DCP Relies 100% On The Discovery Institute For His Latest Recycled Article

[Everybody Wang Chung]

DCP just posted another (recycled) article called, "'Local Planetary Conditions." In the recycled article, DCP cites the works of 4 different authors, Jay W. Church, Lawrence Henderson, Michael Denton and Guillermo Gonzalez. Unfortunately, all of these authors are associated with the Discovery Institute, a pseudoscientific organization that is laughed at by the scientific community. Is DCP even capable of posting an article on science without relying on the Discovery Institute?

Guillermo Gonzalez https://www.discovery.org/p/gonzalez/

Jay W. Richards https://www.discovery.org/p/richards/

Michael Denton https://www.discovery.org/p/denton/

Lawrence Henderson (whom the Discovery Institute cites as well as Michael Denton) https://www.discovery.org/t/lawrence-henderson/


ChatGPT: "How is the Discovery Institute viewed by the scientific community?


"The Discovery Institute and its promotion of Intelligent Design are widely discredited and rejected by the scientific community. The scientific consensus is that Intelligent Design is not a legitimate scientific theory, but rather a form of creationism dressed up in scientific language. Evolution by natural selection, on the other hand, is a well-established scientific theory with a vast amount of empirical evidence to support it.

Many mainstream scientists and science organizations have publicly criticized the Discovery Institute and its agenda, stating that the institute's efforts to introduce Intelligent Design into public school curricula are an attempt to undermine the teaching of evolution and promote religious views in the classroom. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and numerous other science organizations have issued statements affirming the scientific basis of evolution and rejecting Intelligent Design as a legitimate scientific theory.

In short, the Discovery Institute and its promotion of Intelligent Design are not taken seriously by the scientific community and are viewed as a political and religious movement, rather than a scientific one."

[Everybody Wang Chung]

I have a challenge for you DCP. In your next recycled and/or plagiarized article on "intelligent Design" I challenge you to support your argument with authors or evidence not associated with the Discovery Institute, but with mainstream scientists or mainstream articles. Good luck!

The Discovery Institute:

"The Discovery Institute (DI) is a politically conservative[4][5][6] non-profit think tank based in Seattle, Washington, that advocates the pseudoscientific concept[7][8][9] of intelligent design (ID)"

"The Discovery Institute denies the scientific consensus on climate change.[45]"

"Scott S. Powell, senior fellow of the Institute, has promoted the false claim that the 2020 United States presidential election was stolen.[45]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute

[toon]

It’s my impression that a good amount of what the Discovery Institute puts out is pure polemics. For those more scholarly folk here, is that common for an institution that is viewed a a seriously scholarly one? How do they compare with FARMS or it’s related projects? What about the MI post DCP?

[drumdude]

Discovery Institute was basically the template for what DCP is doing with Interpreter.

Doing shoddy academic work that no unbiased historian/scientist/sociologist would accept? Come to Interpreter! We'll publish your garbage with our patented Rubber Stamp peer review!

Anti-vax journals, anti-climate change journals, flat earth journals, the possibilities are endless.

[Alphus and Omegus]

It's good to document this, but it's really no surprise. Both Discovery and Interpreter produce fake scholarship that convinces no one. They are only about preserving faith for the current believers. This is the very best they can hope for.

But the arguments of both organizations are shoddy and are no different than trying to prove that Zeus or djinn are real.

And deep down, most of these well paid people know this.

[Physics Guy]

The Earth is a nice planet, all right, but it makes little sense as a fine tuning argument for design in creation, because the tuning doesn't have to be very fine. The most one might conclude would be that intelligent life might be rare in the universe without God nudging the scales. Given the number of planets around, the odds of a life-friendly planet by no means get so low that it becomes surprising that we exist at all, somewhere—and wherever that was would then be our "here". And perhaps intelligent life really is just that rare. Planetary fine tuning is only going to even start the race, as an argument for design, if we get so many communications from intelligent extraterrestrials that it becomes hard to explain how life can be so darn common.

For each of the individual factors that these DI people have identified, the parameter ranges that have been good for our kind of life are not all that narrow. We probably have wiggle room of somewhere around 10-50% in them all.

And you can't just multiply all those 10%-ish factors together to get a really low number, because most of those factors are correlated. The distance of the Earth from the sun is closely connected to its composition and size, because in a swirling nebula that is slowly condensing into planets, which elements and compounds are gaseous and which are solid depends on local temperature, which depends on distance out from the star. Gas giant planets in an outer solar system are also thought to be a nearly inevitable result of this basic fact. Our observations so far have shown a lot more big planets in close-in orbits than we expected, but this is probably because larger planets at shorter radii are much easier for us to detect than smaller or more distantly orbiting ones.

The large size of Earth's moon does seem at this point to be an unusual fluke. That stuff about stabilising the Earth's axis tilt seems bizarre to me. Angular momentum is still conserved pretty well without moons. Our axial tilt makes our seasons but it doesn't affect our year-round average temperature, and life works fine in the tropics, so seasons can't be so important for life. Our large moon does give us our tides, and it's possible that tidal zones were an important habitat at an evolutionary bottleneck for the development of more complex life. It's hard to be sure about that, though.

[drumdude]

Dan just posted 2 entries on the beatitudes. They’re so cursory that they could be written by ChatGPT or a high schooler with access to Wikipedia.

I assume Daniel was an expert in whatever he taught at BYU. Yet he posts almost nothing in that area of expertise on his blog. Seems kind of strange.

But I guess within Mormon apologetics, you’re forced to talk about things you have no expertise in. Because if you do have expertise, like Gee and Egyptology, your peers call you out for your clearly biased and shoddy work.

[Marcus]

I remember when I myself began, as a teenager, to grow serious about the gospel. I quickly discovered that, where some of my high school friends could get drunk and be immoral and swear and do everything else with a seemingly clear conscience and in apparent happiness, I agonized over being late to priesthood meeting. It wasn’t fair. My newly-hypersensitive conscience seemed to make me less happy than they were!

That hypersensitivity didn’t apply to his plagiarism, clearly.

[malkie]

Dan just posted 2 entries on the beatitudes. They’re so cursory that they could be written by ChatGPT or a high schooler with access to Wikipedia.

I assume Daniel was an expert in whatever he taught at BYU. Yet he posts almost nothing in that area of expertise on his blog. Seems kind of strange.

But I guess within Mormon apologetics, you’re forced to talk about things you have no expertise in. Because if you do have expertise, like Gee and Egyptology, your peers call you out for your clearly biased and shoddy work.

Perhaps when your audience will oooh and aaah over whatever you write, it's easy to become lazy.

Perhaps it's a bit like modern revelation: expectations are low, detail is unexamined, the pronouncement alone is sufficient.

For example, I'm still waiting to see the 1978 revelation, but I don't think that many faithful Mormons are the least bit concerned: the announcement that there had been a revelation, and a description of its effect, was enough to let the Prophet off the hook.