Interplanner
Well-known member
Is there any wonder that the United Methodist Church would prohibit the teaching of Intelligent Design? Really?
UMC Prohibits Teaching ID
- Thread starter Interplanner
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Interplanner
Well-known member
Alive enough to produce and market a beautiful DVD series subtitled ID in the [physical science realm]. See illustramedia.com. The series is titled THE DESIGN OF LIFE.
"Nature does have the appearance of having been designed." --Dawkins
gcthomas
New member
Appearances can be deceptive, of course. And that was the (missing) context of your alleged quote mine.
In fact, I can't find a source for your 'quote' beyond creationist sites. Is it made up?
What he DID say was:
I never trusted the Methodists
Jose Fly
New member
A DVD? Wow. I guess ID creationism is an active, valid field of science! I mean.....a DVD!!
I agree with this apart from a teeny qualification: A church should teach a theology of creation that avoids making scientific statements.
You see, the church's theology should not be driven by what scientists tell us. Neither should scientists interfere with our theology or practice.
You are however wrong about 'scientific facts'. No such thing. Theories, hypotheses, measurements, degrees of accuracy, you get the picture I am sure.
There is another thing that perhaps you confuse. Scientists are not really an issue for the church. Historians are. Evolution is a theory of history. Cosmology is primarily a study of history. The Bible also offers a history. It is different versions of history that cause conflicts with Christianity, not different versions of science.
Where a lot of Christians have been duped is that they have been given to understand that evolution is a theory of science and that cosmology is a theory of science. Because of this, they are led to believe that Christianity is anti-scientific. If it were, that would be something to fear. This is the big error. Christians invented science. Science is Christian because it seeks verifiable and realistic truth about the world which God made. History, on the other hand, is a soft subject: notice how almost every day evolutionists change their story in some detail or another, notice how cosmlogists also do the same. You don't need to worry about soft subjects such as these. And your deference towards 'scientific facts' seems more than a little misplaced.
Jose Fly
New member
No doubt! Don't they realize that "Desert Reign" said in an internet forum that those are mere history, not science?
Well all know that if "Desert Reign" says something is so, it is so!
Selaphiel
Well-known member
Desert Reign said:
I have not said the church should make scientific statements. I said that the church needs to relate to scientific facts when doing theology. That does not mean that the church should deny a theology of creation, it means that it must be a theology of creation that relates to a factual description of the world.
This is a field I know fairly well, I wrote my thesis on the relationship between science, philosophy of science and philosophical theology.
Who suggested that they should? Intelligent design and creationism isn't just lousy science, it is garbage theology as well, especially intelligent design which turns God into a pagan incompetent demiurge.
There are facts, the facts of science are the observational data. Theories describe facts by proposing a coherent framework of concepts and ideas that make sense of the various facts/observations.
That is absolute nonsense. The theory of evolution explains the observational facts from fossilic and genetic data using the theoretical concept of natural selection and observed genetic mechanisms. This theoretical framework produces testable predictions. This is why the theory of evolution is considered a highly accurate theory, because its succesful predictions using that theoretical framework.
Once again, no. Cosmology is a field of theoretical physics. If that borders to anything, it is not history, but rather metaphysics due to it being so extremely abstractly mathematical in its theories and at times lacking in empirical data or a conceivable possibility of empirical verification.
The theory of evolution is a theory of science. Cosmology is not, it is a field of physics. Big bang theory is a scientific theory, a theory that falls in under the field of physical cosmology.
The medieval synthesis of Greek thought and Christianity was a necessary precursor to the scientific enterprise. I do not deny that.
If you think that is contrary to science, then you do not understand what science is. They change details according to new data, that is how all science works. What the theory of evolution might change is the reconstruction of phylogenetic relationships, it has not changed or removed a core theoretical concept like natural selection or the genetic mechanisms such as genetic drift and mutations. It may have supplemented those genetic mechanisms according to new findings with mechanisms such as epigentics and more complex systems level feedback mechanisms such as the relationship between the levels of genetics and the dynamics of ecosystems.
You are way off when calling the theory of evolution for a theory of history. Then you either do not understand what constitutes a scientific theory or you do not understand the theory of evolution.
wanna bet that he does not provide anything accurate?
Selaphiel
Well-known member
Desert Reign said:
The Bible offers a history, that is correct. Your error is in conceiving a scientific theory as a history. The history the Bible offers, and as read according to the creedal affirmations of the church (I can't say that I see any conflict between science and the first articles of either the Apostolic or Nicene creeds) and so in the light of Christ does not need to be in conflict with the scientific theory of evolution at all. There is only a conflict as soon as one mistakenly thinks of the significance of the scriptural accounts of creation as descriptive of an actual cosmological process that this becomes problematic.
The Biblical story of creation, sin, redemption and eschatological fullfilment still stands, but it must be understood in continuity with scientific descriptions of the universe, and certainly not come up with pseudoscientific nonsense that contradicts it. In doing that, it only unnecessarily stains the church.
