I saw the film EXPELLED today and it was interesting ...

Select poll option that suits you most closely:

I am with Ben Stein who is a genius.	12.7%	[ 40 ]
I am with Dawkins who is brilliant!	28.3%	[ 89 ]
Darwinism is a foggy working hypothesis.	6.4%	[ 20 ]
There is no academic freedom anymore.	14.6%	[ 46 ]
I evolved from a cluster of cells that emerged from a pokey-ball.	37.9%	[ 119 ]
Total Votes:			[ 314 ]

[I Director]

Lady_Imrahil

I Director

I saw it an hour ago or so, mainly because my dad wanted me to see it.

And I... just can't seem to care about our origins at this point. Some would call me extremely dense for asking this, most likely, but I never understood why our origins were so critical.

Maybe someone would like to explain it to me. Because I've yet to find any significance with regards to life today.

The movie wasn't about our origins -- it is about having the academic freedom to search scientifically any theory you want to explore. Remember the people he interviewed at the beginning who were fired? Or the comparison to the Berlin Wall?

Which, in effect, is dealing with our origins by trying to find out where we came from. The freedom to choose what type of origin to study. And I still don't see the point in that.

[mitoguard]

Lady_Imrahil

Rao the Zen Android

Lady_Imrahil

Theology is the study of God. Theo = god and ology = study of. Intelligent Design is just a working theory for biology (study of life) where you presume intelligence (alien, divine or otherwise) is involved and thus there is order and reason for/in each part found. Nothing that is really threatening ... but of course the point of the movie is that science needs to be open to all questions, and in American no one should suffer for their point of view. sweatdrop

That's not science, that wildly open ended speculation.
And again, Occam's Razor.

Dawkins didn't seem to think so. Its just allowing an idea to exist as a working hypothesis.

Dawkins seems to recall that interview a bit differently.

That British Atheist Guy

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE" wink and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may not persuade you. That is not my concern here. My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction movie with some kind of android figure – that may have been used in the service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the partisan audience).

(Link)

[Rao the Zen Android]

mrsculedhel

Rao the Zen Android

mrsculedhel

Rao the Zen Android

Intelligent Design in terms of coming from supernatural entities does not belong in science class, period. That's what Theology is for.

Duh.

Intelligent Design in terms of scientific others designing is some Occam's Razor s**t.

Congrats on really thinking this through guyz.

Tell it to the mirror Rao. Your post makes no sense. ID is not about theology at all. I thought it was until I viewed the film. ID is not the same as creationism and is not proposing an Abrahamic God as the creator. Even Dawkins posited a designer for genetic earth life. But that would require that the person reading posts has learned to actually read.

If you can listen to Ben Stein drone on you can read a post as long as I made, rather than just the first two sentences.

Of course you and your accounts don't know what Occam's Razor is do you.

No, you don't know what or who Occam was. He was a Franciscan monk.

You just wikied it and ran back as soon as your eyes glazed over "friar" didn't you.
Go back and read the whole thing.

[mrsculedhel]

I Director

I saw it an hour ago or so, mainly because my dad wanted me to see it.

And I... just can't seem to care about our origins at this point. Some would call me extremely dense for asking this, most likely, but I never understood why our origins were so critical.

Maybe someone would like to explain it to me. Because I've yet to find any significance with regards to life today.

The point is that no one can answer what the origin of life is. Science is interested in everything. I am interested in everything, aren't you? Science is knowledge.

At issue here is the supression of curiosity and critical thinking. Darwinism is a very foggy hypothesis. Can anyone here give us a definition of Darwinism? Please give it because honestly, I don't think it is very clear at all.

Some people said my Sisterhood thread was not defined closely enough ... eek What is the definition of evolutionary theory. Please anyone ... care to answer this for us?

[Dark Bunny Lord]

Rao the Zen Android

Lady_Imrahil

Rao the Zen Android

Lady_Imrahil

Theology is the study of God. Theo = god and ology = study of. Intelligent Design is just a working theory for biology (study of life) where you presume intelligence (alien, divine or otherwise) is involved and thus there is order and reason for/in each part found. Nothing that is really threatening ... but of course the point of the movie is that science needs to be open to all questions, and in American no one should suffer for their point of view. sweatdrop

That's not science, that wildly open ended speculation.
And again, Occam's Razor.

Dawkins didn't seem to think so. Its just allowing an idea to exist as a working hypothesis.

Why should I care what Dawkins thinks?
I'm not saying the idea shouldn't be allowed to exist, I'm an agnostic myself, I'm open to all possibilities. But there's a time and place for that sort of speculation. And it's not science class. And it's not science.

Wait, wait, so your saying "let it exist, but don't let it be studied further".
Look, no one should teach it as fact as it's in no means fact (neither is darwinism) however allowing people to choose to study it should be allowed. America is all about making choices you wish to make, forcing people to study it is just as bad as forcing them not to. If you dont' want to study it, hey great, but don't impose that choice on others either and instead let them choose what to study and further try to prove, allowing every angle no matter how absurd to be looked into is how we advance as a culture, when you start cutting out veniews you hinder the progress.

