If Intelligent Design is a scientific theory...

[David T]

uh...which "they" are you referring to as not understanding the topic?

ID proponents. I dont see any emperical evidence that they do. Why would anyone assume that ID folks understand the topic God at all? Are all the anti is folks saying is folks do understand the topic?? That's bizaare

 

[David T]

I didn't assume that.
Only that ID is based upon a gussied up version of creationism, & therefore religion.

So if I make a claim "scientifically" that's clearly clueless do we call it science?.

 

[Revoltingest]

So if I make a claim "scientifically" that's clearly clueless do we call it science?.

"Clueless" or clueful isn't a standard I'm familiar with.
I prefer that something be 'useful" to qualify as science, ie, it
should make (or have the potential to make) testable predictions.
So far, ID doesn't offer that. It's not even wrong.

 

[David T]

"Clueless" or clueful isn't a standard I'm familiar with.
I prefer that something be useful to qualify as science, ie, it
should make (or have the potential to make) testable predictions.

Lol. Haven't you ever dated a female? Maybe that's why monestaries arose long ago. " they aren't testable predictable.

 

[Revoltingest]

Lol. Haven't you ever dated a female?

It's been a long time.....but I vaguely recall it.

 

[siti]

The question really should be whether the combination of random genetic mutation and natural selection (on the one hand) or "Intelligent Design" (on the other) best explain the observed FACT of evolution. There is (as far as I can see) no question that no child is an exact replica of its mother - whether the mother is a bacterium, a bat or a banana tree. It is obvious that over many generations, these variations can build up to the point where a "new" species has emerged (bearing in mind, of course, that delineation of species is a matter of taxonomical opinion rather than scientific fact).

Anyway, random mutation is routinely observed, natural selection has been thoroughly tested and there are literally millions of peer-reviewed papers with details of these. So far, so-called "intelligent design" has failed to provide a single peer-reviewed research paper or make a single scientifically falsifiable claim.

All that said, I think there is a growing realization that perhaps mutation/natural selection is not sufficient alone to explain evolution. But my suspicion is that any "intelligent design" involved would have to be natural.

I like to to think about my own ancestry at this point. Clearly I am of the opinion that my own parents made an intelligent choice before I budded off their particular branch of the phylogenetic tree. But my favourite ancestor was my several billion times great-grandfather who was, after all, the very bacterium who invented multi-cellular life by taking the drastic but ultimately rewarding decision to swallow his neighbour whole. Good call grandpops!

 

[McBell]

Lol. Haven't you ever dated a female? Maybe that's why monestaries arose long ago. " they aren't testable predictable.

Dating a female is an art.
So nothing to do with science at all...

 

[siti]

Dating a female is an art.
So nothing to do with science at all...

Sh#* - that's blown my "natural intelligent design" argument out of the water straight off!

 

[David T]

It's been a long time.....but I vaguely recall it.

Well that measurable testable repeatable thingie! Good luck with that.

Lol sometimes I think all this is just to occupy our time creatively...

 

[David T]

Dating a female is an art.
So nothing to do with science at all...

Oh and what is the bible my friend science?. And btw correctomundo.

 

[Jose Fly]

How, exactly, would one test the proposition that "God stepped in at certain points and did things?"

Oops, I misread your post. End of a long day.

Sorry 'bout that.

 

[beenherebeforeagain]

Oops, I misread your post. End of a long day.

Sorry 'bout that.

No worries...been there, done that...then did it again...

 

[shmogie]

The real point of any science is to try to find rational ways to explain what we see and experience. Gravity helps explain why we don't fly off this spinning ball, but then it also (almost magically) explains why and how planets orbit stars and satellites orbit planets and a whole lot of other things (including our sense of balance).

The Theory of Evolution, which is a scientific theory, attempts to explain our trillions of actual observations of what life is, what forms there are, how they are related, what forms there were (i.e. exist as fossils only, with no living examples), and how all this happens. It also tries to explain why the fossils of life forms past appear only separately in the geological strata -- the "written history" of the earth itself.

For most (actually, nearly all) people in the sciences, ToE does this with absolutely stunning accuracy. That makes it -- for them at least -- kind of compelling.

