So I am curious, I know we have a lot of science buffs out here, and people that don’t believe in the christian account of creation, and that is fine. I was curious tho what your take is on the intelligent design theory?
Here is a link that discusses it briefly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design
many thanks
Curt
Let me supply three
Let me supply three definitions as given them to me by a Bible as Literature professor I once had.
1) Micro-evolution: Evolution within a species. The Gypsy moths chaning from white winged to brown. Completely compatible with even a literal fundamentalist reading of the Bible.
2) Macro-evolution: Evolution between a species. Humans coming from apes which came from something lower, etc. etc. Incompatible with certain literal interpreations of the Bible, but not imcompatible with Christianity, as it may have been guided by an unseen hand, insomuch as every law of nature could be guided by an unseen hand.
3) Evolutionism: a belief (in its own ways, no less religious than any other dogma) that the process of evolution is completely random and unaided. That all mutations that seem random really are. Incompatible with Christianity and most other religions.
I would not advocate the instruction of Evolutionism in a Biology classroom, as so far I’ve not yet seen compelling empirical proof against the existence of God. Evolutionism is a faith-based philosophy, and therefore is inappropriate for a scientific forum like a biology class. The same would apply to Intelligent Design.
—————————– “I can kill you with my brain…” Arthur Rowan
“Evolutionism:”
Curtis, were you just intentionally trying to stir up a hornet’s nest?
Let me see if I can break down exactly what you are asserting:
Assertion 1: Belief in evolution is a religion. Richard Dawkins dealt with this assertion in 1996. http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html. “Now in practice, of course, individual scientists do sometimes slip back into the vice of faith, and a few may believe so single-mindedly in a favorite theory that they occasionally falsify evidence. However, the fact that this sometimes happens doesn’t alter the principle that, when they do so, they do it with shame and not with pride. The method of science is so designed that it usually finds them out in the end.”
A definition of “religion” under which the principles of natural selection, biology, genetics, geology, anthropology, archaeology, and other disciplines could be classified as “religion” is so broad as to be meaningless. Individuals may take belief in a particular theory to religious excess, true. To infer from this that the principle itself is religious in nature is bogus logic.
Assertion 2: Evolution is dogma This depends upon which definition of “dogma” you are using:
Assertion 3: The process of evolution is completely random This is an absolutely false assertion. If I attempt to guess some random number between 1 and 16,777,216, my chances of getting it right are (1 in (16,777,216 – chances attempted)). Really bad. If, however, I can somehow “read” whether or not my guess is closer to or further away than my previous guess, my chances of getting it right become (1 in (16,777,216/chances attempted^2)). If I follow any reasonable guessing pattern, I will get the random number in far less than sixteen million guesses. I can guess it in just twenty-five passes!
(For those who know computers, yes, that number is suspect. It just happens to represent the maximum number of colors available in a 24-bit pallette. If your guessing pattern follows the bits from highest to lowest, you’ll narrow it down in 25 or fewer guesses, guaranteed.)
Obviously, this infers some sort of logic on the part of the guesser. But in nature, that logic is present, in the form of relentless selective pressure. If a mutation creates an adaptation which offers a survival or reproductive benefit, that mutation has a better chance of propagating through a line. With selective pressures being what they are, over a timespan of billions of years evolution becomes not just a hypothesis, but a near certainty.
Assertion 3: The process of evolution is completely unaided This is where the Intelligent Design apologists and evolutionary biologists differ, and the crux of the difference between Evolution and Intelligent Design.
As usual, most of this is a bunch of semantic game-playing hooey on both sides.
— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are lots of phrases. My favorite is `nitwit’ — and the rationale is the Internet philosophy has always been you have extremely bright, non-partisan researchers look at a topic, do world-class research, do several competing implementations, have a bake-off, determine what works best, write it down and make that the standard. The OSI view is entirely opposite. You take written contributions from a much larger community, you put the contributions in a room of committee people with, quite honestly, vast political differences and all with their own political axes to grind, and four years later you get something out, usually without it ever having been implemented once. So the Internet perspective is implement it, make it work well, then write it down, whereas the OSI perspective is to agree on it, write it down, circulate it a lot and now we’ll see if anyone can implement it after it’s an international standard and every vendor in the world is committed to it. One of those processes is backwards, and I don’t think it takes a Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford to figure out which. — Marshall Rose, “The Pied Piper of OSI”
I think you misunderstand me
I think you misunderstand me concerning Assertions 1 and 2. Perhaps my definition was weak. I meant to define Evolutionism not as a belief in the process of Evolution (natural selection through genetic mutation, etc…), but rather as the belief that this process is completely unaided, (the last Assertion you provided).
