Re: What is legitimate about the ID bait and switch scam at this time?

On 6/18/2025 6:45 PM, Ernest Major wrote:

On 18/06/2025 11:31, Martin Harran wrote:

On Tue, 17 Jun 2025 18:54:14 -0500, DB Cates <cates_db@hotmail.com>
wrote:
>
[...]

I have been reading this thread with great interest and near zero
understanding. But I enjoy that it illustrates an understanding that I
was late to appreciate. That biology is *really* messy and the stories
we are usually told are greatly simplified and 'prettied up', leaving
out the true nature of what is actually happening.

>
Or maybe MarkE's designer is just a particularly messy one ;)
>

 On the one hand if one is arguing for organised complexity being evidence of design then the messiness of life in general and biochemistry in particular is a problem. Life doesn't even have the appearance of design (IMHO).
 On the other hand one could argue that the designer was constrained by the laws of chemistry. But an omnipotent and omniscient designer isn't so constrained, so the intelligent design advocate has a problem. They can resort to "mysterious ways" (the intelligent designer's reasons are beyond our understanding), or assert that the intelligent design can do anything it wants.
 On the gripping hand, this is why intelligent design is not science. By refusing to place constraints on the designer intelligent design can explain (explain away) anything, and therefore is not subject to empirical verification/disconfirmation.
 

The ID perps lied about doing real science.  All they really wanted to do was deny the existing science.  They lied about being able to do the same science as real scientists because they wanted to fool the rubes into supporting their Wedge scam to recreate a theocracy that likely never existed in this country.  They even started out by claiming that the way to do real science was wrong even though what they were advocating as an addition had never resulted in adding anything to our existing knowledge of nature.  The inability to test the proposition and the 100% failure rate of the god-did-it proposition was the reason that it was dropped out of consideration by serious scientists.  We have never been able to test the god-did-it notions directly, but every time we have figured out what was really going on the god-did-it proposition has failed.  Some god does not open up the firmament to let the rain fall through like the Bible claims.  Early on a lot of interesting discoveries were made by religiously motivated individuals who wanted to bring the Bible to life in nature, but they all failed to accomplish their goal, but ended up learning something interesting about nature once in a while.  It had already been determined before Darwin that the earth was not flat, we did not live in a geocentric universe, and it looked like there had to be more than one global Noachian flood to explain the fossil record and the different biospheres that had apparently existed in the past.  The earth had already been estimated to be much older than a few thousand years old.  Even Kelvin's objection to Darwin's notions placed the earth at around 300 million years old.  All Darwin could do was admit that if 300 million years was all life had to evolve into the extant lifeforms that is all he had.  It turned out that Kelvin was wrong.  MarkE and most of the ID perps understand that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old.  Luskin even bragged about doing his Geology PhD on rocks over 2 billion years old when life was limited to microorganisms.  Luskin is one of the authors of the current teach ID scam propaganda claiming that it is still legal to teach ID in the public schools, and lies to the rubes about the Big Tent viability of ID when he knows that any ID science has to be consistent with an earth that is billions of years old, and the vast majority of political support for the bait and switch scam comes from young earth creationists.  It may be that 100% of the time that the bait and switch has gone down it has been on YEC.  Luskin ran the bait and switch on the West Virginia creationist rubes the last time in 2024.  YEC seem to be the only group of Christians that have fallen for the ID bait and switch scam.
Ron Okimoto