Rusting Car Bumper

Here is a brief version of my take on the question in the topic:

Part 1: A ID theory if successful would give criteria or methods for determining whether observed structure is either designed or the result of rule based processes. (or perhaps somethign else but those two properly defined seem to cover all cases.) The second part is that an ID theory could also be successful if it could give criteria or methods for determining that rules existing in a rule based process are designed or are the result of something else.

Part 2: If Part 1 is acheived then one would need to show that there was indeed designed implied in either observed structure or in rules themselves.

No ID theory has done the first and failing that the second can't happen. The burden of proof is on the claimant.

DC

theyeti

What ID "theory" needs to be scientific is a theoretical model that actually describes what happened and how it happened. It's meaningless to say something was "designed" without going into detail about what that entails. Without that, there's nothing to test, no research to be conducted, no way to compare how well it holds up to the existing (and very successful) evolutionary model.

Ironically, YEC is more "scientific" in this regard than ID is, because it at least has a model that explains what happened. Of course the evidence contradicts it at every turn, but that's the whole point.

theyeti

Rusting Car Bumper

I guess I don't agree exactly. What you say above would essentially be bound up in Part 2.

To demand this immediately is putting the cart before the horse. One didn't need a theoretical model to discover Newton's laws, laws of thermodynamics and so on. One merely needed to map behavior and test it. The history fo science is not composed PRIMARILY of people proposing large models. Those are the exceptions rather than the rule. Models tend to come later in the game.

For example, the uses and extent of Newton's laws come well after they are established. The big bang is a consequence of general relativity but Einstein was not obligated to provide some large model in order to simply produce general relativity.

The evolution of quantum theory goes from what is now thought of as niavely simple in the beginning to broad and well tested and this occurred over many many decades. Nobody in the beginning proposed or new what sort of model would come out the other end at the beginning of the 20th century.

What I proposed would be the first steps of ID and for that matter a simple litmus test for current IDers to show why exactly current IDers aren't legitimate or going anywhere.

DC

Writer@Large

In addition, ID would neeed to be predictive--that is, after establishing the criteria for nature vs. design, it would need to bear out in new discoveries.

--W@L

Rusting Car Bumper

Indeed.

DC

Peez

Some science.

Yes, I know, that isn't helpful. Still, it is worth stating explicitly.

Peez

hagiograph

The most interesting thing about this sort of question ("What would ID require to be scientific?") is precisely what you are attempting to do, DC. But the problems I see arising from this is that all historical geology is, essentially, backwards induction. Geologist make use of Uniformitarianism as the "null hypothesis", that if I see a structure in the rock record that looks like the modern analogue being made in soft sediments today, that I _assume_ that the processes were the same and at approximately the same rate. Of course, as Hume approached, empirically we cannot know this to 100% assurity because it could have come about by a ridiculously different process. With regards to I.D. you _could_ end up with a system that looks exactly like a designed system if it is a sufficiently evolved non-designed system. In other words, if you are walking down the street and see a penguin there are two reasons that are possible: either the penguin was transported there across great distances from the Antarctic OR the penguin was made in that spot just the day before by God or whomever. You are seeing the penguin but you don't know how it got there.

Now, of course, Occam's razor and all that would tell you it is irrational to assume that the penguin was created ex nihilo by God just yesterday on that street, but it _could_ have been. You have no evidence to gainsay that claim.

This is the really hard part when dealing with something like origins of life or evolution of living creatures. We simply have to rely on the vast amount of evidence to _indicate_ that it has happened in the past, but we've only been observing it for less than 200 years ourselves. In that time we haven't necessarily seen a new species pop out of the process, so our ability to compare to a modern analogue is dicey at best. But we have our null hypothesis and sufficient data to indicate that we are clearly able to keep the null hypothesis, our probability of rejecting truth is very low. But it is not 0.00000000000000000...

For Intelligent Design to be scientific on a footing with current evolutionary theory, it would seem that the ID advocate would have to present some technique for differentiating between a designed and a sufficiently evolved system, OR show instances where design v lack-thereof is implicit in a situation like the planet earth. Someone on a different E/C thread suggested that the I.D. advocates should show us a planet or universe where we KNOW there was a designer. I can watch a watchmaker make a watch, so I know that if I find another watch somewhere I can deduce that such an item was indeed designed. But sadly I cannot watch a planet evolve from abiotic to biotic and then to different evolutionary directions or be designed.

I am always frustrated by the fact that the ID crowd never is required to define aspects of the designer. Just because two things work well together doesn't indicate that it was "designed", but if you think you have a design you have to be able to say something definite about the designer, right? So shouldn't they have to prove that the designer exists or existed at one time?

I think the real reason all of the E/C discussions happen century after century, decade after decade is precisely because the creationist/ID side is posited to be completely unprovable or unfalsifiable. If creationism/ID is _designed_ to be unprovable and unfalsifiable it is, by definition, not science. But it may just be that they haven't found the right data yet.

I have a philosophy prof friend who is an evolutionist but insists that scientists must answer the questions raised by creationists or ID advocates if only to be "fair" and truly unbiased scientists, but I contend that if that was the imperative of science then we would be stuck constantly re-proving gravity every day we got up in the morning and re-inventing the wheel and never move onto anything else.

Empirically I think it is clear that the earth is an old system that has undergone change, ie has evolved into its current state. The ID advocate will say that he or she sees the same thing but it got here by a radically different process. Honestly I don't know how to disprove them apart from saying "have you ever seen the miraculous creation of a penguin on the street?", but I don't know if that is any more scientific. This is the hardest part, teasing out the empirical root of science from the logic-based fundamentals of what science actually "is".

-hagiograph

theyeti

I'm afraid your part 2 doesn't make a lot of sense to me:

"Part 2: If Part 1 is acheived then one would need to show that there was indeed designed implied in either observed structure or in rules themselves."

I don't see any mention of a theoretical model here. And what exactly is "designed implied" supposed to mean?

Laws are not the same thing as theories, particularly historical theories. A law is simply a mathematical relationship between two or more observable phenomena. Note for example that we have Newton's law of gravity, which simply postulates that the attractive force between two objects is the product of their masses divided by the square of their distance. However, a theory has to explain why something occurs the way it occurs. There still is no finalized theory of gravity; no one really knows yet what causes the gravitational force. In order to do so, one has to come up with a model for what causes gravity, and this might include for example postulated particles (gravitons) that can in principle be detected.

Evolution, as a theory, explains the diversity and continuity of living organisms. It provides a history for living things, a model that explains how things have changed over time, and where they originated from. ID would have to do something similar for it to be scientific.

theyeti

Worldtraveller

ID would have to make predictions. One would think, given the amount of evidence available to the scientific community, the IDists would come up wioth a robust theory that matches the data as well as possible, with the caveat that it requires a designer...and therein lies the difficulty.

Once a designer is proposed, one has to either start asking questions about the nature of the designer, or posit the same requirements of the theory to the designer, which obviously leads to an infinite regression.

Thus, it seems to me (from this admittedly simplistic view) that ID is doomed to failure as a rigorous scienitfic model. It's one thing (and it can be demonstrated) to say, show evidence of, experimentally verify, and observe naturally the process of evolution. Given these same observations, where does the designer fit in?

And remember the 'I' in ID. There has to be some definitive demonstration of defined intelligence. Not an easy, and I would posit, an insurmountable, task.

I'm an aircraft engineer, I work with designed stuff all day, there is definitely a difference.

Cheers,
Lane

JLK

Steps 1 and 2
Define "intelligent".
Define "design".

Appears ID is really VP. Volitional Purposefulness.
Good luck from there.