Intelligent Design: Viable Theory or Religious Rewording?

• tk421

  

  jmog wrote:

  tk421 wrote:
  
  How is it ignorant? Do you have some knowledge of how the universe started? No, I don't think so. You don't find the idea that "God" created the heavens and the Earth and all the plants, animals, etc on this planet just for us a tad arrogant?

  Anyone who truly understands the math/statistics/science involved in the creation of the first life could tell you why its ignorant to believe it just happened by chance.
  
  How is it arrogant to believe that "God" created everything? Please explain that logic.

  Ha ha, no one understands how the first life started. To say otherwise is stupid. Just because it was written in a book does not make it true. I find it arrogant of humans to think that we are so special that "God" created only us in this vast universe and that "God" watches over us and everything follows "his" plan. The vast cosmos must have been created by "God" so that we would wonder about our place in life and marvel at his greatness.
• tk421

  

  I have far more faith in random chance of life starting in this universe than any "god" creating life. The idea that some omnipotent being has nothing better to do than watch over us insignificant beings is laughable.
• jmog

  tk421 wrote:
  Ha ha, no one understands how the first life started. To say otherwise is stupid. Just because it was written in a book does not make it true. I find it arrogant of humans to think that we are so special that "God" created only us in this vast universe and that "God" watches over us and everything follows "his" plan. The vast cosmos must have been created by "God" so that we would wonder about our place in life and marvel at his greatness.

  Find where I said anyone knows for a fact how the first life started, if not then learn to read.
  
  I have stated my belief, but never said I knew for a fact.
  
  I can say that anyone who believes the first life started by chance doesn't understand the math/science involved, that's coming as a mathmetician and scientist myself.
  
  Who said "god" only created life on this planet? I don't see anywhere in the Bible that says yea or nay on this subject one way or another. So your premise that the Bible says we are the only ones is false.
  
  So both things you assumed to write that post are false.
• jmog

  tk421 wrote: I have far more faith in random chance of life starting in this universe than any "god" creating life.

  Then you truly don't understand statistics and the science involved in creating the first life. Like I said, even the evolutionary biologists don't believe it was by chance anymore.
• FatHobbit

  

  jmog wrote: Even the evolutionists are starting to "come around" and realize it all didn't happen by chance. However, they refuse to even consider an "inteligent design" so instead their answer is aliens planted the first life on the planet. Still an inteligent "being" starting life here on Earth, but they refuse to even consider a thought of that being being "god". I wish I was making it up, but its true, one of the most common beliefs among evolutionists with regards to how life began on Earth is now an alien "plant" or "seed" of life of one form or another.

  I don't know anyone who believes aliens planted life on this planet. That would then cause me to ask how the aliens came into being.
• jmog

  FatHobbit wrote:
  
  I don't know anyone who believes aliens planted life on this planet. That would then cause me to ask how the aliens came into being.

  Google search my friend, its a very common belief of the origin of life on Earth among evolutionary biologists who study this subject.
  
  Then, why you ask the origin of life on the "other" planet, they are then just lost.
  
  I wish, as a scientist, I was making this up.
  
  Look up Abiogenesis, which is the scientific study of the origin of life here on Earth. I hate wikipedia, but its a quick source on the subject if you don't want to dig through scientific papers on the subject.
• Paladin

  ID is just another attempt by the religious whackos to get religion into the schools. The extremists stop at nothing to further their agenda. Real scientists by huge margins in poll after poll do not believe in god or an "intelligent design". That always rubs the whackos the wrong way and instead of just science being taught, they want their indoctrination included.
  
  Thats best left in the home or church, not at school.
• jmog

  Paladin wrote: ID is just another attempt by the religious whackos to get religion into the schools. The extremists stop at nothing to further their agenda. Real scientists by huge margins in poll after poll do not believe in god or an "intelligent design". That always rubs the whackos the wrong way and instead of just science being taught, they want their indoctrination included.
  
  Thats best left in the home or church, not at school.

  What's interesting, is the exact same could be said for some "scientists" if you put them in your statements instead of "religious whackos".
  
  Look at AGW scientists, and even some evolutionary scientists. They are no different than "religious whackos".
  
  And you want to talk about indoctrination? Take a college philosophy or science class, if some of the profs even get a hint that you don't believe in evolution/big bang you can/will be laughed out of the room. I've seen just as much "indoctrination" in science classes as I have in any church...sometimes more so.
  
