Is Intelligent Design dead?

[barts]

Quote by: Angry Citizen Please directly link some of these debates, if you can. My curiosity is piqued.

AC, there are literally hundreds, maybe even thousands, of videos of scholars putting wooden stakes and silver bullets into the heart of ID. I suggest you go to any of the sites and use their search facilities for "intelligent design" or any of the putative researchers cited by M. Dozens of references will appear.

Trust me, I'm not avoiding your answer, it's just that ID is so discredited that to give you a list of links would be doing you a disservice because I couldn't list them all.

Moroeover, TED and Fora TV are wonderful places to explore.

To get you started, however, Battle of Ideas: Debating Darwin on Fora TV. And one I like is Dan Dennett's response to Rick Warren on TED.

[Century 25]

Quote by: Angry Citizen I'd like to correct you here. "Deists" and Deism is the belief in a non-interfering God who may or may not have any knowledge of us whatsoever. According to Deism, God made the universal laws of nature, and this reality is the direct result of it. It's the only creator-religion with an ounce of self-respect, and has numerous famous adherents (many of America's Founding Fathers were Deists or Closet-Deists). On the other hand, Theists believe in an interfering, petty little prick God who'll send you to an eternity in either flaming pits of despair ruled by His arch-nemesis, or to an eternity of non-existence just because you calculate he doesn't exist. Or because your culture reached an entirely different spiritual conclusion. They are the "ignorant dark-agers" to which you are referring; not Deists.

This is a sterling example of how humans are wasting millions of of 'man/years' per year. Arguing the nit picking details of everything based on nonsense. People need to know that there simply never was a 'god' - and that the entire universe is merely an 'event' in progress, of which we are just an extremely minor sub-event.

If the human race were all aware of our tenuous position in this deal.. I doubt we would be so stoked for stupid wars.. not to mention crapping all over our environment with trash & toxic chemicals.. smoke, CO2.. etc, etc.. just so a tiny percentage of the populace could live.. large - larger than the kings of old could dream of.

Sorry to use your post as an example, but deists also believe in 'god' - no matter what else they claim to be, or not to be. Claiming their 'creator' is lurking amid the cosmic dust, not interfering, that is still living a lie, a vast lie.. the worst possible thing we could base our lives upon.

There simply does not exist any 'heaven' (or 'hell') - just all of the material now slowly (to us) exhausting its energy. We are, as Sagan commented, also made of 'star stuff' - and entropy will continue for all of the 'star stuff' - and of course, us.

[tengers]

Quote by: Meleagar I'm not a statistician. That would be up to experts in those areas to figure out.

Sometimes the use of statistics is helpful and sometimes it can be quite misleading when dealing with an anomoly. The problem is that statisticians often use standard distribution curves to determine the liklihood of an event, as in your examples above. These probability curves find their way into many things. A good example of this is virtually every financial program used by investors and large financial organizations to pick their way around Wall Street. Most of these programmers spend their days looking for trends or any sign of regularity in the patterns of pricing and then see how these patterns fit and then they try to build predictors. The problem is that Nature seems to to follow different patterns that are not necessarily Gaussian. It looks Gaussian, but there are anomolies and usually people throw those out of the data points, or don't deal with them properly. It is these anomolies that occasionally make a loud speaker pop. Those pops are real and they can create significant change and they are at present, unpredictable. Those pops also killed Wall Street. Wrestling with the unpredictable pops that cause major changes has been popularized of late by books with titles like "Black Swans" and the like and this field is a major area of research.

I say all of this to you because I see many things by researchers, especially ID and financial people that are throwing out the ":pops" with the bathwater in the hopes of rationalizing their ( often reductionist) data, because ultimately rationalizing is what we do to understand things. That is probably a mistake because understanding the pop and understanding whether or not there are 'emergent laws " in assemblies of things is a good next step in our understanding of the world around us. There is still quite a future in "reductionist science" as well, but we will have to find the bridge between the very small and the large structures that are associated with evolution. ID'es may be filling that that gap with an intelligent designer process, while others in the Science community seek other explanations.

