These people are blinded by their own faith to rationalize the whole situation. Firstly all religious texts out there are as far from truth as African Pygmies are from arctic ice. So if we can’t logically trust the texts, why would we trust any ideas emerging from them?

This whole debate about ID vs. Evolution is nothing but a means to introduce religion back into our education system and hence indoctrinate and propagate religion into the future.

Evolution has proof, whereas ID has nothing but faith, which for science means absolutely nothing.

I have to hand it to Stein, though, he ticks all the boxes for infuriating creationist rhetoric. His Marxist conspiracy ‘theory’ sounds like cold war propaganda.

I hope this doesn’t get released in the UK.

They’re still in charge . . . and having some problems (as committees always do):

** The Arthropodic Principle — note from HQ **

To: All
From: CEO, Sentient Beings Inc.

Subject: Major anthropic screw-up, causes and proposed solutions

It was the Corporate Committee on Systematic World Ordering which initiated an RFP, cost-plus basis. Failure to recognize that Hellaburton was an unreliable contractor, created certain problems with shoddy workmanship and substandard materials which quickly emerged.

These however were plastered over for at least 4 billion years until the first multicellular creatures appeared in planet’s Precambrian oceans. By then it was too late to adjust any nucleotides. After all, it is a double blind test.

The last 550 million years, however, have proved one unforeseen disaster after another, culminating in Nature’s Greatest Mistake, humanity. Currently, almost 7 billion cases of hypertrophy of ape prefrontal cortex! [Walking and talking mutants all of them!]

Delicious irony though. The defect provides an illusion of having “free will.” Of course, homeostatic causes are still causes. But, as delusions go, this one is a sicko. Unfortunately, the trait is far too entrenched now to be wiped out by laws of population genetics.

Looks like human heads must roll. The Corporate Committee on Oort Cloud Exploitation hopes to find a suitably large comet in the next 65 million years, give or take 5 million years.

However, let there be light. The standing Corporate Committee on Bio-organics has estimated that the average species lasts only about 2 million years. Patience hath its rewards.

Personally, I want the testing to continue. I find myself inordinately fond of beetles. Let it be called the arthropodic principle.

bipolar2
© 2008

I think you make an excellent and oftentimes overlooked point. The god one must conjure up within an ID explanatory framework is a pale imitation of the god most Christians believe in. Whenever they hitch their hopes of spreading the word to ID’s broken-down horse, they fail to realize how they’ve fundamentally undercut one of their most treasured fantasies.

One of our local NPR stations does a regular Monday morning show called “Interconnect”, which usually focuses of faith and spirituality. One morning last year while driving to work they had as a guest one Micheal Corey, who was an astrophysicist pushing his new book, “The God Hypothesis”. This man claimed to be a scientist, and was claiming that the structure of the universe indicates a designer. I couldn’t help myself. I called in and got on the air, and told him that as a religious belief, what he was saying was fine, but it wasn’t science. He rebutted something about God starting everything and letting it proceed apace, and I said something to the effect of “But that’s not the God everybody imagines exists”, which other subsequent callers took him to task for. Its not everyday when one gets to confront an astrophysicist on the air.

Anyway, good point.

It’s kind of a dim view of God, too, if you get right down to it. If you *need* to find things that are difficult to explain so that you can point to where God must have been involved, what kind of a minimalist God is *that*? It’s one who’s powerless to act in the really real world that you and I inhabit (unless He gets in the mood to shoot lightning bolts or something), and one who’s shrinking all the time as we learn more and more about what the Universe was like before we got here.

Such a limited God is too tiny for any theology I might ever think about wanting to embrace. Thanks anyway.

That seems to be the crux of their argument to me. That because something is unlikely, or needed a certain amount of random chance, that it is impossible. It’s like they view it as offensive, and believe that we have to have been planned thoroughly because the possibility that we came from a lucky break hurts their ego.

THANKS, RON! I’ve been wondering what that logical fallacy was called for a long time now!

Clue me in, science guys. It sounds kind of kinky.