  Modern science, especially in the areas like AGW and evolution, oftentimes teach as FACT things that are still only theory and won't hear/talk about any other theories at all.
• BoatShoes

  jmog wrote:

  tk421 wrote:
  
  How is it ignorant? Do you have some knowledge of how the universe started? No, I don't think so. You don't find the idea that "God" created the heavens and the Earth and all the plants, animals, etc on this planet just for us a tad arrogant?

  Anyone who truly understands the math/statistics/science involved in the creation of the first life could tell you why its ignorant to believe it just happened by chance.
  
  Even the evolutionists are starting to "come around" and realize it all didn't happen by chance. However, they refuse to even consider an "inteligent design" so instead their answer is aliens planted the first life on the planet. Still an inteligent "being" starting life here on Earth, but they refuse to even consider a thought of that being being "god". I wish I was making it up, but its true, one of the most common beliefs among evolutionists with regards to how life began on Earth is now an alien "plant" or "seed" of life of one form or another.

  Ok, you're exaggerating a lot and you know you are. "Anyone who understand statistics is ignorant to think it happened by chance"...
  
  C'mon, it's reasonable to hold the position..."this couldn't have happened by chance"...but to say it's ignorant to believe it happened by chance and any scientist, statistician or mathematician will tell this is untrue, and you know it's untrue...you just think it's ignorant. There are plenty of mathematicians who are naturalists would disagree.
  
  AND, in regards to abiogenesis on earth....it is far from the case that extraterrestrial theories about the origin of life building molecules are the most widely accepted theories.
  
  There is a lot of debate and different conjectures but the most commonly adopted foundation is the idea is that early Earth had a chemically reducing atmosphere and it was demonstrated, that in this environment, electrical activity can catalyze the creation of small monomers like amino acids...
  
  After that we have, how did these molecules get together and start self-replication which has to be done with BOTH proteins and nucleic acids and from there you'll see divergence as to whether proteins or nucleic acids came first.
  
  Some have come along and argued that the early earth didn't have a chemically reducing atmosphere and therefore the experiments demonstrating that electricity can't catalyze monomers are useless.
  
  Nonetheless, this is along the lines of what most naturalist biologists believe.
• bigmanbt

  By the way, without a single fossil ever being found, evolution would still be a verifiable fact. Those that are stuck on fossils and don't look any further haven't a clue about real evolution.
• bigmanbt

  jmog wrote:

  tk421 wrote: I have far more faith in random chance of life starting in this universe than any "god" creating life.

  Then you truly don't understand statistics and the science involved in creating the first life. Like I said, even the evolutionary biologists don't believe it was by chance anymore.

  Being a sibling of an evolutionary biologist, and an avid life researcher, you couldn't be more wrong. They don't know for sure how the origin of life came about, but they certainly don't think there was a creator. Very, very, very few biologists believe in a supernatural being.
  
  Oh, and about statistics, a conservative estimate of the number of planets in the universe is a billion billion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. With that many planets, it's almost impossible that life didn't pop up somewhere.
• Strapping Young Lad

  

  Most scientists I've read to not concede that happened by chance is too unlikely. In fact the idea that the universe is so vast and so old is reinforcing to the concept that there wasn't just one chance for conditions to be met for life to happen.
  
  There is probably much life out there in the universe and so what if we happened to evolve to intelligence??? We're probably not the only ones so it's not all that crazy. It was bound to happen given the size and age of the universe and now that it did happen, here we are wondering where we came from. It doesn't blow me away and make me run to a god.
  
  And I've read some the leading evolutionary biologist and while i've heard the idea that life may have been planted by a meteor, I've don't think they're ready to give credit to E.T. just yet....
• ptown_trojans_1

  

  Intelligent design is not something that should be taught in school, well maybe Sunday School, but that is it. It is not applicable to the scientific method, but that does not mean it needs to be dismissed completely, just in schools. Parents can just as well teach it to their kids and have the kids come to their own conclusions.
  
  Furthermore, I actually think the idea of creation and the big bang go together. In my mind, it was God that created the heavens and earth with the big bang as something beyond human comprehension had to happen to start it. From that bang, came everything we see today, and that does include evolution to a large degree.
• Cleveland Buck

  

  It is fine to teach the Big Bang as a theory that might have happened, but to teach it as the sole origin of anything is 100% false. If there was nothing before the Big Bang, then the Big Bang never would have happened and there would still be nothing. An isolated system trends toward entropy over time, not toward exploding and creating our universe.
• HitsRus

  

  Strapping Young Lad wrote: Most scientists I've read to not concede that happened by chance is too unlikely. In fact the idea that the universe is so vast and so old is reinforcing to the concept that there wasn't just one chance for conditions to be met for life to happen.
  
