Given Dembski‘s recent remarks, this is spot on:
ID is science. Always has been. Always will be. Amen.
Shorter Bill Dembski
ID is science. Always has been. Always will be. Amen.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Unrelated:
“Is human evolution accelerating?”
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/12/13/evolution.speedup/index.html
Good photo choice. Could he look any more arrogant?
All hail the great prophet Dembski! He knows what happens as t goes to infinity!
I can haz cre-duh-bility?
Shouldn’t that read “Credulity”?
That’s sort of what I thought it read until I looked closer.
Here’s a response in suit
http://archaeoporn.wordpress.com/2007/12/15/credibility/
over at UD someone has asked Dembski to explain his response to question 4 from the interview. He has responded. I love this:
“Come on folks, it’s no secret that I’m a Christian and that I have various motivations for pursuing ID.”
I thought that acording to Demski and Behe it was the science and the evidence that had lead them to their conclusions. Looks like Dembski is admitting it’s the religion that is leading him after all.
In all seriousness, why all the fuss about ID? So the guy believes in God and looks for His fingerprints in the world around him. So what? Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian priest. I doubt if you took Mendel and transplanted him into 2007 that he’s be running around yelling about how stupid ID is.
Why not live and let live?
If it’s his effect on textbooks that concerns you, you might want to go read what our kids are learning in Social Studies. That area is a total mess of political correctness. It’s a worthless pile of garbage compared to ID.
oh boy
Uh, Right. And teaching bad science to children makes that better how?
To paraphrase a speech from a certain well-known movie:
“The Gospel,the Gospel according to Dembski. God speaks to Dembski and Dembski tells the world! Dembski, Dembski, Dembski almighty! … Suppose that a lesser human being, suppose a Dawkins or a Darwin had the audacity to think that God might whisper to him, that an un-Dembski thought might still be holy, must a man go to prison,because he differs with the self appointed prophet? Extend the testaments, let us have a book of Dembski! We shall hex the Pentateuch and slip you in neatly between Numbers and Deuteronomy!!!!!!”
Of course the difference between Dembski and ‘Matthew Harrison Brady’ (or William Jennings Bryan on whom the charatcer is based) is that Brady was honest about his religious beliefs and agenda. There was no attempt to disguise faith as science in order to slip it into the public school science curriculum.
Uh, Right. And teaching bad science to children makes that better how?
Well, it’s obviously not bad science, because God is real and good, while being PC is about being a subversive anti-American atheist commie which is faaaar worse than lying to kids.
Bill Dembski = Dale Gribble.
So what if that guy thinks that the holocaust wasn’t real? Why not live and let live. So you don’t like his history book? Have you seen what they are teaching in Science class? They actually say we come from monkeys.
Welcome KT you apologist twit.
ID is a worthless pile of shit. But you seem ok with it.
Idiot.
And what “social studies political correctness” are you talking about? This ought to be good.
Follow the link to KT’s blog and you’ll see what.
/eyeroll
“Welcome KT you apologist twit. ID is a worthless pile of shit”
Wow. That kind of answered my question.
Thanks for the cephalapod photos. I’ll keep coming back for those. I appreciate you sharing them with us.
Wow. That kind of answered my question.
Not a response to what was said. Do you have anything of value to add, or is it going to be your silly apologetics for ID and against liberalism.
Follow the link to KT’s blog and you’ll see what.
Yeah, seems like a 24%er…and Fred Thompson?! Someone’s not quite dealing with reality.
So you are not going to defend your position KT?
Will you use one snarky post for asn excuse to run away and ignore everyone else?
“If it’s his effect on textbooks that concerns you, you might want to go read what our kids are learning in Social Studies. That area is a total mess of political correctness. It’s a worthless pile of garbage compared to ID.”
well historians and social sciences aren’t going to cure cancer, scientists might, but it certainly won’t help them if they don’t understand the most basic uniting factor in biology.
Note, this is coming from a social scientist.
