Solving the Origins "Problem" Part One. Acknowledging Design Will Be the End of Scientism and Darwinism!
Perhaps the reader may notice that I recently posted a series of videos by Ian Juby that, as a whole, were called "Complete Creation" and presented a fair overview of the findings of Creation Science at that time. There are a few new ideas that have been presented and some new evidence uncovered since Ian's series was made, but it did the job of setting the stage for this blog to argue for the eradication of Darwinism and Scientism and a return to real science, for the sake of both science and society. To this end I am determined to keep presenting strong evidence for Creation and strong evidence against Scientism and Darwinism. This post will address that second stated goal.
credit
There was a man named William Paley who wrote about the Universe and all we see around us and compared it to a watch. His Teleological Argument can checked out at this pdf site. The Free Online Dictionary definition.
Paley is quite unique in that, both his reasoning and his work concerning the watchmaker argument are well-respected in scientific circles. Charles Darwin read and admired Paley's work. Yet modern scientists then dismiss the teleological argument with very weak counter-arguments that are based on unproven hypotheses. No self-respecting school of philosophy fails to include Paley and the Teleological Argument. They often will say that David Hume "falsified" Paley's argument with his own counter-arguments. Feel free to look at a site which is NOT Creation-friendly for an overview of some of the arguments and counter-arguments - From this site.
It is humorous and tragic at the same time, but many colleges tend to treat Paley's arguments as religious in nature while pretending that Hume's argument is scientific. We are talking about worldviews and you cannot call one worldview "religion" and another "science!" Worldview is the set of presuppositions each person carries around with him, the starting line so to speak from which each line of reasoning is begun.
Not only does the Universe (a macro view of creation) and the e.coli bacteris (a micro view) both appear to be designed, our experiences in real life tell us that the watchmaker argument involves more than simply the appearance of DESIGN but also of ORIGIN or START. A dead dog may be identical in construction and weight and various other ways to his twin from the same litter who is alive, but there is a huge difference at the time of death of that dog. One is "running" or operative (alive) and one is not. Those of you with training in biology know that once an organism dies it begins to immediately change as organisms begin to convert it into carrion. But the point is that not only does the watch have a designer, it also had someone who set the time and wound it up so it would work!
The Universe and a living e.coli both have not only all the hallmarks of design, they have also been "wound up" and are running. Check out the Laws of Thermodynamics and you will also see that the wound watch will eventually stop ticking and so, too, will the Universe. The Universe is running downhill or winding down or however you care to put it. It is heading for a stop, just as a wound spring-driven watch is heading for a stop.
21st Century science has reset the argument with a very strong case for design that challenges the arguments of Darwinists. I believe that the Uncommon Descent blog has given us a great argument for Intelligent Design and I believe that American Thinker has a concise expose of Scientism. Understand that Intelligent Design does not "prove" that there is a God or Who that God might be, it simply uses logic and evidence to make a reasonable argument that falsifies Darwinism and the entire "something from nothing" canard that Scientism espouses.
Darwinism/Scientism and their related belief systems is the wrecking ball by which Atheistic Naturalistic Materialists are destroying the nuclear family and Godly morality in the United States and elsewhere. In a world where blind, uncaring chance randomly produced this Universe, there is no real value to life or purpose for any one man or woman, no destiny to fulfill, no consequences of lasting nature for actions. Humanists may claim to be moral, but their morality is either borrowed from Christians or is based on fallible opinions of fallible men.
Taking God out of society removes the intrinsic value of human life and also real meaning to life. A society that believes that God created also believes that God created people. People therefore have a meaning and a purpose in this life. The moral laws of God are respected and are fundamental to society. This is the basis for the founding of the United States. The Founding Fathers stated this in the Declaration of Independence when they wrote these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
credit
I therefore assert that the question of whether God created everything or that nothing exploded to randomly produce everything is essential to every person and every society. This basis for a worldview is crucial to the nature of the person or the society that results from the answer to that question.