  There is probably much life out there in the universe and so what if we happened to evolve to intelligence??? We're probably not the only ones so it's not all that crazy. It was bound to happen given the size and age of the universe and now that it did happen, here we are wondering where we came from. It doesn't blow me away and make me run to a god.
  
  And I've read some the leading evolutionary biologist and while i've heard the idea that life may have been planted by a meteor, I've don't think they're ready to give credit to E.T. just yet....

  Laddie,
  I find it hard to believe that considering the complexity and precision, the idea that the universe came together by random chance is anymore plausible than 'design'. Even if it did by its sheer vastness, you still have Aquinas' causality to contend with.( wasn't it you who claimed love for TA?).
  
  There is no reason that evolution or the big bang could not be part of the design, and hence be compatible with Christianity and other religions. The problems that arise here are from assigning human characteristics to God....finite properties to the infinite.
  It's easy to knock down the straw man.
  
  
  Here is the classic example:
  bigmanbt wrote talking about Richard Dawkins' book 'The Greatest Show on Earth'...
  "Pertaining to this topic, in the book he suggests the internal layout of mammals is evidence against intelligent design. We all know of things in our body that have no use any more, like the appendix and the tailbone. But he mentions other examples with even more glaring evidence against intelligent design. Like the laryngeal nerve (I am going off memory as I loaned the book to a friend, but the name isn't as important). This is the nerve that runs from your brain to your larynx and allows for speech. You would imagine it would be a shorter strand of nerves, but it actually runs down your neck, around the lungs, then back up into the neck and connects to the larynx. If there was intelligent design, you would expect the nerve to run straight to the larynx, but the fact that it doesn't suggests no intelligent design"
  
  
  See what I mean? As if God micromanages his universe!
  In actuality the idea of "intelligent" design doesn't do God justice....the design merely intelligent?.... C'Mon! ...it's superduper awesome bonkers 'intelligent'. Give him some credit will ya?
• eersandbeers

  jmog wrote:

  FatHobbit wrote:
  
  I don't know anyone who believes aliens planted life on this planet. That would then cause me to ask how the aliens came into being.

  Google search my friend, its a very common belief of the origin of life on Earth among evolutionary biologists who study this subject.
  
  Then, why you ask the origin of life on the "other" planet, they are then just lost.
  
  I wish, as a scientist, I was making this up.
  
  Look up Abiogenesis, which is the scientific study of the origin of life here on Earth. I hate wikipedia, but its a quick source on the subject if you don't want to dig through scientific papers on the subject.

  I don't know many who think aliens populated the Earth besides Scientologists, but I know many believe we have been visited by aliens at some point in our history. I am one of these people as there is a great deal of evidence to bolster this theory.
• bigmanbt

  Hey, sorry I tried to give you a little more information about the evolutionary process. Those are human examples, but also are found in giraffes and other mammals. You should really read up on some science and biology, you sound very unintelligent when debating science.
• HitsRus

  

  Are you referring to me???? You are going to give me information? Son, I have a Bachelors in biology with a chemistry minor from a prestigious Eastern University, and a doctorate in Dentistry from Ohio State. My education includes 4 semesters of microbiology, 4 semesters of Biochemistry, 2 semesters of genetics, 3 semesters of Cellular Molecular Biology, 2 semesters of physiology, and 6 semesters of human and vertebrate anatomy.
  Giraffes and other mammals?...no shit Sherlock. Maybe because our genomes are 96% the same? Ya think?
  
  Unintelligent when debating science? I don't have a problem with science. I am 100% behind evolution as the best theory of explaining the development of life on this planet. But that in no way contradicts God or 'intelligent design'.
  YOU are the one with the problem of conceptualizing and thinking intuitively. YOU are the one limited by by what you can measure empirically with your 5 senses. Now I've posted a web site where you can read about these questions from several different scientists and scholars and viewpoints.
  
  http://www.templeton.org/belief/
  Take your head out of Dawkins' ass and see the UNIVERSE!
• Strapping Young Lad

  

  HitsRus wrote:

  Strapping Young Lad wrote: Most scientists I've read to not concede that happened by chance is too unlikely. In fact the idea that the universe is so vast and so old is reinforcing to the concept that there wasn't just one chance for conditions to be met for life to happen.
  
  There is probably much life out there in the universe and so what if we happened to evolve to intelligence??? We're probably not the only ones so it's not all that crazy. It was bound to happen given the size and age of the universe and now that it did happen, here we are wondering where we came from. It doesn't blow me away and make me run to a god.
  
