Zane_Marlowe

Anyone listening to the Podcast commentaries? I didn't feel it was wussing out to pull back from that possibility. Cain had her victory over the Cylon fleet, Adama was reluctant to do it in the first place, and officers historically dislike the subterfuge of what each had planned. Loved it, am fascinated and will continue to watch avidly. I'm actually buying them the day after and watching them on my TV with my video iPod that I got for Christmas!

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Cmdr: I think I know why they killed one character in the film. I mean , seriously, how believable was it that he was married to her? What are those odds? Well, I think it was very believable. She was one of those super-serious types, and he was more a light-touch humorous kind of person. Opposites attract man. Alternately, you can look at the fact that on the series, their marriage was having trouble, so maybe it was an impulse thing that was going south. Either way, imagine yourself spending most of your time far from port and there's only one girl around (remember, there was some kind of interval before they got Kaylee), kinda narrows your vision a bit. "Fools rush in..." Mal wasn't going to go for her, and the engineer (prior to Kaylee) was too irresponsible for Zoe anyway. Their relationship made sense to me for those reasons.

Got em both, was a latecomer, and am sad to say it. Now I'm missing what I missed. Hope the show lives again, finds a new home... I'd watch it zealously.

I'm actually pretty interested in getting this game. The only reason I didn't really play X2 was because the zarking interface didn't support mouse for all those little menus. Okay, without drawing meaningless comparisons to UC (in any of its forms), how do you like X3? Is it good times?

Welcome new recruits! Coder and Thor, you now belong to one of the fittest fleets in the known universe. Our battle record is exemplary, but I expect you have done your homework. Congratulations on your first steps. Now let's get you trained to meet our enemies in all environments.

Hey coder, I'm going to try to meet you online on Thursday if you're free then. I'm in the Central time zone, so let's try to connect about 7pm or so my time. Meet on the GCHQ lobby app that comes with UCAWA. If you don't have AWA, but only UC, let me know. PM me perhaps is best since that is forwarded to my email.

If I might intrude. Two comments for ISS staff discussion, let me know what you think: 1. I'd use the links to our site wherever possible, since it tells those interested that there's more to see than just the name. Wings have a description, and so do ships, which I note we are not currently linking to our ship database (perhaps we could?). It enhances the look of our fleet to use such links, imho. 2. Alternately, I recommend relocating the ship mottos, information, type, base location, etc. to the forthcoming ship registry module on our site (thus shortening the first line and creating room for the links in the sig variable). What say you all?

LOL, Scriv, you kill me man. If there was ever a movie that was intended for kids, it was this one. If there was ever a movie that could pass on the gore and blue language (as Lewis himself unfailingly did) that you seem to treasure so much, it's this one. Nothing against Scriv personally, but I'm going to offer a general observation on Scriv's reviews of late (since I've only lately paid attention): I think the problem is not that he sees where people actually did edit things down to a lesser degree of violence (although in some cases, perhaps so), but that more often (and especially in the case of Narnia) he sees places where the filmmakers COULD have turned it up and didn't. Apparently for Scriv, choosing to NOT show that degree of sex or gore is not an artistic decision, but some form of capitulation to the ratings gods. I won't argue that in some (who knows, perhaps even most?) cases this may be true, but Narnia was executive produced by Christians and Disney, both of whom are known for gentler depictions of violence; and the source material itself does not include the sorts of violence that Scriv seems to think the filmmakers were cowed into cutting. In other words Scriv, some people show less because they don't think we or the film wants, needs, or benefits from showing more. On to the rest. I'm not going to take issue with the editing and technical details, but I didn't feel like anything was remarkable enough to take me out of the story. Tilda Swinton was EXACTLY what she should have been as the witch. Ethereal, beautiful, cold, and deadly. I think she nailed that role the way Ian McKellen nailed Gandalf. I was also pleased to see Deep Roy (the Oompa Loompa from the recent Willy Wonka movie) show up as the evil dwarf serving the witch. James McAvoy was an excellent Tumnus, and I genuinely got to liking him more on film than I did in the book. Overall, I felt the scenes that were important to the book were present in the movie, and they did an excellent job with the core ideas, much as the Tolkien films did. 9/10