Now both of these arguments concerning Scientism and Intelligent Design are presented to you in that order:
December 30, 2012
credit
When I come across a new idea, I like to see if there are any
relatively simple and obvious arguments that can be levied for or
against it. When I first came across ID, this is the simple argument I
used that validated it – IMO – as a real phenomenon and a valid
scientific concept.
Simply put, I know intelligent design exists – humans (at least, if not other animals) employ it. I use it directly. I know that intelligent design as humans employ it can (but not always) generate phenomena that is easily discernible as product of intelligent design. Anyone who argues that a battleship’s combination of directed specificity and/or complexity is not discernible from the complexity found in the materials after an avalanche is either committing intellectual dishonesty or willful self-delusion – even if the avalanche was deliberately caused, and even if the rocks were afterward deliberately rearranged to maintain their haphazard distribution.
Some have argued that we only “recognize” human design, and that such recognition may not translate to the intelligent design of non-human intelligence. The easy answer to that is that first, we do not always recognize the product of human design. In fact, we often design things to have a natural appearance. That we may not recognize all intelligent design is a given and simply skirts the issue of that which we can recognize.
Second, it is again either delusion or dishonesty to ignore a simple hypothetical exercise: in some cases, were we to find certain kinds of objects/phenomena [edited for clarity] on distant, uninhabited and otherwise desolate planets, would we be able to infer that such were most likely specifically designed by intelligent creatures of some sort for some purpose?
Again, the obvious answer to this except in cases of delusion or or dishonesty is “yes”. Then the question becomes: without a scientifically valid means of making such a determination, how would one be made? Intuition? Common sense? Is the recognizable difference between such artifacts and those that appear to be natural not a quantifiable commodity? If not, how do we go about making the case that something we find on such a planet is not a naturally-occurring phenomena, especially in cases that are not so obvious? There must be some scientifically-acceptable means of making such a determination – after all, resources committed to research depend upon a proper categorical determination; it would quite wasteful attempting to explain a derelict alien spacecraft in terms of natural processes – time and money better spent trying to reverse engineer the design for practical use and attempting to discern the purpose of its features.
Thus, after we make the determination that said artifact is the product of intelligent design, our investigatory heuristic is different from what it would be were we to assume the artifact is not intelligently designed. A scientific, categorical distinction is obviously important in future research.
The idea that there is no discernible or quantifiable difference between some products of ID and what nature produces without it, or that such a determination is irrelevant, is absurd. One might argue that the method by which ID proponents make the differential evaluation between natural and product of ID (FSCI, dFSCI, Irreducible Complexity, Semiotic System) is incorrect or insufficient, but one can hardly argue such a difference doesn’t exist or is not quantifiable in some way, nor can they argue that it makes no difference to the investigation. One can hardly argue, IMO, that those attempts to scientifically describe that difference are unreasonable, because they obviously point at least in spirit to that which obviously marks the difference. IMO, the argument cannot be against ID in spirit, but rather only about the best way to scientifically account for the obvious difference between some cases of ID and otherwise naturally-occurring phenomena, whether or not that “best accounting” indicts some phenomena as “product of design” that many would prefer not to be the case.
The only intellectually honest position is to admit ID exists; that there is some way to describe the differential in a scientific sense to make useful categorical distinctions (as “best explanation”), and then to accept without ideological preference when that differential is used to make such a determination. If the best explanation for biological life is that it was intelligently designed, then so be it; this should be of no more concern to any true scientist than if a determination is made that some object found on a distant planet was intelligently designed, or if a feature on Mars is best explained as the product of water erosion. To categorically deny ID as a valid, scientific explanatory category (arrowheads? geometric patterns found via Google Earth? battleships? crop circles? space shuttle? potential alien artifacts?) is ideological absurdity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I believe that an intelligent and logical person will look carefully at organisms and be certain that they had to have been designed. The cell itself is a world of specified complexity and interdependent operations and organic machines that is far more complex and efficient than anything man has ever designed. The only thing most people lack is information, because Darwinists dominate the academic world, the media and have completely taken over secular scientific organizations. Nevertheless more scientists are beginning to think and not simply swallow Darwinism whole and, as a result, a number of interesting discoveries have been made. Scientists interested in advancing technology have, in many fields, made a tacit concession to design by trying to copy the design features of organisms for the use of mankind. This is no surprise, since the concept of Darwinism is a hindrance rather than a help in the laboratory.