  And I've read some the leading evolutionary biologist and while i've heard the idea that life may have been planted by a meteor, I've don't think they're ready to give credit to E.T. just yet....

  Laddie,
  I find it hard to believe that considering the complexity and precision, the idea that the universe came together by random chance is anymore plausible than 'design'. Even if it did by its sheer vastness, you still have Aquinas' causality to contend with.( wasn't it you who claimed love for TA?).
  
  There is no reason that evolution or the big bang could not be part of the design, and hence be compatible with Christianity and other religions. The problems that arise here are from assigning human characteristics to God....finite properties to the infinite.
  It's easy to knock down the straw man.
  
  
  Here is the classic example:
  bigmanbt wrote talking about Richard Dawkins' book 'The Greatest Show on Earth'...
  "Pertaining to this topic, in the book he suggests the internal layout of mammals is evidence against intelligent design. We all know of things in our body that have no use any more, like the appendix and the tailbone. But he mentions other examples with even more glaring evidence against intelligent design. Like the laryngeal nerve (I am going off memory as I loaned the book to a friend, but the name isn't as important). This is the nerve that runs from your brain to your larynx and allows for speech. You would imagine it would be a shorter strand of nerves, but it actually runs down your neck, around the lungs, then back up into the neck and connects to the larynx. If there was intelligent design, you would expect the nerve to run straight to the larynx, but the fact that it doesn't suggests no intelligent design"
  
  
  See what I mean? As if God micromanages his universe!
  In actuality the idea of "intelligent" design doesn't do God justice....the design merely intelligent?.... C'Mon! ...it's superduper awesome bonkers 'intelligent'. Give him some credit will ya?

  I like Aquinas as I mentioned, but I also mentioned that his 5 proofs are certainly not irrefutable. I'm not going into them because they're easily accessible.
  
  You're right there is no reason the Big Bang and Evolution couldn't be part of God's plan, but as I see it there's no need for god in the first place. Why make life complicated by inventing a God just because there are things we can't explain at this moment? I'm not going to waste my life depriving myself, being a good little boy in an attempt to get to a heaven that doesn't exist. Then two years after I die they'll create life in a laboratory and there goes god.
  
  If you were born in Saudi Arabia you'd be worshipping some other god and practicing some other arbitrary, superstitious rituals and you know it. What's the point???
• Cleveland Buck

  

  If there was no God or creator, then the Big Bang could never have happened and that is a scientific fact.
• Strapping Young Lad

  

  Who created God????
• Cleveland Buck

  

  Who said God needed to be created? God certainly wouldn't abide by our laws of physics. The Big Bang would though, which is why if it indeed happened, an outside influence would have had to cause it to happen.
• Strapping Young Lad

  

  Why do you think that the Big Bang defies the laws of physics??? Would it be accepted if it defied the laws???
• Cleveland Buck

  

  Look up the Laws of Conservation of Energy and Matter and tell me how we can get our universe today from nothing.
  
  Matter and energy can not be created or destroyed. Since they cannot be created, they have always existed in some form. Correct?
  
  Look up the Second Law of Thermodynamics and tell me how that big pile of matter and energy sits there for any period of time and spontaneously combusts into the universe.
  
  It can't. As an isolated system (which the universe is the only example of) exists, its entropy increases until it reaches equilibrium (maximum entropy) where no work can be accomplished. That system of matter and energy would not have become more volatile and exploded, it would have calmed down to nothingness.
  
  It seems more of a stretch for me to put my faith in believing a pile of matter and energy has always existed than to believe that God created it.
  
  Anyway, so either that system always existed and inexplicably exploded into our universe, which is impossible according to the laws of thermodynamics, or it didn't always exist, which means it was created, which is impossible according to the laws of physics.
• HitsRus

  

  Laddie wrote:
  " like Aquinas as I mentioned, but I also mentioned that his 5 proofs are certainly not irrefutable. I'm not going into them because they're easily accessible.
  
  You're right there is no reason the Big Bang and Evolution couldn't be part of God's plan, but as I see it there's no need for god in the first place. Why make life complicated by inventing a God just because there are things we can't explain at this moment? I'm not going to waste my life depriving myself, being a good little boy in an attempt to get to a heaven that doesn't exist. Then two years after I die they'll create life in a laboratory and there goes god.
  
  If you were born in Saudi Arabia you'd be worshipping some other god and practicing some other arbitrary, superstitious rituals and you know it. What's the point??? "
  
  
  YOU can refute Aquinas? Take your best shot!
  
  Religion is only a way to find your spirituality. You don't like one...find another.
  
  I'm Catholic...my sister is a buddhist....we both like Thai food....Go figure!