“I look with confidence to the future, to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to view both sides of the question with impartiality.” -Charles Darwin

I have been having an annoying, fascinating, and fun debate with a leftist who I attempted to ban, but found a way to come back. I was more fascinated by what I learned from the exchange than annoyed by the troll-like behavior of the individual, which was why I didn’t nuke the person completely from Cao’s Blog and TWA into the stratosphere. What’s been particularly annoying to me is contemplating where we are in the debate, and how leftists seem to negate what it is we’re talking about, in true authoritarian style. But how can it possibly be done with science? Isn’t science about postulating a theory, a hypothesis and then testing it to see if it’s true? No, that’s not the way it’s done in the natural humanist religion. They have found a way to lock us out of even bringing up our part of the argument. And here’s how it’s done. I found this at The Intelligent Design Network, where there is a collection of completely fascinating articles. It completely filled in the gaps for me on how someone can ridicule my ’superstitious’ belief system. Even though I recognize it as a communist attack on Christianity, I didn’t realize how much this philosophy has invaded other aspects of thinking.

From Design or Occurrences, John H. Calvert, BA (geology), JD, Managing Director of Intelligence Design network, inc. -draft dated 11-10-2203

This is an excerpt from a 32-page report. The question is, are we designs or occurrences? There is a moral and ethical reason why we should be asking these questions, because secular humanism, is in fact, a religion, much like Ann Coulter said in her book “Godless”. The question is, are we designs or occurrences? My lefty commenter said ‘we are designed by evolution’. Which is in itself contradictory; evolution doesn’t ‘design’, the entire premise of the theory is that we ‘happened’ by ‘accident’. When you examine all the different systems in the human body that work perfectly together and have a purpose of function, that assumption seems rather senseless, as though this individual knows nothing about the human anatomy. I am an advocate of ‘design’, because I see the perfect beauty in designs like a string of DNA, or if you look at a leaf close up, or watch a spider spinning its web with due glistening on it early on a spring morning. But there are more serious and far reaching reasons that we should be motivated in asking the question ‘are we designs or occurrences?’

If we are just occurrences, like the secular humanist Dr. Kirk claims, we have no reason to subscribe to traditional religion as a basis for our social systems. The alternative necessarily becomes human reason and science. Evolution then becomes the foundation for ethics. According to Michael Ruse that is now happening:

“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion - a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality.”

Ernst Mayr, one of the towering figures in the history of evolutionary biology, notes with pride that “Darwin provided a scientific foundation for ethics…to Borrow Darwin’s phrase, there is grandeur in this view of life. New modes of thinking have been, and are being, evolved. Almost every component in modern man’s belief system is somehow affected by Darwinian principles. Similarly, Michael Shermer explains that

“Scientism is courageously proffering naturalistic answers that supplant supernaturalistic ones and in the process is providing spiritual sustenance for those whose needs are not being met by these ancient cultural traditions.”

All of these ideas logically follow if we are occurrences. If life was not intended, then it has no inherent meaning. This creates an ethical vacuum to be filled by whatever can be rationally justified by human minds.

This is a frightening concept, when you think about it.

Formal anlysis of many apparently designed natural phenomena tentd to confirm rather than rebut the inference of design. Some of that analysis is very briefly summarized in Intelligent Design, the Scientific Alternative to Evolution. According to William Harris, Ph.D., a research biochemist, the strength of the design inference increases in proportion to our increase in knowledge about the genome. This is reflected in Gene Myer’s assessment of the “architecture” of life that is unfolding as the code is cracked.

I just love the idea that it’s so complex, that the ‘code’ needs to be ‘cracked’. The answers are still out there, we just need to find a way to study them.

The results of analysis that tend to confirm design include:

• Lack of natural explanation for the laws which appear to be designed to order certain aspects of the Universe.
• Lack of an adequate natural explanation for the “fine tuning” of a universe that is ncessary for our existence.
• Lack of a natural expalanation for the semantic character of biological information.
• Lack of natural expalanation for the origin of genetic code, the origin of the first cell and the origin of the ength set of genetic instructions necessary to sustain life int he most primitive cell. Chemical analysis shows that the sequence of message bearing symbols in DNA is not dictated by law and statistical calculations indicate that chance formation is not a scientifically reasonable hypothesis. If the weight of the evidence favors design for the origin of life itself, then Occam’s razor would seem to cut off any Darwinian hypothesis as an explanation for all the remainder of the diversity of life.
• The fossil record reflects long periods of stasis in biological complexity punctuated by sudden bursts of increased complexity, a pattern more consistent with technological development by design than the gradual increase in complexity postulated by the Darwinian theory.
• Lack of adequate natural expalanation for many biological systems that appear to be ‘irreducibly complex’.
• The lack of adequate evolutionary simulation.
• The fact that much of the evidence that supports evolutionary theory is also consistent with the competing design hypothesis and therefore proves neither.

In the case of the Martian Face, we have used further analysis to test the inference of design and have found natural explanations that show that it is not a face at all, but merely an illusion of design. However, in the case of the messages that we find in DNA, we have looked behind the messages and are not finding natural explanations, but rather deeper layers of design. Rigorous scientific analysis seems to be leading us toward confirmation of design rather than away from it.