Jag, all you have to say right now is "I'm politicizing science." If the best you can do is a sneer and an smear, then I'm not going to try to reason with you if you're not willing to produce actual reasons and reasoning. Cite some actual scholar ship man! Don't you read? Let us know what you're reading if you in fact know all that you say you do. At least take a lesson from Nomad, who is at arguing substantively. By the way, who said metaphysical claims are unfalsifiable?

Yeesh, I keep trying to make these smaller but it doesn't work! I have stuff to go off and do now!

Wow, you guys are really going at it. A few points: To Nomad's posts following mine: Excellent opener! Now we can discuss since we're talking about the content of the argument. ID's basic contention is irreducible complexity, which means that because Natural Selection can only select for those traits that confer a survival advantage, then for systems that fail to do so, they cannot be inherited. ID theorists point out that there are biological systems that only become advantageous once they have achieved a specific degree of complexity, which means they must be fully present (not gradually acquired and adapted) or they cannot confer the survival advantage that will allow them to be inherited. How then can the gradual process of evolution select for these complex systems? Also, you'll recall that my earlier point about the Miller-Urey experiment was that he didn't select the chemistry of the experiment on the basis of theories about geo-chemistry in the early earth, but rather he put together those compounds that he believed might produce life. If we look around at the chemical composition of any other planet of which we are aware, all of them (the terrestrial planets, to be fair) contain toxic chemical concentrations sufficient to doom any form of life from emerging on them. That is an empirical observation note, and I wonder why we should think that Earth should have been any different than her solar neighbors. Jag, you've confirmed my earlier point. You're not arguing the merits of the idea, you're telling us it's religion because religious people are behind it. On a related note, the entire concept of a holiday was invented by religious people, and the days of the week are named for Norse gods. Because we all use those names, are we all viking pagans now? Should we forfeit all our holidays since that would de facto lend support to religion? I'm using a little hyperbole here, but I hope I'm showing just how silly this kind of argument is. If you're suggesting that there are political winds that American Christians are trying to navigate and ID is friendly to their views, then good luck to them; but to then read their views into a theory I have yet to see you show any actual reading of makes you yourself a good candidate for your own politics of suspicion. (Why won't he read? Why wouldn't he actually debate the issue rather than just throwing stones at the people who support it? Must be [insert completely speculative, groundless, superfluous explanation here].)I'll concede the point that many ID theorists are Christian. However, I am still waiting for you to tell us how ID is religion, not just a philosophy of science that is friendly to it. To Marvin: You're correct that science doesn't accept metaphysical entities, but that sentence should finish "as objects of study." Science is not the tool with which we study what, if anything, exists beyond the natural world. That is outside the scientific discipline. However, the word metaphysics is properly a philosophical term. I've here been using it to mean simply "whatever is real but not empirically sensible." That may include God, angels, demons, souls, and other elements of a religious worldview, but it also includes the principles that must be true of the world (both metaphysical and natural) for us to make any sense of it at all. The notion that the world is an orderly place, that physical laws and principles will remain constant, and that other people have minds similar to mine are examples of metaphysical truths that are not possible to prove empirically, but which we normally take ourselves to have confidence in as settled knowledge (whatever one's level of certainty). For another example, as you read this, you maintain the belief that you parked your car outside earlier. This is not based on present empirical perception, (even if you can see it from where you're sitting right now), but on a non-empirical memory which is not available for empirical inspection. Do you know that you parked your car outside? I do, and I'll bet you do too, but neither of us knows that on the basis of our present sense experiences. Metaphysics is like that. It's stuff you know, but which, while not empirically known, may in some cases be real nonetheless. If God's existence and nature are a point of metaphysical enquiry, that's not because metaphysics is the word we use when something's a fairy tale, but because it's simply the word we use when we have to describe things that sense experience. If there is no difference between those categories, then you're a materialist, and I've already ceded the point that if this is so, then I can see where ID would not interest you. To clarify: Evolution in its materialist form requires randomness as a precondition. If Jag wants to debate this, then he's not talking about the materialist form of the theory. If he claims that he is, and maintains that randomness is not part of it, then I don't know who he's reading and would genuinely like to if he'd be so kind as to include any citations he has. Again people use the word belief to denote something not known by the senses, and less valid or invalid as evidence. Belief is a precondition to knowledge (since you don't fail to also believe that which you know), and if a belief is true, then quite often we call that conjunction knowledge. If Jag wants to tell us all that religion is just beliefs, then we can fairly reply that so is science, and so is anything else that we think we know. At that point, we're going to have a discussion about truth (or at least try) and see which of our beliefs may in fact be knowledge. Make no mistake friends, this is a philosophical discussion we're having about what counts as knowledge, and what, if anything, is true beyond the merely physical. You cannot answer those questions by saying "a majority of scientists don't think so" because they're not trained in those fields of knowledge that their discpline presupposes. That's no sleight against them, and it doesn't mean we're now in the "realm of religion," but it does mean that they're no longer authorities on the subject. This is why, again I repeat, if you're a materialist, you'll see things one way; if you're not, you'll see it the other.

