The Wedge Document, which appeared on the internet in 1999, is a curious thing. I don’t want to discuss is merits and demerits in this post, but what it says about fear: on the one side of the wedge, the fear that motivated its writing, and on the other side, the fear of those who felt targetted by it.
Because even though the document itself has ceased to have force, the mutual distrust remains.
Dawkins was asked if seeing God would cause him to believe, he replied, in effect, he’d presume he was hallucinating. You can hear him in his own words at about 12:30 in the following video:
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ID proponents often portray ID critics as “materialists”, and recently someone asked whether a force was “material”. Well, if a force isn’t “material” then there are no “materialists”. So yes, is the answer to that question. A force that can move matter is a material force. A force that can’t move matter isn’t a force at all.
And this matters for the Intelligent Design argument, because when we infer that an object has been intelligently designed, we are also inferring that it was fabricated according to that design. And to fabricate an object, or modify it, the fabricator has to accelerate matter, i.e. give its parts some kinetic energy it did not otherwise possess, by applying a force.
Kairosfocus discusses this comment of mine at UD:
Elizabeth: That’s not what “undermines the case for design” William.What undermines the “case for design” chiefly, is that there isn’t a case for a designer.
If current models are inadequate (and actually all models are), and indeed we do not yet have good OoL models, that does not in itself make a case for design.It merely makes a case for “our current models are inadequate”.
Even if it could be shown that some oberved feature has no possible evolutionary pathway, that wouldn’t make the case for design.What might would be some evidence of a design process, or fabrication process, or some observable force that moved, say, strands of DNA into novel positions contrary to known laws of physics and chemistry.
And it would be interesting.
I’m not going to discuss things at UD until Barry makes it clear that he will not retrospectively delete, wholesale, posts by posters he subsequently decides to ban. It makes discussion pointless. In any case, comments are closed on that thread.
But I will respond to one thing in Kairosfocus’ post here:
Some of you are raring to go with responses to the Uncommon Descent post Dr. Ewert Answers. Adapa dropped the following into a thread in which I hope to engage Ewert in discussion of my own question, not Andy’s. Have fun.
___________________
Over at UD Ewert hand-waved away this question by Andy:
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…- A Sign of Unintelligent Design
In a recent thread here at TSZ William J. Murray brought up the subject of semiosis, to which Allan Miller responded:
Allan Miller: Nice to see WJM has absorbed UB’s ‘semiotic’ nomenclature though. Published nowhere, of course…
Let’s try this again.
In a recent post here at TSZ Elizabeth Liddle made the following statement:
What undermines the “case for design” chiefly, is that there isn’t a case for a designer.
Odd, I thought. Surely she knows better. All that time spent over at UD and never a case for a designer? Is this claim believable? I thought not.
…Gap Highlighter, Design Conjecture
Though I’ve continued to endear myself to the YEC community, I’ve certainly made myself odious in certain ID circles. I’ve often been the lone ID proponent to vociferously protest cumbersome, ill-conceived, ill-advised, confusing and downright wrong claims by some ID proponents. Some of the stuff said by ID proponents is of such poor quality they are practically gifts to Charles Darwin. I teach ID to university science students in extra curricular classes, and some of the stuff floating around in ID internet circles I’d never touch because it would cause my students to impale themselves intellectually.
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In a recent post here at TSZ Elizabeth Liddle made the following statement:
What undermines the “case for design” chiefly, is that there isn’t a case for a designer.
Odd, I thought. Surely she knows better. All that time spent over at UD and never a case for a designer?
This was later followed by yet another comment from Elizabeth:
I haven’t really taken to the “atheist” label, much although I don’t reject it – but it [the atheist label] implies that my non-belief in god or gods is something categorically different from my non-belief in unicorns or toothfairies, or in the proverbial orbiting teapot.
It’s not, of course, Elizabeth would say. But it is categorically different. For example, no one believes orbiting teapots design anything, and an orbiting teapot would be an instance of design, not an instance of a designer.
As this has now become a topic of discussion in the original thread I think it deserves it’s own thread. Well, not just that, I also think Elizabeth is being dishonest [EDIT: but not deliberately misleading: dishonest, defn. not worthy of trust or belief].
