If I may:

Originally Posted by marc9000

I was originally questioning mans human, limited capabilities to understand what was involved in incomprehensible distances.

What is there to understand? At what point does distance stop being what it is? A car travelling at 60mph will take one minute to cover one mile. It will also take a billion minutes to travel a billion miles. My inability to grasp the scale of a billion miles or a billion minutes is irrelevant to the truth of that statement.

Here's a good one in the other direction: the number of atoms in a single pea is roughly the same as the number of peas it would take to cover the British Isles to the depth of one kilometre. And if you think that stretches the imagination, you might want to try reading this page. Given your earlier statements regarding the responsibility scientists supposedly have to make clear just what they want the general public to swallow, what's your take on the failure of creationists to make clear the implausible density of the pre-flood biosphere?

That prompted your above statement that “we don’t use naked eye observations.” Your answer was, in effect, that it’s not mans limited, human capabilities that are making the determinations, it’s machines that man has built that make the determinations.

No, they're gathering data that our own faculties are too limited to apprehend. Our eyes can't see the microwave aftermath of the Big Bang, a star's red-shift, analyse absorption or emission spectra, or spot gamma-ray bursts.

If these machines aren’t coming to completely new, different conclusions, then they aren’t showing themselves to be on the completely different level that you clearly implied that they were on.

That's like saying that if climbing Everest doesn't fundamentally alter your understanding of what's in your sock drawer, you haven't accomplished anything Of course, I would never denigrate the achievements of our ancestors - let us imagine that the sock drawer in question had been unusually tricky to locate and quite firmly locked.

Although in a sense, such a fundamental shift in understanding has in fact happened. As recently as the 1970's we were discovering that past supernovae were responsible for producing the heavy elements of which this planet, and everything on it, are largely composed. As it turned out, all our socks were from space.

Originally Posted by Peeling

And nor does anyone else. I think you grossly underestimate the thoroughness of much of the science you criticise.

Two points;

1)Thoroughness is good, things being built on step by step is how technology increases. There’s no question that a lot of science is like that, but it gets dangerous when it’s a subject that can be philosophical - something can be very narrowly explored and still be thorough, new exploration can constantly be started at…… step 3 for example. Astronomy can be like that, Darwinism IS be like that, and ID can be like that. Whenever popular assumptions are made without proof, those assumptions are built upon, without looking behind those assumptions and critically examining its foundation. Evolution is like that - Darwin had no idea that the simplest forms of life were so complicated. Philosophers (Huxley, Spencer many others) took right off with the social implications of evolution, and of course it’s all being continued today by Dawkins, Stenger and many others. Darwin’s simple thoughts that mice spontaniously generated from dirty hay for example, were the perfect building block for natural selection and all the other aspects of evolution that he came up with. We now know that the simplest forms of life are not simple, yet the scientific community continues to remain faithful to Darwinism/ evolution, and not look back behind Darwinism, something that ID can do.

2) Thorough science is public science. Demands of thoroughness are made of ID that were not made of astronomy in 1850, 1950, or 2008.

That's a pretty tortured comparison What exactly makes the forecaster's error one of measuring distance?

It was a conclusion from observation. He observed the clouds and the temperature and the biometric pressure etc and came to a conclusion that it was going to be a dry day. Astronomers look through a telescope and see a glimmer of light through thousands of light years of dark matter, and come to a conclusion that they see a galaxy. The difference is, the forecaster came to an observable conclusion as the result of his observation, one where the conclusion will be observed, and it showed him to be wrong. There is no observable conclusion to the sighting of a galaxy, there’s no upcoming event that can possibly prove it wrong.

Throw off our conclusions about what? I'm getting a bit confused as to what you're trying to cast doubt upon.

Our conclusions that we see a galaxy, hundreds of thousands of light years away. We’re seeing glimmers of light. Maybe they’re something else, much closer.

Dark matter is stuff that doesn't interact via the electromagnetic force, so again by definition anything that we can't 'see' using EM waves is dark matter. this is an interesting article about one way we can observe it indirectly

They “made the landmark observations by studying a galaxy cluster 3 billion light years away.” Is there a chance that maybe they started their observations at step three?

Dust and clutter we can see, and chemically analyse through emission or absorption spectra. But again, what exactly do you think it's interfering with?

Our ability to see what we think we see, and be so sure about it that we establish it as fact, then use it as a foundation for further exploration. To no longer subject step one to scrutiny. The way Darwinism isn’t subject to scrutiny, in spite of what we’ve learned about the simplest forms of life. To go back to step one, as ID seeks to do.

I think it's fine, although when you shrink the earth to 1" across one starts to lose one's grip on how tiny a person is. I don't really get what the problem is.

Tininess can mean insignificance, when it comes to great distances. When we shrink the earth to a grain of sand, the Hubble telescope becomes microscopic, can something that microscopic see inconceivable distances, even when those distances remain inconceivable even after they’ve been proportionally scaled down?

Originally posted by marc9000] The nearest star to us, Centauri is 4.22 light years away, making it 1050 miles away from that grain of sand earth. If the grain of sand earth is in New York city, the nearest star is in Montgomery Alabama. Sirius, 8.55 light years, 2129 miles, just about New York to LA.

Originally Posted by Peeling

Illuminating, but again - so what?

Distances mean things. If I’m viewing webpages or sending messages to places like Australia or Germany, I sometimes notice just a little less speed and dependability than when I do it withiln the U.S. Compared to thousands of light years, overseas internet communication is drop in the bucket concerning distance, yet I suspect distance and all it’s complications are causing it. Space is comparatively clear compared to earth’s dense atmosphere, but it’s not perfectly clear. When any vision that’s less than perfect is multiplied by thousands of light years, who can say for sure just how severe the distortion really is?

I still don't see what this has to do with your claim that atheists love the idea of a universe too big for any god to preside over it. I think you've realised that argument makes no sense and you're trying to turn it into something else.

But ok, let's follow this new avenue instead. If anyone is actively seeking to support a belief system, no matter what it is, they'll readily accept hypotheses and conclusions they find agreeable whatever the source. Equally, they will dismiss theories or conclusions they find disagreeable, whatever the source, and without giving the details much thought. This has no bearing on the scientific validity (or lack thereof) of the hypotheses or conclusions themselves.

You’ve touched on something important - It DOES have a bearing on scientific validity if there’s a REFUSAL TO OBSERVE something that’s relevant.

To put it another way, the fact someone can unquestioningly take statements about the universe's vast scale at face value does not mean if they did ask questions they would find it to be in error.

But there would be a possibility they would find it in error.

I was 15 years old in 1969 when men supposedly walked on the moon. I was a normal, patriotic American, I wanted to believe they did. A small percentage of people didn’t believe it back then, mostly non religious types, some people won’t believe anything unless they see it. I just shrugged them off, but the one thing that I didn’t completely understand was the 1/6th gravity thing, why the astronauts weren’t able to jump 20 feet in the air. Quite a coincidence, the space suits were so heavy that they jumped just like they were on earth, in an old-time movie with film speed issues. It wasn’t until 30 years later when I saw the Percy/Collier video about it, with lots of observations, that I now have doubts, though I don’t take a firm position one way or the other. Many people do, and it’s amazing how much observing is going on, and how different things are seen. There are legitimate questions being asked about lots of observations, and they’re being steamrolled by the NASA community. Have you ever wondered why we can’t use the technology that we use to see 3 billion light years away, and focus a telescope on the surface of the moon and clearly see the left-behind base of the lunar modules from Apollo, or the moon-rover vehicles? Is this an example of refusal to observe? The moon is only just over a light-second away, we ought to be able to see a gnat at that distance.