quote:Originally posted by LostInSpace: OMG, the both of you missed my point in posting that link completely. That Diane Glass, for a left-leaning columnist, isn't all that bad looking. Hmm, now that you mention it, quite so

You know, I can say I'm an elf until I'm blue in the face and that won't make it so. Prove that ID is religion Jag. So far I just keep hearing you say so, and I don't see any reasoning about the definition of religion or how ID meets that definition. The fact that ID implies a supernatural entity as a conclusion does not mean you get to just dismiss it unargued because it doesn't fit people's contemporary notions of science as an exclusively materialist enterprise. Simple Theism is not religion, and ID is not trying to disguise itself as anything but what it is. The reason it's got people so animated is because it's not being offered 1) as an alternative theory to Darwinism (however much some religious people wish it were) 2) by people who spend their Sunday mornings delivering homilies. ID is being offered by Ph.D-bearing scientists who have had all the education of their critics, and they are publishing papers that neither cite nor require adherence to any particular religous tradition. In so doing, it avoids the thorny issues of the first amendment separation clause because it cannot designate the nature of the designing intelligence(explicitly, it need not even be supernatural as we think of the term). ID accommodates Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, but also fits within some traditions of Hinduism, and perhaps even some forms of Buddhism (admittedly Buddhism's a reach). If you're going to contend with ID as an idea, then do so, but the content of my posts to this point is been an attempt to show that 1) science need not be materialist in its orientation, and that it historically has not been, that 2) religion (and Christianity in particular) does not require one to forfeit one's rationalistic or scientific knowledge unless and until one is required to adopt materialism (ask the Jesuits), and that 3) ID is a theory that challenges materialist construals of Darwinism that include claims on the origin of life, not Darwin's theory of natural selection per se. Now in your (plural persons here) various responses, I've seen much talk about science, religion, the alleged sins of the church, rationality, evidence, convictions, beliefs, and lots of other categories that belong to philosophy, and which represent (most often) gross generalizations based on stereotypes based on urban legends based on...ad nauseum, with little in the way of substantive references to actual scholarship in those fields (positiveatheism.org is not a good source, and the one link I've posted was for the footnotes, not the main content). You want to debate what counts as knowledge? Great, let's do that, but recognize that there's an entire field of Epistemology that is devoted to discussing this question and it contains finer distinctions than are here being produced. You want to debate history? Wonderful! By all means, but let's actually cite some primary texts and get our facts straight. Maybe we can go for the big one: Philosophy of Science! Excellent! Now let's read Stephen Jay Gould, Ian Barbour, Thomas Kuhn, and Karl Popper just to warm up. Or not. What I'm not seeing is anyone actually telling me what claim or claims within ID are false. Instead people are confusing the message with the messenger, and that means it's just politics, not rational debate. If that's the case, then the critics offering that kind of criticism are simply asking us to substitute one dogma for another without argument. If that's the case, then recommend your views accordingly, but do not pretend that you've just taken any rational high ground. If you (anyone really) would be so kind as to tell me what's wrong with the idea besides "it's not science" (which I answered in my first response to the effect that it has no bearing on whether it is teachable alongside science as part of the philosophy that underlies science since a materialist philosophy of science is being presently taught with it now) by actually producing some version of an accepted argument for it and showing the rest of us "non-rational poorly-educated over-zealous militant religious types" where it goes wrong, then maybe we could discuss this more intelligently.

