Stamp out anti-science in US politics

[Martinus]

There problem with ID is that it is unfalsifiable and and they require one positive proof. No such proof exists. ID is philosophically unsound and scientifically unsupported.

Well right it is pretty worthless as anything other than a political compromise sorta thing.  It makes no appreciable difference and even if the proof existed...I mean if God poofed before you and said 'Yo I did this'...how would that even effect how we do science?  Except maybe we might rename it 'finding out the stuff God did'.

As I said, it's the God of Gaps. Essentially, the shtick of the religious has always been to find whatever it is that the science cannot explain (right now it's the Big Bang and origins of the universe) and claim it's the evidence (or at least a possibility) of God's involvement. If you consider however that they have been doing this act for centuries and every single time so far they have been proven wrong (they claimed God created life, God created man, God created earth, God causes a lightning to strike, God causes diseases, etc.), I see little reason to even consider that this time they may actually be right.

It's as if you had a friend who claimed he saw a ghost at a specific location. But every time you went there, there would be no sign of the ghost, but your friend would always point to another place as the one where you would surely find the ghost instead. And each time he would be proven wrong. Over and over again. Eventually, you would stop listening to him and would consider your friend a liar or a nutcase, even if, at any particular time, he would point to a place you cannot get to and check just yet - it would take a very naive person to falll for that shtick all the time.

[Valmy]

No, religious people are not one some sort of borg hive mind. The only philosophically sound arguments permitting a god are Deist. A Christian or a Jew or a Muslim arguing for the existence of god by arguing for Deist cosmology is just as silly as any of the three using each other in their own support. None of the Abrahamic Religions claim God started the world and then just watched from afar as the Deists claim, they claim that God interferes.

Wait you just claimed a theist view of nature is philosophically unsound then you turn it around and claim that the only relgious people who take the the fundy view of God are philosophically sound?

[Valmy]

As I said, it's the God of Gaps.

Well Fundies, at least Christian fundies, do that even inside their own scriptures so it is their favorite weapon.  Mostly because you can never disprove it and then they can use that to claim anything and everything they want is absolute truth.  Which would be hilarious if it did not have such frustrating consequences.

[Valmy]

I've used precisely that argument against ID when "in my cups". Even if ID was true it would be better to pretend that it wasn't since if ID is true cause and effect in biology is gone and any science cannot produce results.

Ultimately ID is an attempt to disprove philosophical naturalism by falsifying methodological naturalism.

Hmmmm I had not thought about that.  ID as a way to remove the legitimacy of cause and effect relationships.  Perhaps this is the old canard about how natural selection is evil and cannot be true (because, it seems, that means the Nazis were right or something).

[Viking]

No, religious people are not one some sort of borg hive mind. The only philosophically sound arguments permitting a god are Deist. A Christian or a Jew or a Muslim arguing for the existence of god by arguing for Deist cosmology is just as silly as any of the three using each other in their own support. None of the Abrahamic Religions claim God started the world and then just watched from afar as the Deists claim, they claim that God interferes.

Wait you just claimed a theist view of nature is philosophically unsound then you turn it around and claim that the only relgious people who take the the fundy view of God are philosophically sound?

The only way your reply here makes any sense to me is if you don't know what Deism is.

[Neil]

I`ve no problem with intelligent design, it is indeed a valid idea that is fine to teach in schools, afterall its a commonly believed answer to one of the great questions.
The only problem is when it gets into creationism and starts saying evolution is wrong, there it`s just outright wrong and anyone who supports that needs shooting.

eh? I'm sorry, but getting into high school biology textbooks is going to require a higher standard than being "a commonly believed answer to one of the great questions", even in countries that don't have a separation of church and state. You should look up Kitzmiller vs. Dover, ID is Creationism.

This is simply not true.  It's like arguing that Lamarckian evolution is the same as Darwinian Evolution.  I agree that it's not appropriate in a public school, but it's not the same as arguing that God created the Earth over the course of a week.

Creation, ID and Lamarckian Evolution are all just as untrue. They are all contradicted by the evidence. Quibbling about the degrees of wrongness is pointless outside of nerd-debates.

You can't falsify the soft version of ID, so for you to say it's untrue is overreaching on your part.  ID of any kind isn't scientific though, but rather religious.

[Viking]

I've used precisely that argument against ID when "in my cups". Even if ID was true it would be better to pretend that it wasn't since if ID is true cause and effect in biology is gone and any science cannot produce results.

Ultimately ID is an attempt to disprove philosophical naturalism by falsifying methodological naturalism.

Hmmmm I had not thought about that.  ID as a way to remove the legitimacy of cause and effect relationships.  Perhaps this is the old canard about how natural selection is evil and cannot be true (because, it seems, that means the Nazis were right or something).

