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Stan Zhang's avatar

You're making completely false claims that intelligent design people are intellectually dishonest and the standard dogmatic people are intellectually honest. In reality, intelligent design people have valid mathematical concerns that they are bringing up about the prevailing dogma about how the universe works.

"Not wanting to give ammo to creationists seems to be what's going on."

It is what is going on. That's how human nature works when faced with any theory that's contradictory to your own theory, no matter how wrong. Even if the randomness dogmatists are correct, that doesn't change how the human mind works when arguing something they're emotionally invested in.

"there's nothing "baffling" about the origin of life, there's just a lack of data"Yes there is. It takes a lot of organization of proteins, and the randomness of organization is in a way that cannot be improved upon through natural selection because there is no replication (though natural selection through random mutations is comparatively a weak process that loses out to the mutations destroying order faster).

"expectation that everything in the world has a law-like explanation is the only rational expectation"No it isn't. It's what's the *intuitive* explanation because most things that we directly observe work law-like, but it is not necessarily what's rational when describing the entire universe/other esoteric topics. Your relabeling of it as rational shows you as intellectually dishonest, which clearly marks you as a hypocrite.

"certainly does resolve any apparent coincidences ... which aren't all that many"Another intellectually dishonest quote. There are a lot of apparent coincidences, such as the diproton instability, assemblance of proteins to create life, the fact that we are the only civilized species and the first one on Earth (when in fact it probably could've easily occurred in one of the earlier glacials), the relative isolation of the boiling point of water compared to other materials, etc. etc. At some point we have to wonder if you are the intellectually dishonest one.

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Jim Balter's avatar

Nice ad hominem. I'm certainly a better sort of person than a dishonest one like you ... blocked for being a fundamentally bad person.

P.S. Funny how Hanson says that, to be honest, one has to consider both the possibility that someone is sincere and that they aren't ... but apparently applying that to Hanson himself is verboten.

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