So, let's allow, for the sake of discussion, that ToE is wrong and Intelligent Design is the correct "scientific theory." Well, how might we examine that? We could, of course, do what science always does, and ask, "how does ID explain those things that we observe?"

So, let's propose some questions to see how well it might do that -- and alternately, whether it might not do it very well. I'll post some, and encourage others to think of more in this thread -- but most of all, I'm hoping that the supporters of ID, instead of saying "ToE is impossible" (which is what we always get), instead try to live up to their own belief in their theory, and actually try to answer the questions asked.

I'll start with one of the most obvious questions that I think needs explaining if ID is true:

1. There are literally thousands of life forms that by their very nature cause immense suffering -- and death -- to many other life forms (including humans, guilty and innocent, very young and very old) quite apparently at random. The list is simply enormous and the suffering often terrible beyond description. So, I ask myself, why would a Designer fashion me -- and at the same time something that can cause me unbearable agony and eventually destroy me? And not just me -- the newborn child who can't possibly be guilty of anything warranting such pain, not to mention the grief of family. If you accept ID, there must be an intelligent, or intelligible answer to this. The theory of ID should be able to explain it. The ToE, by the way, can explain it with almost trivial ease.
2. Somebody, earlier in this thread, said something like "if ToE is true, then we would have an appendix or wisdom teeth." Apparently this means he thinks that those are artefacts mandated by the Intelligent Designer. There are many other things that are sub-optimal about our design(eyesight and blind spot, dangers of giving birth to a large-brained baby, etc.), and yet an Intelligent Designer should not be expected to choose bad designs, and a perfect designer should select only optimal designs. This is clearly not the case with the human body. Blind selection by ToE would be expected to produce frequently optimized designs, but hardly ever optimal ones -- which is exactly what we see. So, how does ID explain why we are as we are?
3. The question of why the evidence of life that has existed is so stratified cannot be ignored. Layers happen in chronological order, and nobody gets to insert one geological layer underneath another one crust of the earth. And the fossils found in those layers -- all over the earth -- show a clear progression of species. So, if ID is true, we need an explanation for why the Designer tried so very hard to fool us. ToE, of course, provides a perfectly rational explanation, but does ID?

I will have more questions as the thread progresses -- I hope others will, too!

You make a number of assumptions about what those who accept ID that aren't correct for many. First you assume that life as it exists today is in harmony with it's original creation/design, that the design has not been degraded. Second, your observation re geological "layers", is simply not true. Throughout the world an active geology has convoluted these "layers" bent them back on one another, so the idea that the fossil record is always in a set consistent order is not true. ALWAYS the elephant in the room with evolution, macro or micro, is how it began. The theory proposes abiogenesis, the self creation of life from non living material. This concept has virtually NO evidence that it explains it or shows it occurred, it is a myth. One can also look at the Universe as well, no evidence of how it ultimately began, nor an explanation of how about 40 individually extremely remote coincidences occurred to create a planet perfectly suited for carbon based life. I really love Sir Fred Hoyle's analogy to the accidental creation of a perfect planet or life, " how many tornado's in an airplane junkyard would be required to build a perfectly functioning 747 ?"

 

[viole]

How is ID testable?

Well, SD is.

Ciao

- viole

 

[rusra02]

Again, you are making assumptions as to why people suffer. Our common descent from Adam made us all subject to the same deterioration and death he brought on himself, IMO. Romans 5:12 explains: "through one man sin entered into the world and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because they had all sinned." I do not find so-called punctuated equilibrium a convincing theory for explaining the existence of life in all it's forms. It appears to be an attempt to explain away what Raup and many others describe in the fossil record.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

You make a number of assumptions about what those who accept ID that aren't correct for many. First you assume that life as it exists today is in harmony with it's original creation/design, that the design has not been degraded. Second, your observation re geological "layers", is simply not true. Throughout the world an active geology has convoluted these "layers" bent them back on one another, so the idea that the fossil record is always in a set consistent order is not true. ALWAYS the elephant in the room with evolution, macro or micro, is how it began. The theory proposes abiogenesis, the self creation of life from non living material. This concept has virtually NO evidence that it explains it or shows it occurred, it is a myth. One can also look at the Universe as well, no evidence of how it ultimately began, nor an explanation of how about 40 individually extremely remote coincidences occurred to create a planet perfectly suited for carbon based life. I really love Sir Fred Hoyle's analogy to the accidental creation of a perfect planet or life, " how many tornado's in an airplane junkyard would be required to build a perfectly functioning 747 ?"