Dembski has more hair than Dale Gribble, but Dale is more rational.
MAJeff, these images appear to based on the “Successories” series of motivational prints, the affected profundity of which is substituted for managerial competence and leadership in conference rooms across America. The designer (of the images) has left the ‘inspiring words’ (desirable qualities) as they appear in the originals, and modified the captions, and in some cases, the photos, to show how these traits are exemplified by our good friends, the cdesign proponentsists. Art at its finest!
well historians and social sciences aren’t going to cure cancer, scientists might, but it certainly won’t help them if they don’t understand the most basic uniting factor in biology.
Note, this is coming from a social scientist.
And this other social scientist will add that we need to understand social processes because they are often linked to health results. For instance, the political and economic relationships of domination have an effect on, for instance, where chemical wastes get dumped…which also has an effect on cancer.
Then again, the critical thinking and analytical skills required in any of these endeavors is exactly the type of thing Ms. Kat, Mr. Thomspons, and the right have been agitating against for years.
However, taking a look at such social, economic, and political relationships is also outside the spectrum of acceptability, I would guess, of Ms. Kat’s perspective, since such investigations are generally looked at and termed as “politically correct” among her set.
In other words, google “cancer alley”
MAJeff, these images appear to based on the “Successories” series of motivational prints, the affected profundity of which is substituted for managerial competence and leadership in conference rooms across America.
Among the first mall kiosks to go up in flames come The Revolution.
I like the Demotivators product line better.
Hey Steve_C:
Is Ms. Kat yet another virtual ID, neocon sockpuppet using feigned innocence to advance the same old BS, and not interested in any substantive discussion?
Quite Possible.
Does this blog still have a 3-post rule before biting new posters’ heads off?
I thought it did.
For all the little creationists out there that idolize Dembski, keep in mind that he’s the mathematician that fell for the “bible code”. He was quoted as saying something to the effect that he was expecting many new discoveries in “bible code technology”. In other words, Dembski is a mathematician that fell for equal-distance number sequencing. Do you have any idea how idiotic that is? A mathematician falling for something like that is kind of like a real estate agent getting sold a bridge. It SHOULD be impossible.
This should be hanging up in Bill’s office:
http://imageupload.com/~imageupl/show.php/54041_findx.jpg.html
At least our method (another social scientist chipping in) is not based on criticising an important branch of science with well established evidence on the basis of a random choice of scriptures from illiterate desert people living 3000 years ago.
You’re so cute and shiny, I just want to rub your little head and put you in my pocket.
MAJeff, these images appear to based on the “Successories” series of motivational prints, the affected profundity of which is substituted for managerial competence and leadership in conference rooms across America. The designer (of the images) has left the ‘inspiring words’ (desirable qualities) as they appear in the originals, and modified the captions, and in some cases, the photos, to show how these traits are exemplified by our good friends, the cdesign proponentsists. Art at its finest!
J Myers, I’m the guy that created the images, and you’re right, although as someone pointed out, the spoofs at despair.com (“Demotivators”) was an influence as well. The “Succesories” posters, which I often see in my corporate travels, are just so over-the-top in their feel-good BS, that they have become a form of self-parody. IDers need some feel-good tools, the way things are going lately, so I’m just serving a small market niche. ;-)
-TS
Well, that picture of wild Bill would look great above my toilet.
Above it?
TS, I like yours much better than the originals–nice work!
There is a 3 post rule.
But I spotted the winger in 1 post.
And I’m cranky.
Apparently KT thinks our social studies textbooks would be ‘less PC’ if they said things like this:
Gregor Mendel, heap big researcher. Many moons pass while pea plants grow. Mendel find that pea colors inherited. Mendel waste much time while Iroquois braves wonder when he’s going leave his freakin’ pea plants and join the hunt.
KT Kat #8 wrote:
Don’t be so sure about Mendel. There is a critical difference between Intelligent Design/Creationism and theistic evolution: they use completely different approaches when they look for “God’s fingerprints in the world around them.”
