Thursday, June 23, 2011

more vjtorley insanity

Some IDiotic statements by vincent joseph torley:

"A lump of inanimate matter lacks intelligence altogether. Since the angel possesses (in some fashion) a perfection which belongs to God and a lump of inanimate matter does not, the angel is more like God than the lump of matter."

"Since an angel is more like God than a lump of matter, someone who comes to believe that the universe was created by an angel is therefore closer to classical theism than a materialist."

"The charge that Intelligent Design theory is tied to an anthropomorphic conception of God has been made before, and repeatedly refuted."

"(a) An intelligent agent – for example, a human being."

"I hope Professor Feser answered (a). Since he is a devout Catholic, he accepts that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God."

"Intelligent Design theory claims that life, and indeed the cosmos, can only be explained as the work of an intelligent agent – i.e. something in category (a)."

"I hope to convince some of them that we in the Intelligent Design movement have thought long and hard about our philosophical position, that we are capable of answering the best objections that can be raised against it."

"On the contrary, Professor: what would be truly "inconsistent with the Catholic intellectual tradition" is a refusal to even examine newly discovered physical effects in Nature, which may require a supernatural cause in order to explain them. Whatever their merits, Aquinas would say that these effects at least warrant honest investigation."

"Aquinas taught that some physical changes are beyond the power of nature to bring about. These changes cannot have a naturalistic explanation. They must therefore be produced by the power of God alone. Examples include the raising of a dead body, the production of the first human body from inanimate matter and the production of the first animals, according to their various kinds. (However, Aquinas also mistakenly believed that some of the lower animals were capable of being generated spontaneously, without "seed," from dead or decaying matter, and that these animals need not have been produced by God, in the beginning.)"

"So what ID proponents like myself are claiming is that the original production of biological forms exhibiting the property of specified complexity must, of necessity, proceed from the Creator alone. Is that precise enough for you, Professor Tkacz?"

"What "God-of-the-gaps"-style ID proponents like myself are saying, then, is that complex biological forms, whose specified complexity exceeds a certain threshold, were produced immediately by God. Production of a new form in pre-existing matter would be described as a change by Aquinas, rather than an act of creation, and ID proponents are perfectly happy to refer to it as a change."

"ID proponents are interested in identifying changes in Nature which are unambiguously the work of an Intelligent Agent, in order to overturn the reigning scientific paradigm, that mindless forces are sufficient to explain the world around us. That's why Intelligent Design proponents are interested in "discontinuities" in Nature, among other things. But we do not hold that these changes are the way in which God creates things. We're quite happy to use Aquinas' word, "produce," and many ID proponents would add that patterns in Nature exhibiting a certain level of specified complexity were "produced immediately by God," as St. Thomas puts it."

"God created Nature"

"I am not a creationist."

"The world is an expression of God's intellect as well as God's will."

"Nature is an expression of God's will"

"everything in Nature contributes to the perfection of the cosmos as a whole"

"God knows what effects He wants to bring about in the natural world."

"God is the cause of knowledge in human beings"

"The value of ID is that it supplements the argument from contingency, which gets us to a Necessary Being, but not an Intelligent Creator."

"If we bear all these similarities and differences in mind between God and human designers, then the assertion made by various ID proponents, that some forms in Nature were originally produced immediately by God alone, in a manner similar to the way in which a work of art is produced by an artist, will no longer sound anthropomorphic."

"What ID proponents like myself hold is that God, in creating the universe with its laws of nature, its natural constants and its initial conditions, did not thereby specify every event that was to follow, in the long history of the universe. In particular, God did not specify the subsequent emergence of structures exhibiting specified complexity in the Big Bang. That's because He never intended to - and for a very good reason, which we'll discuss below. (The curious reader can find the explanation in "Fatal Flaw Number Four".) To ensure the emergence of these structures, God timelessly decided to supplement His initial specification of the cosmos with some additional acts, involving the immediate production of biological forms exhibiting specified complexity, without the use of any secondary causes. From our (time-bound) perspective, then, God produced these forms after the Big Bang, but from God's perspective, all of these acts were part of His timeless plan for creation."

"It would be better to say that from time to time, new and distinct forms of life instantiating the property of specified complexity have appeared on Earth, and that these forms were produced immediately by God, Who is outside time."

"Putting it another way: many Intelligent Design theorists (including myself) would maintain that at certain points in time, Nature is manipulated by God. Indeed, we'd go so far as to say that Nature is made to be manipulated. However, this does not entail that God manipulates Nature at certain points in time. God is outside time; when He manipulates Nature, He does so timelessly."

"There are good mathematical reasons for believing that even God couldn't design a universe that can produce life in all its diversity without any need for "manipulation""

"Anyway, what I wanted to say is that Darwinism is a spiritually poisonous theory, which is totally incompatible with Thomism - a marriage made in Hell. Whatever you think of Intelligent Design, Darwinism is a much greater enemy. There's no way it can be sanitized or Catholicized, as I demonstrate in Parts Two, Three and Four of my five-part reply to Professor Tkacz. It makes little sense to me for believers to attack each other at a time when children are being indoctrinated with atheism."

"Evolution cannot be preordained."

"God's manipulation of Nature is required to account for the vast quantities of CSI we find in living things."

"If someone wants to construct a philosophical argument for why the biological world points to a Intelligent Creator, I don't think the atheists could care less, for the simple reason that most of them don't consider philosophical argumentation a valid source of knowledge. Only science counts in their book."

"And even if we can't tell a sequence containing FCSI from a random sequence just by looking, I say: so what? If we learn only in hindsight that a sequence has FCSI, that's still a useful discovery, and we can still quantify the information."

"I find no evidence to suggest anything more than that Professor Dembski is a political animal - and aren't we all? - who has a theological agenda of combating atheism, on scientific grounds. Big deal."

"At times, Feser’s hyper-orthodoxy borders on the comical: he publicly maintains (I kid you not) that it is a sin for parents to tell their children that Santa Claus is real. Hmmm. Here’s what the Catholic Theologian Fr. John Hardon, S. J., has to say about Santa Claus in his book, “The Catholic Catechism” (Doubleday, 1975, paperback edition, page 402): “Circumstances are an integral part of human speech; such circumstances are the time, place, tone of voice, and the persons addressed. Thus what may be verbally contrary to fact, like telling children about Santa Claus, is not lying.” Whom should we believe? I think I’d take the word of a highly respected theologian over that of a philosopher, on a point of Catholic doctrine. Wouldn’t you?"

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Well vincent, you call yourself a "philosopher", so why should anyone take your word "on a point of Catholic doctrine" or anything else?

And yes, only science counts. Your nutty religious ramblings don't count.