Below is a press release from Access Research Network. It highlights what they consider the top ten science stories of 2011 involving Darwin and Design.
I will be calling on a wide variety of scientific sites to help make the case that Darwinism must be discarded and that Scientism is a plague on society. Some of them will be Creation sites, some ID sites and some of the information will come from sources with no stated worldview. The body of the press release is below:
Headline: Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories of 2011
Colorado Springs, CO – January 5, 2012
Access Research Network has just released its annual “Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories” for 2011.
Gaining top honors on the list was the publication of the 50th peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific paper. A major criticism of the intelligent design movement over the past decade has been the lack of scientific research and peer-reviewed scientific papers. The establishment of two ID research labs, Biologic Institute and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, along with a peer-reviewed scientific journal Bio-Complexity, where the scientific merit of intelligent design claims can be examined, have helped accelerated the body of peer-reviewed scientific literature for ID. According to Dennis Wagner, ARN Executive Director “Together, these labs along with individual researchers have published peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific papers in journals such as Protein Science, Journal of Molecular Biology, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Quarterly Review of Biology, Cell Biology International, Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum, Physics of Life Reviews, Annual Review of Genetics, and multiple others. Collectively, this body of research is converging upon a consensus: complex biological features cannot arise by Darwinian mechanisms, but require an intelligent cause.”
Biomemetics, the field of science where man tries to mimic designs found in nature, made the top 10 list again this year with inventors from Harvard building a prototype butterfly and researchers in China reverse-engineering the woodpecker in order to build a better shock-absorbing system. “In order to reverse-engineer a system,” Wagner pointed out, “it has to be engineered in the first place. The butterfly and the woodpecker are just two examples of biological designs that are so complex, they defy the limited capabilities of Darwinian mutations and natural selection."
An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2011 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.
Access Research Network is a 501(c)3 scientific and educational organization dedicated to providing accessible information on science, technology and society issues from an intelligent design perspective.
For Release January 5, 2012
Press Contacts:
Dennis Wagner, Executive Director
Phone: 719-633-1772
E-mail: dwagner@arn.org
or Kevin Wirth, Director of Media Relations
Phone: 360-990-5422
E-mail: kwirth@arn.org
Website: see www.arn.org/top10 for web version with hyperlinks to source information on the top ten Darwin and Design news stories of 2011.
There was a man named William Paley who wrote about the Universe and all we see around us and compared it to a watch. His Teleological Argument can checked out at this pdf site. The Free Online Dictionary definition.
Paley is quite unique in that, both his reasoning and his work concerning the watchmaker argument are well-respected in scientific circles. Charles Darwin read and admired Paley's work. Yet modern scientists then dismiss the teleological argument with very weak counter-arguments that are based on unproven hypotheses. No self-respecting school of philosophy fails to include Paley and the Teleological Argument. They often will say that David Hume "falsified" Paley's argument with his own counter-arguments. Feel free to look at a site which is NOT Creation-friendly for an overview of some of the arguments and counter-arguments - From this site.
It is humorous and tragic at the same time, but many colleges tend to treat Paley's arguments as religious in nature while pretending that Hume's argument is scientific. We are talking about worldviews and you cannot call one worldview "religion" and another "science!" Worldview is the set of presuppositions each person carries around with him, the starting line so to speak from which each line of reasoning is begun.
