121. 107. Dena, please educate yourself on the intelligent design theory. Intelligent design came about when creationists realized that the evidence for evolution was so compelling that creationism needed to be revised to INCLUDE evolution. Intelligent Design Theory is a DIRECT result of the acceptance of evolution by creationists. The fact that I, as an atheist, need to explain the premise of ID to you is extremely disturbing.

emma at 5:28PM on Jan 7th 2008


>Creationists never conceded to include evolution as part of Intelligent Design. I still conclude, no matter what evolutionists and courts want to term it, our existence was designed by an Intelligent Higher Being.

Intelligent design
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Intelligent design is the assertion that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."[1][2] It is a modern form of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, modified to avoid specifying the nature or identity of the designer.[3][4] Its primary proponents, all of whom are associated with the Discovery Institute,[5][6] believe the designer to be the God of Christianity.[7][8] Advocates of intelligent design claim it is a scientific theory,[9] and seek to fundamentally redefine science to accept supernatural explanations.[10]

The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science but pseudoscience.[11][12][13][14] The U.S. National Academy of Sciences has stated that "intelligent design, and other claims of supernatural intervention in the origin of life" are not science because they cannot be tested by experiment, do not generate any predictions, and propose no new hypotheses of their own.[15] The National Science Teachers Association, an organization of American science teachers and the largest organization of science teachers in the world, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have termed it pseudoscience.[16] Others have concurred, and some have called it junk science.[17]

"Intelligent design" originated in response to the 1987 United States Supreme Court Edwards v. Aguilard ruling involving separation of church and state.[18] Its first significant published use was in Of Pandas and People, a 1989 textbook intended for high-school biology classes.[19] Several additional books on "intelligent design" were published in the 1990s. By the mid-1990s, intelligent design proponents had begun clustering around the Discovery Institute and more publicly advocating the inclusion of intelligent design in public school curricula.[20] With the Discovery Institute and its Center for Science and Culture serving a central role in planning and funding, the "intelligent design movement" grew increasingly visible in the late 1990s and early 2000s, culminating in the 2005 "Dover trial" challenging the intended use of intelligent design in public school science classes.[5]

In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a group of parents of high-school students challenged a public school district requirement for teachers to present intelligent design in biology classes as an alternative "explanation of the origin of life". U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design is not science, that it "cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents", and concluded that the school district's promotion of it therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.


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Intelligent designer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


An intelligent designer, also referred to as an intelligent agent, is the willed and self-conscious entity that the intelligent design movement argues had some role in the origin and/or development of life and who supposedly has left scientific evidence of this intelligent design. They also use the term "intelligent cause" implying their teleological supposition of direction and purpose in features of the universe and of living things. The intelligent design movement is a neo-creationist campaign that arose out of the previous Christian fundamentalist and evangelistic creation science movement.[1][2][3] Proponents of intelligent design argue to the public that their concept does not posit the identity of the designer as part of this effort. But in statements to their constituency, which consists largely of Christian conservatives, they identify the designer as God.


[edit] Who does the ID movement think the designer is?
William Dembski states in his book Design Inference that the nature of the intelligent designer cannot be inferred from intelligent design. All leading intelligent design proponents have stated identifying or characterizing the designer is beyond the scope of intelligent design as a line of inquiry. Proponents had hoped that, by avoiding invoking creation by a specific supernatural entity, (such as that employed by creation science), intelligent design would be considered scientific and not violate the establishment clause of the US constitution. Proponents feared that were intelligent design identified as a restatement of previous forms of creationism, it would be precluded from being taught in public schools after the 1987 Supreme Court of the United States decision in Edwards vs Aguillard. This line of reasoning was not particularly persuasive to many in the scientific community, which largely rejected intelligent design as both a line of scientific inquiry and as a basis for a sound education in science.

On December 20, 2005 federal district court ruled in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District that intelligent design was not science and was essentially religious in nature. The ruling not only rendered that public school district's requirement endorsing intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in science classes unconstitutional on the grounds that its inclusion violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, but validated the objections of critics who discounted proponent's claim that the identity was not God.

Highlighting these mutually exclusive claims about the designer, Dembski, despite having said that the intelligent designer or designers could be any god or gods, or even space aliens, has also said that "intelligent design should be understood as the evidence that God has placed in nature to show that the physical world is the product of intelligence and not simply the result of mindless material forces"[8] and that "Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."[9]

Michael Behe, in his book Darwin's Black Box, suggested the designer might be a time traveling cell biologist, apparently ignoring that such a hypothesis results in a grandfather paradox.

