Kansas Votes 4-1 To Allow Intelligent Design

[JoeyKnothead]

From Kansas Votes 4-1 To Allow Intelligent Design:

Topic for debate:

Should Kansas have voted to allow Intelligent Design in order to achieve "balance"?

[ChaosBorders]

From Kansas Votes 4-1 To Allow Intelligent Design:

Topic for debate:

Should Kansas have voted to allow Intelligent Design in order to achieve "balance"?

No. Intelligent Design is not science. Period. End of story. They are idiots if they think otherwise.

Your opinion. Funny how the mainy Christian founders of Western science had no problem with the concept of God and His involvement in Creation, not for some reason it's 'anti-science'.

A) Many of those founders had deistic leanings.
B) Evolution does not address how life came about, only how it changes over time.
C) Depending on what 'founders' you are speaking of, they lived either close to (or extremely in excess of) a hundred years before the basic idea came into existence and began to be tested. That they were ignorant at the time does not mean they would endorse it today. You are commiting the very essence of the genetic fallacy.
D) Evolution and God are not mutually exclusive. Intelligent Design and Science, however, are.

[Wyvern]

From Kansas Votes 4-1 To Allow Intelligent Design:

Topic for debate:

Should Kansas have voted to allow Intelligent Design in order to achieve "balance"?

No. Intelligent Design is not science. Period. End of story. They are idiots if they think otherwise.

Your opinion. Funny how the mainy Christian founders of Western science had no problem with the concept of God and His involvement in Creation, not for some reason it's 'anti-science'.

No it is not opinion, the Dover case quite thoroughly showed that ID is nothing more than creationism repackaged. I would like to see one theory from these christian founders of western science which utilizes god in their theory. It seems like you are trying to resurrect the god of the gaps, just because you don't know something is no reason to invoke god and close the door on further investigation on the matter. Long ago we did not know what caused lightning so each pantheon created a god that made it, it may have been comforting but it does not help getting to the truth of the matter.

[East of Eden]

Intelligent Design is just a dressing up of the classic "God of the Gaps" fallacy...

If anything is so complex that we cannot fully explain it... then it "must" be made by a god.

What if God really was the first cause?

Then if you want it in a science class you had better show it scientifically.

It is unscientific to rule out a possibility a priori,

It is not ruled out a priori, however, until a testable hypothesis is constructed it cannot be examined with science.

especially when more and more scientists are seeing evidence for design.

Certainly false. ID never had widespread support to begin with and it has less now, what with most of the leading proponents, like Behe, has thoroughly discredited themselves.

And mainstream science doesn't know how the first non-life became life, they only have guesses.

No, they have testable models and data.

How come the only forbidden guesses are those involving ID?

Because it has no testable models, no data, and the predictions they make keep coming back wrong.

Where is that testable data of how the first non-life became life?

Self replicating RNA

Peptides might hold missing link to life

From your link:

"He is quick to point out that, while the self-replicating RNA enzyme systems share certain characteristics of life, they are not themselves a form of life."

Yes?? And??? No one said that know everything. You asked specifically about testable data on how the first life became non-life. This is step one.. Combine that with the peptide article, we get more steps. We don't have the whole picture, we only have bits and pieces of data.

Why rule out the possibility of a Designer, as some scientists think? Does it not fit into your agenda? You say you don't know everything, yet the one thing you claim to know with 100% certainty is that God wasn't involved. Even Richard Dawkins says it is possible God exists, which means it is possible He was involved in our being here.

The sound of moving goal posts is horrendous.

I have no clue what you mean.

[East of Eden]

No it is not opinion, the Dover case quite thoroughly showed that ID is nothing more than creationism repackaged. I would like to see one theory from these christian founders of western science which utilizes god in their theory.

How did Christian belief provide a cultural matrix (womb) for the growth of science?
In Christ and Science (p. 23), Jaki gives four reasons for modern science's unique birth in Christian Western Europe:

"Once more the Christian belief in the Creator allowed a break-through in thinking about nature. Only a truly transcendental Creator could be thought of as being powerful enough to create a nature with autonomous laws without his power over nature being thereby diminished. Once the basic among those laws were formulated science could develop on its own terms."
"The Christian idea of creation made still another crucially important contribution to the future of science. It consisted in putting all material beings on the same level as being mere creatures. Unlike in the pagan Greek cosmos, there could be no divine bodies in the Christian cosmos. All bodies, heavenly and terrestrial, were now on the same footing, on the same level. this made it eventually possible to assume that the motion of the moon and the fall of a body on earth could be governed by the same law of gravitation. The assumption would have been a sacrilege in the eyes of anyone in the Greek pantheistic tradition, or in any similar tradition in any of the ancient cultures."
"Finally, man figured in the Christian dogma of creation as a being specially created in the image of God. This image consisted both in man's rationality as somehow sharing in God's own rationality and in man's condition as an ethical being with eternal responsibility for his actions. Man's reflection on his own rationality had therefore to give him confidence that his created mind could fathom the rationality of the created realm."
"At the same time, the very createdness could caution man to guard agains the ever-present temptation to dictate to nature what it ought to be. The eventual rise of the experimental method owes much to that Christian matrix."