Mendel and other religious scientists reverently study nature to see “what God has done.” They are not looking for miraculous interventions which cannot be explained through nature — to them, Nature itself is the miracle. They see the hand of God in the primary creation of the world around them, and use science to study that world. As they see it, the more we all learn, the more it enhances their view of God.
Creationists, on the other hand, are looking for where Nature breaks down. They’re looking for telltale fingerprints which don’t belong: that’s how you know God’s been there. Nature is not miracle enough. God is confirmed through the existence of the extraordinary and inexplicable. The more we all learn, the more it takes away from their view of God.
The first approach may be a bit disingenuous and inconsistent (it’s not a scientific approach to the concept of God itself) — but it does allow believers to do regular science, and accept regular science. The second approach doesn’t — it forces them to look for holes and attack mainstream scientific findings.
I believe that Mendel belonged to the first group. So yes, he’d be yelling how stupid ID is today. The creationists of the time would have been arguing that inherited traits were each mini-miracles with no explanation other than the grace of God, and that whole genetics idea is nothing but an ungodly materialistic reductionism.
i’m getting a lot of flak on this topic on Uncommondescent. i rarely ever comment there and they’re all piling on me.
Anyone else think Dembski bears a striking resemblance to Richard Owen, the guy who championed the whole “God’s archetype” thing?
i’m getting a lot of flak on this topic on Uncommondescent. i rarely ever comment there and they’re all piling on me.
Golly. And I thought they were all such reasonable, broad-minded people at UD. Go figger.
Poor Dembsky, working so hard while all his life achievements will be in vain because the aimless process of evolution do can create the most complex lifeforms imaginable with the greatest of ease (it only needs some time, let’s say a few billion years ;-) )
Sastra #36
Very reasonable post, but I think I am misreading you on this line: “The first approach may be a bit disingenuous and inconsistent (it’s not a scientific approach to the concept of God itself)”
Clarify please if you have a moment? Thanks.
Schooner —
I wrote:
When theists assume that Nature itself is a work of God, that means that the concept of “God” is unfalsifiable. There is then absolutely no possible evidence or event which would force them to question their belief. By definition, everything can only confirm it.
Scientists commit themselves to a method of inquiry which requires that they are always open to changing their minds if the situation warrants. Any one of their beliefs could be wrong. When I said that seeing Nature in itself as God’s miracle is a bit “disingenuous and inconsistent,” I meant that scientists who do this are deliberately placing their belief in God into a special box where they can’t be shown to be wrong. They’re taking a controversial assumption that might be mistaken, and protecting it.
I think that, philosophically, scientifically, and ethically, that’s not really a very good thing to do. It doesn’t show respect for the concept “God,” as a hypothesis. However, in theism, doing this is supposed to be a very good and wise thing to do: it shows respect for God, as a Being. I’ll agree that, for practical reasons, it is a very good and wise thing to do — if you want to believe in God and do honest science.
There’s a big debate on this point, of course.
Steve_C (#14),
I don’t agree with KT_Cat at all, but that was a pretty harsh response for a relatively innocuous introductory comment. Take a diazepam, and save the large ammunition for the pernicious trolls.
I misread your intent, as it turns out. Thanks, much appreciated.
If it’s his effect on textbooks that concerns you, you might want to go read what our kids are learning in Social Studies. That area is a total mess of political correctness. It’s a worthless pile of garbage compared to ID.
I find this interesting given that I teach … [drum roll] social studies.