…non-interactive, invisible, silent, hidden, indifferent, concealed Designer
I cringed when I heard an IDist say something to the effect, “we use forensic science all the time to infer design, and this same science demonstrates an Intelligence made life”. The problem is forensic science identifies designs made by humans (or something human like). People generally believe some designer made Stonehenge because they see humans making comparable designs all the time. Many IDists don’t seem to appreciate invoking a never-seen designer poses a challenge for accepting design in biology.
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…Church Was On the Wrong Side, As Usual
http://www.theguardian.com/global/live/2015/may/23/counting-underway-for-irelands-referendum-on-marriage-equality
Irish voters have decisively voted in favour of marriage equality, making Ireland the first country to do so through the ballot box. Only one of the 43 constituencies voted against the proposal – Roscommon-South Leitrim – while the yes vote exceeded 70% in many parts of Dublin. The no campaigners have paid tribute to their opponents, and the archbishop of Dublin has said the result should be a wake-up call for the Catholic church in Ireland.
[title shortened by Lizzie]
I’d like to start a thread about the proposition that features of the universe indicate that a designer designed and created it for a purpose.
We have had many such discussions on this blog previously, but I propose that in this thread we abide by a new rule: we will conduct the discussion solely in the form of English called E-prime:
E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes denoted É or E′), a prescriptive version of the English language, excludes all forms of the verb to be. E-Prime does not allow the conjugations of to be—be, am, is, are, was, were, been, being—the archaic forms of to be (e.g. art, wast, wert), or the contractions of to be—’m, ‘s, ‘re (e.g. I’m, he’s, she’s, they’re).
A little fun, where you can unleash you inner crank / woomeister. Do you think there is anything we’ll discover in the future that will radically change things? Examples include but not limited to:
Life on Mars, Signals from ET, FTL travel, PSI phenomena, Limitless energy, Immortality, Message from God, Real AI, Crashed UFO, Atlantis, Decent country music, etc.
Have some fun with this. No-one is judging*
*Probably not true.
to recent discussions here at TSZ:
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.
Albert Goldbarth, ”The Sciences Sing a Lullabye”
about “belief”, and “expectation” …
I’m ambivalent to the question whether ID is or is not science. I don’t care how it is classified. The more important question is whether it is true. Even though in some people’s definition of science, ID might count as science, in other people’s definition of science it won’t count as science. Therefore, just to be safe and avoid pointless arguments, ID should not be promoted as science even by IDists.
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photo credit: Ninshinoshima in March 2015. NASA Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen
The picture is of Nishinoshima island.
A robot is presented with a collection of 2000 randomly configured fair coins. The robot orients them all to heads. How much CSI is evidenced by the 2000 coins after the robot is done with them? I said 2000 bits. Winston said 0 bits. Other IDists said something in between.
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A thread at UD that was just beginning to get interesting was unfortunately cut short when Elizabeth departed.
As is oh so typical over at UD, those silly IDiots were appealing to obvious truths and the primacy of logical reasoning. Elizabeth, in contrast, was championing her empirical methodology.
During the exchange, Elizabeth made the following statements:
As we have some newcomers, and some new-oldcomers (including me!) I thought I’d just draw everyone’s attention to the Rules of the Game at TSZ. They are written here and updated from time to time, but I have also pasted them below. We do try not to be heavy-handed with them, and to be as equitable as is humanly possible, but we will make judgements that you disagree with, possibly with good reason. The good news is that you can discuss these in Moderation Issues, and that, with the exception of a very narrow and specific range of material, posts will only be moved, not deleted. Moving a post because it contravenes a rule does NOT imply ANY kind of moral judgment on the post. A post can be morally justified yet contravene the rules, and can be morally indefensible yet remain within it. The rules are entirely orthogonal to morality, and when we ask you to “assume all other posters are posting in good faith” we do not require that you believe it, any more than the assumption of innocence until proven guilty requires belief in a person’s innocence.That is why I call them “Game rules”. They are simply the rules of the discussion game as played here at TSZ. We also have the Sandbox for off-topic scrapping that is getting in the way of discussion, or even off-topic chat about fun stuff.