Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

You’ve heard it: “The Debate is Over”

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In fact, you have heard it way too often. Commentator Joel Kotkin writes,

This shift has been building for decades and follows the increasingly uniform capture of key institutions – universities, the mass media and the bureaucracy – by people holding a set of “acceptable” viewpoints. Ironically, the shift toward a uniform worldview started in the 1960s, in part as a reaction to the excesses of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the oppressive conformity of the 1950s.

But what started as liberation and openness has now engendered an ever-more powerful clerisy – an educated class – that seeks to impose particular viewpoints while marginalizing and, in the most-extreme cases, criminalizing, divergent views.

Today’s clerisy in some ways resembles the clerical First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, which, in the words of the historian Georges Lefebvre, “possessed a control over thought in the interests of the Church and king.” With today’s clerisy, notes essayist Joseph Bottum, “social and political ideas [are] elevated to the status of strange divinities … born of the ancient religious hunger to perceive more in the world than just the give and take of ordinary human beings, but adapted to an age that piously congratulates itself on its escape from many of the strictures of ancient religion.”

You know, it could be simpler than Kotkin or Bottum are making out.

Materialism (and a bunch of other isms) simply haven’t performed as promised. Usually, the people they’re trying to shut up are saying so.

And remember, there seems to be a trend now to say that it is okay to lie in science, when defending one of these “the debate’s over” causes.

Of course it’s okay to lie. They have to lie. The truth is no help to them.

