Things are at a sad pass when we can easily identify a Pilate, a Barabbas and a crowd . . .

Have we become so ignorant of our cultural history that we do not see how we are facing a very familiar game by the powerful in the face of one who makes them feel threatened?

Has it occurred to them that the fact that hey cannot simply laugh off this man as an ill-educated eccentric is itself telling?

GEM otf TKI

“Does belief in Panspermia ( i.e., a hypothesis that the seeds of life are prevalent throughout the Universe, and furthermore that life on Earth began by such seeds landing on Earth and propagating.) count as intelligent design?”

I think it does, but only a very attenuated version mostly accommodating materialism. Panspermia still seems to assume Darwinism as the basic explanation for evolution past single promordial cells, and therefore rejects most of the central tenets of ID as defined by leading exponents and thinkers like Behe, Meyer, Dembski, etc. All the implications of Darwinism follow as also accepted by Panspermia, including evolutionary psychology, consciousness as an epiphenomenon of complex brains, etc.

Yes, but the problem is less Pilate than the Crowd. Said Crowd is the majority opinion of “mainstream” science–and they have chosen Barabas to go free.

Are we going to witness the modern-day manifestation of Pilate in IOWA?

But we support him. And support academic freedom.

http://www.eLearningStreams.co.....zalez.html

re does panspermia count as ID

If it’s directed panspermia like Francis Crick wrote about (search our site for this) then it very likely does. Panspermia is the hypothesis that the first cells or protocells arrived here from outer space. However, unless they originated in our solar system (which seems unlikely given that life seems to have appeared on the earth not long after our solar system formed) it’s exceedingly improbable it could have made it to the earth from another solar system without being purposely targeted in a transport vessel of some kind. The earth is so small and intergalactic space so large that the chance of a planet around another star exploding and one of the fragments containing life arriving here by chance is quite unlikely. If microbial life was sent here in some manner of guided spacecraft then it stands to reason the life it carried was, if not totally designed, at least custom designed for our world. Personally this makes the most sense to me but it still leaves open the question of how the senders came to exist. We don’t know the scope of different configurations of matter and energy that lead to self-awareness and intelligence. It’s possible (in fact it seems probable given the fine tuning of the universe) intelligence existed before the observable universe was born and it certainly could have self-organized in some exotic manner any time after the birth of the universe.

The bottom line is there’s a stark and unyielding discontinuity between inanimate matter and the simplest (but still extraordinarily complex) free living cell. No attempt to come up with a plausible chemical pathway for this leap in complexity has come anywhere near success. The leap required makes the evolution of the flagellum look like child’s play in comparison.

First ….

To those who think that Guillermo Gonzalez does not deserve tenure because he believes the fine-tuning of the universe and the conditions that create life on our privileged planet are better explained by intelligent design, you might want to ask yourselves why the following professors who endorsed his work are TENURED :

1) Owen Gingerich
Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Author of The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus

2)Michael J. Crowe
Cavanaugh Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame

3) Philip Skell
Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Physics, Pennsylvania State University
Member, National Academy of Sciences

4) Henry F. Schaefer III
Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry
Director, Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry, University of Georgia
Five-Time Nobel Prize Nominee

5) Simon Conway Morris FRS is a British paleontologist. He made his reputation with a very detailed and careful study of the Burgess Shale fossils, an exploit celebrated in Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life. Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology in the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University.

Just to name a few…

Are these respected scientists loonies too ? Are they people who don’t know what they’re talking about when they endorse Gonzalez’s work ?

The Second one is a question…

Does belief in Panspermia ( i.e., a hypothesis that the seeds of life are prevalent throughout the Universe, and furthermore that life on Earth began by such seeds landing on Earth and propagating.) count as intelligent design ?

No less a distinguished scientist than E.O. Wilson (Pellegrino Research Professor in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University) seems to be attracted to it. There is a hypothesis that alien lifeforms seeded earth eons ago with microorganisms to produce life as we know it.

See here for instance :

http://www.panspermia.org/whatsnew.htm

It says :

“E.O. Wilson thinks panspermia is likely: Some serious biologists – and I count myself among them – have begun to wonder that among the enormous and still unknown diversity of microorganisms one might – just might – find aliens among them – true aliens that arrived from outer space. They’ve had billions of years to do it. But especially during the earliest period of biological evolution on this planet. We do know that some bacterial species that have earthly origin are capable of almost unimaginable extremes of temperature and other harsh changes in environment, including hard radiation strong enough to crack the Pyrex vessels around the growing population of bacteria.”

The fact that these scientists, who are supposedly open to following the evidence wherever it leads, have resorted to blatant discrimination to avoid having this conversation speaks volumes about the weakness of their position. They realize their arguments are not sufficient to defeat the intelligent design movement and they must, therefore, shut their opponents out of the conversation.

This is one of the things that makes every one realize that Darwinists know they can’t win the scientific debate. People who have “overwhelming evidence” on their side don’t act like this.