Anonymous Opinion's Politics

It should be pointed out that "Intelligent Design" and the belief in an intelligent designer are in many cases two different things. The trouble with Intelligent Design (with capital letters) is that it is an intentional attempt to prove a specific thing that people believe, and it uses gaps in information instead of hard data to try to prove it.

In my estimation, something like this flies in the face of God just as much as claims that Darwinism disproves His existance does. Creative Evolution essentially raises man to the level of God by supposedly proving His (or "a creator's") involvement (i.e. getting inside God's head), while those who "disprove" God through Darwinian Evolution lower God to the level of man by assuming God could not possibly mastermind things that we perceive as random using current scientific methodology.

Too many people in this world sell God short. Had you not posted this first, I would have posted this in response to Kevin's comments regarding scientific progress removing God from the picture. His argument totally sells God short, and unfortunately, many who would take offense at his words do the same in response.

Specifically regarding your honeycomb (and tons of other things that I see every day), I am right with you. Why must it be that what appears random to us must therefore be random to God? That sort of thing strengthens my faith. I do not think it unfathomable that God could set up an elegant, unifying equation (human terms) that incorporates randomness (more human terms) to achieve exactly what he wants. I think that is part of why I feel such a deep connection with nature.

A quick addition:

I go outside and I see your honeycomb, or the sky, or a flower, or barn swallows chasing insects over the water, and I perceive them all as beautiful. Not useful, logical, or interesting, but beautiful. Surely that is the work of God.

How about this article?
Dogs can do calculus.

A church I pass on my way to work every morning for a while had a quote "All that I have seen teaches me to believe in the Creator I have not seen." GIven Occam's Razor, God ia a much simpler explanation for all that we see than the current leading cosmological theories.

Wait, a dog can do calculus?

I wish he could have passed my course for me in college. Ick.

Dogs are great at calculus. They just have problems holding the pencils.

I can't tell you how hard I tried to find a picture of a dog somehow using a pencil so I could link it here, but I failed. It appears you are correct sir.

Now enough of this tomfoolery. Back to the topic at hand!

Andy,

It does seem odd to use man's general ignorance about the universe to prove the existance of God.

In the same vein, if the abundance of ignorance served as proof of anything...

...I was just going to say an inappropriate and disparaging political remark, but realized that I would suddenly find myself sounding as crass as the people who I loathe to read. Just fill in the blanks and giggle for me, will you?

The trouble with Intelligent Design (with capital letters) is that it is an intentional attempt to prove a specific thing that people believe, and it uses gaps in information instead of hard data to try to prove it.

Information cannot exist without gaps in formation, no more than you can write your messages on this medium with all your HDD micro magnets turned to 0. A pattern of gaps is just as necessary for the existence of information as the "hard" medium it exists in. It is worth pointing out that information relies on an agreement between the sender and the reciever, otherwise symbols and signs of design will never be read. So a person presumably being "hard" minded with real material data and filling every so-called "gap" like Richard Dawkins argues that even if one saw a statue of the virgin Mary waving at them it would be best to assume that all the atoms just happened to move that way instead of taking it as a sign. Therefore, everytime Jesus says "Let this serve as a sign to you." after a miracle Dawkins would not agree to recieve the information/knowledge/wit/witness as such, therefore it wouldn't be recieved. At some level it is not an issue of how much a mind is witnessed to if it will not accept the form of knowledge/wit at issue. It is pretty much as simple as that, an act of will, although the whole issue is surrounded in much debate and a rippling haze of supposed chains of cause and effect.

In my estimation, something like this flies in the face of God just as much as claims that Darwinism disproves His existance does.

If the attempt at proof (mathematical, physical?) was not intentional, would that make it more "natural" and therefore acceptable? I see that you want the truth of things to exist in their natural beauty and so on. It seems that you are making that which is complementary to be contradictory, i.e. the logical "proof" set against the natural evidence. Yet the logico-mathematical structure of the way the verses are the universe are written is beautiful and natural, that which is seen by insight is complementary to sight.