[Meleagar]

Quote by: tengers Sometimes the use of statistics is helpful and sometimes it can be quite misleading when dealing with an anomoly. .

Which is why we have the peer-review process, no? To prevent such misleading errors in application.

[dan4reason]

Intelligent design is not dead, but it has been disproved and trampled over by science. The reason it has been disproved is because it is not objective. It has a religious basis. Some people believe the universe was created, so they put together evidence to prove it. That is not how science works. You form a conclusion AFTER you look at the evidence.

[Meleagar]

Quote by: dan4reason Intelligent design is not dead, but it has been disproved and trampled over by science. The reason it has been disproved is because it is not objective. It has a religious basis. Some people believe the universe was created, so they put together evidence to prove it. That is not how science works. You form a conclusion AFTER you look at the evidence.

How do you scientifically disprove something that supposedly isn't scientific? ID is entirely evidence-based.

[tengers]

Quote by: Meleagar Which is why we have the peer-review process, no? To prevent such misleading errors in application.

Much of our work in mathematics and science is evolving (sorry). There are some things that occur that are not understood at all. For instance, we can observe the onset of turbulence or chaos and we can develop formulas to try and anticipate things, but we do not know why they occur or specifically what they will do. Another simple case is gravity. We can use gravity and develop formulas to send Voyager on a long mission in space, but we have no idea as to what gravity is. Science and Mathematics are works in progress. The entire financial industry is working with Gaussian predictors, they work fine, a lot of the time, but they fail often enough to wipe you out. No one wants to admit that this is what lies beneath all the pin-stripe suits. You just have to try and understand the limitations.

[Meleagar]

Quote by: tengers You just have to try and understand the limitations.

Understanding the limitations doesn't prevent the use of such science in any other field from making predictions and driving inferences. Claiming that statistical and probability-bound limitations should be "set aside" or ignored when it comes to evolutionary theory would be "special pleading".

We do the best with what we have: that's science. "Best Explanation" should never be conflated with "Correct Explanation".

[Maryjane]

Quote by: barts To insure that when advocates of various religions attempt to push their dogma into the classroom disguised as science, there is valid and demonstrable scientific evidence to refute their assertions. Duh.

Advocates for the teaching of CD/ID in public school are alive and well here in VA. A neighbor (the one that told me my husband's death was "god's plan") regularly invites me to attend women's only seminars at Swift Creek Baptist Church. Here's the actual pamphlet description of the Creations vs Evolution class. (sorry to say I wasn't able to attend)

J. Creation vs. Evolution: Ray Garrett Learn some fundamental flaws in the evolutionary argument and discover scientific evidence for the creation account in Genesis 1-11. This class will equip you with tools to counter the atheistic view of the origin of life presented in school science textbooks.

http://swiftcreekbaptist.org/Ministr...ops%20Info.pdf


I didn't know who Ray Garrett was until I googled him and found the following article. It's an interesting read with excellent links that show the the CD/ID groups aren't satisfied with the public classrooms...they want to be in your bedroom, in your womb, and on your death bed making your decisions for you.

Recently, a distinct rumble of agitation in favor of teaching intelligent design has been heard in Chesterfield County, located just south and west of Richmond, Virginia. This became very noticeable when proceedings of the May 22nd Chesterfield County School Board (CCSB) were reported in print and on the Internet. Shawn Smith, a science supporter and Chesterfield County resident, has established a blog on this issue, and does an excellent job of summarizing the events that have transpired. Readers who haven’t been following this story are encouraged to get caught up via the many links given in Shawn’s blog. So far, the official actions of the CCSB have been limited to issuing a rather vague and confusing statement. ID proponents had hoped to influence the selection of science textbooks, but they started their campaign too late, and the CCSB approved the selection of standard biology texts. But there is still much concern about the situation in Chesterfield. ID supporters, backed by a local conservative group called the Family Foundation, are energetic and well-organized, as evidenced by their ability to deliver a petition with more than 1,100 people who questioned the use of “evolution-only” science texts. Press coverage has been mixed, accompanied by the usual assortment of pro-creationist letters. One noteworthy article has just appeared in the July issue of Richmond Magazine. The article in question, entitled “The Unsolvable Debate – Chesterfields’s School Board Rebuffs Intelligent Design Concerns – For Now,” is not available online, so we will review its main points here while pointing out some of the more salient errors and omissions. The article opens by quoting ID supporter Ray Garrett, who says that “I don’t want God anywhere near the classroom”, and further cites a desire for ID to be evaluated on its scientific merits alone. The article notes that Garrett is “simply a layman with an avid interest in science”, but was encouraged to speak at the CCSB meeting by members of his church, Swift Creek Baptist.[/B] So, one must ask, how well does Garrett really understand evolutionary science and how qualified is he to evaluate the scientific merits of intelligent design?

