So SETI is just another word for Such Expenditure of Time and Intelligence...for nothing
So,
With the help of a fellow blogger, I begin:
Intelligent Design – Select Quotes
May 25, 2008 By 3 Comments
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~ Michael Behe, in The Sterility of Darwinism
The probability of life originating from accident is comparable to the probability of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing factory.
~ Professor Edwin Conklin, Princeton University biologist
Intelligent design begins with a seemingly innocuous question: Can objects, even if nothing is known about how they arose, exhibit features that reliably signal the action of an intelligent cause? To see what’s at stake, consider Mount Rushmore. The evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design is direct—eyewitnesses saw the sculptor Gutzon Borglum spent the better part of his life designing and building this structure. But what if there were no direct evidence for Mount Rushmore’s design? What if humans went extinct and aliens, visiting the earth, discovered Mount Rushmore in substantially the same condition as it is now? In that case, what about this rock formation would provide convincing circumstantial evidence that it was due to a designing intelligence and not merely to wind and erosion? Designed objects like Mount Rushmore exhibit characteristic features or patterns that point to an intelligence. Such features or patterns constitute signs of intelligence. Proponents of intelligent design, known as design theorists, purport to study such signs formally, rigorously, and scientifically. Intelligent design may therefore be defined as the science that studies signs of intelligence.
~ William A. Dembski
As biochemists discover more and more about the awesome complexity of life, it is apparent that its chances of originating by accident are so minute that they can be completely ruled out. Life cannot have arisen by chance.
~ Sir Fred Hoyle, in The Intelligent Universe
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from th facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question…. Rather than accept the fantastically small probability of life having arisen through the blind forces of nature, it seemed better to suppose that the origin of life was a deliberate intellectual act.
~ Sir Fred Hoyle
Hopefully I have made the issues quite clear. I truly believe that most people who believe in Darwinism have given little thought to the matter and have simply swallowed all the propaganda whole. In a world where we are busy trying to have fun, find love, make a living, figure out what to do for a career, what to buy people for Christmas, deal with the weird squeaking sound when you hit the brakes on the car and unfortunately in these times very possibly trying to find a job...most folks just take the science classes that are required to get through school and get on with their lives. So all the shows and magazines proclaiming millions of years go in one ear and out the other, a little bit sticks and it means nothing to them 99 per cent of the time...
When you engage a Darwinist, they do not like to discuss science at first, they try to dismiss YEC and ID people as religious kooks. To me, they are the religious kooks. When a Darwinist begins to talk about YEC they jump right into the metaphysical and try to avoid the messy science part. They do not wish to talk about things like chirality and meta-information and transposons and irreducibly complex systems and symbiotic relationships in detail, because they soon find themselves exposing their complete lack of evidence for their various claims. Macroevolution has never been observed. Speciation has. YEC can give great proofs that organisms are designed to conserve the kind of organism while allowing for wide variation within kinds and that in fact there are switches built into many organisms that operate when a common mutation or copying error occurs. A human cell is far more complex than the world's biggest factory, has far more redundancies built in than a space station and has far more information than all the libraries in all the schools in the USA. Evolve THAT, atheists! The odds against one simple cell happening by chance are mathematically impossible and we have complex organisms everywhere of all kinds. Figure it out!
Many Christians just accept Darwinism as fact because they have been told it is a fact and they do not look too hard at the whole thing. All sorts of big church organizations and of course typically the more organized and the longer they have been around the farther away from any critical thinking they get - Lots of them have endorsed Darwinism. Sure, they say, Darwin and God get along just fine. We have our religion and science has science. They do not understand that Darwinism is religion and it is absolutely the opposite of real Christianity. They do not think deeply and critically about what Darwinism teaches. They do not bother to investigate for themselves.
As I said, I came to the question being at first a Darwinist and later ambivalent and still later a Young Earth Creationist but it was years later than that when I understood the metaphysical implications. No actual Adam and Eve, no Fall, no Original Sin, no need or use for Christ, no Salvation, no hope or purpose to life! No wonder so many young people grow up and turn away from church. If you believe Darwinism and really think about it, then Christianity is a myth and the Bible is just a good source of morality in a general way. Now I can see that millions of years of evolution just doesn't fit into the Bible. So while I came to a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis by studying science, it was my study of the Bible that confirmed to me that Darwinism is in opposition to Christianity. So now I am fortified by faith and by fact.