Hat tip: Mark Steyn

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Comments
wallstreeter43 @ 7 Yes, good point. Thanks.
they consider anyone that thinks differently than they do as dumb, ignorant and lacking in reason and logic
That's sad, isn't it?Dionisio
April 8, 2014
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bornagain77 - good comments, very rich in information, as usual. Thanks. Barb @ 3 Yes, good point. Thanks. William J Murray @ 6 Yes, good point. Thanks. 1. Aren't we in the middle of a heated clash of opposite irreconcilable worldviews? 2. Is it possible for one side to concede to the other? What would that take? 3. Is there a middle ground option between remaining entrenched or switching sides? 4. Is this an exclusive 'either-or' situation or a 'both-and' case? My answers: 1. Yes 2. Yes. It would require strong convincing evidences and willingness to listen and consider them. 3. No 4. The former.Dionisio
April 8, 2014
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BA77 @2: Thanks, I'm flattered to have made the cut! :)Eric Anderson
April 7, 2014
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Correct William Murray. They will do everything to deny the obvious , the inference to the best explanation , and on top of that they consider anyone that thinks differently then they do as dumb, ignorant and lacking in reason and logic. As a former believer in evolution (theistic that is) I didn't notice this bias until after my secular brainwashing in college.wallstreeter43
April 7, 2014
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The self-evident and the obvious must be assumed for there to be grounds for debate. Materialists & Darwinists deny the self-evident and the obvious. What debate is then possible? At best, you can only provide information on the chance that they might choose to see it at some point. Argument, facts, & evidence cannot penetrate denial. Denying the self-evidently true is, IMO, the evidence of a rebellious heart and someone that has chosen to deny truth and god.William J Murray
April 7, 2014
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Corrected sermon link: Dr. Brian Mattson - The Old Man Upstairs - video http://www.harvestchurch.tv/sermons/elephant-in-the-room/#652bornagain77
April 7, 2014
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Barb as to:
Everything has DNA, the “computer code” or language of life. Could this be because they had the same designer, and not the same ancestor?
Well seeing as the DNA code is optimal
“The genetic code’s error-minimization properties are far more dramatic than these (one in a million) results indicate. When the researchers calculated the error-minimization capacity of the one million randomly generated genetic codes, they discovered that the error-minimization values formed a distribution. Researchers estimate the existence of 10^18 possible genetic codes possessing the same type and degree of redundancy as the universal genetic code. All of these codes fall within the error-minimization distribution. This means of 10^18 codes few, if any have an error-minimization capacity that approaches the code found universally throughout nature.” Fazale Rana - From page 175; 'The Cell’s Design' http://www.reasons.org/biology/biochemical-design/fyi-id-dna-deciphering-design-genetic-code DNA - The Genetic Code - Optimal Error Minimization & Parallel Codes - Dr. Fazale Rana - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4491422
and taking into consideration 'Shannon Channel capacity'
Shannon Information - Channel Capacity - Perry Marshall - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/5457552/ “Because of Shannon channel capacity that previous (first) codon alphabet had to be at least as complex as the current codon alphabet (DNA code), otherwise transferring the information from the simpler alphabet into the current alphabet would have been mathematically impossible” Donald E. Johnson – Bioinformatics: The Information in Life
Then the DNA code is by all rights a 'frozen miracle':
Ode to the Code - Brian Hayes The few variant codes known in protozoa and organelles are thought to be offshoots of the standard code, but there is no evidence that the changes to the codon table offer any adaptive advantage. In fact, Freeland, Knight, Landweber and Hurst found that the variants are inferior or at best equal to the standard code. It seems hard to account for these facts without retreating at least part of the way back to the frozen-accident theory, conceding that the code was subject to change only in a former age of miracles, which we'll never see again in the modern world. https://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/ode-to-the-code/4
Of humorous note: Evolutionists have long argued that the genetic code is universal for all lifeforms, and maintain that that fact is strong evidence for evolution from a universal common ancestor, yet it appears they were wrong once again:
Dr. Craig Venter Denies Common Descent in front of Richard Dawkins! - video Quote: "I think the tree of life is an artifact of some early scientific studies that aren't really holding up.,, So there is not a tree of life. In fact from our deep sequencing of organisms in the ocean, out of, now we have about 60 million different unique gene sets, we found 12 that look like a very, very deep branching—perhaps fourth domain of life. " - Dr. Craig Venter, American Biologist involved in sequencing the human genome http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXrYhINutuI Venter vs. Dawkins on the Tree of Life - and Another Dawkins Whopper - March 2011 Excerpt:,,, But first, let's look at the reason Dawkins gives for why the code must be universal: "The reason is interesting. Any mutation in the genetic code itself (as opposed to mutations in the genes that it encodes) would have an instantly catastrophic effect, not just in one place but throughout the whole organism. If any word in the 64-word dictionary changed its meaning, so that it came to specify a different amino acid, just about every protein in the body would instantaneously change, probably in many places along its length. Unlike an ordinary mutation...this would spell disaster." (2009, p. 409-10) OK. Keep Dawkins' claim of universality in mind, along with his argument for why the code must be universal, and then go here (linked site listing 23 variants of the genetic code). Simple counting question: does "one or two" equal 23? That's the number of known variant genetic codes compiled by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. By any measure, Dawkins is off by an order of magnitude, times a factor of two. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2011/03/venter_vs_dawkins_on_the_tree_044681.html
