Atheist Scient challenges Christian Apologist

[markdohle]

Quote

DannyDanDan:  Isn't "Dr" Berlinski a very staunch advocate for intelligent design? He is most certainly IN a camp.

The Intelligent Design group are interesting.  Some, are agnostic, or even atheist, don't get that.  Anthony Flew, he came to believe in an intelligence that designed the universe.  It was his study of DNA that brought him to that conclusion.  However, he was a diest, which I am sure you know, and did not believe in an afterlife, nor from what I have read, did not want one to exist.   I guess that everyone belongs to one camp or another, which has it own built-in bias.  

peace

Mark

[markdohle]

Quote

eights bits said:  Berlinski? He speaks for the Discovery Institute. Now, he can be as coy as he likes about saying what he thinks personally about Intelligent Design, but the Discovery Institute is one of the camps, and Berlinski's way inside.

1

Ok, thanks for the information.  Does not mean he does not have something important to say. 

Peace
Mark

[markdohle]

I do think Belinski is hard to pigeonhole.  Below is something I found on the web.

ENV: You describe yourself as a “secular Jew” and “remarkably indifferent to the religious life.” Yet so much of your writing bears directly on whether religion has been intellectually defeated by secular, science-flavored ideologies. You can’t have given no thought to religious questions. Would you share with us your hunches and suspicions about spiritual reality, the trend in your thinking, if not your firm beliefs? 

Continue:

https://evolutionnews.org/2009/09/david_berlinski_on_religion_hi/

“A defense [of religion] is needed because none has been forthcoming. The discussion has been ceded to men who regard religious belief with frivolous contempt. Their books have in recent years poured from every press, and although differing widely in their style, they are identical in their message: Because scientific theories are true, religious beliefs must be false.”

― David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

 

Edited June 28, 2018 by markdohle

[psyche101]

33 minutes ago, markdohle said:

The Intelligent Design group are interesting.  Some, are agnostic, or even atheist, don't get that. 

I'm not sure how. Its just religion repackaged with some science terms. By large, its nonsense that explains nothing. 

33 minutes ago, markdohle said:

Anthony Flew, he came to believe in an intelligence that designed the universe.  It was his study of DNA that brought him to that conclusion.  However, he was a diest, which I am sure you know, and did not believe in an afterlife, nor from what I have read, did not want one to exist.   I guess that everyone belongs to one camp or another, which has it own built-in bias.  

peace

Mark

I don't see how you see science as bias. Observations and predictions don't lend themselves to preference, the simply are what they are. 

Flew just made the same basic mistake we did in antiquity thinking that the compkexity of structure in nature from our vantage point offered the illusion of design, but further evidence provided another option of evolution was the correct process to achieve that balance. 

[psyche101]

33 minutes ago, markdohle said:

I do think Belinski is hard to pigeonhole.  Below is something I found on the web.

ENV: You describe yourself as a “secular Jew” and “remarkably indifferent to the religious life.” Yet so much of your writing bears directly on whether religion has been intellectually defeated by secular, science-flavored ideologies. You can’t have given no thought to religious questions. Would you share with us your hunches and suspicions about spiritual reality, the trend in your thinking, if not your firm beliefs? 

Continue:

https://evolutionnews.org/2009/09/david_berlinski_on_religion_hi/

I can't agree, his conclusions are more than obviously creationist. No matter what he claims, his work speaks loud and clear for him on this issue. 

33 minutes ago, markdohle said:

“A defense [of religion] is needed because none has been forthcoming. The discussion has been ceded to men who regard religious belief with frivolous contempt. Their books have in recent years poured from every press, and although differing widely in their style, they are identical in their message: Because scientific theories are true, religious beliefs must be false.”

― David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

 

Quite plainly the universe is natural or created, evidence strongly favour a natural universe. How can completely different conclusions be compatible? 

And why does religion need defending? There are also plenty of apologists who openly debate the subject, although their efforts are countered convincingly, why does Berlinski ignore them? 

[Only_]

6 hours ago, psyche101 said:

Flew just made the same basic mistake we did in antiquity thinking that the compkexity of structure in nature from our vantage point offered the illusion of design, but further evidence provided another option of evolution was the correct process to achieve that balance. 

So you believe that life and the Universe are meaningless?

[danydandan]

8 hours ago, markdohle said:

The Intelligent Design group are interesting.  Some, are agnostic, or even atheist, don't get that.  Anthony Flew, he came to believe in an intelligence that designed the universe.  It was his study of DNA that brought him to that conclusion.  However, he was a diest, which I am sure you know, and did not believe in an afterlife, nor from what I have read, did not want one to exist.   I guess that everyone belongs to one camp or another, which has it own built-in bias.  

peace

Mark

Everyone does have there own built in biases, but as a scientist we try to not let these interface, hence we have the scientific method. If you knew the history of the Discovery Institute and what they do and how they do it. You would understand how they spread propaganda, how all they did was tipex over God and written Intelligent Designer over the tipex. Every single person there spreads biased propaganda, lies and falsehoods to justify their beliefs in the Intelligent Designer for God's sake they even state that humans, homo sapiens, lived alongside Dinosaur's.

Edited June 29, 2018 by danydandan

[danydandan]

1 hour ago, Brother_Spirit said:

So you believe that life and the Universe are meaningless?

How the hell did you reach that conclusion from that part of the post you quoted?

It might be meaningless to you without a creator, it certainly is not meaningless to the billions of people who don't ascribe to a creator.

 

Edited June 29, 2018 by danydandan

[Rlyeh]

On ‎29‎/‎06‎/‎2018 at 7:28 AM, markdohle said:

The Intelligent Design group are interesting.  Some, are agnostic, or even atheist, don't get that.  Anthony Flew, he came to believe in an intelligence that designed the universe.  It was his study of DNA that brought him to that conclusion.  However, he was a diest, which I am sure you know, and did not believe in an afterlife, nor from what I have read, did not want one to exist.   I guess that everyone belongs to one camp or another, which has it own built-in bias.  

Took him dementia to come to that realization.

Theists are scraping the bottom of the barrel using a dementia patient to give credence to intelligent design.

[eight bits]

We need to get Flew straight. He died in 2010,  institutionalized for senile dementia after his elderly wife could no longer care for him at home. The form of his dementia was not revealed so far as I know, but the suspicion is Alzheimer's.

Sometime around 1999-2000, about a decade before he died, Flew correctly noticed a foundational technical flaw in his thousand-word signature essay, "Theology and Falsification." The effect of correcting the errror was for him to realize that there might be a basis for natural theology under certain circumstances, and for some god-hypotheses.

This did not in itself lead him to deism, but it probably helped. Flew began to look for evidence in the natural world favoring a creator god (but not a revealed god like the Christian one, with no afterlife for different reasons than for his deism, and no worship needed or rewarded).

His initial forays were in "fine tuning" physics and Intelligent Design, particularly Behe's irreducible complexity critique of natural selection. Allegedly, Richard Dawkins talked Flew out of accepting Behe, and Flew thereafter accepted evolution by natural selection.

That still left the question of where the initial replicating organism came from, and that was the gap wherein Flew stationed his own personal deist God of the Gaps. The DNA system was too complicated, in Flew's view, to have arisen without a little help from our invisible friends.

I think his participation in the There is a God (2007) farce was the result of exploitation of a sick elderly man by opportunistic professional Christian publicity hounds (my apologies to dogs) who posed as his "friends." However, Flew's basic "change of heart' (which actually wasn't all that radical) was well-established years earlier, too early in the process of his decline for dementia to have been a plausible main cause.

https://uncertaintist.wordpress.com/tag/antony-flew/