Thursday, July 14, 2005

Telic Thoughts

I looked up the blog Telic Thoughts because I was told that I wrote some rather telic thoughts by a half-wit who cannot think such thoughts. Maybe that was meant to be, although that might be of some annoyance to the half-wit.

This article about the usual Darwinian claim of "bad design" is based on telic thoughts, which is good.

I would note that there very well may be degeneration or even "bad design" and artifacts of malevolent intelligence in Nature. Distinguishing between malevolent and benevolent design may be an issue for philosophy, natural theology, history or UFOlogy for that matter. That is not the type of distinction that ID is about.


Don't laugh about UFOlogy, there is some good scholarship being done with respect to the study of UFOs. And I'm sure that if some "UFOs" or "beings of light from the sky" appeared over Jerusalem tomorrow then suddenly everyone would be interested in aliens, UFOlogy, mythology, the Bible or even demonology for that matter. They'd probably follow anyone given a minimum amount of signs, whether benevolent or malevolent. Heck, a generation that seeks after signs while rejecting knowledge will probably even look to salt stains under a bridge for guidance.

But at any rate, the claim of ID as a science is minimal with nothing to say of benevolence or malevolence. All the claim seems to be is that the detection of the work of metaphysical intelligence as an artifact in the physical can be accomplished through the systematic thought and empirical tools typical to what we usually call "science." If it is possible, then ID might even be used to prove that a salt stain is just that. I doubt that would be very complicated. Simple.

Note that the recognition of intelligent selection is the only way to falsify notions of natural selection, so you would think that Darwinists would be happy to have a way to verify and falsify natural selections. Yet they are not because for all the talk of science (Science!) the fundamental issue for them is not limited by the limited empirical view and precise systematic thought typical to science. They tend to believe that all things are Nature's "selection" and tend to believe and argue that such belief is the best belief for other people to have too. Therefore, they stick with the belief they consider beneficial no matter what the systematic thought as applied to empirical evidence typical to science indicates about the matter of matter. They believe that Naturalism is the best belief system and philosophy for people to have lest they kill each other over religion like some Islamic terrorists and so on. All other beliefs just aren't as safe as their own, you see...and so the fundamental issue for the average Darwinists is not one of science. (More on saftey and the Left, see post below this one.)

Yet ironically even as they discard science in favor of Naturalism and saftey most Darwinists seem quite concerned with what gets labelled as science. Their main concern and the majority of their writing is about what is or is not scientific and not with seeking after knowledge or the truth about origins. It would seem that is because what is scientific has to do with their career or vested interests as scientists while reason or what is true and epistemically sound does not. The situation seems to be similar to what goes on in the Court system where you can pay a scientific expert to testify to one story of past events and pay another to say the exact opposite. How can that be when only one version of events can be true? To at least some extent it is because there are careerists who work in scientific fields yet are not interested in what is reasonable or true. Note that if you were only allowed to pay those who told one type of unreasonable story then that is the only story that would tend to be told scientifically. There might be a few mavericks to blow careerists out of the water with empirical evidence and so on. But they would be few and only a few others would seek them out, which would make them safe to ignore. The general Herd that goes by, "Well, all experts say..." would believe the official story as long as it was surrounded with some type of jargon that sounded scientific.

In America Darwinists have succeeded in structuring a system in which only experts that tell one type of story can be payed by the State, thus the proliferation of mythological narratives of Naturalism should not be surprising to anyone.

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