Creationist Wolf in Cheap Clothing

So, if there was a theory that was contradicted by something we know to be true, we should say that theory is not true anymore?

 

In my understanding, ID (in it's most basic, stripped down version), has nothing to do with faith at all. It's a theory that attempts to answer questions that scientific evidence has yet to address adequately. When augmented by items like irreducible complexity, one could call ID a hypothesis, but really without some form of faith or religious aspect, it's not bulletproof at all.

However, Darwinism is no better. It, too, is a theory that attempts to answer questions that science has yet to address adequately, keeping in mind that proof is a subjective term. Neither theory is bulletproof. Which is more likely may be the topic of debate for generations to come, but that's partly what this forum is about.

 

Dude, you couldn't possibly be serious. slydevyl is being a complete dick to me and I'm just sitting here taking it because I'm trying to comply with the rules of this particular forum. Seriously, if you plan to have any credibility whatsoever, you need to actually watch what people say and how they say it instead of whether or not they agree with your particular viewpoint. There's no question that HardHarry was getting out of line, and I even told him that it wasn't helping, but slydevyl has been by far the most rude and abusive person in this thread.

Yes, it does. It has everything to do with faith and little else. There is no evidence for a creator at all, but there is nothing that disproves the existence of a creator either, and we just don't know enough to rule out the possibility that someone or something set the universe in motion. There's nothing for it either, though, so it's something you have to take on faith or not at all. There's no science to it whatsoever.

No, no. A hypothesis is something that can be tested either through observation or experimentation. ID is not testable or observable in any respect whatsoever. Science has nothing at all to do with the supernatural, and the supernatural has nothing at all to do with science.

No, you're wrong about that too. Evolution has an incredibly expansive body of evidence that you can observe and test, which we've done. Speciation and change over time are proven to occur, which is why there's no legitimate debate over it. It is akin to the "earth is flat" or "earth is the center of the universe" mistakes of the past because it's denying something known to be true scientifically. But like the "theory of gravity," our understanding of exactly how and why it works continues to change as our understanding of the universe grows. So we have a more complex view of evolution than we did a century ago, but we've known all along that it does happen.



vpkozel:
Nope. If something in a theory is incorrect (re: we've found various things slightly wrong with Newton's laws), it is then modified to be correct again to the best of our current knowledge.

One of the problems is that common people and scientists use words differently. In scientific terms, nothing becomes a theory until it is proven to model a real world phenomenon. It cannot be called a theory until it has been tested and supported. Prior to that, it is called a hypothesis. Obviously that's not the case with the popular lexicon, as people regularly talk about "theories" in a sense that is interchangeable with "ideas," which is a source of much confusion regarding the evolution "debate."

And when a theory is completely discarded (this happens very rarely), we usually consider that to be a paradigm shift.

 

You got some problems with gravity then.

 

That is all included in ID. ID is additive to evoution, not a replacement for it.

 

None at all. It's really the force of angel's wings pushing you down.

 

Then the ones at teh edge of the universe must be pulling it along then, cause it's speeding up.

 

And ID is something completely separate from evolution or any other part of science. It is indeed possible for a creator being to have brought the universe into being, governed by the natural laws we can observe scientifically, but we can't ever know such a thing or test it.

 

That's exactly the argument that several of us have made for months, but Sly calls us idiots and continues to attack evolution. But no, he isnt scared of it at all.

 

Bush and the ID people are fooling no one. Look who cheers when the president makes such remarks: not scientists--who overwhelmingly reject "intelligent design"--but bible toters, theocrats and preachers. Theologian Cardinal Schonborn of Vienna claims that evolution as an "unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection" is untrue. This is not science vs. science. This is poorly disguised religious dogma vs. the fact of evolution.

"Creationism science" is three things:

1) An attack on evolution, offering no evidence for their hypothesis of a designer ("Natural selection is wrong, so we win by default");

2) The old "god of the gaps" strategy of seeking supposedly unanswerable questions, and plugging the gap with a deity ("Gosh, we can't explain this, so there must be a god");

3) A story, such as the creation myth in the book of Genesis ("God said it, I believe it").

"Intelligent design" is not science. Its proponents have never had an article published on the topic in any peer-reviewed scientific journal. They conduct no experiments that would prove or falsify their hypothesis. Their conjecture makes no useful predictions, nor can it be mathematically modeled. There are no research labs doing ID science.