Defence of Intelligent Design

Well, one thing you could do is peruse the ID theads here.To summarize the so called (my bias shows) support for ID seems to be.1) There are somethings we don't know enough about to know how they happened. (origin of life is one, some biological structures are others) Therefore some thing with intelligence must have been involved.2) Some things "obviously" could not have happened using the current explanations. These things are called irreduciably complex. So something with intelligence must have been involved.3) Things look, to an individuals eye, designed therefore they must have been designed.I think that covers it (it will have to do until someone comes along that believes it).I'll leave my rebuttal to the above for the next post. But again you should go to the threads in the ID forum for much more detail.

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Common sense isn't

Now I'll have to show you how dumb that NosyNed guy is. This is just another form of God-of-the-gaps theology. (gotg). That is, if we don't know something "god did it" is the answer. Historically this has proved to be a rather bad idea. As we learn more the gaps keep getting closed. Most Christian theologians don't think that this is a good idea. This may appear to be another form of gotg and it is but has it's own twist. What it is saying isn't that we don't know, yet, how something happened but that what happened is impossible. Of course, since it happened there is something wrong with that. From this the leap is made that the solution must be something intelligent. How that leap is made is not clear. In addtion, how to determine if something is IC (irreducibly complex) isn't clear to me.Additionally, many examples of things which are supposed to be IC have been shown to NOT be impossible after all. However, no one seems to be able to say how we tell if something is designed or not. Whenever asked to do so they refer to things which we know are designed by humans. They, implicitly or explicitly, contrast these things to natural things. But it is exactly natural things which are then claimed to be "obviously" designed.This was an interesting arguement until Darwin (for one) showed that "design" is possible without being created by any intelligence. This has since been demonstarted in a number of ways. So the argument has weakened considerably.Sorry Nosy ol' boy, but you haven't got it covered yet have you?

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Common sense isn't

We can only hope that s/he has no children.

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Common sense isn't

Not a useful comment, Crash. Don't bother venting that.I'm not trying to be nasty, just noting that the debate doesn't move anywhere with that. Ok?

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Common sense isn't

But we already know that some do believe and some don't. We also know that most of those who do don't have any evidence for that belief. They just believe. That's been discussed a lot. Why bother?Once someone picks the existance of God as an axiom there is still plenty to discuss.

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Common sense isn't

I'm stretching what I know a bit too but I think that there is also an engineering problem with the exoskelton. If you take the materials and just scale up the dimensions equally it will fail.

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Common sense isn't

LOL, I am, almost all the time, calm. whatever is not worth the fuss. S/he is easy to ignore (most of the time) because the posts are so obviously stupid. S/he obviously isn't (or can't) read the replies given. When it gets this extreme I read for amusement only.I feel that enough forum guidelines have been violated by whatever that a suspension is in order, however I also thing that the creationist side should be held to much lower standards. What I suggest is just ignoring his/her fool rants.

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Common sense isn't[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 01-23-2004]

Hey you took that out of context!!! A quote mine!!I am mostly calm here. Ask my teenagers how calm I am "all the time". I think you were being complimentary. Thank you for that. But it is also stereotyping and to be politically correct I should chide you for that.It may be, also, that the underlying reasons for my calm are not so complimentary. It may be that I am an arrogant SOB who feels he is so knowledgable and intelligent that I can look down on someone who obviously cannot compete with me intellectually (and in spite of my moderately advanced age perhaps physically ).S/he is just words on a computer screen. There are fools all over who have no hope of learning a damm thing. When you run into one don't waste your time on them. Give them a moderate chance to demonstrate a mimimal ablitity to think and then put 'em on the ignore list.

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Common sense isn't

I encourage them to read it. My daughter gets a huge case of the giggles at some of the fundie antics.

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Common sense isn't

He has a chance. The question is: "does he have the capability?"

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Common sense isn't

Very nice, Thank you.The site looks interesting too.Hang around here will you?