The thrust of my post was supposed to be that while I agree that debate over Evolutionism (as defined above) in a scientific forum can frequently wander into the realms of faith on both sides, the process of Micro-Evolution and Macro-Evolution are both scientifically documented and proven, and do not necessarily conflict with faith. —————————– “I can kill you with my brain…” Arthur Rowan
A rose by any other name…
I fail to see much of a difference between ID and Genesis 1, much in line with the tone of the wikipedia article. IDer’s basically take Creationism, with its 6-day workweek and solid sky and spin it into something that takes into account what we see in the world around us (especially in the fossil record). It holds the same flaw as any creation myth–namely an adherence to the arbitrary and unprovable.
What baffles me about ID proponents is that they make assertions so incongruent with the typical Christian assertions about God (as I perceive them). If He is omnipotent and perfect, why did He follow a path of creation with so many dead ends and fluky outcomes? Scientific American had a great article once about the obvious design flaws of the human body (stress concentration from knees bending the wrong way, an air pipe that sits unprotected next to the food pipe, blood vessel on the wrong side of the retina (unlike squid–even they have this right), etc.). It was pretty amusing, but had a good point–maybe things aren’t that intelligently designed after all. Sucks to be human, eh–I bet Lassie never thought about her design flaws.
If you could disprove speciation occurs through natural processes (which seems hard to do, since speciation has been simulated in labs), that wouldn’t prove that God exists, would it? All a rational person is left with is “Maybe I just don’t know.” Asserting the arbitrary into the holes in your knowledge seems a little myopic, even if it is typical human behavior. This is where the idea of “evolutionism” goes astray: studying natural selection is not faith–it is the opposite of faith. Faith cannot be studied, proven, or disproven, whereas biology is all about empirical, objective proof.
As a parting thought, I think the fact that we don’t see apes continually turning into humans or whatnot does not cast a bit of doubt on the theory of natural selection. It merely reinforces the fact that people are very bad at estimating big numbers. What kinds of things can happen over the course of 1,000,000 years? How about 1,000 of those periods? The duration of recorded human history takes up less than 10,000 years–1% of that time! But to our own experience, 30 years (or however long you’ve lived) is forever, so 1,000,000,000 years won’t “seem” all that much longer.
That said, If there is no God, Not everything is permitted to man. He is still his brother’s keeper And he is not permitted to sadden his brother, By saying that there is no God. –Czeslaw Milosz
Picking and choosing..
You seem to have asserted (as an argument against the idea of “evolutionism” being religious or dogmatic) That “evolutionism” is synonymous with “studying natural selection”.
As presented here, it is not. There is a belief that life as we know it had nothing to do with a creator based on the fact that you cannot perceive or detect one. You have no proof to back up the idea that an intelligence has not guided “Macro-evolution” (as presented). To be entirely objective, you would have to submit that either is almost equally plausible.
People of faith can present you with thousands of similar sounding experiences with what they believe to be God. You will counter that it is sociological and psychological responses to fear and teachings, and that they are misconstruing sensations to be “God”. But the fact remains that there is at least circumstantial evidence pointing toward a Diety. Not enough to prove anything, but enough to make it more than an entirely baseless claim.
So for you to suggest that “God” is a sociological construct is a Belief you hold, especially if your reason is because you don’t see enough evidence. You are rejecting the evidence you know about because you think its not enough. And that’s fine. But you cannot be sure, you have decided to come down on the side of anti-theism. Thats fine, that’s your belief.
To assert that intelligent design is uninvolved without more than the most circumstantial evidence to the contrary, while at the same time rejecting the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that suggests Intelligent design (half the world disagrees with you, and many, of many religions, would give you thousands of reasons why), is a valid choice. But it is a DOGMATIC choice.
The only truly objective choice is to accept either intelligent design or random chance to be equally possible, if we accept that Macro Evolution (as stated) is undenyably going on. Both arguments fit the current model. Both have some evidence for and against them. Neither is required to produce more evidence than the other. Both are fantastic, unlikely ideas. One is true, the other is not.
Therefore, “Evolutionism” is as much a belief system as “Macro_Evolution through Intelligent Design”.
Your comments, backwards
I’m going to argue your statements backwards and sideways 🙂 Hope you don’t mind.
The word religion is not synonymous with belief system. The U.S. courts have fought answering the question of what a religion is for some time, due to how many cans of worms that would open. Under any sufficiently broad definition, any reasonable belief could be called a religion. But under such a broad definition, the word also loses Constitutional potency.
For instance, I have ethics. I have morals. I consider principles like the Golden Rule to be an important part of my life, as are philanthropy and social justice. I, however, have no religion. Christians may argue that I worship Mammon now, but I don’t agree. I don’t worship anything.