bornagain77
April 7, 2014
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I have to agree with BA77 when he posits that it's "...not primarily a debate over the evidence but is the age old problem of dealing with rebellious hearts." I would add that it can be a debate, not over the evidence itself, but over the interpretation of the evidence. Consider the debate over a common ancestor. Everything has DNA, the "computer code" or language of life. Could this be because they had the same designer, and not the same ancestor?Barb
April 7, 2014
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One thing I have had to learn in dealing with hard core Darwinists is that the debate over Darwinian evolution and Intelligent Design is not primarily a debate over the evidence but is the age old problem of dealing with rebellious hearts. Here is an excellent sermon that gets the 'heart problem' across very clearly:
Dr. Brian Mattson’s Superb Sermon on the Existence of God (Romans 1:20) - Melissa Cain Travis - April 2014 http://hcchristian.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/dr-brian-mattsons-superb-sermon-on-the-existence-of-god/ video link: The Old Man Upstairs - video http://www.harvestchurch.tv/sermons/elephant-in-the-room/#play
If the debate between theists and atheists were merely a matter of intellect and evidence, there would be no debate at all for the evidence overwhelmingly supports Intelligent Design. Indeed, life harbors programming, and information storage architecture, that our best computer programmers, and engineers, can only dream of imitating!:
Three Subsets of Sequence Complexity and Their Relevance to Biopolymeric Information – David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors – Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling, Vol. 2, 11 August 2005, page 8 “No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organism with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms’ genomes programmed?” http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1742-4682-2-29.pdf Storing information in DNA – Test-tube data – Jan 26th 2013 Excerpt: Dr Goldman’s new scheme is significant in several ways. He and his team have managed to set a record (739.3 kilobytes) for the amount of unique information encoded. But it has been designed to do far more than that. It should, think the researchers, be easily capable of swallowing the roughly 3 zettabytes (a zettabyte is one billion trillion or 10^21 bytes) of digital data thought presently to exist in the world and still have room for plenty more. http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21570671-archives-could-last-thousands-years-when-stored-dna-instead-magnetic “Complexity Brake” Defies Evolution – August 2012 Excerpt: “This is bad news. Consider a neuronal synapse — the presynaptic terminal has an estimated 1000 distinct proteins. Fully analyzing their possible interactions would take about 2000 years. Or consider the task of fully characterizing the visual cortex of the mouse — about 2 million neurons. Under the extreme assumption that the neurons in these systems can all interact with each other, analyzing the various combinations will take about 10 million years…, even though it is assumed that the underlying technology speeds up by an order of magnitude each year.”,,, Even with shortcuts like averaging, “any possible technological advance is overwhelmed by the relentless growth of interactions among all components of the system,” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/complexity_brak062961.html “(Although atheists accuse Theists of making extraordinary claims) The truly extraordinary claim — indeed, the wildly and irresponsibly outrageous claim — is that a highly scalable, massively parallel system architecture incorporating a 4-bit digital coding system and a super-dense, information-rich, three-dimensional, multi-layered, multi-directional database structure with storage, retrieval and translation mechanisms, utilizing file allocation, concatenation and bit-parity algorithms, operating subject to software protocol hierarchies could all come about through a long series of accidental particle collisions. That is beyond extraordinary. It is preposterous. It is laughable.” - Eric Anderson
And as far as intellect, atheistic naturalism is completely absurd when called upon to give an account for our intellect:
Is Metaphysical Naturalism Viable? - William Lane Craig - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzS_CQnmoLQ The Heretic - Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him? - March 25, 2013 Excerpt:,,,Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heretic_707692.html?page=3 Existential Argument against Atheism - November 1, 2013 by Jason Petersen 1. If a worldview is true then you should be able to live consistently with that worldview. 2. Atheists are unable to live consistently with their worldview. 3. If you can’t live consistently with an atheist worldview then the worldview does not reflect reality. 4. If a worldview does not reflect reality then that worldview is a delusion. 5. If atheism is a delusion then atheism cannot be true. Conclusion: Atheism is false. http://answersforhope.com/existential-argument-atheism/