With such an illustrious background, you should know then that scientific theories make predictions which are testable.
The prediction that a random mutation in a population will occur is not a testable one. Because you cannot prove that it is random. All you can say is that you don't know what the cause of the mutation was. The theory of evolution was always about how species originated, not how they will progress for the simple and obvious reason that randomness by definition cannot be predicted. And the moment you do experiments like bombarding cultures with UV radiation or stuff like that, and you get loads of mutations and you say, 'Hey, there it is, evolution in front of our very eyes!' you are sorely mistaken - because what you just did wasn't random at all. It was your own purposeful act that caused these mutations. The theory of evolution by definition, is not a scientific theory because it is untestable.
Apart from the bolded part, I am in agreement with you. And I think that a lot of 7 day or YEC is a disgrace. For the reason I gave in my earlier post which you seemed to disagree with, namely that Christian theology should steer away from making scientific claims. As soon as it does that, it opens itself up to those claims being tested by scientists. Our faith is not testable by those outside it.
Selaphiel
Well-known member
Desert Reign said:
Which the theory of evolution does. It makes predictions on phylogenetic relationships and on how species will adapt in relationship to their environments.
Then you misunderstand what is meant by the term random mutations. It is not random as in "we have no idea what causes it", it is random as it is highly complex and thus extremely difficult to predict exactly when and where it will happen. The former would be ontological randomness, the latter, and reality, is epistemological randomness so to speak.
They don't need to use radiation to observe evolution in action. Take Richard Lenski's famous E.coli experiements for example, no radiation involved in that, and they observed significant changes.
Which is the reason that the UMC's decision was good. Intelligent design is just pseudoscientific nonsense that any serious church should not dream of entertaining.
Which is where you are mistaken. It is a theory that makes predictions using the principlet of natural selection (a principle that is observable with simple experimentation) and genetic mechanisms (which are observable). It makes predictions using these which are confirmed by data such as fossils, molecular biology and other experiements.
In fact, there are quite few theories of science that are more robust than the theory of evolution.
One of your charges was that it was not a theory of science because it changes. All science does. Theories become more sophisticated as more data is gathered. As I mentioned, the theory is expanded with more complex genetic mechanisms, but the core concepts have not been invalidated.
I suspect you are using words that mean nothing. But I don't want to prejudge. So if you could kindly translate this into ordinary language then I would comment further.
Am I right in saying that you just here agreed with me? For all your words, you are saying that the main event of your theory of evolution cannot be predicted? Isn't that what I just said? And aren't you exaggerating slightly? Isn't it true that in fact it is not just 'extremely difficult' but rather impossible to predict?
'So to speak'? I'm really thinking now that you are just making fun of the people who are reading your posts. We are talking about predictions. Prediction is the act of an intelligence, or rational beings.
But it was still a purposely designed experiment, right? So no randomness there. Did you understand what I said or are you purposely avoiding it? These organisms were given a citrate environment on purpose. If they had been given an ammonia environment or something like that, they would have all died instantly. This experiment didn't test the theory of evolution. A test of the theory would have been to throw random changes in the environment at these organisms to see if they adapted. The experiment tested our knowledge of the genetic structure of the organism but not the theory of evolution.
You forgot that we are rational beings. If you make observations and formulate a theory from those observations then it is obvious that the observations will support the theory because they were used to formulate the theory in the first place. You have to make predictions. And your only prediction is this (or something similar):
Given some random change in an enviroment, an organism will either die out or it will adapt to that change.
Anyone with an ounce of sense can see that this theory is unfalsifiable.
Zeke
Well-known member
There is still a literal residue in both of you're beliefs, yet you at least have the common sense to grasped that ID birthed by Thought is the glue that holds the chaos together.
Jose Fly
New member
It's amazing to watch people who have deemed themselves qualified to pass judgement on entire fields of science, simultaneously demonstrate that they know almost nothing about those same fields of science.
Dunning-Kruger Effect
Dunning-Kruger Effect
why is intelligent design, whatever that is
tied to creationism, whatever that is
why can't they be on there own?
who can deny intelligent design
no matter how it happened
the plants and the animals
all know what to do
and
they continue to do it
tied to creationism, whatever that is
why can't they be on there own?
who can deny intelligent design
no matter how it happened
the plants and the animals
all know what to do
and
they continue to do it
Jose Fly
New member
Because ID is a form of creationism. Specifically, it was crafted as a legal strategy to get around court rulings banning the teaching of creationism in public school science classes.
The federal courts had ruled that it is unconstitutional to teach creationism in public schools, because doing do amounted to the government advancing a particular religious belief. So the creationists came up with "intelligent design", which is basically the same old arguments they had before, only stripped of all their references to the Bible and the Christian God. They figured if they took away all the Biblical/religious references, they could get their material in public schools.
Fortunately a federal court in Pennsylvania saw right through that charade and ruled that teaching ID creationism in public schools is also unconstitutional.
One of the best bits of evidence demonstrating the creationists' charade is the "cdesign proponentists" error in the creationist textbook Of Pandas and People.