I wonder how many times people need to be told that NO, the theory most definitely DOES NOT propose abiogenesis, before they get it.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

You make a number of assumptions about what those who accept ID that aren't correct for many. First you assume that life as it exists today is in harmony with it's original creation/design, that the design has not been degraded.

I think it ought to be pretty clear that since I do not accept "original creation/design," it is pretty much impossible that I could even wonder whether life today is in harmony with it or not.

Second, your observation re geological "layers", is simply not true. Throughout the world an active geology has convoluted these "layers" bent them back on one another, so the idea that the fossil record is always in a set consistent order is not true.

This is very well understood by geologists and others studying the fossil record. It is usually (though not always) possible to reconstruct the geological events that cracked, shifted or bent strata. This is quite a normal part of the science.

ALWAYS the elephant in the room with evolution, macro or micro, is how it began. The theory proposes abiogenesis, the self creation of life from non living material. This concept has virtually NO evidence that it explains it or shows it occurred, it is a myth.

As has been repeated until one would think it impossible you could have forgotten it once again, that elephant is NEVER in the room with evolution. Evolution, as a theory, stands apart from abiogenesis and/or creation, does not depend on them, does not reference them, does not care about them at all.

One can also look at the Universe as well, no evidence of how it ultimately began, nor an explanation of how about 40 individually extremely remote coincidences occurred to create a planet perfectly suited for carbon based life. I really love Sir Fred Hoyle's analogy to the accidental creation of a perfect planet or life, " how many tornado's in an airplane junkyard would be required to build a perfectly functioning 747 ?"

Nothing whatsoever to do with the Theory of Evolution.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Still waiting for anybody to offer up a little science -- describing how either ID or ToE provide better explanations for things that we observe. So here's another one from me:

Complex, image-forming eyes (in all forms of life known to have existed) have evolved somewhere between 50 and 100 completely separately times -- resulting in what are very different sorts of eyes in existence today. In addition to this, there are animals that currently live in utter darkness that have vestigial eyes that are no longer functioning. This is precisely what one would expect if evolution, as described in essence (not complete detail) by Darwin were a fact over many eons, in every environmental condition over the history of this planet.

I would not expect a Designer to create anywhere from 50 to 100 completely different sorts of internal combustion engines -- and in fact, none has. And more to the point, I would certainly not expect a designer to install some feature into its design, and then make it deliberately unfunctional. What would an automobile designer be thinking when he added headlights to his new car, and then covered them with opaque material so they could perform no useful function?

 

[Jose Fly]

To be honest, while threads like this are fun, the reality is that ID creationism is dead.

It was specifically crafted as a legal strategy to sneak creationist material into public school science classes, following a series of court rulings forbidding the teaching of Biblical creationism in those classes. After the rulings, creationists stripped their material of the overt Biblical material, kept the talking points, and re-labelled the whole thing "intelligent design". But that effort was short-lived, ending at the Dover, PA trial where the judge ruled that ID is a form of creationism, and as such cannot be taught in science classes.

So as a legal strategy it is long dead, and since it never generated any actual science of its own, it was stillborn as a science.

Now it only exists as discussion fodder in religious internet forums.

 

[siti]

Still waiting for anybody to offer up a little science -- describing how either ID or ToE provide better explanations for things that we observe.

OK - how about the course of the recurrent laryngeal nerve...this nerve loops around the aorta en-route from the brain to the larynx. In fish (and the fish-like common ancestor of modern fish and mammals) this route is (would have been) more or less direct, but in mammalian bodies with longer necks and the heart sitting much lower in the body, the detour around the aorta becomes increasingly extended. Evolution explains how, once the pattern was set, it would simply have become successively extended to accommodate the detour. As to whether this constitutes evidence of lack of "intelligent design" - I suggest we ask the giraffe - but we won't get very far - the 15 foot detour of the nerve controlling the larynx in their case means they are capable of only a few feeble bleats. But even that is as eloquent testimony for evolution as any I have seen for ID.