The Use of Methodological Naturalism in origins science prejudges the question, and effectively ordains that life is an occurrence and not a design.

Now there is one of the things that has been bothering me about this debate: the religion of methodological; or secular humanism, or however you want to label it-precludes the question, eliminating any other answer.

The pursuit of an informed, scentifically literate society may be a valid goal. But a science policy that prejudges the most important characteristic of natural phenomena is inconsistent with that goal. The prejudgement occurs when methodological naturalism is applied to the question of origins.

Of course ‘prejudging’ it is inconsistent! But there is no relevant science that can prove it, so questions are ruled out, and any science that might point to an alternative is ruled out. This is what I have a problem with.

In practice, methodological naturalism is synonymous with philosophical naturalism and materialism. Philosophical naturalism is “the doctrine that cause-and-effect laws (as of physics and chemistry) are adequate to account for all phenomena and that teleological [design] conceptions of nature are invalid. Materialism also rejects design by allowing only material causes to explain natural phenomenon. Although it has been argued to the contrary, methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism are synonymous, because a “method” that does not allow its fundamental assumption of no-design to be contradicted as a doctrine. The non-contradictory character of metholodolgical natrualism is seldom disclosed but commonly acknowledged. Its nature as a doctrine is evident in the statement of John Rennie, the Chief Editor of Scientific American, that “A central tenet of modern science is metholodolgical naturalism.” Any theoretical distinction is lost in practice where overt efforts are taken to officially suppress any contradition of the doctrine. The most recent evidence of suppression is found in a resolution adopted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science which urges a ban on any discussion of intelligent design in public schools.

They have their own religious doctrine, just as we have; they just don’t dare recognize it as a religion, because then it would have to be treated as such.

To effectively exclude design theory, one must also censor criticisms of evolutionary theory and its fundamental claim of no-design. Teachers who seek to teach evolution ‘honestly’ are reassigned. A bevy of censors recently turned out in force to oppose a statement placed in biology textbooks that would urge students to understand that evolution is a ‘theory’ that should be ‘approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.’

That’s what these amazingly stupid attacks seem to be about; censoring the criticisms of the theory. And we must admit it’s an ancient theory that has very little scientific evidence to back it up. What I don’t understand is why they call it ’science’ at all. That little blurb they were suggesting to put into textbooks might have encouraged kids to look for alternative answers, and the totalitarians who are leading us with the carrots certainly don’t want them to do THAT.

This is not a case where we are excluding a falsified hypothesis that the earth is flat or a religious hypothesis that a literal interpretation of Genesis is true. In this case, an inference of design that arises from both intuition and analysis of the data per the scientific method is per se disallowed without any objective consideration of the evidence because it conflicts with a philosophical notion that looks very much like religion itself.

Ha! No, what the ID proponents are suggesting is not some crazy idea even taken out of the bible. Still, what they’re doing is guiding people to a godless religion of secular humanism, called methodological naturalism, which as we’ve seen in other nations whose proponents admired Darwin’s theory and whose societies threw out Christianity as a ’superstition’ resulted in utter catastrophes with millions of people being murdered by cruel and heartless regimes.

The use of methodological naturalism in origins science is scientifically problematic for a number of reasons. It converts origins science into a dogmatic religious belief system rather than a theoretical enterprise where all of its statements are open to contradiction. As discussed in note 9 and elsewhere, its materialistic hypothesis that all of nature can be reduced to physical and material causes flies in the face of many non-physical aspects of the natural world, including minds and biological information processing systems which have a semantic characteristic. It violates the scientific method by philosophically disallowing the very hypothesis that evolutionary biology seeks to rebut. This effectively exempts the no-design claim of evolution from any effective scientific test. Since testing of evolution cannot be performed experimentally, the only way to test its claims of no-design is with a forensics approach that requires one to find evidence that both rules out design and rules in natural sorting. Protecting evolutoin from the competition exempts it from a test that is ncessary for it to be a legitimate scientific theory, rather than an untested speculation.

In my opinion, it’s completely an untested speculation, and further than that; because it’s been promulgated and propagated so carefully in our schools in order to indoctrinate generations of children, it seems to be to be a MYTH, not even a ‘theory’ anymore, because it’s so apparent in areas such as genetics and biology where the systems are irreducibly complex, that the mathematical probability of these things occurring and resulting in all of these forms of inderdependent life is completely impossible by pure random occurrence alone.

Evolution has become an answer ordained by ‘the central tenet of modern science’. When that ‘central tenet’ banishes the idea of design from the realm of science, it also places it in limbo: a place where there are no qualified investigators to analyze and test its claims. It takes physicists, chemists, geologists, mathemeticians, information theorists, biochemists, biologists and others to formally analyze and test an inference of design. Theologians and philosophers don’t have the experience or training to do that job. Excluding scientists form the investigation effectively assigns the evidence of design to an intellectual black hole. Under this paradigm, the answer that is ordained - that we are occurrences and not designs - wholly lacks credibility. It is nothing more than a counter intuitive dogma. Instead of swapping lawyer jokes at parties we will shift to jokes about scientists who can’t be believed. According to a quote attributed to Thomas Huxley, “Science commits suicide when it adopts a creed.” In origins science, the central tenet is nothing more than a creed.