Even the people working in operational science may not give much though to Darwinism, because in truth operational science doesn't need or use it. How an organism works, how the planets move, what we see the moons of Jupiter doing and so on and so forth? Bringing evolution into any of that simply slows down the investigative process. People like Dawkins with their half-baked ideas about memes, Darwinist priests making cladograms and for good measure throw in punctuated equilibrium and hopeful monsters and junk DNA and vestigal organs and the ludicrous Drake Equation and directed panspermia and frankly, from here, it all sounds like a grade schooler trying to think of the best lie to use to convince a parent he wasn't one of the kids that broke out the windows on the back side of his school the night before. Fairy tales, just-so stories, dating records designed to produce long ages that have been repeatably falsified, on and on and on. Will ordinary scientists just take a look around and begin to put the pieces together? The answer is yes, the number of YEC and related organizations is growing rapidly and the ID movement is picking up steam because of evidence, not worldview, but because of empirical study of the world around us. Geocentricism took a few hundred years to be accepted by the scientific establishment. Darwinism is kind of like the guy who knows he has a disease that will kill him in three days. Darwinism is desperate to hold on but it is doomed by it's lack of evidence. Atheists need Darwin like junkies need their next fix. They will lie and cheat to get it.
So this is why some Darwinists are more than willing to lie and cheat and overturn actual laws of science in their quest to somehow, someway, get past the elephant in the room - Organisms are designed and ergo, they have a Designer. But of course the drumbeat of propaganda goes on and on and on. We shall do our best to overcome waves of ignorance with lifesavers of truth. Ah, the great thing about having a blog is being able to say things like that. Overcome savage sharks of superstition with harpoons of hope? Wash away piles of poo with firehoses of truth? Anyway, the news media is so gullible that they just barf up everything Darwinists feed them. So the ICR begets the AIG which begets the CMI and at the same time the Discovery Institute comes along and now there are lots of ID and YEC in the scientific community and there will be more and more of us as time goes by.
One hilarious aspect of the search for ET they call SETI is that they are trying to find analog communications from a supposedly advanced race of aliens who would be highly unlikely to be broadcasting what SETI is trying to find. Mankind has advanced from analog to digital, radio and television signals actually going out on the airwaves are diminishing in amount for so much of our devices are receiving from cable and satellites and cell towers now. Wax cylinders became flat platters of vinyl and then tape and then cds and then MP3 and so on and so forth. If there really was an ET, why would you think they give out signals we could even discern?
Why are Darwinists willing to spend millions and millions of dollars looking for the slightest hint of design and intelligence from the stars while they totally ignore the massive evidence for design and intelligence in organisms? This is the most amazing case of not seeing the forest for the trees in scientific history!
As Cre-Evo headlines tells us...
See an interesting update to the 12/05/2010 entry, “Lean to the Left.”
SETI Ignorance Gets Stronger 12/09/2010 http://creationsafaris.com/crev201012.htm#20101209a
Dec 09, 2010 — “Science is not about blind faith” begins a video posted on MSNBC about SETI. Part of an article by AP reporter Seth Borenstein, “Evidence for E.T. is mounting daily, but not proven,” the video explains Frank Drake’s famous equation that tries to quantify the probability for extraterrestrial intelligence. Though Drake confidently asserts the probability that 50,000 advanced communicating civilizations exist in the Milky Way, Borenstein’s subtitle asserts, “So far, first signs of life elsewhere are more likely to be closer to slime mold.”
Confidence exudes like a strong perfume from both the video and the article. “Lately, a handful of new discoveries make it seem more likely that we are not alone – that there is life somewhere else in the universe,” Borenstein began, diving immediately into Wolf-Simon’s claim that some microbes can imbibe arsenic as a substitute for phosphate in their proteins and DNA (12/02/2010). Then Carl Pilcher, director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, was given the microphone to say, “The evidence is just getting stronger and stronger” that
“There’s got to be life out there.” After a brief caveat that “Since much of this research is new, scientists are still debating how solid the conclusions are,” Borenstein reassures the reader that even if something simple, like slime mold, is detected first, “It can evolve from there.”Borenstein’s confidence is based on the premise that the search for E.T. is based on “Some science, some pure guesswork.” Since every non-scientist has access to guesswork, to what science does he refer? Admitting that the Drake Equation includes guesswork factors, “such as the likelihood of the evolution of intelligence and how long civilizations last,” Borenstein strips it down to two factors: “How many places out there can support life? And how hard is it for life to take root?” Bolstered by Wolf-Simon’s arsenic microbes, he beamed, “That means the probability for alien life is higher than ever before, agree 10 scientists interviewed by The Associated Press.” He said additionally, “nothing topped last week’s news of a lake bacterium that scientists could train to thrive on arsenic instead of phosphorous.”
Perhaps Borenstein celebrated too soon. Live Science said, “Many skeptical scientists not involved with the study have raised questions about its methods and findings.” Later, Karl Tate on Live Science included the arsenic claim as #10 in his list of top ten “Kerfuffles” – “The debate over arsenic-based life is just the latest example of science -- blown out of proportion or just plain misunderstood -- exploding across the news media.” (Others included Martian bacteria and overhyped human ancestors). And Nature News said that the announcement got a “toxic response” from other scientists, who called it “premature at best” and complained about the way it was publicized. Steve Benner, an origin of life researcher, “used the analogy of a steel chain with a tinfoil link to illustrate that the arsenate ion said to replace phosphate in the bacterium’s DNA forms bonds that are orders of magnitude less stable.” Not only that, the NASA Astrobiology team failed to show that the microbes actually incorporated arsenic into their molecules. Some scientists were upset that NASA’s teaser to the press had them thinking life had been discovered beyond Earth; indeed, even Fox News reporters were expecting an announcement that life had been discovered on Titan.