Of course Social Studies are a mess to people like KT, it implies that Victorian and Protestant ideas about language, clothing, nudity, sex, and everything else in the world might be wrong, and as everyone knows, its not like people bathed in rivers, preached in the nude, allowed women to dress in pants, instead of skirts, or anything else in the Bible. Those things, and more, only happened among pagans and sinners, and it took stuck up, Machiavellian, religious fanatics to set us right back when Queen Victorian saw the light and wrote the passages called, “Edicts to live by, verses 1-1 to 24-13.” Oh, wait, you mean there **are** no such passages in the Bible? Well, then why the #@$#@$ are we listening to the ravings of moralistic idiots that thought showing your ankles was a sin, or saying the wrong words would get you sent to hell? Because, the only justification for saying that social studies and any understanding of human society and psychology is garbage is if you actually think these idiots where right, and that the fact that their own bloody Bible contracted them in many cases (until they rewrote bits of it to remove the “confusion” that arose when people pointed those bits out), doesn’t matter at all.
Becasue I, too, first read “Credibility” as “Credulity”:
http://jillswift.home.comcast.net/~jillswift/Credulity.jpg
LOL!!!
ROTFL!!!
Once as tragedy, once as farce…
(Usually I say “once as farce, once as farce”. But the great Owen falls, at most, under tragedy, while Dembski…)
LOL!!!
ROTFL!!!
Once as tragedy, once as farce…
(Usually I say “once as farce, once as farce”. But the great Owen falls, at most, under tragedy, while Dembski…)
Once as tragedy, once as farce…
See, Kat was right. Marx-quoting, anti-American commie….
I don’t know if anyone else caught the NPR story about the canoeist from UK that reappeared after an apparent accidental death. Neal Conan (NPR reporter) was talking to some women about the fact that the man has some mental illness issues. The woman made the crack “with a name like Darwin what do you expect” Conan laughed along with the woman after her funny joke. The ID nuts have made considerable headway into the fabric of American thought.
I once visited an interesting ID blog, and one of the posts was about how ID is scoffed at even though it’s ready to make a stunning breakthrough. The breakthrough in question was PoMo at it’s best:
“Dark energy, that drives the expansion of the universe, is one of the deepest and most exciting puzzles in modern science. We posit that dark energy is the field manifestation of the parent seed of the universe, just as the cosmic vacuum’s zero-point energy. They all originate from the cosmic seed’s biophoton emissions, which blackbody radiation provides a holographic biofield for the generation of the physical universe.”
This was classic on its own merits. However, it turns out with a bit more digging, the “parent seed of the universe” is Jesus Christ.
ID is science! Amen.
I can’t read that poster: “Id is science…Amen” without laughing
Aside from the absolutely bizarre, irony-meter-detonating spectacle of Ian Spedding castigating anyone else for being dishonest about their motives…
He doesn’t look for them. He’s aware they aren’t there, so he lies about finding them in order to deceive the ignorant and/or weak-minded. Thank you for demonstrating that this effort on his part has been at least partly successful.
What point are you trying to make here?
Indeed. While you’re at it, though, you should probably lay into the mass media and popular culture for their inexcusable bias against fires and in favor of fire brigades.
Idiot.
Tatarize #51 wrote:
Heh! Great quote, but wouldn’t that be “New Age” instead of “PoMo?” Postmodernist rhetoric usually translates everything into power relationships by knocking down logic, reason, and objectivity. If it sounds like Deepak Chopra is writing technobabble for Star Trek, then that’s more likely New Age (rhymes with “sewage.”)
Tatarize (#51),
“Parent seed of the universe”? Wow. Sounds like the old Egyptian myth about the universe being created by the sun god jacking off — or, in some versions, autofellating.
@peon #50
They mentioned the canoeist on the Now Show (comedy for those who don’t know it) on BBC 4 too and it went something like that (I am paraphrasing):
I guess it is little comfort but for many on this side of the Atlantic ID remains a joke.
Some people have done functional MRI studies looking at what parts of the brain are active during religious experiences
‘God spot’ researchers see the light in MRI study
What would be more interesting would be to see what parts of the brain are active when cdesign proponentists claim that ID isn’t creationism or that the Intelligent Designer isn’t God.
Ah, Marx was it who said that? I had no idea.
Ah, Marx was it who said that? I had no idea.
Awesome. I’d seriously pay for a print of this!