Nicely put Jaguar. Of course that's not a claim that Jesuits are materialists, which Nomad would have had to show in order to substantiate his suggestion that (paraphrasing here) "educated religious people now support the notion of chance origins for human life as described by materialist paleobiologists." What you've just said is compatible with ID since your comment includes "god started it." That's the simplest expression of the conclusion drawn by ID proponents, and that's what's being missed in the cultural discussion right now. I'm going to bet that Nomad will not share your view however.

Well, you guys certainly manage to write volumes on this stuff before I have a chance to respond, so instead of trying to hit everything, let me pick a few things and work from there. First of all, religion is defined in various ways, and I would counter-argue that the fairest definition that makes the most sense of it as a phenomenon is that religion is the human response to what is thought to be holy. That captures the notion that there is a human component to religion (rites, rituals, and the other cultural aspects mentioned above), but that there is also a metaphysical component to the world's religions, without which these religions would be dead things. If that's the case where you are in Spain, Nomad, then I'm sorry, but your convictions are not shared by the Buddhists in Tibet, the Muslims in Arabia, the Baptists in Oklahoma, or the Hindus in Bombay. For those groups of people, this isn't a cultural mask for some scientific or natural phenomenon, it is the broader order of being in which the natural world itself is enclosed. Note that I do not deny the cultural component, but without the metaphysical component, it's not "religion" as the world's religions understand the term (which, by the way, accounts for a great majority of how all of humanity understands the term if you start looking at population stats). To answer one of Nomad's statements in this context properly now, religion answers existential questions by by pointing to the metaphysical realities they claim, expressly included among them the origins of humanity and the natural order. Regarding the intellectual posture of science and religion. Science and religion both have doubts and convictions. If you read Thomas Kuhn's work on paradigms in science, you'll read about how science has convictions that only change with great reluctance. If science were an inherently skeptical discipline, we wouldn't consider scientists to be people who expand our knowledge; but in fact we do think of them that way. Religion likewise has its skeptical components, and our discussion here is an example of scientific convictions dueling with religious skeptics since ID is a skeptical claim about materialist readings of Darwinism. The realm of evidence, doubt, skepticism, belief, etc., is the defined and discussed within realm of Philosophy, and that's why science, philosophy, and religion need to be properly understood both in themselves and in their relation to one another. I've said before that the discussion on ID is a discussion within Philosophy of Science, not science. As such, it is unfortunate that so few scientists trained in the Philosophy of science are weighing in on ID with comments that show they are not trained in that discipline. With regards to the Miller-Urey experiment. Contemporary exo-biologists do not currently hold that the planet's atmospheric chemistry resembled the carefully chosen chemistry in the Miller-Urey experiment. Miller's experimental chemicals were chosen not for any geologic evidence of their presence in the early atmosphere, but expressly because he thought they might produce life under certain conditions. I found an interesting article on this here, and while I accept that the source is obviously friendly to ID, I'd recommend your attention to his footnotes, since they are not. For Nomad, I included the distinction between "evangelist" and "Evangelical" because one is a largely American protestant church movement, and one is descriptive of a kind of person. Your comments are describe the type of person, not the church movement. My earlier comments about Evangelicals refer to the church movement, not to missionaries per se (although I've known a fair number of well-educated missionaries too). As regards your comments on the Jesuits, I am still waiting for you to produce an argument to prove that these well-educated Catholic monks are materialists who deny the hand of divine providence in human origins. Well, that's probably sufficient for now, I shall again await your replies. Cheers friends.