Did Borenstein have any other science, less dubious, to amass in favor of his contention that the evidence for E.T. is getting stronger and stronger? Indeed he did. Calling on SETI Institute senior astronomer Seth Shostak, who “ticks off the astronomical findings about planet abundance and Earthbound discoveries about life’s hardiness,” he agrees that these points “have gone in the direction of encouraging life out there and they didn’t have to,” – so much so, that denying the existence of extraterrestrial life, Shostak alleged, is tantamount to believing in miracles (i.e., that life only exists on earth). Time out for a brief reality check:
Astronomers, however, do believe in proof. They don’t have proof of life yet. There’s no green alien or even a bacterium that scientists can point to and say it’s alive and alien. Even that arsenic-munching microbe discovered in Mono Lake in California isn’t truly alien. It was manipulated in the lab.With that brief time out over, Chris McKay assured readers that, “There are real things we can point to and show that being optimistic about life elsewhere is not silly.” He called on the red dwarfs to sing in agreement – red dwarf stars may not be the anti-life districts once thought; “That didn’t just open up billions of new worlds, but many, many times that,” Borenstein chimed. The giants chimed in, too: “scientists now believe that as many as half the stars in our galaxy have planets that are two to 10 times the size of Earth — ‘super Earths’ which might sustain life.” With a recent estimate that the universe may contain six times as many stars as thought, the chorus just keeps getting louder.
Of course, 300 sextillion lifeless locations would still be lifeless. “The other half of the equation is: How likely is life?” Borenstein continued, calling briefly on Donald Brownlee to debunk the notion that intelligent life is common, but agreeing that microbial life could be. “By making life more likely in extreme places, it increases the number of planets that are potential homes for life,” astrobiologists agree – even though all those extreme places studied are right here on Earth. But does a potential habitat rise to the level of scientific evidence? Never mind; potential is enough: Mars, Europa, Titan, Enceladus – places where no life has been found – put dollars on the bet that aliens inhabit the universe, so much so that “Shostak puts his money behind his optimism,” Borenstein ended. Apparently Shostak bets a cup of coffee at his lectures that scientists will find proof of alien life by 2026. “The odds, he figures, have never been more in his favor.”
Got odds? We do. Read our online book, especially Ch. 6.
Let’s unpack this reasoning about odds in this SETI drinking party. “The odds, he figures, have never been more in his favor.” What are the odds when your sample size is one? You have one example, and you want to extrapolate the odds to 100 billion planets in the galaxy. This is like winning the world’s biggest lottery on your first draw the only time you play, and thinking the odds are great of winning many more times because there are a lot of convenience stores where you can play the lottery.
Statisticians like to think about urns with colored marbles, so let’s say you are walking on your terrace, and discover an iPhone, not yet aware of its purpose or function; also on the terrace you find an urn with marbles in it, but you know nothing about what kind of marbles are inside. You reach in and pull out an orange marble, then a red one, then another orange one, and a white one (these represent Venus, Mars, Europa, Titan, and Enceladus), along with a lot of black marbles. Because your iPhone contains some of the same colors that are in the marbles, you concoct a theory that iPhones evolve out of marbles. Then you look off into the distance and see many more urns you think must have marbles, too – billions of them. Yet get all excited, thinking that the odds of finding more iPhones must be astronomical.
In your ecstasy, you produce an equation you call the Flake Equation, and calculate your odds: N is the number of iPhones that must exist in all the urns. R(u) is the rate of formation of urns, f(m) is the fraction of those urns with marbles, n(g) is the number of urns large enough to contain iPhones, f(g) is the number of urns where circuits begin evolving from the marble material; f(s) is the number of marbles that evolve into iPhones, f(c) is the number of iPhones that spontaneously call you up, and L is the lifetime of the average iPhone battery. Would this justify the Search for Extra-Terracetrial iPhones? Get real.
Even if one of the iPhones calls you up some day, it would not support your theory that the iPhone evolved out of the marbles. It would validate the view that both iPhones were intelligently designed. But in our day, such reasoning is disallowed a priori, because it’s not “science.” Thus, science has devolved into absurdity, where sophisticated ignorance is glorified, because intelligent causes have been excluded from the very definition of science. The cult of Darwin has given birth to the cult of SETI, where marbles evolve into iPhones, and molecules evolve into minds.
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The ancient Greek eclipse-predicting computer, the Antikythera Device, has been brought to life in Lego blocks. Go to Live Science for two fun video clips revealing the intelligent design that went into the original device and its modern copy.