So thus, it is a matter of heart not of mind!
Romans 1:20-23 For from the creation of the world the invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. For when they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God, nor were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man, and to birds and fourfooted beasts and creeping things.
Why trade what is of infinitely worth for a bowl of porridge? It makes no sense! Music:
In Better Hands - Natalie Grant http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=D7DDYGNX
bornagain77
April 7, 2014
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One thing I have had to learn in dealing with hard core Darwinists is that the debate over Darwinian evolution and Intelligent Design is not primarily a debate over the evidence but is the age old problem of dealing with rebellious hearts. Here is an excellent sermon that gets the 'heart problem' across very clearly:
Dr. Brian Mattson’s Superb Sermon on the Existence of God (Romans 1:20) - Melissa Cain Travis - April 2014 http://hcchristian.wordpress.com/2014/04/02/dr-brian-mattsons-superb-sermon-on-the-existence-of-god/ video link: The Old Man Upstairs - video http://www.harvestchurch.tv/sermons/elephant-in-the-room/#play
If the debate between theists and atheists were merely a matter of intellect and evidence, there would be no debate at all for the evidence overwhelmingly supports Intelligent Design. Indeed, life harbors programming, and information storage architecture, that our best computer programmers, and engineers, can only dream of imitating!:
Three Subsets of Sequence Complexity and Their Relevance to Biopolymeric Information – David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors – Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling, Vol. 2, 11 August 2005, page 8 “No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organism with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms’ genomes programmed?” http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1742-4682-2-29.pdf Storing information in DNA – Test-tube data – Jan 26th 2013 Excerpt: Dr Goldman’s new scheme is significant in several ways. He and his team have managed to set a record (739.3 kilobytes) for the amount of unique information encoded. But it has been designed to do far more than that. It should, think the researchers, be easily capable of swallowing the roughly 3 zettabytes (a zettabyte is one billion trillion or 10^21 bytes) of digital data thought presently to exist in the world and still have room for plenty more. http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21570671-archives-could-last-thousands-years-when-stored-dna-instead-magnetic “Complexity Brake” Defies Evolution – August 2012 Excerpt: “This is bad news. Consider a neuronal synapse — the presynaptic terminal has an estimated 1000 distinct proteins. Fully analyzing their possible interactions would take about 2000 years. Or consider the task of fully characterizing the visual cortex of the mouse — about 2 million neurons. Under the extreme assumption that the neurons in these systems can all interact with each other, analyzing the various combinations will take about 10 million years…, even though it is assumed that the underlying technology speeds up by an order of magnitude each year.”,,, Even with shortcuts like averaging, “any possible technological advance is overwhelmed by the relentless growth of interactions among all components of the system,” http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/complexity_brak062961.html “(Although atheists accuse Theists of making extraordinary claims) The truly extraordinary claim — indeed, the wildly and irresponsibly outrageous claim — is that a highly scalable, massively parallel system architecture incorporating a 4-bit digital coding system and a super-dense, information-rich, three-dimensional, multi-layered, multi-directional database structure with storage, retrieval and translation mechanisms, utilizing file allocation, concatenation and bit-parity algorithms, operating subject to software protocol hierarchies could all come about through a long series of accidental particle collisions. That is beyond extraordinary. It is preposterous. It is laughable.” - Eric Anderson https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/naturalism-intelligent-design-and-extraordinary-claims-part-ii/#comment-455980
And as far as intellect, atheistic naturalism is completely absurd when called upon to give an account for our intellect:
Is Metaphysical Naturalism Viable? - William Lane Craig - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzS_CQnmoLQ The Heretic - Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him? - March 25, 2013 Excerpt:,,,Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/heretic_707692.html?page=3 Existential Argument against Atheism - November 1, 2013 by Jason Petersen 1. If a worldview is true then you should be able to live consistently with that worldview. 2. Atheists are unable to live consistently with their worldview. 3. If you can’t live consistently with an atheist worldview then the worldview does not reflect reality. 4. If a worldview does not reflect reality then that worldview is a delusion. 5. If atheism is a delusion then atheism cannot be true. Conclusion: Atheism is false. http://answersforhope.com/existential-argument-atheism/
So thus, it is a matter of heart not of mind!
Romans 1:20-23 For from the creation of the world the invisible things of Him are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. For when they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God, nor were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like corruptible man, and to birds and fourfooted beasts and creeping things.
Why trade what is of infinitely worth for a bowl of porridge? It makes no sense! Music:
In Better Hands - Natalie Grant http://www.godtube.com/watch/?v=D7DDYGNX
bornagain77
April 7, 2014
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