It seems that Darwin was making a theological or philosophical argument, not a scientific one. Let’s look at that quote in context:
Obviously, Darwin was talking about the theological implications of what he saw in nature. He wasn’t making a scientific argument.
And surprisingly open minded and welcoming to the theist too.
I like the whole passage, but I love this:
The college ID/Creation course will cover theological and philosophical viewpoints, and since this is an online unacredited course that is being offered for viewpoints not welcome in traditional universities, the customer base will mostly by a Creation-friendly, Christian friendly audience. However, I want it to be reasonably balanced.
There is a reason for covering “the bad design argument” and “the hiddeness of God and science” argument since it’s on a lot of people’s minds based on this poll:
I taught on these two topics at the Creation Forum of a mega church this summer. It was a popular topic and on people’s minds. This is how I framed the questions in my talk:
The problem of evil – why would God put a snake in the Garden of Eden?
The hiddenness of God – why is God not as obvious as the air we breathe?
One can take the snake literally and/or as a metaphor, but the problem of evil remains. It trumps a lot of design arguments, not on scientific grounds, but philosophical ones. Same for the hiddeness of God.
Thanks for the full quote. I think Darwin summarizes the intuitions and sympathies and unspoken thoughts of many people, including those in church.
So @patrick finds common ground with @stcordova, now @stcordova finds common ground with Darwin (without mining a quote!).
Is it upside down day?
As of right now the ID/Creation college course will be offered free of charge since it isn’t ready for prime time, but on the other hand it has to start getting rolled out and cleaned up by user feedback.
I’ll be re-recording my presentations that I gave regarding the problem of evil and the hiddeness of God and will make it available after the recording. It will be offered as one of the viewpoints that attempts to answer these questions. The only exam questions would be listing what scripture passages were referenced and what passages or quotations were used and who wrote them. It will be a couple weeks at least before I get the re-recording done.
I would agree. However, those seem like topics for a more general theological setting. The “Problem of Evil” is one of the big topics in apologetics, and it certainly isn’t limited to questions about evolution. Looking at this from the outside, I would probably shunt those questions to other courses.
Indeed. It is also worth mentioning that it was a personal letter sent to a close friend. It was never meant to be a publicly facing treatise on the theological implications of evolution and science. I am sure that we wouldn’t want our personal thoughts in emails to friends and family broadcast as if they were great arguments meant to sway the masses.
Hi, The ID/Creation course was to be taught in philosophy/religion departments, not science departments. This is a long thread, so it’s probably been lost in the shuffle that the start of the thread pointed that out, as well as Eugenie Scott’s correspondence with me that gave her blessings on the project.
I think I understand what you are aiming for. My only thought is that if you get distracted by the big, expansive questions found in general theology then you may not have time to focus on the specific topics that you may want to talk about. Just a thought.
The buffet-style college level course will be cobbled together and will be fragmented as I release the modules. I’m making it a course since I’m creating teaching modules for my church, McLean Bible Church, and thus I’ll be developing a lot of material anyway for the church. The online college course is merely and extension of something I’m doing anyway:
Some of this will follow what I teach at the Creation forum of McLean Bible Church. The Forum is a quasi-Sunday school, but I’ve taught it by showing un-edited videos or passages by evolutionary biologists and other opposing viewpoints. Some of the first learning modules I’ll release are online.
Definitions – the difference between ID and Creaitonism
problem of evil
hiddenness of God
law of large numbers and detecting man-made designs
This will take some reworking, but here is the SKETCH of the first module based on my interview of Stephen Meyer (it wasn’t a good interview on my part, but hey I was just starting out):
By accident I discovered a file I thought was forever lost. It was my 13-minute interview of Stephen Meyer in McLean, Virginia when he was on his book tour for his book Signature In the Cell .
I asked him 4 question, the first being, what is the difference between Creationism and Intelligent Design (ID).
I characterize Meyer as a Progressive/Old Earth Creationist. Many people in the ID community are Old Earth Creationists, but there are a few who are Young Earth Creationists like Paul Nelson.
But anyway, here is Stephen Meyer in his own words:
http://creationevolutionuniversity.org/public_blogs/podcasts/stephen_meyer_4qs.mp3
NOTE1 : I somewhat adopted Meyer’s definition of Creationism and ID for several years, but after some thought, here are my definitions (which might be different from other people’s definitions).
CREATIONISM : Creationism encompasses two major lines of thought, Creation THEOLOGY and Creation SCIENCE. The two disciplines argue for miraculous special creation and a time line for those miracles. There are a variety of creationisms, mostly differentiated according to proposed time lines, such as Young Life Creationism, Young Earth Creationism, Young Age Creationism, Old Earth Creationism, Progressive Creationism, etc.
CREATION Theology : Theology regarding creation developed from sacred texts such as the Bible.
CREATION Science : Science supporting the hypothesis of miraculous special creation and time lines of the miracles. The approaches of Intelligent Design are sometimes incorporated into some aspects of creation science, but creation science encompasses larger questions than just ID.