quote:Originally posted by nomad: ...Historically, the catholic church (like it or not the most influencial christian stream) has fundamentally been anti-science on any subject were science (or anything dissident for that matter) challenged some of its dogmatic concepts.Historically, I can understand how the Spanish experience with the Catholic church could tend to sour contemporary Europeans on established religion, but the above statement is just simply inaccurate. I'm not claiming that the church has never had problems with science (of course it has), but there is a problem with the statement above. There is an assumption that the church is a single entity with a single mind, where in fact there are and have been many views on controversial opinions within the church, the various churches, and within Christianity in general. It is a gross oversight to make such blanket statements about an entity composed of so many diverse thinkers. Look to the medieval debates on realism vs. nominalism to see a debate that had genuine theological teeth, but which was conducted with civility by brilliant and diverse minds within the church. quote:When I hear sentences like "Galileo got house arrest, and his problem wasn't with religion, it was with the church of his day", I can only laugh. No matter what religious texts convey, religion is ALWAYS the "CURCH OF THE DAY", because the ultimate interpretation of the contents before mass transmission is always done by contemporary individuals.My earlier comments also apply here: there are always a variety of thinkers within the church, with a variety of interpretations. There are fewer authorities than there are interpretations, but that is the case in any movement, and I don't see why that should make Christianity remarkable. For clarification on my part however, I want to know: are your remarks directed at the Catholic church of the enlightenment, or at the various churches of contemporary Christianity? Your comments make both kinds of claims and, again I note, seem to regard contemporary Christians as somehow culturally medieval. quote:We have come to the point were what was used to be the conservative catholic church now accepts most of what science has to offer, but US evangelists don't. Would you interact with Jesuites who are by definition the most scientifically-open among the christian official structure, you would see that at least on the grounds of intellectual argumentation, evangelists don't really play in the same league. I wonder how many ppl ignore that there are for example astronomical observatories entirely operated by Jesuites who aren't precisely looking for angels...I have met Jesuits, and I have discussed theology, culture, science, and history with them. I find them fascinating and among the best educated people in the world. That said, I've also met a number of superbly educated Evangelical Christians (an "evangelist" is someone who actively proselytizes) who are just as educated. To your point about not looking for angels through a telescope, I very much doubt that either my Evangelical and Jesuit, or my less-educated friends (Catholic and Evangelical) would attempt this. This seems like hyperbole on your part, but let me answer the underlying point about these "educated ones" whom you respect being hard-headed about science. When they relinquish Theism and any notion of divine providence in the unfolding of human history, biological or otherwise, I'll be happy to admit that you can count them for your side. However, I think it would be more worrisome to you to mention such people because the obvious fact is that in light of their excellent education, they remain believers in a supreme God whose divine will is expressed in the ordering of the world. The rest of your comments are directed at ID as though it were offering an alternative theory of some kind to Darwinian evolution. If you read my previous posts, you will see that natural selection is not at issue with ID. Rather, what is at issue is the ability of Natural Selection to produce living creatures from non-life. In essence, it is a challenge to materialism, not a challenge to the clearly observable phenomena of natural adaptation over time. Let me suggest that the simplicity of your solution has a problem. The problem with the provided definition of life you suggested earlier is that it already includes the notion of organic matter. To include the thing explained in the definition is not an explanation. The question is how you distinguish organic from non-organic matter in the first place, and my first point was that no amount of natural selection could change the one into the other, and that denying the distintion between the two was impossible to maintain. I was not attempting to sketch out a definition of life per se since that's beyond my expertise.

