To be an anti-ID'er you have to demean the great minds of history and you have to find flaws in life forms, in order to prove they weren't designed.
hehe. Demeaning the great minds of history? Are these the words of someone who is demeaning somebody?
quote:
Newton was a genius of the highest order. Nobody can realistically call his brilliance into question when it came to describing the world around him. In the Principia he covers the laws of motion and gravity - which he managed to codify before he reached 26 years old!
If only my peers would demean me so!
All I said was that Newton wasn't perfect. That is not demeaning, it is the truth.
If evolutionists followed their theory to its logical conclusions they would see that thought itself is only an illusion, an electro-chemical phenomenon that happens to have survived through the generations. The evolved human thinks what he thinks because it works, not because it's true.
I make the same point in
Message 291. Descartes did this very thing a long time ago. Axioms are needed to proceed in any philosophy to get beyond cogito ergo sum type problems.
It is precisely because through most of history men have believed that they were capable of objective thought, and because they believed the world to have been made, at least partially, for their discovery, that man engaged in discovery and analysis.
I've never denied that. That is a point entirely seperate from the one I was making. I was saying that settling on 'An unknown intelligent entity is responsible for this phenomenon in ways we cannot fully understand', hampers discovery not believing that we were put here to understand and analyse the world. A better statement is: 'An unknown entity is responsible for this phenomenon in ways we cannot fully understand - so let's try and work out what this entity is, how it came about and the laws etc etc surrounding this entity...so that we can eventually erradicate the 'unknown' part of our description'
The anti-ID'er must disregard the first piece of evidence he encounters - his own reason - in order to proceed.
Actually the scientist has to disregard pure reason to proceed. Science is not a reason-based pursuit. It is first empirical and second reason based (that is to say, that evidence is collected and then reason is applied to infer conclusions from the evidence, which can then be used to find more relevant evidence and so on). It is clear that one of the first assumptions science makes is that we can use reason and evidence to come to conclusions about the natural world. Otherwise we end up in Descartes' shoes.
But secondly, I think Modulus misunderstands Newton, and does so because he has such a prejudice against the ID-er. Newton was talking about the genesis of the planetary system, and to my knowledge no one has yet definitively explained that.
see
Message 11 which is the beginnings of this same thought process.
I can't see why an evolved being should care about anything. The evolved being certainly shouldn't mind some tales of a creator if it helps get you through the night. Yet you do care, and deeply. Why? Perhaps you are something more than you thought you were? And if you could honor yourself this way you might then see that your internal image of the ID'er is way too small as well.
Caring is a survival mechanism of intelligent beings. If an evolved intelligent being didn't care about anything, it would die without reproducing. Also it is probably a cultural thing. Culture is a very strong influence. In the culture I was raised in the pursuit of knowledge and high education standards were held in high esteem. Therefore, my feelings are a reflection of those influences.
So I think you've got it precisely backwards. Just as the human who uses the power of the internal combustion engine can win a race against the runner, so the ID believing human has an unfair advantage over the naturalist who must spend all his time explaining away the obvious.
Designing something intelligently is not something I deny can happen. Naturalism is irrelevant to this discussion. I regard myself as pro-science. Science is about making conclusions from the evidence, not letting personal conclusions influence the method of interpreting the evidence.
Bias is ever present, which is why the antagonistic nature of science is a superior system than the self-supporting group-think that is prevalent in ID circles.
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