Modern science has grown out of Christian soil. This has been documented by many people, not necessarily Christians themselves. It was stressed by such writers as Alfred North Whitehead, the widely respected mathematician and philosopher, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.

[Goat]

Why rule out the possibility of a Designer, as some scientists think? Does it not fit into your agenda? You say you don't know everything, yet the one thing you claim to know with 100% certainty is that God wasn't involved. Even Richard Dawkins says it is possible God exists, which means it is possible He was involved in our being here.

I give the chance of God existing about the same level of confidence Richard Dawkins does.

Now, let's see you come up with a way to TEST for a designer. How do you 'detect design' ?? What method can you come up with to see if a 'design' was because of an
'intelligent designer' verses variation followed by selection.

Until you can do that, the concept of an 'intelligent designer' is merely religion. It has no real world application, except to make some people get warm fuzzes.

What explanatory power does I.D. give? If it is found correct, how can we apply that new knowledge to biology?

Come up with a way to test for I.D., and to falsify it, and then demonstrate it is true, you got a Nobel prize in the making. However, the groups that push for I.D. are not trying to do science, their battles are entirely in the political arena. Why would any group that is pushing a concept as science put all their effort into a political / PR effort, and no effort into doing any primary research? Think about it. Could it be that they are not doing any scientific research because the concept they are pushing is not science?

[aarons914]

I think we should allow the teaching of intelligent design but only if you guys allow multiple theories of it.

http://www.venganza.org/about/open-letter/

This letter to the Kansas state board explains why.

[WinePusher]

A) Many of those founders had deistic leanings.

We know of only three founders that were self proclaimed deists. Jefferson, Frankin and Paine. I do not think three constitutes many.

B) Evolution does not address how life came about, only how it changes over time.

Exactly

C) Depending on what 'founders' you are speaking of, they lived either close to (or extremely in excess of) a hundred years before the basic idea came into existence and began to be tested. That they were ignorant at the time does not mean they would endorse it today. You are commiting the very essence of the genetic fallacy.

It is this type of attitude that is the foundation for Liberal Judicial thought. I believe that you are suggesting that the founders and the constitution are not relevant today. That is flat out wrong, the constitution is meant to be read in it's originalist form to permitt maximum liberty. If the founders did not endorse something back then, then we today should follow their examples. Most countries tend to revere and respect their country founders instead of bash and dis credit them.

[Abraxas]

C) Depending on what 'founders' you are speaking of, they lived either close to (or extremely in excess of) a hundred years before the basic idea came into existence and began to be tested. That they were ignorant at the time does not mean they would endorse it today. You are commiting the very essence of the genetic fallacy.

It is this type of attitude that is the foundation for Liberal Judicial thought.

If so, "Liberal Judicial Thought" should be embraced by all. The idea that we should refuse to acknowledge the past 234 years of scientific advancement because the founding fathers couldn't have been aware of it is entirely indefensible, yet precisely what you are proposing.

I believe that you are suggesting that the founders and the constitution are not relevant today. That is flat out wrong, the constitution is meant to be read in it's originalist form to permitt maximum liberty. If the founders did not endorse something back then, then we today should follow their examples. Most countries tend to revere and respect their country founders instead of bash and dis credit them.

The irony is the founding fathers would be absolutely horrified to find that sentiment so common. They thought the constitution was something that needed regular revision, updates to make sure it stayed contemporary and kept pace with changes to the American landscape. They never wanted to have it or themselves enshrined with the kind of religious reverence and untouchable, sanctified status you want to bestow upon them. Honestly, I can think of nothing more disrespectful to what they did in creating the constitution than to attempt to hold America back from advancement and improvement and to do so in their name.

[chris_brown207]

Intelligent Design is just a dressing up of the classic "God of the Gaps" fallacy...

If anything is so complex that we cannot fully explain it... then it "must" be made by a god.

What if God really was the first cause? It is unscientific to rule out a possibility a priori, especially when more and more scientists are seeing evidence for design.

Yes, and what if Zeus was the first cause?... I don't see the point in arguing something for which no evidence exists to support it out side of our "awe and wonder at the majesty of the universe."

As was posted earlier: what is the point in supposing a god did anything until it can be tested and verified? How do these arguments further science in any way? It is not like the proponents are bringing scientific studies that are being discredited - they are bringing rationalizations of their own personal wishes... Hardly science.

[JoeyKnothead]

From Post 27:

...It is this type of attitude that is the foundation for Liberal Judicial thought. I believe that you are suggesting that the founders and the constitution are not relevant today...

I'd suggest they are relevant, but not so relevant we can't make up our own minds today.

That is flat out wrong, the constitution is meant to be read in it's originalist form to permitt maximum liberty.

If I accept that, I run into the issue of these founders' slaves.

I would contend we shouldn't so revere a document or notion simply because it has historical value or precedent.

Why does this notion that we should be bound to ancient documents always seem to come from (some) theists?

If the founders did not endorse something back then, then we today should follow their examples.

And make ancients of us all?

I personally will not ascribe to any notion that binds me to what the ancients thought simply because they may have been first to write it down.

Most countries tend to revere and respect their country founders instead of bash and dis credit them.

We shouldn't bind ourselves to what other countries think or do. Yours is an argumentum ad populum, if in reverse.

I would contend we are nigh on required to "bash and discredit" where such is due.