Common thinking seems to be that in controversial scientific matters, the truth will always eventually make it’s way to the forefront as time goes by. It’s not necessarily true, not when one special interest that’s saturated with tax money, seeks to steamroll opposition to its establishment. There are striking similarities to the attitudes of evolution defenders and NASA defenders.

If you'll forgive me for saying so, you seem to have a rather fuzzy idea of what it means for something to be 'scientific'

This coming from someone who says hundreds-of-thousands-of-light-years telescope gazing IS science, Richard Dawkins evolution proclamations IS science, and study for evidence in biological design IS NOT science. It’s your fuzziness that I’m trying to explore.

I don't think your scale analogies (if that's what you're talking about) are soaring over anyone's head. I think they, like me, are wondering what you're trying to show with them.

Suppose you’re a teacher with a room full of students, and the state of........ Tennessee is the subject. You want to teach them some basic borders, city locations, river locations, adjoining states, etc. Do you scale it down and show the whole state and all the above associated things on the chalkboard, or do you have a bus drop the class along a road in the Tennessee woods somewhere and start talking about it? Which is most effective? Scaling something down to a more perceivable level is often the only way to a basic, overall understanding of it.

Yes, and then answering them yourself, with fantastic stories

If there’s one thing evolutionists do well, it’s mocking any type of question about anything they like with the “fantastic stories” chant, the “evil conspiracy“ chant, “EAC” chant, etc. So much ridicule for anyone but themselves. The evil ID conspiracy seems to be the only one on earth they allow, the only one on earth that cannot be mocked. This kind of double standard should show any casual observer that attacks on ID are more rooted in emotion than anything else.

Again, you're going to have to explain what relevance the difficulties we have forecasting the behaviour of a complex, chaotic system has to the straightforward observation of galaxies. I mean, they're galaxies. Right there, in a picture in front of you. I'm struggling to understand what you think can have gone wrong

Let's use the same kind of analogy you've employed. If I want to take a picture of a basketball, I can do that close up, right? But if I want to take a picture of 1500 basketballs, all spaced out, I have no option but to do so from further away. With a standard 28mm lens on a 35mm camera, and allowing 4 square feet of floor per basketball, I would need to be roughly 90 feet up in the air to fit them all in the frame.

Now imagine I want to take that same picture with an extreme telephoto lens, equivalent to peeking through a dime-sized hole seventy-five feet away. In order to see all those basketballs through that hole, they're going to have to be a bit further away. Almost nineteen miles in fact.

Now make them 1500 earth-sized planets. It's a straightforward scaling up of similar triangles: now I'd have to be almost 2,000,000,000 miles away. 1500 suns? 217,011,334,736 miles away. 1500 solar systems (just out to pluto, not including the comets)? 919,679,070,315,789 miles away, or 156LY. If we include the comets, that becomes 2,299,197,675,789,472,500 miles.

But we aren't looking at basketballs, planets, or solar systems. We're looking at galaxies, giving us a whopping 145,473,622,268,931,148,838,190 miles or 24,746,725,672 LY. Now, that's actually rather more than the measured distance to those galaxies, mainly because I'm assuming they're all laid out flat. To get a more accurate estimate we need to think about looking through a 'cone' of space, with galaxies at different distances.

But I dunno - maybe I'm just swallowing all this without really thinking about it

You‘re thinking about space being crystal clear with no interference whatsoever. If there‘s.0000000000000000000000000000000001 percent of space dust and dark matter and interference, multiplied over your 24 billion light years may be thick enough to play tricks on those who think they can see through it with something as imperfect as the human eye, and all the tools the human eye and it‘s attached imperfect body has come up with.

Um... I'm no stranger to these analogies. I think every astronomical book I've ever encountered has had some variant of 'If earth was a tennis ball...'

I don’t see them discussed enough in news reports and magazines to consider them to be widely thought of. Whether one does or doesn’t accept them without question, I think they’re interesting enough to be a much hotter topic than they are.

Originally posted by marc9000] If they don’t care, if it’s not their job, then maybe it’s just arrogant elitism, and it’s not good for a society.

Originally Posted by Peeling

....no, sorry, you're losing me again now. If I choose to take an interest in a subject, it's suddenly my responsibility to ensure everyone else takes an interest in it too, lest I be guilty of elitism? Most people don't care how far away Andromeda is. If they take an interest, I'm happy to oblige.

If you’re teaching a class or making a news report, it should be your responsibility to include enough detail about what you’re saying to make it clear that subjectivity may be involved. Some sciences are fuzzier than others.

Why do you keep talking about 'the public' and 'scientists' as if they're somehow seperate? Scientists are members of the public too. They're members of the public who have taken and interest and do ask troubling questions. That's how science has advanced. It's a good thing.

The majority of scientists are atheists. The majority of the general public is not. I don’t believe scientists became atheists because of science, I believe they became scientists because of their atheism. They followed their interests. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy. But it’s a foundation for political views to quickly go in separate directions from the people who pay them.

However, you have inadvertantly put your finger upon the primary reason ID is vilified by scientists: it's a PR campaign knowingly exploiting ignorance to leverage public opinion for religious and political purposes, and it is doing so without a care in the world for the damage it is doing to science.

The EIDC (evil intelligent design conspriacy) ? It’s the only conspiracy in existence? Many current best selling books by Dawkins, Stenger, Hitchens, Sagan, so many others, aren’t PR campaigns knowingly exploiting public ignorance to leverage public opinion for atheistic and political purposes, and doing so without a care in the world for the damage it’s doing to society/morality?

Now who's choosing to believe something that panders to their beliefs without thinking too hard about the details?

I see details in websites like talkorigins, in best selling books by the above named people, in the Dover Pa. case not long ago, in the evolutionist-gang style posting here, need I go on?

Like I said: you're much happier telling fantastic stories than thinking critically about them. Evolution has been a 'theory in crisis' for hundreds of years now, and for an equally long time ID has been confidently on the brink of shattering revelations. Call me when something changes

It will take a while, it‘s a pretty new thing. It needs thoroughness, something astronomy has needed centuries to come up with. It would help if it wasn‘t ‘separated from state’ by the political process in the US. But it‘s possible, as long as Darwinists remain completely stumped by the recent discoveries of the complexities of the simplest forms of life. Hopefully they won’t waste too much tax money in pursuit of their dreams, but that’s probably wishful thinking on my part.

Not everyone reacts to repeated accusations of global scientific conspiracy, incompetence and corruption the same way. You ought to at least consider the possibility that you're merely being offensive

As you should consider when you describe ID as you did above, the “PR campaign knowingly supporting ignorance.” The double standard is amazing.

