Friday, March 21, 2014

 

Up Close and Personal With the "Designer"


This is precious!

The Discovery Institute has been furiously denying that, in the course of its attacks on Ball State University for jettisoning a course that was, apparently, claiming that Intelligent Design Creationism is scientific, that John West, Vice President and Senior Fellow of the DI, admitted that ID is, in fact, a religious belief. You can go to the links and decide for yourself how successful their denials are.

But, thanks to The Sensuous Curmudgeon, we now have it, straight from one end of the horse or the other ... Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC) and "a founder both of the intelligent design (ID) movement and of the CSC" ... in an article in the Christian Post entitled: "Big Bang 'Gravity Wave' Discovery Supports Biblical Creation, Say Old Earth Creationists." The article is about the discovery of gravity waves announced earlier this week by scientists at the South Pole telescope called BICEP 2. Young-Earth Creationists are uncomfortable with the result but those "old-Earth Creationists" aren't.

Who should show up amongst the OECs but none other than Meyer!

In a horrible accident, beans were spilled everywhere:
Stephen Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at The Discovery Institute and author of the New York Times best-seller Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, told CP on Tuesday that he also believes "the big bang theory supports a biblical understanding of creation."

"If you look at scientific history, the theory that persisted before the big bang was the steady state theory of the universe, which fits well with Carl Sagan's famous line: 'The universe is all that ever was, all that is, and all that ever will be,'" Meyer said. By suggesting a concrete beginning, the big bang hints toward creation, rather than the eternal universe, as proposed by Sagan and presented in the new series, "The Cosmos."

Meyer even suggests that the recent evidence for inflation supports the scriptural depiction of an expanding universe.

"We find repeated in the Old Testament, both in the prophets and the Psalms, that God is stretching or has stretched out the heavens," he noted, suggesting that there are "at least a dozen references" to this idea in Scripture.

"Space expanded very rapidly, and this is additional evidence supporting that inflation," he said, referring to the study. ...

Meyer's [sic] also pointed to three large scientific discoveries in the past century that supports the biblical account for creation: the big bang, which says, "the universe had a beginning;" "the anthropic fine-tuning of the universe," which claims the rules of matter work in a way best suited for human life; and evidence of the information-bearing properties of DNA that the basic building blocks of life have a sort of knowledge.

He also commented on his article, "The Return of the God Hypothesis," which he said explains that only theism, not deism, pantheism or materialism, can account for these new discoveries.

Meyer reiterated his belief that Christians must use the best available scientific evidence and the best available understanding of the Bible and reconcile the two.
Only theism, not deism, pantheism or materialism, can account for these new discoveries? But what about aliens? Oh, right! He was lying about that for constitutional reasons!

But don't forget, folks, ID has nothing to do with religion ... because the DI has told us so!

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Comments:
Typical case of free association between the latest science headline and random Bible verse.

 
If you look at scientific history, the theory that persisted before the big bang was the steady state theory of the universe, which fits well with Carl Sagan's famous line: 'The universe is all that ever was, all that is, and all that ever will be,'" Meyer said. By suggesting a concrete beginning, the big bang hints toward creation, rather than the eternal universe, as proposed by Sagan and presented in the new series, "The Cosmos"

Seriously? Is Meyer seriously trying to imply that Sagan was a steady state theorist?

Maybe he should try another quote from Cosmos: TOS:

But we don't yet know whether the Universe is open or closed. More than that, there are a few astronomers who doubt that the redshift of distant galaxies is due to the doppler effect, who are skeptical of the expanding Universe and the Big Bang. Perhaps our descendants will regard our present ignorance with as much sympathy as we feel to the ancients for not knowing the Earth went around the Sun. If the general picture, however, of a Big Bang followed by an expanding Universe is correct, what happened before that? Was the Universe devoid of all matter and then the matter suddenly somehow created, how did that happen? In many cultures, the customary answer is that a God or Gods created the Universe out of nothing. But if we wish to pursue this question courageously, we must of course ask the next question: where did God come from? If we decide that this is an unanswerable question, why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the Universe is an unanswerable question? Or, if we say that God always existed, why not save a step, and conclude that the Universe always existed? That there's no need for a creation, it was always here. These are not easy questions. Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries, questions that were once treated only in religion and myth.
 
Seriously? Is Meyer seriously trying to imply that Sagan was a steady state theorist?

Naw ... anymore than he is seriously trying to imply that all those scientists he quotemines in Darwin's Doubt are IDers. The religious right has had its knickers in a knot about Sagan's 'The universe is all that ever was, all that is, and all that ever will be' line ever since the show first aired. Meyer's just doing a bit of a rhetorical trick for the benefit of his audience.
 
A recent essay from the DI defended their claim that objection to ID was religious discrimination: Even if ID wasn't religion, it could be the target of religious discrimination.

Has Discovery Institute Admitted that Intelligent Design is Religion> by Joshua Youngkin (March 14) @ evolutionnews.org

"… it does not care whether intelligent design really is religion … only cares what state employees think it is …"

I wonder about this.

If a gang choses to bear religious signs, and the school attempts to stop students from the practice on the mistaken that it is a practice of that religion, can the gang claim religion discrimination so that they can keep their gang signs?

TomS
 
Meyer even suggests that the recent evidence for inflation supports the scriptural depiction of an expanding universe.

"We find repeated in the Old Testament, both in the prophets and the Psalms, that God is stretching or has stretched out the heavens,..."


That's a bit of a, um, stretch. What about contradictory Bible passages, such as "Thou didst set the earth on its foundations, so that it never should be shaken..." Or that Heaven was a "firmament," or solid arch of sky, into which were "set" the lights.

Chasing after Biblical passages to find agreement with scientific findings is a fool's errand.
 
Tom:

If a gang choses to bear religious signs, and the school attempts to stop students from the practice on the mistaken that it is a practice of that religion, can the gang claim religion discrimination so that they can keep their gang signs?

it is a non sequitur. Nobody is trying to deny Christians their "gang signs" (I really like that analogy and will be stealing it). What we are trying to do is keep them from insisting that only their gang sign can be used in publicly-funded schools.
 
Since this is touching on the legal definition of religion again - sort of - has anyone else read this thesis.?
 
The part about God stretching the heavens is not only cherry picking, but ignores the fact that this is a stretching akin to stretching a tent when pitching it, not stretching some elastic material. This imagery starts right in te beginning:
[He] stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in. (Isa 40:22, KJV)
 
@Karel Peijnenborg
This is a common enough kind of cherry picking to deserve a name. The interpretation without precedent which is informed by modern science. It is suggestive of vaticinium ex eventu (a prophecy created after the fact), but not the same thing.
The type of this is the reinterpretation of the Bible, contrary to 2000 years' unanimity for geocentrism, that it really ought to be figurative language.
I have heard of applied to writings as diverse as Homer and Hindu Scriptures.
I have even heard it applied to discover evolution in the Bible, but, for some reason, that has not caught on.

TomS
 
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