I think you could search everything I've ever written on the topic and you'd find I've never supported anything that William Dembski has said, try searching this blog for his name and you'll find out I've never mentioned him once in a blog post. Nor have I ever dealt with one of his theories.
I am not even certain we'd agree on the existence of natural selection. I, unlike, as I suspect, you, have read some of what he says and have listened to a few of his lectures and think that he's not irresponsible in many of his claims - I think we'd disagree on one thing, he seems to believe in natural selection whereas I think it's a product of imagination, wishful thinking and self-interest turned into required dogma.
I think natural selection is a lot like Ptolemaic cosmology, an attempt to come up with a mechanism to scientifically and rationally explain natural phenomena, the movements and positions of planets, stars, the Earth and the Sun, from a pre-set point of view on the basis of very limited information. Only the phenomena that classical-medieval cosmology attempted to explain is simple childs play as opposed to the vast, huge, largely unobservable natural history and events which produced the diversity of species on Earth. And, I'll point out, natural selection has both been the dominant ideology in biology and associated sciences and pseudo-sciences for a small fraction of the time Ptolemaic cosmology was the dominant model and it has already undergone both drastic, I would say basic modifications and and has spun off an enormous diversity of variant, sometimes opposing and contradicting definitions and versions. And it has had to contend with other, far less overstretched and distorted theories of evolutionary change even as it's retained as the required dogma that all sciency persons must swear allegiance to in order to avoid being declared to have cooties and not an uncouth, declassé hillbilly, which is probably the strongest motive in its retention. I'll point out in passing, uncouth hillbillies aren't that different than college credentialed snobs. Look at the college grad who support Trump.
The short answer is, look at what I wrote that you're whining about, I don't believe intelligent design has any prospect of being proven scientifically anymore than I do abiogenesis does or, in fact, that natural selection can either be adequately defined or confirmed as actually happening in reality. I've declared over and over again that unless you discover THE original organism that did not, as all other organisms have, come from an already living organism, You can know nothing about how that original organism arose, what the organism was like or how the various parts of it, including I would insist, a containing membrane in which its body chemistry would have had to happen, formed, and how it metabolized and, most importantly, reproduced. The only way you can know what that original organism was you would have to have it or its resolvable fossilized remains and even those could only tell you a small fraction of what you would need to know. It's doubtful that even if you had the best possible micro-fossil of its structure to observe it would tell you much if anything as to how it came about or even what infinitesimally small probability of that happening spontaneously would have been. I think it's entirely unreasonable to believe that could have happened by random, chance events because I believe those are more than size of the universe against 1 of happening unlikely to have ever occured even once. But any such belief in intelligent design, even if it had enormous power of likelihood would remain invisible to legitimate science because science couldn't do the work to confirm that.
Not everything important to conclude is resolvable by science. I don't think science has any exclusive claim to the issues involved and only has a claim in so far as, within its rules and capabilities, it can contribute information supporting a conclusion. But in biology and cosmology, not to mention the pseudo-sciences, the claims of atheists far outstrip the legitimate bounds of science and, when looked at rigorously, are no more well founded than the 6-day creationists. I know, I've argued with atheists about abiogenesis and they're totally faith-based on the topic. Only their ideology being atheism instead of religion, they're allowed to insert that into science where neither belong.
Update: YOU CAN'T CLAIM I'VE REPEATED WHAT WILLIAM DEMBSKI SAID BY SENDING ME A VIDEO OF MICHAEL BEHE. They aren't the same person. Either get the guy with cooties you're claiming I'm copying right or admit that I never copied the one you claim I did. As I challenged you, search my blog for Behe and you will find I've never mentioned him before in this blog or, as I recall, did I ever mention him in an argument except to make the point that in order to know what someone was saying you had to know what they said, not what someone attacking them claimed they said.
That Micheal Behe pointed out in his disagreement about mousetraps with John MacDonald that there's nothing surprising about an intelligent designer being able to design an irreducibly complex system ONLY SUPPORTS MY CONTENTION THAT ANY INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED EXPERIMENT OR CONSTRUCT ENABLES A PROPONENT OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN TO POINT OUT THAT IT IS A PRODUCT OF WHAT THEY ARE CLAIMING IS NECESSARY FOR DESIGN. Behe is, with complete justification, pointing out something I pointed out in a blog post about the claims that scientists had been able to synthesize DNA and getting it to replicate after a series of very well conducted experiments (which, of course, blog atheists claimed nailed their case for them) about four years before Behe claimed it in that video. Though I doubt Behe got the idea from me, it's so friggin' obvious that anyone smarter than your typical online atheist can see it. In other words, most people.
YOU CANNOT USE AN INTELLIGENTLY DESIGNED EXPERIMENT OR SYSTEM TO PROVE THE ABSENCE OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN BECAUSE INTELLIGENT DESIGN IS INTRINSIC TO THE RESULTS YOU WANT TO SO USE. That you don't like that fact is just tough cookies, kid. It's the way it is.
Geesh, you guys really have no clue as to how reason works, do you. And you claim "WE own it, man."
You know, trying to find a source for an argument is not the same thing as dismantling the argument with reason.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, there's a name for that fallacious reasoning: it's called the "straw man."
I think easily 98% of pop atheism is founded on the genetic fallacy and the conviction that religious people are hillbillies with cooties.
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