Er, they are held to the same standards. ID fails to meet them. That's the point

ID hasn‘t had time to meet them. Unlike astronomy, unlike evolution, unlike so many other scientific diciplines, it has been politically attacked in its infancy.

That's certainly true, but that doesn't make ID as it stands valid science. It's a PR campaign, designed to achieve precisely what it has achieved in you.

Best selling books by Dawkins, Stenger, Hitchens, etc are PR campaigns. They’ve had the claim to valid science to help them achieve what they have in you.

No. Current estimates put it at at least 93 billion light years.

What’s on the other side of that?

Logically incorrect. One can as many red balls as one likes, and still only have one green one.

Green balls were designed and built by someone. You’re telling me that this earth fell together by unguided processes. If unguided processes are unlimited, and space for them is unlimited, they would have to be unlimited. This part should probably be another thread.

Again, logically incorrect. That's like saying there must be a world just like this one where water flows uphill - clearly that's nonsense: this world has been shaped by forces that ensure water flows downhill.

Forces? The only kinds of forces that exist are ones that we can conceive?

Originally posted by marc9000] I don’t believe there are any more earths like this one. I don’t believe there are any planets where dogs rule. I believe there is some kind of limit to the universe somewhere. I'm not afraid of being mocked because of it.

Originally Posted by Peeling

And nor should you be. Mocked, that is.

What I would venture to chastise you for is your oft-demonstrated arrogance. You don't see it that way, I think, but arrogance is what it is.

I’m really surprised to see that, coming from you. Do you not notice the arrogance that I’m on the receiving end of on these forums? I seldom get the last word on any thread that I’m a part of. Not that I seek the last word, but so many of the last posts are personal insults of me just because of my opinions. You’ll never see me drive by a post that I’m not yet part of, personally insult someone, and drive away, as was done in posts #4 and 40 on this thread. Did you not notice what I said at the beginning of this post; “Then that’s as far as we can go on it, and that’s fine“. ?? That wasn’t sarcasm, it’s a suggestion for civilized debate. Please read The Arrogance Thread again. Do you believe a person should respond to posters like this with love & tolerance? All I was doing was putting fourth my personal opinions. I was a good sport in those formal debates. There are a lot of decent Christians who have been bullied off of these forums. Maybe because they tried to oppose cannons with bb guns?

What inspired you to chastise me for arrogance? Something like my post #20 (a response to arrogance) or the simple fact that I sometimes ask questions that the mighty status quo finds uncomfortable? Are you desperate for the last word in this thread?

Time and time again you describe something that you can clearly see is stupid, and blithely assume that other people have been stupid enough to accept it. A more useful attitude would be to think 'If I think this is stupid, maybe I haven't understood it properly.' A limitless universe does not logically entail 'planet of the dogs'.

We need a new thread for that. Should you start it, or should I? If I were to start it in as friendly a way as I possibly could, simply asking about a finite universe, if it is finite then what’s outside of that, if non religious people see it differently than religious people, if there’s harmony about it within the different worldviews, etc. do you think it would immediately load up with conspiracy theory talk, numb mind talk, trash marc9000 talk, or do you think there would be any substance?

Originally Posted by Peeling

No marc, not even then. However much control such a being exerted, he would merely be replacing one kind of selection with another. Evolution would still be occurring.

Evolution is more powerful than God, could we agree to disagree on that?

Actually, I don't think I've been particularly critical of Christianity at all. I've been critical of faith on a number of occasions, and I'm critical of the justifications offered for Christianity being 'true' or being of genuine divine origin, but as a belief system I don't think I've given it much stick at all. You can believe all you like; you'll only hear from me when you try and justify that belief objectively.

You need to seperate in your mind the idea of looking for design and the ID movement. They are not the same thing. We can talk about the difficulties with detecting design in more detail elsewhere, if you like, but that's really only a tangential issue. ID as it stands is a religious PR campaign.

They ARE the same thing, they are both criticized as one, they are blocked by the courts from the public realm as one. They are practically never separated in reference or discussion. Just like Richard Dawkins (and others) proclamations and evolution are one. They combine as an atheist campaign.

I don’t have time to talk about detecting design, and countering all the opposition garnered against it in recent years. As I said, it’s a new science that has been mercilessly attacked far more than any previous new science.

Why is a religious PR campaign such a crime, while the atheist PR campaign runs rampant?

Anyone is free to propose a method for detecting design. The ones proposed so far are faulty. What gets up the nose of scientists is 1) that the ID movement is asking for these worthless methods that have fallen at the first hurdle to be given equal prominence in science classrooms to theories that have withstood centuries of critical and empirical bombardment, and 2) that they're being dishonest. The infamous 'cdesign proponentsists' debacle being a classic example.

Cry foul all you like - that's the real goal of the ID movement: to manipulate public opinion by false appeals to 'fair play'. Fair would be ID hypotheses successfully weathering the critical storm of peer review like everything else you get taught in the classroom. The proponents of the ID movement know full well that you either don't know or will readily refuse to believe that theories like the Big Bang and evolution have won out on merit after a long, bitter slog. Their stated goal is to foster a default position of cynicism and mistrust of scientific methods, people and results that are not biblically derived. They want to emotionally vaccinate you against being convinced by reason, argument or evidence. You tell me: has it worked?

The only thing they’ve done for me is given me an idea of how complex the simplest biological structures are, very recently discovered, and how evolutionists try so hard to disguise the complications it makes for their entire belief system.

I invite you to refute my earlier calculations regarding the distance requirements for seeing that many galaxies in such a tiny area of sky.

Moreover, you're walling yourself into a paradox: you're saying that we could be wrong about the vast distances to other galaxies because they're so far away.

I’m saying this, that anytime / everytime, when information is transferred over distances, when the methods of transfer do not change as the distance gets larger, the information gets less and less reliable. No space, in any environment, is perfectly pure.

In every dicipline, when distance increases, transfer of information over it decreases in reliability.

Originally Posted by marc9000

1)There’s no question that a lot of science is like that, but it gets dangerous when it’s a subject that can be philosophical - something can be very narrowly explored and still be thorough, new exploration can constantly be started at…… step 3 for example. Astronomy can be like that, Darwinism IS be like that, and ID can be like that.

As usual, we're proceeding from your unshakeable assumption that theories are invariably the product of a philosophy rather than a methodology. This assumption falls at quite literally the first hurdle, failing to square with Darwin's own religious predilictions.

Whenever popular assumptions are made without proof, those assumptions are built upon, without looking behind those assumptions and critically examining its foundation. Evolution is like that - Darwin had no idea that the simplest forms of life were so complicated.

Today's 'simplest forms of life' have had just as many billions of years to evolve as everything else. That 'evolution says we evolved from chimps' misconception keeps tripping you up in different guises.

Philosophers (Huxley, Spencer many others) took right off with the social implications of evolution, and of course it’s all being continued today by Dawkins, Stenger and many others.

You might want to check the assumptions you're making. Dawkins is a staunch critic of Social Darwinism.

Also, anyone who still thinks the 'social implications' of evolution promote selfish individualism hasn't thought things through. After all, what is an individual organism? Answer: a cooperative of cells. If evolution naturally favoured individualism, multicellular organisms could not have evolved. And what do we then see individual organisms doing? Banding together cooperatively to ensure their collective future. Societies - be they the society of cells you call your body, or the one in which your body lives - work, and evolution favours what works.

