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Old 03-19-2007, 11:33 PM
hellbender hellbender is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2006
Posts: 331
Default Re: Is Biological Life the Product of Intelligent Design?

First of all---don't waste your two hours! But if you do...

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ask him to explain vestigial organs.

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Nah, don't ask a question rightfully answered by the consensus of relevant scientific experts. If Durston allowed such consensus to negate his beliefs, he wouldn't believe them anymore. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Ideally, you can question his methodology. These sort of questions might catch him off guard:

- "How do you explain the complete absence of published results by ID scientists? If ID is the correct model for predicting biological complexity, shouldn't ID scientists have a huge edge over their naturalistic counterparts?" (You can double-check this, but as of a couple months ago no hardcore ID scientist had ever published a peer-reviewed journal article.)

- "If naturalism is truly insufficient to explain biological complexity, why can't it be readily and trivially falsified everywhere we look? ID seems to be mistaking a failure of imagination for an insight into necessity."

- "Why does every major research department, Academy of Science, and judicial ruling categorically reject ID? Are you more willing to assume such a conspiratorial, wholesale lack of scientific integrity than you are willing to doubt that ID really is 'the best explanation' for biological complexity?"

- "What would you allow to falsify your position on ID? Please provide at least one empirical result that would accomplish this."

And, my favorite:
- "You are director of The New Scholars Society, whose mission statement is '...to promote Christian scholarship in every field, with a special interest in those areas where philosophy, faith, and science begin to intersect.' Can you describe how you keep your religious presuppositions and organizational directives separate from your personal research as an objective scientist? It must be very difficult."
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