One of the ironies of the conversation between intelligent design advocates and proponents of aggressive scientific atheism is that ID, at its cutting edge, owes a great debt to the atheists.
Self-serving, mendacious, tendentious. What other adjectives can you think of to describe that short article? And doesn’t Meyer understand that fine-tuning of the universe and intelligent design of life are antithetical?
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I am amused at how they really are no longer trying to hide the fact that their claims are of a purely religious nature. And if the existence of their gods is a question for science, why on earth don’t any of them ever attempt to actually address that question?
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Why are they antithetical?
Because their ideology requires a god that is beyond science and therefore can only be known thru revelation. It’s part of their ultimate goal of establishing a Christian theocracy. If reason and evidence were sufficient to understand the world, their position would be undermined.
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If the universe is fine-tuned for life, then no intelligent design of biology is required. If intelligent design is required to explain biology, the universe was not fine-tuned for life. You can’t have it both ways.
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Indeed not, but would you like to make a bet as to whether you’re about to hear an attempt?
Somewhere someone’s formulating the “coarse-tuning” argument: that the universe is tuned just so as to make life possible while keeping life ridiculously improbable, so that one can see the majesty of Baal both in the fact that it’s such a freakin’ marvelous universe for living things AND that this marvelous universe makes life practically impossible but it happens anyhow, at the same time. But surely the term should now be “coarse tuning,” as a fine-tuned universe would be marvelous in only one way while this excrescence, like some immense boil, is a double-header.
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This has been explained to Bill many times, and still he asks. It’s as if he hasn’t been paying attention.
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It’s similar to how ID creationists insist that functional mutations are incredibly rare in sequence space, and also that there is no junk DNA. It took ages for one of them (Ann Gauger) to figure out that these positions were incompatible, but she hasn’t exactly been too vocal about it so the beliefs persist in ID Land.
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Not to mention multiple genes in overlapping and anti-parallel reading frames, TF binding spots inside exons, and let’s not even get into the idea that creationists think most if not all alternative splice-variants are functional. And yet somehow functions are supposedly also incredibly hyperastronomically rare and isolated from each other in sequence space.
Creationism isn’t an alternative to evolution, it’s an incoherent apologetics-motivated mess.
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Yes, we’ve forced them to hone their talents for concealment.
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I’m not sure this is true.
Their ideology requires a god. It doesn’t require a god that is beyond science. If their god was scientifically discoverable and explorable, they would discover and explore it, and so would the rest of us. The only reason for retreating to a god that is beyond science is that science can’t find one.
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This is the explanation I have heard before. The argument does not consider that fine tuning can be a necessary but not sufficient condition for life.
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Not very good fine tuning, in that case. And not a very good creator if he can’t make life without first fine-tuning the universe. Your scenario diminishes all concerned.
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It doesn’t consider it because it is a logical contradiction. If the tuning isn’t sufficient for life, it isn’t fine-tuned for life.
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It’s easy to overlook that ID is just as bad as theology as it is as science.
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It’s absurd, but @colewd goes there very often.
That’s not even getting into the idea that all transcription is functional, or the far more obvious falsehood that all translation is functional.
Evolutionary theory predicts the truth very handily in both cases, as there should not be strong selection to turn off proteins that are present and unneeded, unless they cause a problem.
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The tuning is sufficient for life. The empirical evidence is solid 
Does the smiley mean that this was not intended seriously? If so, that’s progress.
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Hard to know how you determined this, Faizal, since theology is not exactly your field of study. I presume you are borrowing someone else’s opinion. In any case, ID proper (as opposed to individual ID proponents, speaking for themselves) doesn’t have a theology. There are ID Christians, ID Jews, ID Hindus, ID Deists, ID Muslims, ID agnostics – all quite incompatible, theologically. I even knew an ID atheist – though he later became a Roman Catholic. So you couldn’t say, as a generality, that ID offered bad theology. You would have to specify whether it was offering bad Catholic theology, bad Lutheran theology, bad Jewish theology, etc. And then you’d have to point out what was bad in each specific case, and why it was bad.
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