ID and the bias inherent in human nature

Let me remind you of these: Are you going to follow these guidelines or do you intned to go on ignoring them ?

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AND ITS A VIDEO PEOPLE. CLICK IT.

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What we'd really like is to read the research papers.Can you cite some?

Having listened to, and watched, a turgid hour and a half of poorly presented regurgitated arguments with which I am already familiar. If this is your coherent centralising theory then you are really struggling.TTFN,WK

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Are you going to follow these guidelines or do you intned to go on ignoring them ?

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People will do anything to preserve the bliss of their ignorance, eh? However, when people start throwing rules and guidelines at me, I usually back out of the discussion. It's safer that way, since things begin to get messy. So, I'm done with this thread.

Ah..Sir would like to try on a new jacket? Can I recommend the Cut'n'run. It's a fine fit.Out of interest - if anyone got the video to work, anything new? or just a rehash of old ideas?

In other words you are running away because you can't support your assertions.That makes it pretty clear just where the bias really lies.

Think what you want. They threw the rules and guidelines at Galileo too. Seems like you are the cowardly one who hides behind the rules, hoping they will shield you from the truth. Ive seen it a million times. Very predictable.

Yes, they will do things like avoiding engaging in actual debate and providing substantive evidence for their claims.TTFN,WK

See my message 14.

The fact is that you have failed to support your claims as required by the forum guidelines and that you prefer to abandon this conversation rather than do so. It is quite clear who is "running from the truth" here.

What on earth are you talking about? You keep bringing up Galileo, if he were alive today we could test his astronomical observations. What's your point?How does this further our apparently pedestrian knowledge of Intelligent Design. If you think we don't understand completely, numerous people have asked you to explain your definition. I don't think linking a video counts (maybe if it was Quicktime. I AM biased against RealVideo and not afraid to admit it!)

I got it to work. The quality is dreadful; it's painful to watch. It was Dr. Steve Meyer, a few weeks ago (just before his appearance at the National Press Club). He led with complaints about the a New Mexico PBS station cancelling its showing of "Unlocking the Mysteries of Design". I watched for a few minutes and didn't hear anything new. The whole thing runs about 1.5 hours.Interesting that limbo thinks that my comment on the quality of the video is evidence of bias. I wonder if he wants to argue that the video is really high quality?

It's as JonF says, Stephen Meyer from Discovery Institute giving an introductory talk on Intelligent Design. The video quality is poor, but instead of watching it I'm just listening while I work. It's very light on the science because he's speaking to a lay audience, anyone familiar with the ID arguments could follow it this way pretty easily.I'm about three quarters through, and Meyer is giving the traditional ID presentation. First he makes the argument for design, then he follows with the "information requires intelligent sources" argument. If you want to know what ID is saying, I think this is an excellent presentation.I was surprised to find that Meyer is so young.Most discussions about ID quickly bog down in details that pale in significance with the foremost problems of ID, that neither of the alternatives they won't discuss is attractive:

• Ultimately, life somewhere had to arise naturally, or
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• Life had a supernatural origin.

The first falsifies ID, the second isn't science.--Percy

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First he makes the argument for design, then he follows with the "information requires intelligent sources" argument

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I wonder what Meyer means by "information" ? YECs using this argument virtually always refuse to deal with that crucial point. And with Dembski defining information as improbability it looks like we can expect similar confusion from the ID movement.

I forgot to mention that Meyer also makes a strong appeal against methodological naturalism. He says science looks for the best natural answer, while he is just looking for the best answer.About information, he doesn't really define it in this talk. He does talk about complexity versus specified complexity. If it weren't a lay audience he might have preferred speaking from an entropic perspective, but there's no way to know for sure. The analogy he used was a long random string of letters (complex) versus a sentence (specified complexity).He also used a number of examples, the bacterial flagellum among them. He analogized them to machines and represented them diagramatically as machines, and makes the point that they're all irreducibly complex. But his main point is that they couldn't have come about naturally and could only have been designed.Meyer also spoke of a community of scientists working and making progress on ID and the trials they face at the hands of the scientific establishment. He described the BSOW journal incident in which he figured so prominently, and said the BSOW simply declared ID to not be science and refused to allow the issues raised by his paper to be addressed in future editions of the journal. Which is true. He mentioned the peer reviewers, but gave no hints as to who they might be, and he might not even know.Meyer talks extremely confidently, in that he is like Behe, but this kind of presentation is only effective before lay audiences. Before scientists it is unpersuasive. Scientists would probably like to see at least these two things:

• Studies, perhaps blind studies, where the principles of ID are applied to accurately identify which objects are designed.
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• Evidence of implementation of the design. For example, once the designer completed the design of the bacterial flagellum, how did he actually implement that design in a biological organism?

Presentations of ID are often accompanied by examples of fields that already use ID, and they cite archeology and forensics. It is statements like this, so persuasive to lay audiences, and so obviously misleading to scientists, that raises the hackles of scientists. Sciences like archeology and forensics are seeking evidence of human activity, not evidence of intelligent design. An archeologist who finds an ancient stone tool does not analyze its specified complexity. He looks for signs of human actions on the stone like strike marks from another stone. A forensics expert does not analyze the specified complexity of rifling marks on a bullet to find if it was intelligently designed, he just matches it with riflings from known firearms to figure out which one fired it.This is all obvious to us, of course, but it is easy to mislead lay people, and that is why ID takes their arguments to lay audiences rather than scientific journals.--Percy