Not only does the Universe (a macro view of creation) and the e.coli bacteris (a micro view) both appear to be designed, our experiences in real life tell us that the watchmaker argument involves more than simply the appearance of DESIGN but also of ORIGIN or START. A dead dog may be identical in construction and weight and various other ways to his twin from the same litter who is alive, but there is a huge difference at the time of death of that dog. One is "running" or operative (alive) and one is not. Those of you with training in biology know that once an organism dies it begins to immediately change as organisms begin to convert it into carrion. But the point is that not only does the watch have a designer, it also had someone who set the time and wound it up so it would work!
The Universe and a living e.coli both have not only all the hallmarks of design, they have also been "wound up" and are running. Check out the Laws of Thermodynamics and you will also see that the wound watch will eventually stop ticking and so, too, will the Universe. The Universe is running downhill or winding down or however you care to put it. It is heading for a stop, just as a wound spring-driven watch is heading for a stop.
21st Century science has reset the argument with a very strong case for design that challenges the arguments of Darwinists. I believe that the Uncommon Descent blog has given us a great argument for Intelligent Design and I believe that American Thinker has a concise expose of Scientism. Understand that Intelligent Design does not "prove" that there is a God or Who that God might be, it simply uses logic and evidence to make a reasonable argument that falsifies Darwinism and the entire "something from nothing" canard that Scientism espouses.
Darwinism/Scientism and their related belief systems is the wrecking ball by which Atheistic Naturalistic Materialists are destroying the nuclear family and Godly morality in the United States and elsewhere. In a world where blind, uncaring chance randomly produced this Universe, there is no real value to life or purpose for any one man or woman, no destiny to fulfill, no consequences of lasting nature for actions. Humanists may claim to be moral, but their morality is either borrowed from Christians or is based on fallible opinions of fallible men.
Taking God out of society removes the intrinsic value of human life and also real meaning to life. A society that believes that God created also believes that God created people. People therefore have a meaning and a purpose in this life. The moral laws of God are respected and are fundamental to society. This is the basis for the founding of the United States. The Founding Fathers stated this in the Declaration of Independence when they wrote these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I therefore assert that the question of whether God created everything or that nothing exploded to randomly produce everything is essential to every person and every society. This basis for a worldview is crucial to the nature of the person or the society that results from the answer to that question.
Now both of these arguments concerning Scientism and Intelligent Design are presented to you in that order:
December 30, 2012
The Allure and Danger of Scientism
By Trevor Thomas
It
was not unusual in ancient times for individuals to sell themselves
into servitude (as "bondservants"), which was often described as a form
of slavery. Usually this was due to excessive debt, but sometimes it was
done simply to have a roof over one's head and food in one's belly. In
other words, for millennia, in order to satisfy their most basic needs,
human beings have often been willing (not forced) to suffer under many a
heavy yoke. As C.S. Lewis put it, "A hungry man thinks about food, not
freedom."
Writing for The Observer in 1958, Lewis bemoaned the "extreme peril of humanity at present" that leads to the "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State." Typically, in order for any oligarchy effectively to rise and rule, it needs some "extreme peril," something to cure, some desperate need that the rulers promise to fulfill. As Lewis asked, is this not "the ideal opportunity for enslavement?"
When a generation lives in fear or dread of some looming crisis or when a society is made to believe that someone else can provide the things that it cannot live without, is this not the opportunity for those who seek to rule over us to be seen as liberators rather than the tyrants that they are? Were not Stalin and Hitler first seen as saviors and deliverers?
Following two world wars and in the midst of a cold war, Lewis wrote that "The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance...The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good...Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer?"
To "fix" our problems (whether real or perceived) and to exert the power and influence necessary, the new ruling class must more and more rely on the "experts." This means that the politicians must increasingly rely on the knowledge and advice of scientists, until, in the end, the politicians become "merely the scientists' puppets."
Thus, we get the motto of the technocrats: "only science can save us now." Whether it is global warming, stem-cell research, the beginning of life, healthcare, crime, homosexuality, or even gun control or economic policies, the technocrats have the answers. After all, as Lewis also noted, "If we are to be mothered, mother must know best."