I'm a bit unclear about what you are saying. But imagine that you are writing your thesis in biology and you are studying a bacteria which can break down pollutants into benign products and you are writing up your results. How can you prove that in your experiment the Intelligent Designer did not intervene to skew your results? There is no way for you to tell if your results are because the ID is altering your experiments or if this is the nature of the universe. Ultimately nothing can be known since everything that happens, remember not interfering is a choice for the ID, happens at the whim of the ID. We do not know anything about the ID so we don't know anything about the ID's limitations.

So, even if ID were true, we would be better off pretending it were not true, if only to be able to figure out why stuff happens.

[Viking]

You can't falsify the soft version of ID, so for you to say it's untrue is overreaching on your part.  ID of any kind isn't scientific though, but rather religious.

Fair enough... What has been falsified has been every single claim of ID proponents about it.

I'd like to get rid of the use of "soft" and "strong" when referring to ideas and philosophical systems. The only meaning those words confer seem to me to be the importance the holder of the idea or system puts on convincing others to agree with him. Or, alternately, the willingness of the holder to take offense when his ideas are challenged.

[Neil]

I'd like to get rid of the use of "soft" and "strong" when referring to ideas and philosophical systems. The only meaning those words confer seem to me to be the importance the holder of the idea or system puts on convincing others to agree with him. Or, alternately, the willingness of the holder to take offense when his ideas are challenged.

They seem to have caught on as a useful shorthand for discussion purposes.  How else do you differentiate the ID of the Wedge Institute from 'prime mover' ID with a single word?  The meaning is, as always, dependent on the context.

[Viking]

I'd like to get rid of the use of "soft" and "strong" when referring to ideas and philosophical systems. The only meaning those words confer seem to me to be the importance the holder of the idea or system puts on convincing others to agree with him. Or, alternately, the willingness of the holder to take offense when his ideas are challenged.

They seem to have caught on as a useful shorthand for discussion purposes.  How else do you differentiate the ID of the Wedge Institute from 'prime mover' ID with a single word?  The meaning is, as always, dependent on the context.

The Discovery Institute ID is ID.

You'll have to define the other thing for me before I can tell you if it has a word or not.

[Valmy]

The only way your reply here makes any sense to me is if you don't know what Deism is.

Deism: the belief in a clockmaker God who created the universe but does not interfere.

[Valmy]

I'm a bit unclear about what you are saying. But imagine that you are writing your thesis in biology and you are studying a bacteria which can break down pollutants into benign products and you are writing up your results. How can you prove that in your experiment the Intelligent Designer did not intervene to skew your results? There is no way for you to tell if your results are because the ID is altering your experiments or if this is the nature of the universe. Ultimately nothing can be known since everything that happens, remember not interfering is a choice for the ID, happens at the whim of the ID. We do not know anything about the ID so we don't know anything about the ID's limitations.

So, even if ID were true, we would be better off pretending it were not true, if only to be able to figure out why stuff happens.

Yes that was exactly what I was saying.

The Canard part was that alot of the reason some religious people oppose evolution so strongly is because they are fed the line that evolution says that killing off the weakest makes things better.  So they claim evolution is about Nazism and Racism and evil and blah blah.

[Viking]

The only way your reply here makes any sense to me is if you don't know what Deism is.

Deism: the belief in a clockmaker God who created the universe but does not interfere.

Yes, and you realize that the clockmaker God doesn't inhabit burning bushes, 1st century rabbi's or write books for epileptic 7th century arab traders/warlords. You can get Deism at a UU church, nowhere else. Deism is the only religion that has a theology with a leg to stand on, primarily because the God of Deism is the God of Spinoza.

Now a sound argument does not mean a convincing or compelling argument. You can make a sound argument on bad premises (garbage in garbage out). Deism is the only theology which argues for a cosmology which cannot be immediately disproved by logic or observation.

[Valmy]

Yes, and you realize that the clockmaker God doesn't inhabit burning bushes, 1st century rabbi's or write books for epileptic 7th century arab traders/warlords.

Yes of course.  Only those who take spiritual concepts as literal facts get in that trouble: as in fundamentalists.

[Viking]

Yes, and you realize that the clockmaker God doesn't inhabit burning bushes, 1st century rabbi's or write books for epileptic 7th century arab traders/warlords.

Yes of course.  Only those who take spiritual concepts as literal facts get in that trouble: as in fundamentalists.

If Yahwe didn't talk to the Hebrew Prophets why be a Jew?
If Jesus didn't suffer and die for our sins why be a Christian?
If Gabriel didn't reveal the Koran to Muhammed why be a Muslim?

If these spiritual concepts are not facts then why be spiritual at all?