Intelligent Design (ID) : As a discipline, ID is the study of patterns in the physical world that suggest intelligent design. As a theoretical claim, ID claims that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
Creation Science explores things such as:
fossil dating, flood geology, C14, K/Ar, radio metric dating, diffusion dating, racemization dating, DNA dating, stellar and planetary evolution, erosion dating, fast stratification, interpretations of the geological column, baraminology, distant starlight problem, Y-chromosomal Adam/Noah/Aaron/Abraham, mitochondrial Eve, Tower of Babel, Proton-21 laboratory, Sodom and Gomorrah, OEC,YEC, Progressive creation, white hole cosmology, Carmeli cosmology, VSL theories, alternate electrodynamics, mantle plume theories, folding rock theories, RATE work, planetary magnetism, faint young sun paradox, moon recession, ocean mineral saturation, astrometry and proper motion surveys, very long baseline interferometry, CMBR, moon evolution, cosmological vs. non-cosmological red shifts, polonium halos, Hydro Plates and Castastrophic Plates, varves, tree rings, noah’s ark, over thrusts, lithification, hydrologic sorting, canopy theory, crater theory, planetary heating, ancient civilizations, Atlantis, trophical trees in the arctic, woolly mammoths and tropical trees in Siberia, UFOs and creationism, comets and orbital mechanics, planet satellite capture problems, planetary rings, origin of folded rocks, the Grand Canyon, the Green River valley, the Three Sisters, mountain formation, seafloor formation, tectonics, etc.
Whereas, Intelligent Design explores things such as:
design detection, design specification, irreducible complexity, origin of life, platonic forms, design matrix, population genetics, cybernetic theories, semiotic theories, Fishers’s fundamental theorem, Kimura’s neutral evolution, Darwinian evolution, modern synthesis, probability theories, fine tuning, typology, discontinuity systematics, steganography, evolutionary algorithms, published ID material, ID philosophy, front loaded evolution, omega point theory, anthropic principles, multiverses and many-worlds, panspermia, extra terrestrials, teleology in biology, redundant complexity and fault tolerance, algorithmic complexity, complexity measures, no free lunch, blindwatchmakers, bad design, evil design, junk DNA, DNA grammars, von Neumann replicators vs. autocatalysis, Quines, polyconstrained DNA, Mendel’s Accountant, DNA skittle, re-association kinetics, molecular clocks, GGU/GID models, enigma of consciousness and Quantum Mechanics, Turing machines, Lenski’s bacteria, thermodynamics, Avida, self organization, self disorganization, generalized entropy, Cambrian explosion, genetic entropy, Shannon information, proscriptive information, Programming of Life, law of large numbers, etc.
NOTE2 : There will obviously be some overlap between Creation Science and Intelligent Design Science. I’ve gone on record as saying I don’t think ID in the ultimate sense is equal to experimental science (like say electromagnetic theory), but the science supporting ID (like probability analysis and predictions from the law of large numbers) is science.
NOTE3
ID has roots in NATURAL theology whereas creationism has roots in REVEALED (i.e. Biblical) theology.
Discussing the design argument as framed by Paley, Hume, Pandas and People, Kitzmiller vs. Dover, the Discovery Institute would be helpful.
I think YEC is described well by Bishop Usher. The OEC view is harder to characterize, the progressive OEC view is probably limited to descriptions by Stephen Meyer himself, and isn’t very specific. There is the view held by Behe and “Mike Gene” that argue for ID and common descent.
Is there any such? I haven’t seen any. My definition of creationism would be the belief that there are separate “kinds”, i.e. no universal common descent. That seems to be the common denominator among all the types. My definition of ID would be the belief that God had some part in causing current species to be as they are. The ID movement is too vague to characterize otherwise.
How does it explore any of these things? That list just seems like a random spew of stuff you happened to think of. What is “Proton-21 laboratory”? And “Atlantis”??
Again, an apparent random spew of terms. “DNA skittle”?
What about Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe? They’re more up front than Meyer, who just won’t say what he thinks.
Creation science or scientific creationism[1] is a branch of creationism that claims to provide scientific support for the Genesis creation narrative in the Book of Genesis and disprove or reexplain the scientific facts,[2] theories and paradigms about geology,[3] cosmology, biological evolution,[4][5] archaeology,[6][7] history, and linguistics.[8]
It’s is viewed by most as pseudo science or not even science. But that is at least how it is defined. It’s not a term I made up.
Of course not. I was just pointing out that the referent doesn’t exist, assuming the “science” part of the name is intended seriously. I agree that it’s pseudoscience. Do you?
Published: 30 December 2009
Skittle: A 2-Dimensional Genome Visualization Tool
Josiah D Seaman & John C Sanford
Background
It is increasingly evident that there are multiple and overlapping patterns within the genome, and that these patterns contain different types of information - regarding both genome function and genome history. In order to discover additional genomic patterns which may have biological significance, novel strategies are required. To partially address this need, we introduce a new data visualization tool entitled Skittle.
But thanks for at least scrutinizing the list, Dr. Harshman. Anyway, here is an example of Skittle 2.0 for proteins, Collagen:
One can easily see salient features of this protein that are a violation of the law of large numbers (albeit some will argue homologous recombination was the evolutionary mechanism). Here is another violation of LLN, which I don’t think homologous recombination can explain in human KRAB Zinc Finger protein 136:
How is that ID science other than that at least one of the authors is a creationist? And as it’s been pointed out previously, you don’t seem to know what “the law of large numbers” means. If all you mean is that it’s unlikely for lots of tandem repeats are unlikely to happen if protein sequences are drawn at random from a bag of amino acids, then sure. Can you find anyone claiming that protein sequences are drawn at random from a bag of amino acids? If so, you have a point against that person.
I am guessing that @stcordova would miss at least 7 of the questions he posed. While it may not be totally a disaster that an instructor fails the exams given, it probably doesn’t bode well for the learning to be done in the class.
And as it’s been pointed out previously, you don’t seem to know what “the law of large numbers” means.
I disagree. And it doesn’t matter on some level what I understand or don’t if I quote texbook definitions and examples, which I will do, and which I will run by qualified faculty, not biased reviewers intent on misreading what I wrote.
In fact, this drama played out years ago, and people still criticize what I wrote even when it was textbook statistics and probability:
Sorry, what questions? Where were they posed?