In other words, many of our politicians are surrendering themselves to scientism. Scientism is not science. It is an ideology that is often confused with science. It is, rather, an abuse of the scientific method and scientific authority.
Scientism can also be classified as a religion. It is a religion with many denominations: Darwinism, environmentalism, feminism, hedonism, humanism, Marxism, socialism, and so on. How many Americans now find their fulfillment and purpose in these movements? They celebrate Earth Day and Darwin Day. They boldly assert, "Science is my Savior."
Also, scientism arrogantly attempts to lift itself above all other beliefs and disciplines -- philosophy and theology included. "Philosophy is dead," declared Stephen Hawking in his 2010 book The Grand Design. It is dead because, "Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics."
Thus, as we see, scientism seeks to elevate the methods of natural science to a level where it is the bar by which every other intellectual discipline is held. Scientism ridicules faith and religion and tells us that "God is dead." Scientism tells us that the "debate is over," so shut up and get in line.
And, of course, scientism leads us to technocracy. "I dread government in the name of science," said Lewis. "That is how tyrannies come in." What a profound conclusion! How many of us have been duped in the name of "science?" How many of us cower and yield, because, well, if the "scientists" (and then the politicians) tell us so, then it must be so?
We can see the results: generations are taught that life began without God; that the use of fossil fuels is warming the earth; that homosexuality is genetic; that abortion is not really the taking of a life; that marriage is whatever we want it to be; that confiscating the wealth of some to give to others is "fair;" that guns are evil; and so on. Of course, we then get laws and official government policy based on such conclusions.
Sadly, too many of us then grow accustomed to our chains. We become children, or pupils of the State (like "Julia"). We continue to elect leaders who perpetuate the cycle of the "Welfare State" based significantly on the lies of scientism. It's time for Americans to wake up to this perversion of science and return science, faith, philosophy, and by all means, common sense, to their proper place.
Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Writing for The Observer in 1958, Lewis bemoaned the "extreme peril of humanity at present" that leads to the "Willing Slaves of the Welfare State." Typically, in order for any oligarchy effectively to rise and rule, it needs some "extreme peril," something to cure, some desperate need that the rulers promise to fulfill. As Lewis asked, is this not "the ideal opportunity for enslavement?"
When a generation lives in fear or dread of some looming crisis or when a society is made to believe that someone else can provide the things that it cannot live without, is this not the opportunity for those who seek to rule over us to be seen as liberators rather than the tyrants that they are? Were not Stalin and Hitler first seen as saviors and deliverers?
Following two world wars and in the midst of a cold war, Lewis wrote that "The increasing complexity and precariousness of our economic life have forced Government to take over many spheres of activity once left to choice or chance...The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good...Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer?"
To "fix" our problems (whether real or perceived) and to exert the power and influence necessary, the new ruling class must more and more rely on the "experts." This means that the politicians must increasingly rely on the knowledge and advice of scientists, until, in the end, the politicians become "merely the scientists' puppets."
Thus, we get the motto of the technocrats: "only science can save us now." Whether it is global warming, stem-cell research, the beginning of life, healthcare, crime, homosexuality, or even gun control or economic policies, the technocrats have the answers. After all, as Lewis also noted, "If we are to be mothered, mother must know best."
In other words, many of our politicians are surrendering themselves to scientism. Scientism is not science. It is an ideology that is often confused with science. It is, rather, an abuse of the scientific method and scientific authority.
Scientism can also be classified as a religion. It is a religion with many denominations: Darwinism, environmentalism, feminism, hedonism, humanism, Marxism, socialism, and so on. How many Americans now find their fulfillment and purpose in these movements? They celebrate Earth Day and Darwin Day. They boldly assert, "Science is my Savior."
Also, scientism arrogantly attempts to lift itself above all other beliefs and disciplines -- philosophy and theology included. "Philosophy is dead," declared Stephen Hawking in his 2010 book The Grand Design. It is dead because, "Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics."