[mrsculedhel]

mitoguard

Lady_Imrahil

Rao the Zen Android

Lady_Imrahil

Theology is the study of God. Theo = god and ology = study of. Intelligent Design is just a working theory for biology (study of life) where you presume intelligence (alien, divine or otherwise) is involved and thus there is order and reason for/in each part found. Nothing that is really threatening ... but of course the point of the movie is that science needs to be open to all questions, and in American no one should suffer for their point of view. sweatdrop

That's not science, that wildly open ended speculation.
And again, Occam's Razor.

Dawkins didn't seem to think so. Its just allowing an idea to exist as a working hypothesis.

Dawkins seems to recall that interview a bit differently.

That British Atheist Guy

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE" wink and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may not persuade you. That is not my concern here. My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction movie with some kind of android figure – that may have been used in the service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the partisan audience).

(Link)

It is on film. Are you saying that he clipped the film?

[Rao the Zen Android]

Quote:

Wait, wait, so your saying "let it exist, but don't let it be studied further".

How do you study something like this to begin with?

Quote:

Look, no one should teach it as fact as it's in no means fact (neither is darwinism) however allowing people to choose to study it should be allowed.

There's nothing to study.
It's a conjecture and nothing more. It's place is for throwing around hypothetically.

Quote:

If you dont' want to study it, hey great, but don't impose that choice on others either and instead let them choose what to study and further try to prove, allowing every angle no matter how absurd to be looked into is how we advance as a culture, when you start cutting out veniews you hinder the progress.

Keep up the vague accusations and defenitions.
And keep ignoring the distinctions between science and conjecture.

[mrsculedhel]

Rao the Zen Android

mrsculedhel

Rao the Zen Android

mrsculedhel

Rao the Zen Android

Intelligent Design in terms of coming from supernatural entities does not belong in science class, period. That's what Theology is for.

Duh.

Intelligent Design in terms of scientific others designing is some Occam's Razor s**t.

Congrats on really thinking this through guyz.

Tell it to the mirror Rao. Your post makes no sense. ID is not about theology at all. I thought it was until I viewed the film. ID is not the same as creationism and is not proposing an Abrahamic God as the creator. Even Dawkins posited a designer for genetic earth life. But that would require that the person reading posts has learned to actually read.

If you can listen to Ben Stein drone on you can read a post as long as I made, rather than just the first two sentences.

Of course you and your accounts don't know what Occam's Razor is do you.

No, you don't know what or who Occam was. He was a Franciscan monk.

You just wikied it and ran back as soon as your eyes glazed over "friar" didn't you.
Go back and read the whole thing.

I learned about Occam's razor from a Jody Foster film a few years ago. What is your point? That it is easier to believe Darwin than ID? Only science can prove or disprove that. If ID is used as a working hypothesis to look for evidence of a designer then we will find out if it produces anything or not. This is not about the "god of the gaps" as I had first thought. I also learned from the film that ID is not the same as creationism, which I was skeptical about, until I read Voija. I figured Voija could be right. However a court case does not prove anything with regard to science. Science is outside the jurisdiction of the court system. Remember that at one time the courts made a huge mistake in really chosing Biblical Creationism over biology in the Scopes Monkey trial.

Science is neutral on issues of theology. This is not about theology it is about evidence of design in nature. If some hoe-down fundies want to get excited about this is not the fault of those who propose ID. ID is not creationism.

[Dark Bunny Lord]

Rao the Zen Android

Quote:

Wait, wait, so your saying "let it exist, but don't let it be studied further".

How do you study something like this to begin with?

Quote:

Look, no one should teach it as fact as it's in no means fact (neither is darwinism) however allowing people to choose to study it should be allowed.

There's nothing to study.
It's a conjecture and nothing more. It's place is for throwing around hypothetically.

Quote:

If you dont' want to study it, hey great, but don't impose that choice on others either and instead let them choose what to study and further try to prove, allowing every angle no matter how absurd to be looked into is how we advance as a culture, when you start cutting out veniews you hinder the progress.

Keep up the vague accusations and defenitions.
And keep ignoring the distinctions between science and conjecture.

And how do most sciences begin? Thats right, hypotheses and blind guesses, only through further idea's and examinations can we ever attempt to make any facts about them.
If they are just hypothesis and blind idea's then why do you want to stop anyone from looking in to them and teaching them? If there isn't any proof, and never will be, then whom will it hurt?

[veryproname]

Rao the Zen Android

mrsculedhel

Rao the Zen Android

mrsculedhel

Rao the Zen Android

Intelligent Design in terms of coming from supernatural entities does not belong in science class, period. That's what Theology is for.

Duh.

Intelligent Design in terms of scientific others designing is some Occam's Razor s**t.

Congrats on really thinking this through guyz.

Tell it to the mirror Rao. Your post makes no sense. ID is not about theology at all. I thought it was until I viewed the film. ID is not the same as creationism and is not proposing an Abrahamic God as the creator. Even Dawkins posited a designer for genetic earth life. But that would require that the person reading posts has learned to actually read.

If you can listen to Ben Stein drone on you can read a post as long as I made, rather than just the first two sentences.