(emphasis mine)



Rumblings of Intelligent Design in Chesterfield County, VA | Alliance For Science

The Family Foundation

[Uncle Rhynchus]

Quote by: dan4reason Intelligent design is not dead, but it has been disproved and trampled over by science. The reason it has been disproved is because it is not objective. It has a religious basis. Some people believe the universe was created, so they put together evidence to prove it. That is not how science works. You form a conclusion AFTER you look at the evidence.

The situation is a bit more nuanced than that.

Specific arguments put forth by ID creationists have been disproved, such as, "evolution can't generate complex information" (it does), the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex (it isn't), the BF can't come about via evolutionary mechanisms (it can), evolution can't make things that are IC (it can)....

But, that doesn't mean ID creationism itself has been disproved. It can't be. Under the most generous circumstances, ID includes the possibility of gods, and more realisticially is explicitly about gods. And as we all know, gods cannot be tested, let alone disproved. So no matter what experimental result, discovery, or other bit of data we come across, ID creationists can always make the post hoc assertion "Aha! That's how the designer (god) did it!".

Again, I'll reiterate my original point. ID is scientifically dead as no one is conducting any research into ID. In fact, I don't think anyone ever has. Our lone ID advocate on this forum has been repeatedly asked for examples of research that's actually about ID and he has utterly failed to do so. The best he could do is cite cases where ID creationists conduct some research that tries to argue against evolution, but none that has anything to do with ID itself. Thus, one can only conclude that from a scientific standpoint, ID is indeed "dead".

From a political standpoint, the ID creationists at the Discovery Institute haven't been calling for ID to be taught in public school science classes for a while now. They've moved on to arguing for "teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution". The Kitzmiller vs. Dover case essentially killed ID in public schools. Thus, from a political standpoint ID is "dead".

The only life ID creationism has is in public opinion, but this is primarily because the general public sees ID as both a form of creationism and a means to argue against evolution. IOW, pretty much the only way ID is still "alive" is as a type of creationism. And I have no trouble recognizing that.

[dan4reason]

Quote by: Uncle Rhynchus The situation is a bit more nuanced than that. Specific arguments put forth by ID creationists have been disproved, such as, "evolution can't generate complex information" (it does), the bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex (it isn't), the BF can't come about via evolutionary mechanisms (it can), evolution can't make things that are IC (it can).... But, that doesn't mean ID creationism itself has been disproved. It can't be. Under the most generous circumstances, ID includes the possibility of gods, and more realisticially is explicitly about gods. And as we all know, gods cannot be tested, let alone disproved. So no matter what experimental result, discovery, or other bit of data we come across, ID creationists can always make the post hoc assertion "Aha! That's how the designer (god) did it!". Again, I'll reiterate my original point. ID is scientifically dead as no one is conducting any research into ID. In fact, I don't think anyone ever has. Our lone ID advocate on this forum has been repeatedly asked for examples of research that's actually about ID and he has utterly failed to do so. The best he could do is cite cases where ID creationists conduct some research that tries to argue against evolution, but none that has anything to do with ID itself. Thus, one can only conclude that from a scientific standpoint, ID is indeed "dead". From a political standpoint, the ID creationists at the Discovery Institute haven't been calling for ID to be taught in public school science classes for a while now. They've moved on to arguing for "teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution". The Kitzmiller vs. Dover case essentially killed ID in public schools. Thus, from a political standpoint ID is "dead". The only life ID creationism has is in public opinion, but this is primarily because the general public sees ID as both a form of creationism and a means to argue against evolution. IOW, pretty much the only way ID is still "alive" is as a type of creationism. And I have no trouble recognizing that.