Thus, as we see, scientism seeks to elevate the methods of natural science to a level where it is the bar by which every other intellectual discipline is held. Scientism ridicules faith and religion and tells us that "God is dead." Scientism tells us that the "debate is over," so shut up and get in line.
And, of course, scientism leads us to technocracy. "I dread government in the name of science," said Lewis. "That is how tyrannies come in." What a profound conclusion! How many of us have been duped in the name of "science?" How many of us cower and yield, because, well, if the "scientists" (and then the politicians) tell us so, then it must be so?
We can see the results: generations are taught that life began without God; that the use of fossil fuels is warming the earth; that homosexuality is genetic; that abortion is not really the taking of a life; that marriage is whatever we want it to be; that confiscating the wealth of some to give to others is "fair;" that guns are evil; and so on. Of course, we then get laws and official government policy based on such conclusions.
Sadly, too many of us then grow accustomed to our chains. We become children, or pupils of the State (like "Julia"). We continue to elect leaders who perpetuate the cycle of the "Welfare State" based significantly on the lies of scientism. It's time for Americans to wake up to this perversion of science and return science, faith, philosophy, and by all means, common sense, to their proper place.
Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
credit
A Simple Argument For Intelligent Design
| January 20, 2013 |
Posted by William J Murray
under
Complex Specified Information, Functionally Specified Complex Information & Organization, Intelligent Design |
Simply put, I know intelligent design exists – humans (at least, if not other animals) employ it. I use it directly. I know that intelligent design as humans employ it can (but not always) generate phenomena that is easily discernible as product of intelligent design. Anyone who argues that a battleship’s combination of directed specificity and/or complexity is not discernible from the complexity found in the materials after an avalanche is either committing intellectual dishonesty or willful self-delusion – even if the avalanche was deliberately caused, and even if the rocks were afterward deliberately rearranged to maintain their haphazard distribution.
Some have argued that we only “recognize” human design, and that such recognition may not translate to the intelligent design of non-human intelligence. The easy answer to that is that first, we do not always recognize the product of human design. In fact, we often design things to have a natural appearance. That we may not recognize all intelligent design is a given and simply skirts the issue of that which we can recognize.
Second, it is again either delusion or dishonesty to ignore a simple hypothetical exercise: in some cases, were we to find certain kinds of objects/phenomena [edited for clarity] on distant, uninhabited and otherwise desolate planets, would we be able to infer that such were most likely specifically designed by intelligent creatures of some sort for some purpose?
Again, the obvious answer to this except in cases of delusion or or dishonesty is “yes”. Then the question becomes: without a scientifically valid means of making such a determination, how would one be made? Intuition? Common sense? Is the recognizable difference between such artifacts and those that appear to be natural not a quantifiable commodity? If not, how do we go about making the case that something we find on such a planet is not a naturally-occurring phenomena, especially in cases that are not so obvious? There must be some scientifically-acceptable means of making such a determination – after all, resources committed to research depend upon a proper categorical determination; it would quite wasteful attempting to explain a derelict alien spacecraft in terms of natural processes – time and money better spent trying to reverse engineer the design for practical use and attempting to discern the purpose of its features.
Thus, after we make the determination that said artifact is the product of intelligent design, our investigatory heuristic is different from what it would be were we to assume the artifact is not intelligently designed. A scientific, categorical distinction is obviously important in future research.
The idea that there is no discernible or quantifiable difference between some products of ID and what nature produces without it, or that such a determination is irrelevant, is absurd. One might argue that the method by which ID proponents make the differential evaluation between natural and product of ID (FSCI, dFSCI, Irreducible Complexity, Semiotic System) is incorrect or insufficient, but one can hardly argue such a difference doesn’t exist or is not quantifiable in some way, nor can they argue that it makes no difference to the investigation. One can hardly argue, IMO, that those attempts to scientifically describe that difference are unreasonable, because they obviously point at least in spirit to that which obviously marks the difference. IMO, the argument cannot be against ID in spirit, but rather only about the best way to scientifically account for the obvious difference between some cases of ID and otherwise naturally-occurring phenomena, whether or not that “best accounting” indicts some phenomena as “product of design” that many would prefer not to be the case.
