Should Intelligent Design be allowed in school?

2010-07-25T09:01:00.001-07:00

There's a difference between "religion" and believing that an intelligent designer is a viable cosmological model.

2009-07-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

Teachers and professors teach all sorts of cosmological theories. Whatever new model comes along. If someone suggest there might be an intelligent cosmological model, everyone becomes biased and irrational.

God stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

2008-06-20T07:59:00.001-07:00

Job 26:7

God stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

Do you believe in abiogenesis?

2008-06-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

And God said, Let the "waters" bring forth the moving creature that hath life.

And God said, Let the "earth" bring forth the living creature after his kind.

Abiogenesis

Abiogenesis, is the study of how life on Earth could have come from non-life.

In Thy book ,all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.

The main role of DNA is its long-term storage of information.

I recently read and listened to an argument of an intelligent cosmological model here at cosmic fingerprint about how DNA seems like information.

Creationism was trying to model the science on a certain interpretation of Genesis. You don't have anything like that in intelligent design

2008-06-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

Creationism was trying to model the science on a certain interpretation of Genesis. You don't have anything like that in intelligent design. a quote from an advocate of ID or intelligent design, Dembski

In the above post I showed how an alternate interpretation of Genesis could look like abiogenesis.

Fine Tuned Universe

2008-06-06T14:38:00.000-07:00

The fine-tuned Universe is the idea that conditions that allow life in the Universe can only occur with the tightly restricted values of the universal physical constants, and that if any of several fundamental constants were only slightly different the universe would be unlikely to be conducive to the establishment and development of matter, astronomical structures, elemental diversity, or life as it is presently understood.

The arguments relating to the fine-tuned universe concept involve the anthropic principle, which states that any valid theory of the universe must be consistent with our existence as human beings at this particular time and place in the universe. In other words, even if the actual probability of our universe that supports intelligent life may be very low, the conditional probability of supporting intelligent life, given our existence in it, is 1. Even if there could be other universes, less "fine-tuned" and so devoid of life, there would be no one there to observe them.

Fine-tuned Universe proponents argue that deep-space structures such as the Eta Carinae Nebula would not form in a universe with significantly different physical constants. Photo: HST / NASA / ESA.The premise of the fine-tuned universe assertion is that a small change in several of the approximately 26 dimensionless fundamental physical constants would make the universe radically different: if, for example, the strong nuclear force were 2% stronger than it is (i.e. if the coupling constant representing its strength were 2% larger), diprotons would be stable and hydrogen would fuse into them instead of deuterium and helium. This would drastically alter the physics of stars, and presumably prevent the universe from developing life as it is currently observed on the earth. However, many of the 26 constants describe the properties of the unstable strange, charmed, bottom and top quarks and mu and tau leptons which seem to play little part in the universe or the structure of matter. It seems unlikely that the precise values of these constants are important for life; at any rate they are not included in the usual discussion of fine-tuning.

Larry Abbott wrote: "the small value of the cosmological constant is telling us that a remarkably precise and totally unexpected relation exists among all the parameters of the Standard Model of particle physics, the bare cosmological constant and unknown physics." Victor Stenger has suggested that the fine-tuned universe concept can be interpreted as a "claim of evidence for divine cosmic plan" ": "As the argument goes, the chance that any initially random set of constants would correspond to the set of values that we find in our universe is very small and the universe is exceedingly unlikely to be the result of mindless chance. Rather, an intelligent, purposeful Creator must have arranged the constants to support life". Stenger in that paper is critical of the claims of the fine-tuning advocates and provides his own explanations highlighting the flaws in those claims and concludes that "The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe".

As modern cosmology developed, various hypotheses have been proposed. One is an oscillatory universe or a multiverse where physical constants are postulated to resolve themselves to random values in different iterations of reality. Therefore separate parts of reality would have wildly different characteristics. In such scenarios the issue of fine-tuning does not arise at all, as only those "universes" with constants hospitable to life (such as what we observe) would develop life capable of asking the question.

There are fine tuning arguments that are naturalistic, however, the assertion that the universe was designed to be fine-tuned is largely put forward by advocates of intelligent design and other forms of creationism. This apparent fine-tuning of the universe is cited by William Lane Craig as an evidence for the existence of God or some form of intelligence capable of manipulating (or designing) the basic physics that governs the universe. Craig argues, however, "that the postulate of a divine Designer does not settle for us the religious question."

Alvin Plantinga argues that random chance, applied to a single and sole universe, only raises the question as to why this universe could be so "lucky" as to have precise conditions that support life at least at some place (the Earth) and time (within millions of years of the present).

Based upon the Anthropic principle, physicist Robert H. Dicke proposed the "Dicke coincidence" argument that the structure (age, physical constants, etc) of the universe as seen by living observers is not random, but is constrained by biological factors that require it to be roughly a "golden age".

Critics argue that the fine-tuned universe assertion and the anthropic principle are essentially tautologies. The fine-tuned universe argument has also been criticized as an argument by lack of imagination because it assumes no other forms of life, based upon alternative biochemistry, are possible. In addition, critics argue that humans are adapted to the universe through the process of evolution, rather than the universe being adapted to humans. They also see it as an example of the logical flaw of hubris or anthropocentrism in its assertion that humans are the purpose of the universe.-source wikipedia

Shoud Intelligent design be taught in schools?

2008-06-06T11:06:00.001-07:00

Should Intelligent design be taught in schools?

Most of the original colleges in America were founded by organized religion. As well as the one-room school houses that were originally Churches . More than likely your ancestors were taught how to read and write in these one-room church/schools. Later, this property was usually donated to public school systems .

Where was separation then ? Shouldn't public schools give this property back or at least acknowledge,the debt that citizens of the USA , owe,their very own literacy to Christianity?

In a effort to keep God out of the classroom ,no matter what , even if its sacrifices the Truth ,
Your child will never understand the Cosmological argument , the thoughts of Plato ,Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas . They wont be able to fathom Leibniz and the best of all possible universe , never hear about Davies, an award winning physicist , and fine tuning , not to mention contributions by Newton .
Some of these great minds must be wondering what would possess a parent to desire that their child remain stupid.

These geniuses from times past and present day must be bewildered by how citizens, teachers and officials would take what was meant to be something that keeps a government from controlling religion or religion from controlling government and made it an excuse to keep your children dumb. Schools keeping God or the concept out at any cost, has raised stupid parents , that think evolution is an actual cosmological model/argument to be pitted against someones personal version of Genesis.Blind and stupid , blind I can understand , stupid has no excuse.

" He who does not know what the world is does not know where he is, and he who does not know for what purpose the world exists, does not know who he is, nor what the world is.” -Marcus Aurelius