Darwin’s simple thoughts that mice spontaniously generated from dirty hay for example,

Er, that was Aristotle. But what's a couple of millennia between friends?

We now know that the simplest forms of life are not simple, yet the scientific community continues to remain faithful to Darwinism/ evolution, and not look back behind Darwinism, something that ID can do.

As I've explained before, ID (in its present form anyway) can do no such thing. We can go over that again in another thread if you like - maybe a one-on-one debate?

2) Thorough science is public science. Demands of thoroughness are made of ID that were not made of astronomy in 1850, 1950, or 2008.

All that's demanded of ID is that it make a meaningful contribution to science. What it has produced so far is very easily demonstrated to be ill-conceived and meaningless. If it were a scientific discipline it would be merely bad science, and it would go the way of all bad science in the end: either it would sort itself out and prove its worth, or it would be consigned to history. But it isn't science: it's a PR campaign. Consequently, it doesn't matter if it's bad science, so long as it's sufficiently plausible-sounding to make the layman - the intended audience - buy into the PR spin that ID is being persecuted by an atheistic establishment.

Humour me for a moment. Forget about whether or not I'm actually right about this and consider: if the ID agenda were as I describe it, can you think of any reason why it wouldn't work on you?

It was a conclusion from observation. He observed the clouds and the temperature and the biometric pressure etc and came to a conclusion that it was going to be a dry day.

No, what he did was observe the clouds and temperature and pressure and humidity etc, sampled sparsely across a wide area, and then - and this is the crucial step you missed out - he fed those data into a predictive model. That model tried to simulate what would happen next and yielded a prediction. Not a conclusion. The model is complex and sensitive, and the data very sparse - thus the high margin for error.

In contrast, when we use (for instance) parallax to estimate distance, the model is very simple and the data extremely complete.

Astronomers look through a telescope and see a glimmer of light through thousands of light years of dark matter, and come to a conclusion that they see a galaxy.

Marc, don't be ridiculous. Look at the picture I linked to. You can clearly see galaxies, and lots of them. I used very simple trigonometry to produce esimates for their distance: somewhere around 4 billion light-years. Probably less, since I was considering a ball of galaxies spanning the width of the frame, which omits the corners. Lo and behold, my relatively crude trig method puts us in the same ballpark as the other methods used for measuring their distance.

Our conclusions that we see a galaxy, hundreds of thousands of light years away. We’re seeing glimmers of light. Maybe they’re something else, much closer.

Look at the picture, marc. Once you've done that, we can talk about what else they might be.

They “made the landmark observations by studying a galaxy cluster 3 billion light years away.” Is there a chance that maybe they started their observations at step three?

Doesn't matter. They weren't taking the picture to establish the distance, and I started my trig at step one and came to the same analytical conclusion from the contents of the picture alone.

Our ability to see what we think we see, and be so sure about it that we establish it as fact, then use it as a foundation for further exploration. To no longer subject step one to scrutiny. The way Darwinism isn’t subject to scrutiny, in spite of what we’ve learned about the simplest forms of life. To go back to step one, as ID seeks to do.

I won't argue that ID seeks to take us back a step

I don't want to overly burden this discussion, so I won't go into it here, but we can take a closer look at what 'design' means in our prospective one-on-one if you like.

Tininess can mean insignificance, when it comes to great distances. When we shrink the earth to a grain of sand, the Hubble telescope becomes microscopic, can something that microscopic see inconceivable distances, even when those distances remain inconceivable even after they’ve been proportionally scaled down?

Nobody sees anything distant - we see the light entering our eyes. It's not about how far Hubble can see, but how far the light has travelled to get to us.

Distances mean things. If I’m viewing webpages or sending messages to places like Australia or Germany, I sometimes notice just a little less speed and dependability than when I do it withiln the U.S. Compared to thousands of light years, overseas internet communication is drop in the bucket concerning distance, yet I suspect distance and all it’s complications are causing it. Space is comparatively clear compared to earth’s dense atmosphere, but it’s not perfectly clear. When any vision that’s less than perfect is multiplied by thousands of light years, who can say for sure just how severe the distortion really is?

Interesting question. In a cubic centimetre of air there are approximately
26,875,000,000,000,000 molecules of gas. In a cubic centimetre of space (within our galaxy) there are approximately... 1. So looking through a light year of space is a bit like looking through a little over 35cm of air. On a clear day in the Grand Canyon you could see (earth's curvature permitting) about 225km, which would be equivalent to about 640,000LY

Of course, that's not the whole story. The 'haze' in space is almost pure hydrogen, so it's clearer than terrestrial air would be at the same density, and doesn't disperse the same wavelengths of light. There's also no heat-haze. Dark matter doesn't figure into absorption because, well, that's the whole point of dark matter: it doesn't interact with EM waves. Oh, and the 1 atom per cubic cm figure only holds inside this galaxy. Beyond that the figure drops, so (just like with the earth's atmosphere) we get a clearer view looking straight 'up' or 'down' out of our galactic disk, which is only around 1000LY thick. Look in those directions and you're only having to see through 500LY of galactic haze, barely scratching the surface of the 640,000 figure calculated above.

In short, in terms of clarity of view it's no harder for us to see very distant galaxies than it is for you to spot a low-flying light aircraft.

You’ve touched on something important - It DOES have a bearing on scientific validity if there’s a REFUSAL TO OBSERVE something that’s relevant.

You're shifting the goalposts. Originally you were complaining about people swallowing scientific results without criticism. Now you're saying the real problem is that the results might not have been scientific in the first place. If this is really what you want to talk about, let me know and we can do that instead.

I was 15 years old in 1969 when men supposedly walked on the moon. I was a normal, patriotic American, I wanted to believe they did. A small percentage of people didn’t believe it back then, mostly non religious types, some people won’t believe anything unless they see it. I just shrugged them off, but the one thing that I didn’t completely understand was the 1/6th gravity thing, why the astronauts weren’t able to jump 20 feet in the air.

I am seriously not going to get into this in this thread. By all means we can discuss it elsewhere if you like, but the evo forum is not the place.

Have you ever wondered why we can’t use the technology that we use to see 3 billion light years away, and focus a telescope on the surface of the moon and clearly see the left-behind base of the lunar modules from Apollo, or the moon-rover vehicles? Is this an example of refusal to observe? The moon is only just over a light-second away, we ought to be able to see a gnat at that distance.

Incorrect. Hubble could spot a football field on the moon, maybe.

This coming from someone who says hundreds-of-thousands-of-light-years telescope gazing IS science, Richard Dawkins evolution proclamations IS science, and study for evidence in biological design IS NOT science. It’s your fuzziness that I’m trying to explore.

I didn't say that looking for evidence of biological design is not science. I said the ID movement isn't science. Until you appreciate that distinction, you're not going to understand my point of view.

If there’s one thing evolutionists do well, it’s mocking any type of question about anything they like with the “fantastic stories” chant, the “evil conspiracy“ chant, “EAC” chant, etc. So much ridicule for anyone but themselves. The evil ID conspiracy seems to be the only one on earth they allow, the only one on earth that cannot be mocked. This kind of double standard should show any casual observer that attacks on ID are more rooted in emotion than anything else.