In the documentary expelled, they cite examples where scientists and educators have been ruined by even mentioning intelligent design. Maybe there is a reason that intelligent design does not have any peer reviewed papers.

I do not believe in ID, but if life could not have come about undesigned, then it must have come about designed.

[dan4reason]

Quote by: Meleagar How do you scientifically disprove something that supposedly isn't scientific? ID is entirely evidence-based.

Evolution is scientific if it is falsifyable. You can prove evolution wrong.

[PlatoNot]

Quote by: Uncle Rhynchus But, that doesn't mean ID creationism itself has been disproved. It can't be. Under the most generous circumstances, ID includes the possibility of gods, and more realisticially is explicitly about gods. And as we all know, gods cannot be tested, let alone disproved.

Wow! An evolutionist being honest. You are right, ID cannot be disproved. Does it exist as a mechanism for arguing against evolution. Partially. Concerning Gods, I read evolutionary scientists mentioning them as a viable possibility with respect to the creation of the universe. You are right, they cannot be tested. Neither can the Big Bang.

Can the Big Bang be disproved? No. Can it be proved? No. Is it a scientifically developed theory? No. We see only evidence that all the universe was compressed either into an extremely small space or compressed infinitely. If it were compressed infinitely, it did not exist before it expanded. We see evidence of the universe expanding rapidly at what scientists deem to be the beginning of time, but we have no evidence of a singularity ever existing. The singularity is an invention to explain a supernatural occurance. Some have theorized it was a black hole in which the entire universe was compressed to the point that only energy existed and all the laws of physics broke down. Do we observe black holes with the same forces of gravity? No. Do we observe black holes that even approach what the singularity had to be? No. Yet scientists have no difficulty in assuming such a black hole did in fact exist. Is that science? No.

If we are going to teach possibilities of how the universe came to be, it is obvious teaching singularities goes far beyond teaching true scientific theory. If we are going to teach what happened immediately after the beginning of what science calls the Big Bang, after the first 10^-43 seconds, you would hear no complaints from this fundamentalist. There is observable evidence for those assertions. Before that time there is just as much evidence available to teach "God did it" as teaching the existance of a singularity.

[barts]

Quote by: PlatoNot Wow! An evolutionist being honest. You are right, ID cannot be disproved.

Of course, ID can be disproved, but as yet there is nothing to disprove. What exactly--or even approximately--is this "intelligence" that ID invokes? Until there is some theory about that there is nothing to disprove.

Offer a theory of what the I in ID is and testing and experimenting and observing can begin. Until then D is in the eyes and wishful thinking of the beholder and nowhere else.

[tengers]

Quote by: PlatoNot Wow! An evolutionist being honest. You are right, ID cannot be disproved. Does it exist as a mechanism for arguing against evolution. Partially. Concerning Gods, I read evolutionary scientists mentioning them as a viable possibility with respect to the creation of the universe. You are right, they cannot be tested. Neither can the Big Bang. Can the Big Bang be disproved? No. Can it be proved? No. Is it a scientifically developed theory? No. We see only evidence that all the universe was compressed either into an extremely small space or compressed infinitely. If it were compressed infinitely, it did not exist before it expanded. We see evidence of the universe expanding rapidly at what scientists deem to be the beginning of time, but we have no evidence of a singularity ever existing. The singularity is an invention to explain a supernatural occurance. Some have theorized it was a black hole in which the entire universe was compressed to the point that only energy existed and all the laws of physics broke down. Do we observe black holes with the same forces of gravity? No. Do we observe black holes that even approach what the singularity had to be? No. Yet scientists have no difficulty in assuming such a black hole did in fact exist. Is that science? No. If we are going to teach possibilities of how the universe came to be, it is obvious teaching singularities goes far beyond teaching true scientific theory. If we are going to teach what happened immediately after the beginning of what science calls the Big Bang, after the first 10^-43 seconds, you would hear no complaints from this fundamentalist. There is observable evidence for those assertions. Before that time there is just as much evidence available to teach "God did it" as teaching the existance of a singularity.