Well, now you're speculating. I've said it before, I'll repeat it now: enlightenment thinkers were far and away more theistic in their leanings because they thought they would learn more about God's creative work in nature by studying it directly than by using the existing mode of reasoning (known as scholasticism back then). It wasn't a matter of dogma at all, and if you read the documents related to Galileo's trial (I have read parts), you'll find that Aristotle's reasoning for why a heliocentric hypothesis wasn't true was in fact not answered by Galileo. (Aristotle argued that we'd see a parallax shift in the positions of stars, and since we didn't, then the earth was stationary; neither Galileo nor his critics imagined that the stars were as far away as they are, which means that while there is a shift, it's not detectable to us.) What horrifying and draconian sentence did this 17th century Che get? House arrest. In a nice Italian villa where he would continue to read, write, and correspond with other intellectuals to the end of his days. Not that he wouldn't have enjoyed his freedom, but it was a far cry from being burned at the stake (a fate mainly reserved for people who taught formal heresy and who would have had ample warning about matters of doctrine). I won't even start on Newton, who wrote more theology than he ever did science, and dedicated his work to God. The most radical shift in the intellectual / religious thought of the period was something like Spinoza's view, or Deism if you go a little further. I'm not suggesting that Atheists were absent (they were known even in Ancient Greece), but neither was it the case that history's scientists have been uniformly atheist or even hostile to established religion and religious belief. Quite the opposite in fact, and it was the expectation of an ordered universe created by a rational God that motivated many to seek knowledge of that God's designs in nature. Seen in that light, ID could be considered to be clearly a part of an established scientific tradition.

I've read the link in question, and I'd encourage you to create a separate thread so we don't get busted for off topic stuff. I'd like to read primary texts on this guy if possible, instead of the editorial slant of positiveatheism.org. (I'm not taking issue with their facts mind you, but someone like Pierre Bayle, for instance, was widely and wrongly thought to be a proponent of atheism when he merely suggested that you couldn't rationalise everything about faith; he was in fact a pious Calvinist.) Also, a note on Bruno. It was a matter of church policy at the time that you wouldn't burn people unless they were actually preaching false doctrine as truth. If Bruno fell afoul of the church, then it's likely because he was making claims of a religious nature and teaching them as church doctrine, though I admit I'll have to follow up on this. Most people's problem with the church during the enlightenment was a problem with Aristotelian scholasticism, not christianity per se. Let me ask the follow up question here, and that is, would you argue that Bruno's fate was the norm? I ask because I'm watching some people here make sweeping generalities to the effect that religion is anti-science and religious people want to return to the dark ages when in fact science before, during, and after the enlightenment was conducted by people who felt that the nature of that discipline was to uncover the wonders of God.

quote:Originally posted by Wolfheart: Yes,it changes from a form("living") that I cannot completely understand its working mechanisms(unpredictable) to a form(dead) that I can easily understand(predictable) ...Would that dog still seem different to a complex machine if you could predict its moves just like you can predict machine's ? I'd argue that if you're a serious materialist, then understanding the first state requires that you understand the second since the material in question is the same. Since I'm not a materialist, I hold that the reason why I can recognize a significant difference between the two chemically identical states is because there is an organizing/animating principle at work in the living that is not present in the dead. That's the soul in the classic parlance, but I'm hesitant to use the term since contemporary thinkers tend to consider any such usages as tantamount to "pass the rattlesnakes" class fundamentalism. In relation to the point about predictability, remember that we can predict the behavior of two things that behave identically but which are themselves different kinds of entities. This makes sense if you think about the fact that the ability to predict that a feather and a stone will fall toward the earth does nothing to inform you about the difference between them intrinisically, and it obviously does not follow that there is no distinction between them. The ability to describe the operations of a thing is not the ability to describe what a thing is. Getting back towards our topic, it is materialism that ID challenges because it basically challenges the notion of randomness that is part of the present generation of evolutionary thinking. We breed dogs for certain traits (and Darwin mentions pigeons), and that's what evolution looks like with a guiding intelligence. That's what ID's suggesting, and what I think most people are not getting is that you can't just bring out the old saw about science being what reasonable people think as opposed to "those crazy religious wackos." Science has nothing to say about the validity of metaphysical claims (religious or otherwise) because they (the metaphysics) are the framework within which the natural world operates. If we note that these are presuppositions to science, not conclusions which science itself can faithfully interrogate, then we become wiser about what we can and do, or cannot and could not know. By the way, I challenge the earlier writer who spoke of science's martyrdom to religion and 1000-year secrets suppressed by the church to name just one person killed for their scientific theories by established religion. Galileo got house arrest, and his problem wasn't with religion, it was with the church of his day.