The ID movement's goals and methods are a matter of documented fact. Freely admitted to by its proponents. That particular inconvenient truth seems to make no impression upon you.

You‘re thinking about space being crystal clear with no interference whatsoever. If there‘s.0000000000000000000000000000000001 percent of space dust and dark matter and interference, multiplied over your 24 billion light years may be thick enough to play tricks on those who think they can see through it with something as imperfect as the human eye, and all the tools the human eye and it‘s attached imperfect body has come up with.

Sure, there's interference. We've used it to see the helium web between galaxies.

The majority of scientists are atheists. The majority of the general public is not. I don’t believe scientists became atheists because of science, I believe they became scientists because of their atheism.

Because, of course, it has to be that simple. Reality has to tie in perfectly with your prejudices. It can't be complex and nuanced.

The EIDC (evil intelligent design conspriacy) ? It’s the only conspiracy in existence?

I notice you never, ever actually deal with the documented fact of the ID/creationist agenda.

It will take a while, it‘s a pretty new thing. It needs thoroughness, something astronomy has needed centuries to come up with.

It's by no means a new idea. It's been the default belief for centuries, and in all that time it has taught us - what?

With new mathematical and scientific tools at our disposal, sure, let's take another look. But it does need thoroughness. It needs to prove itself. And, like every other scientific discipline it needs to do that before it starts asking for equal representation in the science classroom.

As you should consider when you describe ID as you did above, the “PR campaign knowingly supporting ignorance.” The double standard is amazing.

The difference is, I'm making a statement of documented fact about specific individuals. You regularly level accusations of fraud, bias and laziness at 'scientists' in general.

I've shown in another thread the difference between your view of the issue and mine: in my version of events, everyone is telling the truth about what they believe. In yours, everyone except creationists is deliberately lying. That's a pretty fundamental difference in our attitudes and I think it's reflected in the response we get to our respective posts.

ID hasn‘t had time to meet them. Unlike astronomy, unlike evolution, unlike so many other scientific diciplines, it has been politically attacked in its infancy.

Surely you jest! Astronomy wasn't politically attacked in its infancy?

Best selling books by Dawkins, Stenger, Hitchens, etc are PR campaigns. They’ve had the claim to valid science to help them achieve what they have in you.

Sorry to burst that bubble, but they got to me far too late to make a difference

I quite agree that any popular mainstream book is, to some degree, a PR campaign, and they can be used to bring science to the masses (as you at one point insisted scientists have a responsibility to do). But you can take away those popular mainstream books and still have the science. Take away ID's PR campaign and there's nothing left.

What’s on the other side of that?

It's a meaningless question. You only think it's meaningful because you're picturing the wrong kind of 'edge' to the universe. To be fair, it's the only kind of edge that can be pictured, by the very nature of what a 'picture' is

You’re telling me that this earth fell together by unguided processes. If unguided processes are unlimited, and space for them is unlimited, they would have to be unlimited.

Not necessarily true - but as you say, something for another thread.

Forces? The only kinds of forces that exist are ones that we can conceive?

You're twisting this into a completely different argument. You were justifying your disbelief in a vast universe by saying that in an unlimited space every conceivable variation on earth would have to occur, which is silly so the idea of an unlimited universe is silly. I explained why that reasoning was wrong. Now you're adding new factors into the mix: you're saying that not only is this hypothetical space unlimited, it has wildly different and inconceivable rules in different places.

Since that universe is not the one scientists believe we inhabit, you are constructing a strawman. By all means, do not believe in an unlimited universe where the rules change every few lightyears. I'll happily join you.

I’m really surprised to see that, coming from you. Do you not notice the arrogance that I’m on the receiving end of on these forums?

I certainly see a degree of reciprocity But again, you're trying to make all the problems someone else's fault. I don't think the kind of response you get from other posters is necessarily appropriate - if I did I would be doing the same. Did I say nobody else here was arrogant? No. I said you were. And I stand by that, for the reasons I already outlined.

What inspired you to chastise me for arrogance? Something like my post #20 (a response to arrogance) or the simple fact that I sometimes ask questions that the mighty status quo finds uncomfortable? Are you desperate for the last word in this thread?

I've bolded the most recent statement I think qualifies as arrogant for your consideration.

As far as having the last word goes I never think of discussions in those terms. Ideally the last word would be 'agree', and it hardly matters who says it.

Originally Posted by marc9000

Evolution is more powerful than God, could we agree to disagree on that?

It would help if we didn't It's extremely interesting that you see it in those terms, as a power struggle. It isn't. It's not about imposing physical limitations upon god.

Recall that old chestnut: can god create a rock so heavy he can't lift it? Either answer would seem to place a limitation on god, so the supposed conclusion is that god cannot be omnipotent. However, god can still create a rock of any size he chooses, and he can still lift it - so in what way is he less than omnipotent? What the question really exposes is the ability of language to frame a nonsensical question.

The same kind of thing is going on here. It doesn't matter what god does, life that reproduces will evolve. That doesn't in any way limit god's physical abilities, it merely demonstrates that the term 'evolution' would apply whatever he did. Right? Even if he deliberately kept every species static, that would be evolution of a sort: a force (in this case god) would be selecting one option from many potential variations.

If we manage to contrive a situation where evolution doesn't happen, we start bumping up against the criteria for life itself. For instance, if god just popped each new generation into existence, the creatures in question would not, strictly speaking, be reproducing - which would violate a necessary criteria for life. In the end it's a semantic point more than anything, and not a statement limiting god's abilities.

They ARE the same thing, they are both criticized as one, they are blocked by the courts from the public realm as one. They are practically never separated in reference or discussion.

No. What you're seeing in the courts is the ID movement being exposed for what it is, rather than what its proponents claim it to be. Thence originates the conflation of which you speak. Indeed, the ID movement is doing potentially irreperable damage to the chances of design-based science ever being taken seriously. The boy who cried wolf, and all that.

I don’t have time to talk about detecting design, and countering all the opposition garnered against it in recent years. As I said, it’s a new science that has been mercilessly attacked far more than any previous new science.

Call me when Behe is thrown in jail for thought-crime

It's a shame you aren't prepared to talk about the very subject you think you should be given more discussion time. If you change your mind, let me know.

Why is a religious PR campaign such a crime, while the atheist PR campaign runs rampant?

Whoever said a religious PR campaign was a crime? The point is, it has no place in the science classroom because it hasn't earned one.

The only thing they’ve done for me is given me an idea of how complex the simplest biological structures are, very recently discovered, and how evolutionists try so hard to disguise the complications it makes for their entire belief system.

Again the insinuation that evolution is a belief system rather than a theory. Again the 'theory in crisis' routine.

One can clearly see it working. You aren't particularly curious about the alleged science behind ID. Within this very post, you've explicitly refused to discuss the subject on that level. No: you only want to talk about it in terms of ideologies, morals, politics - the arena in which the ID movement thinks it can win by emotional appeal. You've bought into the PR spin put on the debunking of Behe and Dembski's work: it's not that they're simply wrong, they're being persecuted. And when I offer to correct that misapprehension, you don't have the time to listen.

