Will wrote:
No Namdrol, my concern is with lack of fairness, equanimity or truth valuing on the part of many online Buddhists.
MYM answered this adequately.
And what would Meyer's arguments be, pray tell; page number refs will be accepted. Meyer does not hide his Xtian beliefs, but his arguments for ID are not theological.
Of course they are, since they are bound up speculation. His tests at the end of the book are silly.
If Newton, a devout theist, were alive today none of his insights would be tolerated, much less promulgated by the bigots of science.
Newton was more interested in Alchemy than math. And he, like many of his contemporaries, believed in a designer aka god. Darwin permanently upset that apple cart by showing why the appearance of design in fact is just a sign of natural selection. Meyers and his whole crew of ID people are all just passing off speculations as science.
This notion that religious beliefs trump or motivate every other thought on any subject, especially science, is true for some Buddhists, Xtians, Jews et al. But there are plenty (the majority?) of people of varied faiths who can think and chew gum at the same time.
Well, basically Meyers is a fellow of the Discover Institute. They have an ideological agenda which is contra evolutionary biology. They are about as anti-scientific as one can get. He is absolutely intent on proving that God created life. He wrote in 1999:
Physics and cosmology suggest intelligent design as a highly plausible and arguably best explanation for the exquisite fine-tuning of the physical laws and constants of the universe and the precise configuration of its initial conditions. Since the fine-tuning and initial conditions date from the very origin of the universe itself, this evidence suggests the need for an intelligent as well as a transcendent Cause for the origin of the universe. Since God as conceived by Christians and other theists possesses precisely these attributes, His creative action can adequately explain the origin of the cosmological singularity and the anthropic fine-tuning. Since naturalism denies a transcendent and pre-existent intelligent cause, it follows that theism provides a better explanation than naturalism for these two evidences taken jointly. Since pantheism, with its belief in an immanent and impersonal god, also denies the existence of a transcendent and pre-existent intelligence, it too lacks causal adequacy as an explanation for these evidences. Indeed, a completely impersonal intelligence is almost a contradiction in terms. Thus, theism stands as the best explanation of the three major worldviews theism, pantheism, and naturalism for the origin of the Big Bang singularity and anthropic fine-tuning taken jointly.
http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/P ... dHypth.pdf" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Face it, Will -- this is his strategy:
a) Try to get intelligent design accepted as a plausible and "scientific" explanation for the origin of life, alongside Darwin's natural selection
b) Having done so, then it is a short step to getting theism accepted as the best inferable explanation for intelligent design
c) Introduce creationism into the schools via the backdoor of ID.
His book has been well cleansed on his theistic predilections. But his agenda is perfectly clear, he is anti-evolution, anti-science. He studied the philosophy of science in order undermine one scientific theory, as far as I can tell, Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Furthermore, the Discover Institute promotes that most un-Buddhsit idea: "human exceptionalism" the idea that human beings are "exceptional" among living creatures and morally superior to all, etc.
N