quote:Originally posted by Wolfheart: What people mean by "life" has always been an interesting question for me.The way I see it, people tend to call complex mechanism(too complex to completely analyze-understand- at a time) "living". For example in the past people thought the earth was "living" because they couldnt explain earthquakes,thunders,winds etc. People eventually were able to analyze these(meaning they began to *understand*) and earth is considered "non-living" now. We understand how waves are happening and that makes it "non-living" but we cannot completely explain the complex reactions humans give to their environment(for now) and thats why humans are considered "living". So,IMO, theres no *objective* difference between "life" and "non-life". Just wanted to give my answer to that argument. I'm not sure complexity is what gives us our notion of "life" because I can imagine a machine that was too complex for me to understand it and I can also look at a biological entity that I cannot understand and make a clear distinction between the two. I think the relevant criteria here is the attribution of mind which, for lack of a better set of factors, we judge based on our experience of our own mind. I.e., I think a dog is a living thing because I see that it moves purposively, has reactions indicating intelligence, and other factors that I identify with my own conscious experience. The main point you made about there being no objective way to distinguish between life and non-life is kind of strange because I don't think you have any difficulty picking out a corpse from a live person if you were to see them side by side. To cut to the meat of the question, it may be that our metaphysical intuitions differ here, but if the only change you see in the moments before and after a person dies is that some chemical change has ceased, then I could see how you would reject the distinction. I'm not sure that it is any more objective than the other view for that however since, again, one's presuppositions on materialism weigh heavily here.

For what it's worth, I teach college in this field and want to clear up a few misconceptions and distortions I'm seeing about ID, science, and religion. 1. ID is not science. That said, it's still philosophy of science, and nobody teaching science fails to teach a philosophy of science at the same time. ID challenges a materialist view of reality, and contemporary science is committed to that, but make no mistake, it's a philosophical perspective, not an empirical one. If contemporary scientists want to be materialists, then fine, but let's not pretend that such a presupposition bears the full weight of an empirical proof. 2. Science is not anti-religious. Galileo argued that his views were more orthodox than the church's, and Newton wrote more theology than he did science. Some scientists want to push point (1) above, but you can't use science to prove that God doesn't exist any more than you can use a wood splinter for a compass needle (it's the wrong tool for the job). 3. If people treat any critical discussion of Darwin's theory as "creationism," then the commitment in science to evidence and critical reasoning has gone out the window. It makes sense to think that even evolution is reducible to more fundamental principles (intelligent or not), but as long as it's treated as a point of dogma by materialists in science, then it's no better than dogma as knowledge. 4. Some have said that evolution does not speak to human origins (life from non-life). That's only partly true. Darwin's theory, strictly speaking, does not. That has not stopped contemporary scientists from embracing an evolutionary model for producing the first life, and it is this which has been the most frequent sticking point for people of faith. The number of those who doubt evolution as a theory of change is far smaller than those who doubt its ability to transform raw chemistry into life. This is what ID is really critiquing, and I think that as such it's a good critique. Well, there's probably more to say, but that's good enough for now.

Outstanding work Commander. I'm glad you had the horsepower to finish it off. Cheers!

Twas devious, no doubt. However, their attempt to waylay our superlative CO has failed utterly, he has arrived safe and sound!

CIOPS will conduct an internal audit to see if our signals have been breached by our enemies. Hope you guys are back online soon

That's zarking brilliant work Ben! What a fantastic idea! My hat's off to you, this is something that I think we'll benefit from.