Originally Posted by Peeling

As usual, we're proceeding from your unshakeable assumption that theories are invariably the product of a philosophy rather than a methodology. This assumption falls at quite literally the first hurdle, failing to square with Darwin's own religious predilictions.

Darwin’s biography shows that he was troubled concerning religion, and that his evolutionary exploration may have been related to it.

Today's 'simplest forms of life' have had just as many billions of years to evolve as everything else.

That is your faith, no observation there.

That 'evolution says we evolved from chimps' misconception keeps tripping you up in different guises.

Chimps? Where did I say that??

You might want to check the assumptions you're making. Dawkins is a staunch critic of Social Darwinism.

Links? What is the difference between social Darwinism and atheism?

Also, anyone who still thinks the 'social implications' of evolution promote selfish individualism hasn't thought things through. After all, what is an individual organism? Answer: a cooperative of cells. If evolution naturally favoured individualism, multicellular organisms could not have evolved. And what do we then see individual organisms doing? Banding together cooperatively to ensure their collective future. Societies - be they the society of cells you call your body, or the one in which your body lives - work, and evolution favours what works.

Individualism vs. a cooperative are both present (in different ways) in both a religious and non religious worldview.

Er, that was Aristotle. But what's a couple of millennia between friends?

My mistake. But you‘re right - not much difference in their views concerning the simplest forms of life.

As I've explained before, ID (in its present form anyway) can do no such thing. We can go over that again in another thread if you like - maybe a one-on-one debate?

There's nothing I can say about ID that hasn't already been said.

All that's demanded of ID is that it make a meaningful contribution to science. What it has produced so far is very easily demonstrated to be ill-conceived and meaningless. If it were a scientific discipline it would be merely bad science, and it would go the way of all bad science in the end: either it would sort itself out and prove its worth, or it would be consigned to history. But it isn't science: it's a PR campaign. Consequently, it doesn't matter if it's bad science, so long as it's sufficiently plausible-sounding to make the layman - the intended audience - buy into the PR spin that ID is being persecuted by an atheistic establishment.

Humour me for a moment. Forget about whether or not I'm actually right about this and consider: if the ID agenda were as I describe it, can you think of any reason why it wouldn't work on you?

Yes, it wouldn’t work on me - I wouldn't need it, because I see PR spin far more clearly in the emotion and establishment that opposes ID.

You're shifting the goalposts. Originally you were complaining about people swallowing scientific results without criticism. Now you're saying the real problem is that the results might not have been scientific in the first place. If this is really what you want to talk about, let me know and we can do that instead.

I’ve never shifted anything. The thread is entitled “observation” and that’s what we’re talking about.

I didn't say that looking for evidence of biological design is not science. I said the ID movement isn't science. Until you appreciate that distinction, you're not going to understand my point of view.

I don’t see other evolutionists here, or the scientific community agreeing with you on that. But since you admit it, it shows the double standard. “Looking for evidence of biological design” is not considered science just because the “ID movement” is doing it, while evolution IS science, in spite of the fact that it is largely promoted by militant atheists.

The ID movement's goals and methods are a matter of documented fact. Freely admitted to by its proponents. That particular inconvenient truth seems to make no impression upon you.

Because the evolutionists goals and methods can be documented in the same way. Do I need to link you to some Dawkins / Sam Harris webpages, or do you believe me?

Because, of course, it has to be that simple. Reality has to tie in perfectly with your prejudices. It can't be complex and nuanced.

The exact same way that ID goals and methods have to tie in with your prejudices. The reality that I’m talking about really is that simple. The drastic difference in scientists lack of religion vs the general publics is documented.

I notice you never, ever actually deal with the documented fact of the ID/creationist agenda.

As you never deal with the Dawkins / Harris agenda.

It's by no means a new idea. It's been the default belief for centuries, and in all that time it has taught us - what?

That life may have purpose, that there are consequences from a higher being for our actions, the list is long.

With new mathematical and scientific tools at our disposal, sure, let's take another look. But it does need thoroughness. It needs to prove itself. And, like every other scientific discipline it needs to do that before it starts asking for equal representation in the science classroom.

The difference is, I'm making a statement of documented fact about specific individuals. You regularly level accusations of fraud, bias and laziness at 'scientists' in general.

Why do you never name them, with specifics of what they’ve done, like I have with so many atheist book authors? Why are you actually the one who levels accusations of non science and conspiracy at ID in general?

I've shown in another thread the difference between your view of the issue and mine: in my version of events, everyone is telling the truth about what they believe. In yours, everyone except creationists is deliberately lying. That's a pretty fundamental difference in our attitudes and I think it's reflected in the response we get to our respective posts.

Again, most other evolutionists here and the scientific community don’t agree with you. Most of them constantly call ID proponents liars. You never take exception to it - you seem to give them a free pass on it just like the free pass they get for being far more arrogant than me.

Surely you jest! Astronomy wasn't politically attacked in its infancy?

Well now that is my mistake, (one Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in 1600 for suggesting, among other things, that the sun was simply a nearby star.) But I was talking more about the complications of todays politics and money, vs yesterdays comparable simplicity in those matters. Some things don’t change so drastically however - I suspect it was generally the same human emotion that burned him at the stake as blocks ID from the public realm today. The same human desire to protect the status quo.

Sorry to burst that bubble, but they got to me far too late to make a difference

The same way ID got to me far too late to make a difference.

I quite agree that any popular mainstream book is, to some degree, a PR campaign, and they can be used to bring science to the masses (as you at one point insisted scientists have a responsibility to do). But you can take away those popular mainstream books and still have the science. Take away ID's PR campaign and there's nothing left.

I’ll admit that ID has less substance to prove design than it does substance to question evolution. But questioning evolution can be done with observation. Part of "testablilty" should be to overcome challanges, in a more thoughtful way than burning ID at the stake in the courts.

I certainly see a degree of reciprocity But again, you're trying to make all the problems someone else's fault. I don't think the kind of response you get from other posters is necessarily appropriate - if I did I would be doing the same. Did I say nobody else here was arrogant? No. I said you were. And I stand by that, for the reasons I already outlined.

And it’s really unrelated to the subject. The fact that you brought it up, yet give a free pass to others who generally agree with you, who are far more arrogant than me, speaks volumes.

I've bolded the most recent statement I think qualifies as arrogant for your consideration.

As far as having the last word goes I never think of discussions in those terms. Ideally the last word would be 'agree', and it hardly matters who says it.

As in “agree to disagree”? Or do you just mean “agree with you"?

Originally Posted by Peeling

It would help if we didn't It's extremely interesting that you see it in those terms, as a power struggle. It isn't. It's not about imposing physical limitations upon god.

It really is about a power struggle, and the evidence is in the atheist PR campaign.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/ar...TICLE_ID=57512

http://www.alternet.org/story/36195

Recall that old chestnut: can god create a rock so heavy he can't lift it? Either answer would seem to place a limitation on god, so the supposed conclusion is that god cannot be omnipotent. However, god can still create a rock of any size he chooses, and he can still lift it - so in what way is he less than omnipotent? What the question really exposes is the ability of language to frame a nonsensical question.

