Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Saddle up the goat, I'm going for a ride, thanks to Leon's article referring to the "Copy The Cat" article.

OK, here's an even easier challenge than that: Copy a computer. It doesn't have any biological stuff, so you aren't going to require nanotech or complex chemical laboratories to even start making one. A lot of the parts are readily for sale - PCB, chips, capacitors, etc. You've got a complete blueprint of one inside your computer. It shouldn't be that hard. Let's leave aside copyright issues here. Go on, copy it.

What, you say you can't do it now? That it would take months of time to disassemble the board, to source all the parts, to check the design actually worked the way your now disassembled board used to? And you'd need big complex stuff like wave soldering machines and seven-layer PCB printers? Well, the original board manufacturer's got all of that, why don't you?

The "Copy the cat" argument is absolutely bollocks. Its primary fallacy is Irrelevant Conclusion: "if we can't do it, only God could have" assumes that everything we can't do must be explained by God. That's These people probably don't have the first notion of what a potato does and its role in the overall survival of the potato plant, let alone how to synthesise starches and amino acids and cellulose in a lab. "Oooh, we can't copy a potato, that must mean God exists!" has to be right up there with "God must exist because I can conceive of God existing!" in the realm of "Stupid ways to justify the existence of God."

Because that's what these people are doing. They use "Intelligent Design" because people are weary and cynical of hearing that "God created it all". "Intelligent Design" never means "Aliens created us." It never means "We don't know what created us." It means "And I have this book here that tells us that God is the Intelligent Designer." I do not wonder why these people are trying to hide their stupid, contradictory, hermetic little religions behind the airy sophistication of the "Intelligent Design" moniker: because they know that "Creationism" died back in the fifties. They just can't let go, and their circular, bigoted beliefs tell them to go out and proselytise; like good little marketing executives, they've just simply rebranded it. Claiming that "Intelligent Design does not require the espousing of any religious belief" is really just blushing, just preaching, heh, to the choir.

The fact that they're prepared to play word games with "Fortunate Mutation" - using the popular cancer-derived, eugenics-forming idea that mutation moves 'away' from some 'ideal' - is just further proof that these people have abandoned any "Intelligence" in the "Design" of their arguments and are just relying on sophistry to carry their arguments. Further down they argue that just because we can't create a cat from non-cat materials, there must be an intelligence in the universe. Just another fallacy, carefully wrapped up as a logical deduction. And they have the absolute hide to then ask that ID "be examined on a scientific basis" - as if this hasn't been done countless times before and every examination proved that their arguments are specious at best and absolutely wrong at worst.

You may wonder why I'm so angry. It's simply that these people are the worst kind of hypocrites. They lie, they twist facts and words and arguments, they deny any proof that they're wrong - and then they claim that they're right anyway. They are prepared to do this to weasel their way into an education system that continues to cast them out. Their believers just lap up these 'proofs' in slack-jawed self-confirming agreement, refusing to listen to any of the arguments that might prove that they're wrong. I would be prepared to conclude that belief in God required the sacrificing of ones logical faculties if I didn't know a couple of believers in my local Linux group who are, in every other respect, intelligent, logical and well-read.

It really does make me despair.