And changed the year from 360 days to 365 and a fraction, and the month from 30 days to 28 and a fraction, and changed the water cycle from miraculous fog and dew rising from the oceans into rain and snow, and cut the human lifespan from 600+ years to 70…

The second point was the killer, especially when combined with something the author above refers to: (FTA)

“Scripture is true by virtue of God speaking it.”

IE: “The Bible defines God, and God defines the Bible”. I’m pretty sure that’s tautological, but it is the fundamental foundation of much modern Christian faith.

In the end, it’s not possible to know something without at least one human experiencing it. Everything we know comes through own or someone else’s experience. It doesn’t matter if it’s a subjective religious revelation or an objective breakthrough in science; both are human experiences.

And in both cases, the only affirmation we have to our experiences is from the communities around us; faith communities in one sense and scientific communities in the other.

Once I realized that, religion lost its spell on me. I started to question my faith, and now I’m an atheist. In the end, a tautological definition of god was not sufficient…now I’m not sure if God can be defined in ANY way.

This post was chosen as newsworthy at Sensus Divinitatis News….

So it REALLY WAS a “Global Replace String ‘Young Earth Creationism’ with String ‘Intelligent Design’” (nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean know what I mean)…

I believe Sanford’s book was originally self-published, and later picked up by a Creation-based publisher. I don’t have any personal grudges against self-published books. I self-published my own book on computer science (Programming from the Ground Up) for largely the same reason – I was unable to find a publisher who wanted to publish it. However, self-publishing did not stop Princeton University from using it for several years. The key is the quality of the book, not on what governing committee says whether or not it is suitable for publication.

Human nature is just what it is – it isn’t a conspiracy theory. The same human nature that kept Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar’s ideas out of astrophysics for several decades (Eddington thought it was uncool, and he had enough clout to prevent other people who were sympathetic to his ideas to keep them out). For similar reasons as Sanford, Chandrasekhar spent most of his publishing efforts towards books rather than peer-review journals. It is the highest vanity that people think that scientists are a special class of people who are not prone to the same types of groupthink present in every other field.

And Chandrasekhar and Sanford aren’t the only two who push their work primarily through books. Blanden and Steele published their theories of somatic selection and germline feedback in the book Lamarck’s Signature in 1999. Only in the last few years has the scientific environment changed enough to allow their views in peer-reviewed journals, and even then only a few papers.

Lynn Margulis has often had her funding cut off for much the same reasons.

To say that in order for an idea to be scientific that it must pass through a select group of people or journals is simply silly, and the history of science shows us that over and over again good ideas get shot down in science (both journals and otherwise) simply because they are unpopular, and not because they are wrong.

If I remember correctly from Ruse’s “evolution wars”, the journal Evolution was established because certain scientists did not feel their papers were being given a proper hearing, and therefore made their own journal to publish them. There is nothing wrong with that, but apparently if someone you disagree with does that, it’s foul play.

There is no magic to peer review. The idea should stand or fall as an idea itself, not because some mystical priesthood deemed it worthy of their standards. Having a fixed set of avenues of publication is precisely the _cause_ of dogma, not its solution.

Until the 15th century, Christian science was Aristotelian physics and Platomic ideology (a restructured dualism by its modern name, thanks to Descartes), but somewhat altered screaming and kicking at least as much by the natural physics that worked of a few large brained mammals like Copernicus and Galileo and Newton as by the natural philosophies of Descartes and Leibniz that empowered natural theology. To recast these philosophies as Intelligent Design has some merit but… to be more honest, let’s call ID what it was meant to be by those who created it: the proponents of those who represent the Discovery Institute and put its agenda to work. So let’s not mask ID as something it is really isn’t – natural theology – although I will admit that it could be categorized as such.

Intelligent Design is very much a20th century creature that attempts and fails as a Trojan Horse to get creationism into the science curriculum. The evidence is two simple words: cdesign proponentsists. As Nick Matzke eloquently articulates The definition of “intelligent design” *originated* by deleting “creationist” and its cognates, and inserting “intelligent design”, “design proponents”, etc., from the book Of Pandas and People. The rest of the definition (and the text of the book it was in!!) remained exactly the same. It happened after the 1987 Edwards v. Aguillard decision.

You may choose to think of ID as a new label on an old idea, but unless you can convince those who use the term in its modern form to redefine the antiquated idea of natural theology, then let’s stick to using language we can both understand.