Starboy

And that is why it is religion and not science!

Abacus

What about rocks? Do IDers say rocks were designed? And how about the Grand Canyon? Or craters on the moon? Or globular clusters? Do IDers say these were designed to? Or do they just apply their theory to life?

As far as I know, all IDers are theists of some form. It seems to me that they would want to apply ID to everything in the universe, which would really make them creationists. Very sneaky creationists.

Starboy

They really should be careful with their theory. If applied objectively could one conclude that man is god's favorite creature?

[ July 28, 2002: Message edited by: Starboy ]</p>

Grumpy

In theory, a truly robust ID approach could lead to some fascinating predictions about the nature of the Designer. And it would be a natural Designer, wouldn't it? Since all the clues we gather come from the natural world -- otherwise, it isn't science.

What can we guess about the Designer? For starters, it has an inordinate fondness for beetles. And bacteria. Perhaps this suggests that the Designer is itself a beetle or bacterium.

I wonder how we go about confirming this prediction? Do we leave out trays of agar and see if God grows in any of them?

Coragyps

And if he did, would it only prove he was a cultural concept?

Kosh

ID is simply an attempt to reconcile and salvage creationism in the face of the overwhelming body of evidence that the Genesis story is false.
It's a patch. And a bad one. It's a sanity releif valve for people who can't deal with too much cognitive dissonance.

Oolon Colluphid

The problem with intelligent design is obvious.

P1: Living things are designed by an intelligence.

C1: Living things should be very well designed; there should be no examples of poor design in nature: obvious flaws that could be easily remedied by a change in the design (an intelligent agent should realise these and alter them appropriately).

P2: There are obvious examples of poor design in nature.

C2: P1 is refuted; living things were not designed by an intelligent agent.

The caveat to C2 is that maybe the intelligent agent only dabbled here and there, and left evolution to solve other problems. As far as I can see, this is an irrefutable hypothesis. How can you tell which is which? Evolution is supposed to work towards finding the best solution (‘best’, understood, meaning what works best in each generation, no long-term goals; but repeated algorithmically, it builds on what already works). So it predicts good ‘designs’. It also therefore predicts design oddities and stuff that, with hindsight, might have been better done another way.

Thus, ID is either refuted outright, or it retreats to irrefutability. Also, the intelligent designer in the latter position is superfluous -- and so cut out by Ockham’s razor.

I really don’t see how you can have ID to explain bacterial flagella yet allow evolution to explain eyes. The intelligent agent either was involved in making complex stuff or it wasn’t. Since ID is not required for eyes, invoking it elsewhere is just an ID-of-the-gaps argument. It is just Paley’s watch with a pseudoscientific veneer.

Oolon

Edited to add: See also <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=3&t=001519" target="_blank">this archived thread</a>.

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

skuwiph

As Dawkins said on a radio program:

...Which just about sums up the whole festering 'science' of Intelligent Design. If we're not careful, rather than standing on giant's shoulders, we may all end up being trampled by midgets.

Edited to add URL reference.

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: skuwiph ]</p>

Stephen T-B

We have seen in this thread a number of water-tight refutations of ID (eg numerous and obvious design flaws fatally undermining the notion of an intelligent designer, and the fact that ID is based on a religious belief to which IDers attempt to bolt on bits of science without realising that you might as well try bolting a Rolled Steel Joist to Tuesday.)
The problem with these refutations is that IDers / Creationists have a mindset which perceives Evolution as a rival “religious” belief system; they inhabit a world of beliefs and instinctively assume everyone else does as well. This accounts for their inability to comprehend Evolution Theory and their insistence that if holes can be found it in then the whole edifice must collapse.
By contrast, no holes can be found in ID / Creationism because Faith magically fills them up. Evolution doesn’t have that magic, so Evolution must be a deception. (and, incidentally, one whose source is the Devil himself.)
So what can scientists / rationalists / realists do?
My single and not particularly marvellous suggestion is that they just go on hammering away at the difference between scientific inquiry and religious belief, pointing out that belief starts out with an explanation to which the facts are required to fit whereas Science gathers data (as I understand it, and forgive me if I’ve got this wrong because I am not, you will have guessed, a scientist) and then postulates a possible explanation.
Whereas the religious explanation is rigid and unchanging, scientific explanations are not only flexible, but expendable because data - or our interpretation of it - is constantly changing.
Science is therefore a never-ending process of discovery and learning whereas a religious dogma such as Creationism is welded to the buffers and cannot move.
You cannot do science with a closed mind; you cannot do religion with an open one.
Right?

Principia

Permit me to take the opposite side just for a second...

ID would say that P1 is actually a conclusion, not a premise to some theological/metaphysical question. In essence, they claim to have devised a system to conclude design without having to explore the implications of the conclusion. If someone wants to talk about the implications, then ID carefully and quietly steps aside, while the fundamentalist religion(s) step(s) in [anybody knows of any other religion behind ID other than Christians?].

So, IDi[s]ts neatly quarantine C1 as a theological issue separate from P1, for example, by explaining the existence of [S]in and the [R]evelations of the [C]reator(s). They claim ignorance about when the [C]reator(s) intervened (or if in fact they are still intervening, sporadically). After all, ID makes no claims about the nature of the [C]reator(s) or if they are in fact detectable other than through their designs. My favorite example is the notion of 'Inhering Intelligence' (proposed by ARN's Light Panther). The argument goes something like this: Inhering Intelligence (II) is a pervasive consciousness throughout the Universe that is responsible for guiding the creation of complex structures in life. II is a 'consciousness' that, like our own, seems to be an epiphenomenon of biological processes but yet its existence can be subjectively concluded. <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

P2 can easily be brushed aside by fiat. All designs decay, so ID claims... even ours. So what? Also, P2 does not imply C2, because design does not imply optimality (Dembski?). Perhaps evolution itself was designed (the notion of front-loaded evolution), and its ability to generate adaptibility is optimal. Who knows?

[ July 29, 2002: Message edited by: Scientiae ]</p>