At various times each of the leading proponents in the intelligent design movement have clearly expressed that they consider the Abrahamic God Elohim in his role as a creator God, to be the intelligent designer and denied that intelligent designer is God, depending on which audience they are addressing. On example is William Dembski, who on his blog in response to the question "Is the designer responsible for biological complexity God?" said "not necessarily" and "To ask who or what is the designer of a particular object is to ask for the immediate intelligent agent responsible for its design. The point is that God is able to work through derived or surrogate intelligences, which can be anything from angels to organizing principles embedded in nature."[10] Yet to the intelligent design movement's conservative Christian constituents Dembski has said "intelligent design should be understood as the evidence that God has placed in nature to show that the physical world is the product of intelligence and not simply the result of mindless material forces. This evidence is available to all apart from the special revelation of God in salvation history as recounted in Scripture. ... Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. This gives intelligent design incredible traction as a tool for apologetics, opening up the God-question to individuals who think that science has buried God"[11] and "Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration."[12] Stephen C. Meyer, founder and leader of the intelligent design program of the Discovery Institute admitted on national television he believes that the designer is God.[13]

In addition, the intelligent movement seeks as a well-documented agenda the overall goal "to defeat materialism" and the "materialist world view" as represented by evolution, and replace it with "a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."[14] Phillip E. Johnson, considered the father of the ID movement has stated that the goal of intelligent design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept:

"Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." -- Phillip E. Johnson, American Family Radio, January 10, 2003 [15]

"This isn't really, and never has been a debate about science. It's about religion and philosophy." -- Phillip E. Johnson, World Magazine, November 30, 1996 [16]

The Discovery Institute's leaked Wedge document sets out the movement's governing goals, including:

"To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God." . . . "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions."[17] -- The Wedge Document, a 1999 Discovery Institute pamphlet

DENA at 6:52PM on Jan 9th 2008

122. that's not what I asked. Is god simpler or is the universe simpler? You said god but now you're jesusfishing again. I think your beliefs are very very shallow. (clif)


>God is simpler than all He created. We are not meant to even care HOW the universe came to be, but rather to live according to His word. Jesus had told the pharisees "Thou fools. You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." What do you think He meant? Trivial things are studied under microscopes, so to speak, but what really counts, get ignored.




Now you say 'I said He can do anything.'

If he always existed he can't create himself now, can he?

Also how would he forbid himself to forbid something? Could he make a being he could truly call 'his better half'?

Could he make a more fair more just more benevolent god? a rock so heavy he can't lift it? a distance so far he can't travel it? Can he destroy himself? Can he formulate a suicidal thought he must act on?
(clif)


>No one ever said He created Himself. A God is not created. Our minds won't let us go back that far because we can't grasp it. What reason would give Him to do the things you asked? That would be pure folly. He is INTELLIGENT.



Your preacherbabble posts just take up space and don't convince anyone. I don't bother to read them because those questions have been asked and answered by science for generations.

To make a point that's ten miles over your head, how is a racemic mixture in vivo supposed to stop a levulorotatory or dextrorotatory reaction from happening?

You're not trying to formulate an industrial process, and nothing about racemates precludes reaction with the specific needed enantiomer.

What's your comment on that? It completely debunks one or maybe more of your so-called 'experts' so you'd better come to their defense.

Your silliness re the fossil record is also just as lame.

Post that all you want. Maybe I'll forward some tracts from santeria and church of god with signs following to show everyone how sensible it is to believe what you believe.





Clif Kuplen at 6:12PM on Jan 7th 2008



>Another folly on your part. If science goes against your atheistic viewpoint, you protest, and me thinks you protest too much. You also say scientists who are debunking evolution, (even the non-Christian one) are automatically preachers babbling. WRONG!!! I will continue posting the truth which you can't intelligently refute. Evolution goes against science, therefore it is not science. And no, the questions answered by the scientists I post have not been asked or answered for years. What makes you pathetic is you are so at the end of your evolution/atheistic defense that you have to resort to ask a layperson a question one would only know if that one studied such question. But the compounds and molecules you ask of has no evidence that God did not create plant and animal life in classes. Since He is a God of variety, each living thing within its own class or category is still made uniquely. Nothing in life is exactly the same, even human life. But according to evolution, we are all supposed to be EXACTLY the same since the compounds and molecules, according to evolution theory, is from the same mixture, or racemate. Your question doesn't debunk the scientists in my posts; rather it questions the validity of evolution.
The fossil record is just one of many contentions evolutionists are having trouble with. In fact, many have conceded when other scientists showed what previous relics actually were, though text books were outdated even by evolutionists' admissions.
You can post signs where you want. I don't know what that is supposed to do, but you are free.

DENA at 8:25PM on Jan 9th 2008