Wonders, I saw your comment on Dispatches. Wow. I'm impressed.

But I am curious, how did you find that blog? It's one of my favorites, so I'm curious how you found it.
 

Hi Royale,

I think I was directed there by Telic Thoughts, one of my favorites. I like Ed - he's a reasonable and pleasant guy. I'm sure I disagree with him about everything and the kitchen sink, but that's OK.

I do get irritated when he pulls quotes out of one cultural context and lambasts them - what the AFA says to its supporters is meant to be interpreted within a certain framework and of course wont hold up against someone with Ed's assumptions. He was not the intended audience.

But all this is just to say that he gives me pause, because I realize how inclined I am to do the same thing with those I disagree with. He's thoughtful and somewhat fair, as am I, but he can't help but focus only to the failings of his opponents. And am I any different? It's a good blog for me to read. ;-)
 

Oh, for the rest of you, the blog is Dispatches from the Culture Wars.
 

I have some questions I wanted to ask you regarding your discussion on Dispathces. For these, can I use any comment thread? Or, is there a particular one? I don't want to hijack this Deuteronomy thread.
 

I really should create a new topic for this conversation, but I don't really have time at the moment. So we can talk here. ;-)
 

For starters, do you think ID (intelligent design) is scientifically provable or rather a philosophical inference?

I might post the same question Telic thoughts.
 

Hmmm - for starters? I'm not being baited, am I? ;-)

I've gone back and forth a bit on Intelligent Design. I think at this point I'm a little disillusioned with some of the key players in the ID movement that I once idolized, because they (not unlike some Christian causes) got caught up in a lot of larger political battles.

But the scientific arguments I find very interesting, and I'm pretty sympathetic to a lot of ID theory. The most interesting to me is the notion of front-loading - that the earliest cells, far from being as simple as possible, had an evolutionary map coded within parts of the genome. Hence, the basic architecture of organisms is preprogrammed, while the details are honed out by natural selection.

So - is it scientifically provable? I mean, I suppose if we could somehow find an early cell, and understand genomics and bioinformatics enough to make heads or tails of things, we could verify the front-loading hypothesis. Similarly, the probabilistic challenges to raw random mutation and natural selection are certainly valid scientific critiques to be refuted or taken on board. Likewise, the presence of evolutionary artifacts in the modern genome give evidence for some common descent, with certainly some apparently haphazard changes sorted out by natural selection.

Of course philosophy informs all of this, and has great influence over which arguments people want to win out.