“The holy Bible and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine Word.” --Galileo Galilei, Laws of Dynamics, astronomicalconfirmation of the heliocentric system

(Thanks for the link anonymous. I'm probably going to join the DCBA, see you around.)

Ah, but you see, the scientific method does not allow for theories to be formed via lack of information, but rather requires observable, empirical, measurable evidence. Note that I do not say that because Intelligent Design cannot be considered as scientific theory that it must be false. I think most if not all of us here believe in intelligent design (lowercase letters) in one form or another, but our belief does not necessarily give us the license to declare such beliefs as scientific theory any more than we might declare 2+2 to equal 5 simply because we know it does not equal 6. The bottom line is that science as it is generally accepted throughout the world has rules, and for us to be taken seriously within the scientific community we must play by those rules.

In my estimation, something like this flies in the face of God just as much as claims that Darwinism disproves His existance does.

If the attempt at proof (mathematical, physical?) was not intentional, would that make it more "natural" and therefore acceptable?

I did not represent myself particularly well with this statement. My issue is not with people wishing to understand creation or the role of God in any capacity more completely. My problem is that people try to constrain God within the rules of man. As man advances in scientific knowledge, why must man also be reduced in faith? Surely God cannot be constrained to the laws of science as we understand them, but believers and unbelievers alike use or fear science seemingly on such grounds.

I was trying to find a specific Bible verse while writing my comment-reply, but was unable to succeed. Still, I think my overall point is not so much to connect with nature as it is to place the spirit of Christ above the law as Paul writes over and over again in his letters.

"Ah, but you see, the scientific method does not allow for theories to be formed via lack of information, but rather requires observable, empirical, measurable evidence."

Yet the theory of evolution was indeed formed via lack of information and has no real observable, measurable evidence. I realize that I should back this up with several examples, but there, in fact, have been whole books on this. If you are truly interested, I would be willing to send you some of them. Let me know and we can work out a private exchange. Or I can give you a list of titles. Whatever.

We may be crossing terms a little bit. Scientific theories tend to be, by their nature, unprovable in a global sense that factors in every scenario in existence. For example, while we generally accept that objects fall toward the earth, we cannot say with authority that every object operating under the same set of restrictions has fallen toward the earth simply because we have not seen every object which would be subject to what we call gravitational theory. We still accept the theory of gravity because observation has shown it to be extremely accurate.

The theory of evolution, like other scientific theories, is built upon observable facts. We can argue about how the facts have been assembled, so to speak, to form the over-arching theory, but the facts that have been used to form it are in fact, well... factual. There is a marked distinction between incomplete information existing within any given theory and the idea of basing the model on that lack of information.

It is quite difficult for me to do the kind of reading required to be fully versed on this issue due to my health, but I am absolutely willing to have a look at smaller samplings via links or another medium.

Actually, Andy, I don't think we are crossing terms at all.

This: "The theory of evolution, like other scientific theories, is built upon observable facts." is what I utterly disagree with. It is NOT based on observable facts.

Michael Behe showed quite clearly in his book, "Darwin's Black Box" that there is an irreducible complexity in our cells and in many other "simple" systems that could not spring up by chance.

The Stanley-Miller experiment has been show to be full of holes from the assumptions made of early gases on Earth to the way they had to keep removing the amino acids they "created" to keep them from disintegrating immediately as they would normally do.

Time and again there has been outright fraud in the "early" man claims with pig teeth used for "humans", etc. The hundreds of tiny changes that Darwin predicted would be found in the fossil record and which he himself said his theory would be falsified if the evidence wasn't found; it hasn't been.

There's too much really for one little comment section. I don't know the best sites off hand, but maybe mynym might.

Andy,

Trip on over to mynym's site. He has three links to sites that deal with I.D. if you are interested. Hope that helps. If not, let me know and I will dig deeper for you.

Yours truly,
AV