Of course you and your accounts don't know what Occam's Razor is do you.

No, you don't know what or who Occam was. He was a Franciscan monk.

You just wikied it and ran back as soon as your eyes glazed over "friar" didn't you.
Go back and read the whole thing.

I didn't know Occam was a monk! =o

I thought it was a place. =(

[Lady_Imrahil]

Dark Bunny Lord

The true point of the film was not to encourage Intelligent design to be further explored, but instead to realize that suppressing the study of any non-confirmed theory, whether one thinks them completely ludicrous or not, is something that should never be done. ID is simply one of the things being largely surpressed at the moment despite it being unable to be proved 100% wrong or right.

He had some very valid points and I do hope that the scientific community doesn't continue this path of denying new idea's lest science itself come to a grounding halt should this thought process continue.

Exactly! Thank you for summing that up and posting it. 3nodding I think that this is a general problem in our society today, especially where people refuse to be open-minded towards the opinions of others.

[Trorbes]

mrsculedhel

mitoguard

Lady_Imrahil

Rao the Zen Android

Lady_Imrahil

Theology is the study of God. Theo = god and ology = study of. Intelligent Design is just a working theory for biology (study of life) where you presume intelligence (alien, divine or otherwise) is involved and thus there is order and reason for/in each part found. Nothing that is really threatening ... but of course the point of the movie is that science needs to be open to all questions, and in American no one should suffer for their point of view. sweatdrop

That's not science, that wildly open ended speculation.
And again, Occam's Razor.

Dawkins didn't seem to think so. Its just allowing an idea to exist as a working hypothesis.

Dawkins seems to recall that interview a bit differently.

That British Atheist Guy

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE" wink and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.

This 'Ultimate 747' argument, as I called it in The God Delusion, may or may not persuade you. That is not my concern here. My concern here is that my science fiction thought experiment -- however implausible -- was designed to illustrate intelligent design's closest approach to being plausible. I was most emphaticaly NOT saying that I believed the thought experiment. Quite the contrary. I do not believe it (and I don't think Francis Crick believed it either). I was bending over backwards to make the best case I could for a form of intelligent design. And my clear implication was that the best case I could make was a very implausible case indeed. In other words, I was using the thought experiment as a way of demonstrating strong opposition to all theories of intelligent design.

Well, you will have guessed how Mathis/Stein handled this. I won't get the exact words right (we were forbidden to bring in recording devices on pain of a $250,000 fine, chillingly announced by some unnamed Gauleiter before the film began), but Stein said something like this. "What? Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN INTELLIGENT DESIGN." "Richard Dawkins BELIEVES IN ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE." I can't remember whether this was the moment in the film where we were regaled with another Lord Privy Seal cut to an old science fiction movie with some kind of android figure – that may have been used in the service of trying to ridicule Francis Crick (again, dutiful titters from the partisan audience).

(Link)

It is on film. Are you saying that he clipped the film?

Are you seriously asking if Mathis, who lied to Dawkins et al. about what the interviews were for, stole video made for a different movie, and uses Reductio ad Hitlerum so much you think he made a WWII documentary, could have possibly taken Richard Dawkins out of context?

[Rao the Zen Android]

Quote:

That it is easier to believe Darwin than ID?

Believability having nothing to do with Occams Razor.

Quote:

Only science can prove or disprove that. If ID is used as a working hypothesis to look for evidence of a designer then we will find out if it produces anything or not.

How do you look for evidece of a designer? Seriously.
Copyrights on human bones? UFO wreckage? Martians in Egyptian hieroglyphs?

Quote:

Science is neutral on issues of theology. This is not about theology it is about evidence of design in nature.

Evidence of what now?

Quote:

ID is not creationism.

Good thing I never said anything of the sort.

[Lady_Imrahil]

I Director

Lady_Imrahil

I Director

I saw it an hour ago or so, mainly because my dad wanted me to see it.

And I... just can't seem to care about our origins at this point. Some would call me extremely dense for asking this, most likely, but I never understood why our origins were so critical.

Maybe someone would like to explain it to me. Because I've yet to find any significance with regards to life today.

The movie wasn't about our origins -- it is about having the academic freedom to search scientifically any theory you want to explore. Remember the people he interviewed at the beginning who were fired? Or the comparison to the Berlin Wall?

Which, in effect, is dealing with our origins by trying to find out where we came from. The freedom to choose what type of origin to study. And I still don't see the point in that.

No point in having freedom of thought?? eek

[Rao the Zen Android]

Quote:

And how do most sciences begin? Thats right, hypotheses and blind guesses, only through further idea's and examinations can we ever attempt to make any facts about them.
If they are just hypothesis and blind idea's then why do you want to stop anyone from looking in to them and teaching them? If there isn't any proof, and never will be, then whom will it hurt?

*sigh*

Fit ID into the scientific method.
Go on. Try it.

And stop with the ******** "oooh don't hurrrt the poor people being pushed down by big abd science"
I'm as open minded in regards to these thinsg as possible, I don't however have the gall to force my conjectures into places they don't belong like these "poor widdle peoplez".

Condescending sympathy pandering gets you nowhere.