The singularity arises from the calculations and from what is known of universal constants. It is possible that there is an error somewhere and as soon as that is figured out, the idea can be checked again. That is different than the belief in a Creator, that no one has ever seen. That is simply saying I am here, therefore I was created by an all-powerful being.
There is nothing wrong with this bellief. 70% of people have that belief, but it is a matter of faith and nothing more.

[PlatoNot]

Quote by: tengers The singularity arises from the calculations and from what is known of universal constants.

No it is not. The calculations and what is known of universal constants only apply to the Big Bang after the first 10^-43 seconds of the expansion. Prior to that there is no math nor anything else to prove a singularities existance.

It is possible that there is an error somewhere and as soon as that is figured out, the idea can be checked again. That is different than the belief in a Creator, that no one has ever seen. That is simply saying I am here, therefore I was created by an all-powerful being. There is nothing wrong with this bellief. 70% of people have that belief, but it is a matter of faith and nothing more.

I will agree that creation is a matter of faith and nothing more. The belief that a singularity existed is a matter of conjecture sans evidence and no more. You are trying to say something in which all the laws of physics broke down is provable? No wonder the physicists hate the mathematicians and their fuzzy math.

[PlatoNot]

Quote by: barts Of course, ID can be disproved, but as yet there is nothing to disprove. What exactly--or even approximately--is this "intelligence" that ID invokes? Until there is some theory about that there is nothing to disprove.

Of course it cannot be disproved. Uncle Rhyn admitted it.

Offer a theory of what the I in ID is and testing and experimenting and observing can begin. Until then D is in the eyes and wishful thinking of the beholder and nowhere else.

The "intelligent" in Intelligent Design needs no theory to define who or what it is. That's the theory of ID that the intelligence exists and what it is is irrelevant. Look, I don't like ID. I have said that before. I cannot disprove it, and I have no intention in trying to do so. I cannot prove it and have no intention in doing so. I dislike ID because it attempts to prove creation with science. I know Meleagar will have a fit about that, but it is true nonetheless. Creation stands on its own. It needs no science to back it up, prop it up, or any attempt to make it scientific. God said it, I read it in my good ole King James Bible and I believe it. End of story.

If you want to debate ID, debate Meleagar. He is beset by a horde of wolves and is out debating all of them. I'm sure he won't have difficulty doing the same with you.

[tengers]

Quote by: PlatoNot No it is not. The calculations and what is known of universal constants only apply to the Big Bang after the first 10^-43 seconds of the expansion. Prior to that there is no math nor anything else to prove a singularities existance. I will agree that creation is a matter of faith and nothing more. The belief that a singularity existed is a matter of conjecture sans evidence and no more. You are trying to say something in which all the laws of physics broke down is provable? No wonder the physicists hate the mathematicians and their fuzzy math.

Well that is primarily because there is no time or space or anything to work with. I am actually more of an advocate of Maffatt's idea on Modified gravity where there is an antisymetric part to gravity that exists with large masses and over great distances. Under Modified Gravitational Theory, there is no singularity, no Big Bang and there are no black holes or dark matter needed. There are very dense grey superstars though. In Moffat's work G/c remains a constant over time, but G and c, both vary with time. I have not seen his calculations, but they say it is quite elegant, if you can follow it and it gets rid of some nasty assumptions, including the Singularity..

[Meleagar]

Quote by: barts of course, id can be disproved, but as yet there is nothing to disprove. .

roflmao

[Meleagar]

Quote by: dan4reason Evolution is scientific if it is falsifyable. You can prove evolution wrong.

Well, if you say so.