The only intellectually honest position is to admit ID exists; that there is some way to describe the differential in a scientific sense to make useful categorical distinctions (as “best explanation”), and then to accept without ideological preference when that differential is used to make such a determination. If the best explanation for biological life is that it was intelligently designed, then so be it; this should be of no more concern to any true scientist than if a determination is made that some object found on a distant planet was intelligently designed, or if a feature on Mars is best explained as the product of water erosion. To categorically deny ID as a valid, scientific explanatory category (arrowheads? geometric patterns found via Google Earth? battleships? crop circles? space shuttle? potential alien artifacts?) is ideological absurdity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I believe that an intelligent and logical person will look carefully at organisms and be certain that they had to have been designed. The cell itself is a world of specified complexity and interdependent operations and organic machines that is far more complex and efficient than anything man has ever designed. The only thing most people lack is information, because Darwinists dominate the academic world, the media and have completely taken over secular scientific organizations. Nevertheless more scientists are beginning to think and not simply swallow Darwinism whole and, as a result, a number of interesting discoveries have been made. Scientists interested in advancing technology have, in many fields, made a tacit concession to design by trying to copy the design features of organisms for the use of mankind. This is no surprise, since the concept of Darwinism is a hindrance rather than a help in the laboratory.
Below is a press release from Access Research Network. It highlights what they consider the top ten science stories of 2011 involving Darwin and Design.
I will be calling on a wide variety of scientific sites to help make the case that Darwinism must be discarded and that Scientism is a plague on society. Some of them will be Creation sites, some ID sites and some of the information will come from sources with no stated worldview. The body of the press release is below:
Headline: Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories of 2011
Colorado Springs, CO – January 5, 2012
Access Research Network has just released its annual “Top 10 Darwin and Design Science Stories” for 2011.
Gaining top honors on the list was the publication of the 50th peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific paper. A major criticism of the intelligent design movement over the past decade has been the lack of scientific research and peer-reviewed scientific papers. The establishment of two ID research labs, Biologic Institute and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, along with a peer-reviewed scientific journal Bio-Complexity, where the scientific merit of intelligent design claims can be examined, have helped accelerated the body of peer-reviewed scientific literature for ID. According to Dennis Wagner, ARN Executive Director “Together, these labs along with individual researchers have published peer-reviewed pro-ID scientific papers in journals such as Protein Science, Journal of Molecular Biology, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics, Quarterly Review of Biology, Cell Biology International, Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum, Physics of Life Reviews, Annual Review of Genetics, and multiple others. Collectively, this body of research is converging upon a consensus: complex biological features cannot arise by Darwinian mechanisms, but require an intelligent cause.”
Biomemetics, the field of science where man tries to mimic designs found in nature, made the top 10 list again this year with inventors from Harvard building a prototype butterfly and researchers in China reverse-engineering the woodpecker in order to build a better shock-absorbing system. “In order to reverse-engineer a system,” Wagner pointed out, “it has to be engineered in the first place. The butterfly and the woodpecker are just two examples of biological designs that are so complex, they defy the limited capabilities of Darwinian mutations and natural selection."
An online version of the ARN Top 10 Darwin and Design stories for 2011 with hyperlinks to original news sources can be found at www.arn.org/top10.
Access Research Network is a 501(c)3 scientific and educational organization dedicated to providing accessible information on science, technology and society issues from an intelligent design perspective.
For Release January 5, 2012
Press Contacts:
Dennis Wagner, Executive Director
Phone: 719-633-1772
E-mail: dwagner@arn.org
or Kevin Wirth, Director of Media Relations
Phone: 360-990-5422
E-mail: kwirth@arn.org
Website: see www.arn.org/top10 for web version with hyperlinks to source information on the top ten Darwin and Design news stories of 2011.