The same kind of thing is going on here. It doesn't matter what god does, life that reproduces will evolve. That doesn't in any way limit god's physical abilities, it merely demonstrates that the term 'evolution' would apply whatever he did. Right? Even if he deliberately kept every species static, that would be evolution of a sort: a force (in this case god) would be selecting one option from many potential variations.

If we manage to contrive a situation where evolution doesn't happen, we start bumping up against the criteria for life itself. For instance, if god just popped each new generation into existence, the creatures in question would not, strictly speaking, be reproducing - which would violate a necessary criteria for life. In the end it's a semantic point more than anything, and not a statement limiting god's abilities.

You’re right about that, IF we can broaden the definition of evolution to include everything including reproduction - make it so broad that it’s practically a meaningless term. The way the word "evolution" is constantly redefined to suit an argument is something we've discussed before.

No. What you're seeing in the courts is the ID movement being exposed for what it is, rather than what its proponents claim it to be. Thence originates the conflation of which you speak. Indeed, the ID movement is doing potentially irreperable damage to the chances of design-based science ever being taken seriously. The boy who cried wolf, and all that.

So the ID movement - people like Johnson, Morris, Dembski, or Behe - do irreparable damage to the chances of design based science ever being taken seriously, while the atheist movement - Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, Hitchens - don’t do irreparable damage to science being taken seriously?

Call me when Behe is thrown in jail for thought-crime

If he weren't afraid of being labeled a crybaby, I'm sure he could tell some interesting stories.

It's a shame you aren't prepared to talk about the very subject you think you should be given more discussion time. If you change your mind, let me know.

Whoever said a religious PR campaign was a crime? The point is, it has no place in the science classroom because it hasn't earned one.

Again the insinuation that evolution is a belief system rather than a theory. Again the 'theory in crisis' routine.

One can clearly see it working. You aren't particularly curious about the alleged science behind ID. Within this very post, you've explicitly refused to discuss the subject on that level. No: you only want to talk about it in terms of ideologies, morals, politics - the arena in which the ID movement thinks it can win by emotional appeal.

Ideologies, morals, politics are what the top selling books by Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, and Hitchens are loaded with. Science is their tool. That’s the reason I want to talk about it in those terms.

You've bought into the PR spin put on the debunking of Behe and Dembski's work: it's not that they're simply wrong, they're being persecuted. And when I offer to correct that misapprehension, you don't have the time to listen.

Again, you know that there’s nothing I could say about ID that hasn’t already been said. Anyone can counter it, a simple search of the internet would provide a variety of responses to anything said about ID. The opposition to ID is many multiples of what ID is.

Not every discussion about religion vs. non religion has to go straight to ID. Whenever science and religion clash, it is often claimed that science uses evidence: repeatable, testable, and observable, while religion is nothing but “faith”. I just decided to start this thread to have a look at “observation”, and see how subjective it can be. There is a difference between observation that everyone can agree on, and observation where different people see different things. You look at galaxies that are billions of light years away like you're looking at the back of your hand. And of course evolutionists are equally confident when they make proclamations about what happened on earth billions of years ago. Not everyone sees it that way, and it's more than just a lack of education. There is more to observation than simple “fact”, and there can be more to faith than simple hope.

The reason I started this thread is because so often when religion and science clash, the claim is made that religion is faith, while science is observation. I’m trying to show that it does go both ways; that when science can ‘t observe all the steps required for evolution, or all the theories it has about deep space, faith is involved. When religious people use ID terms such as irreducible complexity, specified complexity, and universal probability bound, they are using observation, even if it’s nothing more than asking questions about another accepted belief. OBSERVATION CAN BE USED TO QUESTION SOMETHING. It can be used to encourage proof. The status quo doesn’t like to be questioned. It was true of religion 100 or 200 or more years ago, and it’s true of science today. But that doesn’t mean something shouldn’t be questioned, in a free and open society.

Originally Posted by marc9000

Darwin’s biography shows that he was troubled concerning religion, and that his evolutionary exploration may have been related to it.

That's a pretty weak riposte. Hardly evidence of the militant atheism you insist is necessary to fuel the otherwise unsupportable nonsense of evolution.

That is your faith, no observation there.

1. The age of life on earth has been established by three methods, so it's a pretty sound deduction, at least.

2. Evolutionary theory accommodates the great age of the earth, even if you don't, which means that it regards even the simplest modern life as the product of 3.5 billion years of evolution. Regardless of what you believe, it's incorrect of you to say the complexity of modern life is a problem for the theory.

Chimps? Where did I say that??

I didn't mean to imply you did, sorry. What I meant is that it's the same mistake in a new guise: you think evolutionary theory requires some very simple life to exist today to bridge the gap from non-life. It doesn't. There are no primitive organisms alive today. Bacteria are not primitive; they did not evolve into us. Chimps are not primitive; they did not evolve into us.

Links? What is the difference between social Darwinism and atheism?

It would be quicker to say what they have in common: nothing. Social Darwinism is a hypothesis based on an unfortunate but forgivable misunderstanding of the implications of evolution, one that some people found or indeed find attractive. The evolution of altruism hadn't even been considered when social darwinism was proposed.

My mistake. But you‘re right - not much difference in their views concerning the simplest forms of life.

'My mistake' would have sufficed

There's nothing I can say about ID that hasn't already been said.

Perhaps not, but you could still have the courage of your convictions, justify your personal conclusions on the matter, and expose them to critical analysis. You've decided that ID is valid science and that an atheist conspiracy is trying to silence its advocates. It also seems you've decided that you like that story so much you're going to avoid exposing yourself to any information or argument that could change your mind.

Yes, it wouldn’t work on me - I wouldn't need it, because I see PR spin far more clearly in the emotion and establishment that opposes ID.

"Shooting me in the head wouldn't kill me if I had already been stabbed to death". That does not answer the question

I’ve never shifted anything. The thread is entitled “observation” and that’s what we’re talking about.

Then why do you ignore the sections of my post directed towards it? It's all there: the density of interstellar haze, comparisons with earth's atmosphere, the clearly discernable photos of distant galaxies. If that's what we're talking about, by all means join in.

I don’t see other evolutionists here, or the scientific community agreeing with you on that. But since you admit it, it shows the double standard. “Looking for evidence of biological design” is not considered science just because the “ID movement” is doing it, while evolution IS science, in spite of the fact that it is largely promoted by militant atheists.

Once again you're starting from the wrong premise, that the ID movement is somehow concerned with looking for evidence of biological design. It isn't. It's concerned with creating the impression of scientific controversy so that it can cry foul when its sciency-looking papers are debunked.

They, like you, want to move the evolution issue away from what can be demonstrated and proven and into the emotive realm of politics and perception. And again, this is their self-proclaimed agenda, not anything I'm making up.

Because the evolutionists goals and methods can be documented in the same way. Do I need to link you to some Dawkins / Sam Harris webpages, or do you believe me?

So am I to understand that you agree with me here, that the ID movement is a PR campaign and not science? That would certainly save us a lot of typing

The exact same way that ID goals and methods have to tie in with your prejudices.

Documented. Fact. Still nothing to say about that?

As you never deal with the Dawkins / Harris agenda.

So you have no answer, but it's still somehow my fault?

