears to be purposeful. It was only until evolution came along that some people said, "But what if it is all capricious and the only reason it appears to be intelligently designed is on account of natural selection that weeds out aberrations.?"The greater point being that life hangs in the edge of a knife. Chaos tends to be chaotic, unless, for philosophical reasons, you want to factor out God. Laws indicate purpose, unless you want, for philosophical reasons, factor out God.You see the design all around us. Penis and vagina, bees and flowers, solar system and entropy, etc, etc, etc. People see it, whether it evidently is true or not. I should assume that you could at least appreciate that much, even if you believe that it is ultimately jumping to a wrong conclusion. Or a convenient scapegoat to get around the obviously flaw... I mean, its like punctuated equilibrium. After years of not seeing any real evidence connecting the dots, they erected a strawman, the fact that we see no evidence is in itself the evidence! Huzahhhhh! Know what I mean? If they have been falsified, as you allege, then ID is falsifiable, because those two arguments in conjunction with one another are the foundation of the theory. That's silly though. That's like saying gravity never existed before it was proven because gravity didn't have a face. Surely you can see how the logic is faulty here. The "how" is what the investigation of ALL science is about though! Everyone knew, long before a law was ascribed to it, that what goes up, eventually comes down. But these are useless facts. The "how" is what science is concerned with, and always has been, and presumably, always will be. But you want the "how" part up front. That's not how it works. We don't how an intelligent designer created life anymore than we know what the First Cause was. Science wants to find it out. So let them! Nobody is content with the "Goddidit" hypothesis, least of all, me. But you use this rather erroneously. When asked how a pakicetus eventually became a whale, you could just say "evolution did it." Assuming evolution is true, that would ultimately be the correct answer, but so what? That kind of answer castrates scientific inquiry to the point where it makes science unnecessary. No one wants those kind of answers, because they are no answers at all.My next question is one of motivation:Suppose you were asked to take a poll. This poll dictated whether or not the writers of a new science textbook would allow the introduction of the Steady State theory to be juxtaposed by the Inflationary model.What answer would you give them, and why?

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“First dentistry was painless, then bicycles were chainless, and carriages were horseless, and many laws enforceless. Next cookery was fireless, telegraphy was wireless, cigars were nicotineless, and coffee caffeineless. Soon oranges were seedless, the putting green was weedless, the college boy was hatless, the proper diet -- fatless. New motor roads are dustless, the latest steel is rustless, our tennis courts are sodless, our new religion -- Godless” -Arthur Guiterman

Why is it a silly objection? Yes - anyone could say evolution was caused by God...and that hypothesis is unfalsifiable...which is why anyone can say it. Anyone can say that an invisible pink unicorn is sitting on their shoulders and they would be making an equally unfalsifiable claim (Assuming said unicorn has no mass etc etc).The addition of a sentient entity into a hypothesis is not the sole qualifier for the lack of falsifiability, and it doesn't necessitate that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable. The capabilities of the sentient entity have to remain unknown or unknowable. Nem, it isn't about finding organisms that look alike - otherwise we'd categorize Thylacine wolves as more related to placental wolves than they are to Kangaroos. Also - dolphins might prove problematic. In order to discover evidence of evolution we have to begin like this "Assuming evolution is true we should find..." and try and find what that is.Shared genetic mistakes is one of them, but another one is the attempt to find synapomorphies (not just 'similarities' - also known as the phenetic method - which is as you assert subjective and flawed). Since you have come to accept the shared genetic mistake argument, perhaps it is time for you to give the 29+ evidences of macroevolution another careful read - it lays out how cladistics are actually done. Well actually getting to the population of universal common ancestors is obviously hard work, but why are you unconvinced by all of the lines? Why not just the earliest ones? Actually it would. The entity is using the method of evolution - thus it is using the method of chance and natural selection. We have used the method of evolution to design things, Nem, and we definitely used chance and selection to do it. Right - we are pattern seeking mammals. And that has gotten us very far but sometimes we see patterns and come to strange conclusions: Scientific laws do not indicate purpose. They are just descriptive, not prescriptive. That is contrary to human laws which are prescriptive not descriptive. Darwin had proposed that the rate of evolution wasn't constant and that it might come in fits and bursts. Gould pointed out that this matches the fossil record. You should probably understand that this is something else. Note that irreducible complexity was an evolutionary prediction made before the first world war. So punctuated equilibria was predicted by Darwin in the late 19th Century and irreducible complexity was predicted by Muller in the early 20th Century. (See Message 15 for details). Not really the image you were trying to insinuate, is it? That particular strain of ID is falsified. When people say that ID is unfalsifiable thy refer to the concept of ID is inherently unfalsifiable because if the ID proponents were to admit that they falsify ID they will still hold to ID and hide behind things such as 'the appearance of complexity not actual complexity'. More importantly they do not give details of how the design is implemented. The implementation is the important part of science - and until some method of implementation is put forward the theory as a whole remains unfalsifiable. No, it is like saying there wasn't a theory of gravity until the mechanism for gravity was hashed out. And there wasn't. It wasn't until Einstein that a falsifiable theory came to be. Exactly my point. When ID gives us a 'how' we'll have a scientific theory. That they refuse to tell us 'how' should tell you something. Nobody is stopping anybody from trying to find the 'how' behind ID. The problem is the refusal of the ID proponents to even try. The difference being is that if you want more information as to 'how did evolution do it' you can get answers. They may not be complete answers, there may be more to evolution than we currently know, but there are lots of hows involved. Compare and contrast to ID. I'd say it depended on context. I'm perfectly happy for the steady state model to be mentioned as a hypothesis which has fallen out of favour due to the overwhelming evidence against it. Likewise, I'm perfectly happy for creationism and Paley and ID to be mentioned in a similar context. However - I would object to the curriculum if a special interest group was trying to do this only for their pet theories or concepts. I'd want historical science or what have you to be across the whole board if its going to be in there at all.Given the amount of time this might take up, it might prove to be unwise in the already full high school curriculum but it might be ideal for a university setting.