Dawkins is an atheist. If he wants to explain to people some of the reasons why, even evangelise atheism, that's fine by me. If he wants to teach evolution as being the best scientific explanation of the shape of our biosphere, that's also fine by me, because it really is the best explanation so far, by far. If he wants to criticise religion from a secular viewpoint, that's also fine.

What wouldn't be fine is for him to set up a 'Christians for Truth' foundation to hose out spurious and poorly-researched theological statements about the messiah's prediliction for young girls and animals, and to respond to the monumental umbrage this would elicit by claiming that parts of the church are trying to silence valid dissenting christian opinion.

That life may have purpose, that there are consequences from a higher being for our actions, the list is long.

The list is precisely that, and no longer The idea that a creator is necessary to endow life with purpose is short-sighted anyway, because what then endows the uncreated creator with purpose? And if an exception can be made for him, why not for us instead?

Why do you never name them, with specifics of what they’ve done, like I have with so many atheist book authors? Why are you actually the one who levels accusations of non science and conspiracy at ID in general?

Knock yourself out.

Again, most other evolutionists here and the scientific community don’t agree with you. Most of them constantly call ID proponents liars. You never take exception to it

Certainly there are clear examples of lies told in the name of creationism. But they aren't lies about what people believe or what their own motivations are. And most creationists aren't lying, they're merely regurgitating wrong information. Your version of events requires almost everyone to be lying about what they believe and why. I don't think that's realistic.

- you seem to give them a free pass on it just like the free pass they get for being far more arrogant than me.

Who's saying they're far more arrogant than you? Impatience or even aggression are not the same as arrogance. "Manifested through presumptuous claims or assumptions" are what I'm referring to here. You put forward a hypothesis (such as the one in this thread), apparently the product of a few moment's idle rumination, and presume that thousands of scientists who've dedicated their working lives to the subject either never thought of it or are deliberately and fraudulently glossing over it. And when people fail to be suitably impressed you unfailingly interpret that as getting under their skin or 'asking difficult questions', an attitude, if I may say, greatly facilitated by your stated unwillingness to engage with substantive rebuttals such as the ones I've presented here.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think you're arrogant in an unpleasant or overbearing way. Which makes it harder for you to see it for what it is, I think.

Some things don’t change so drastically however - I suspect it was generally the same human emotion that burned him at the stake as blocks ID from the public realm today. The same human desire to protect the status quo.

Who the heck is 'blocking ID' from the public realm? Everything they publish is aimed at the layman! They're only blocked from science classrooms because they haven't come up with anything worth teaching yet. Is that really so much to ask? That we reserve science lessons for teaching the fruits of science?

I’ll admit that ID has less substance to prove design than it does substance to question evolution. But questioning evolution can be done with observation. Part of "testablilty" should be to overcome challanges, in a more thoughtful way than burning ID at the stake in the courts.

In order to defeat ID in the courts it was first necessary to debunk the science. So that challenge has in fact been met.

As in “agree to disagree”? Or do you just mean “agree with you"?

If you look closely, neither of those phrases end in 'agree'

You’re right about that, IF we can broaden the definition of evolution to include everything including reproduction - make it so broad that it’s practically a meaningless term. The way the word "evolution" is constantly redefined to suit an argument is something we've discussed before.

*sigh* No, look: reproduction is a prerequisite for evolution, I'm not saying it is evolution.

So the ID movement - people like Johnson, Morris, Dembski, or Behe - do irreparable damage to the chances of design based science ever being taken seriously, while the atheist movement - Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, Hitchens - don’t do irreparable damage to science being taken seriously?

Maybe they do, but that's not really what I meant. Again you're focused on the public, political side of things while I'm talking about science. For instance, Catastrophism endured a period of being persona non grata because it had been tainted by the same kind of dogmatic theism that lies behind ID. And no, not because it's atheists vs theists, but because predetermined conclusions have no place in science.

If he weren't afraid of being labeled a crybaby, I'm sure he could tell some interesting stories.

Of course, because that completely unfounded speculation would make you right, it must be true!

Ideologies, morals, politics are what the top selling books by Dawkins, Harris, Stenger, and Hitchens are loaded with. Science is their tool. That’s the reason I want to talk about it in those terms.

Then fine, let's talk about Dawkins, Harris, Stenger and Hitchens! We can pop over to the philosophy forum, or maybe the worldview page - that doesn't see much action - and get right down to it. Why waste time discussing actual scientific results when you're only interested in the use to which they're put?

Again, you know that there’s nothing I could say about ID that hasn’t already been said. Anyone can counter it, a simple search of the internet would provide a variety of responses to anything said about ID. The opposition to ID is many multiples of what ID is.

I'm not interested in what other people have to say about ID, I'm interested in your justifications for the conclusions you've reached on the topic. You've created for yourself a narrative in which the output of the ID movement is valid science unfairly quashed by militant atheists pretending to be scientists. But if ID hasn't produced valid science, that narrative collapses. All your speculation about motives and politics doesn't matter a bean if ID really hasn't earned a place in the science classroom. That for me makes it the crux of the matter - and you don't want to discuss it.

Not every discussion about religion vs. non religion has to go straight to ID. Whenever science and religion clash, it is often claimed that science uses evidence: repeatable, testable, and observable, while religion is nothing but “faith”. I just decided to start this thread to have a look at “observation”, and see how subjective it can be.

I think it's perfectly clear from the first few posts exactly where you intended this thread to go from the very beginning In your second post you tried to bring in the philosophical angle. You then brought ID into the mix in post 8, and when Kronus tried to correct your earlier mistake you clung determinedly to the philosophical angle even though it was a non-sequitur. When Kronus said 'we extrapolate', he meant our brains extrapolate from the limited information presented to us by our eyes, not that scientists extrapolate the existence of intermediate colours based on our observations of the primary ones.

You look at galaxies that are billions of light years away like you're looking at the back of your hand.

Looking at the back of my hand hardly requires an orbital telescope.

And of course evolutionists are equally confident when they make proclamations about what happened on earth billions of years ago. Not everyone sees it that way, and it's more than just a lack of education.

Undervaluing critical thinking also plays a vital role.

The reason I started this thread is because so often when religion and science clash, the claim is made that religion is faith, while science is observation. I’m trying to show that it does go both ways; that when science can ‘t observe all the steps required for evolution, or all the theories it has about deep space, faith is involved.

Oh dear, no. There's a difference between a leap of faith and a quantifiable judgement call. The evidence favouring common descent, for instance, is so staggeringly vast that the odds of it not being true far, far exceed any universal probability bound. So either you deny the validity of the UPB for drawing scientific conclusions, which knocks ID into a cocked hat, or you accept the implications it has for the truth of common descent.

When religious people use ID terms such as irreducible complexity, specified complexity, and universal probability bound, they are using observation, even if it’s nothing more than asking questions about another accepted belief. OBSERVATION CAN BE USED TO QUESTION SOMETHING.

Yes: we call that 'science'. Which begs the question: if you're such a fan of the methodology, why don't you like the results it produces?

None of the ID terms you mention are observations, so I'm not sure what you meant there. If you want to talk about it properly, actually discuss the real scientific validity and significance of ID terms, we can do that.