Yet under the “belief system” definition of “religion”, I’d definitely have a “religion”. Too broad, too broad. We spend all this time playing sematics, because to have one’s definition accepted is to generally win the argument. Like pro-life vs pro-choice. If one can get the people on the other side to start using one’s terminology, one has as good as won already. So we never get to any really useful compromise-making, because we refuse to come to an agreement on what terms to use to frame the argument.
(sigh)
Once again, evolution isn’t random chance. See above posting. I really, desparately want to be objective. But I can’t consider weighted selective pressures resulting in mathematically-predictable population genetics and distribution to be equivalent to legends of Priapus spawning demi-human offspring via his enormous penis.
Yes, they both fit. However, one argument asks only to rest on the available evidence, while one appeals to an unknown and unknowable sky-god.
Evidence in favor of evolution: literally, mountains of it. The theory was costructed to fit the available evidence. Many portions have been fleshed out over the last century, refining our understanding of the amazing, branching heirarchy of life.
Evidence in favor of a sky-god descending from On High to meddle with DNA: Zero.
Wrong! There’s a good chance both are false! However, proponents of evolution encourage modification of the theory to fit the evidence, while proponents of Intelligent Design attempt to interpret the evidence to fit the immutable theory.
Just because a bunch of people believe something doesn’t make it so. I am a heretic according to, probably, one more religion than you are 🙂 The logical fallacy is called “argumentum ad populum”.
By your logic, twelve million Mormons can’t be wrong. A billion Hindus can’t be wrong. A billion Muslims can’t be wrong. And yet, they are all mutually exclusive beliefs. Except, perhaps, Mormons and Muslims, since Muslims consider Christian-derived religions to be “people of the book” and saved. And maybe some Hindus to both, because Jesus is part of many variants of the Hindu pantheon…
Anyway, that’s beside the point. Just because it’s popular, doesn’t make it right.
The primary reason that evolution is more controversial than astronomy or geology in the USA is because it contradicts fundamentalist, Biblical-literalist traditions which hold sway in the US. In particular, it contradicts core creation mythology. A concerted campaign by religious factions has popularized the notion that evolution is “just a theory” without evidence to back it up, and that it is “not science”.
But the fact is, an astronomer cannot perform experiments on distant stars. A geologist cannot go back in time. But in both sciences, we can learn an enormous amount through observation. We can make useful inferences based on these observations. That’s all evolution is: an inference about the evidence which has proven extremely useful and consistent with the available evidence.
To allow supernatural explanations in science, however, is useless. It’s the equivalent of throwing up one’s hands at a mystery and saying “It’s magic!” It doesn’t get you any closer to finding useful answers to how stuff works. That’s the basic reason why science is atheistic: because if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be useful.
— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: I never made a mistake in my life. I thought I did once, but I was wrong. — Lucy Van Pelt
Hallelujah
Testify, brother, testify! 😉
Summing it up: Science = knowledge (or theories or hypotheses) based sensory input Faith = belief in opposition to sensory input (but not your feelings)
Faith-holders will not like this harsh light of truth, but that’s what it boils down to. No telescope will ever find God. No double-blind experiment will ever prove that Jesus saves. When the mechanisms of God are discovered, God is simply pushed further into abstraction (e.g. do you believe that anticonvulsants drive out demons?). Ask yourself–is the point of my faith to try and experience God sensorially? Of course not. That’s what makes faith so dangerous. If a little boy asks why he’s supposed to hate Jews, even though he has a Jewish friend at school, he’s told “God wills it so.” Don’t trust your own observations–just go with the edicts.
(I’m not saying these can’t be arbitrary assertions with good outcomes. For example, I think that, in harmony with much of Christian thought, serving other people makes one much happier than being constantly self-centered. But winning one round of Russian Roulette doesn’t make the gun a force for good, nor any more trustworthy, for that matter.)
In secular societies, theists struggle to compartmentalize this faith-empiricism conflict, so they try to prove their faith is correct through sensory evidence. Mormons do this a lot (JS saw God, 11 witnesses swore to the day they died that they saw the gold plates, etc.). But tell a Mormon that other people have found plates and have had multiple witnesses swear to it, and you’re likely to be laughed out of the room. Or told that the devil is clearly involved. Same sensory input, totally different output.
This bias is required to make any story or experience “faith-promoting.” A popular Mormon one is about how a church president promised the members in St. George, UT, that if they paid their tithing properly they would be relieved from a drought. They paid up (so the story goes), and after a little while (not immediately) it rained. Hmmm. Does anybody really believe that it would have never rained? If so, I’ve got a tiger rock to sell you.
So, to the IDer’s pushing for equal curriculum time, etc., I say, leave the physical world to people who are in touch with it. They may not have the right answer yet, but at least they’ll admit they are searching for one.
Opposition vs. absence
I’m a stickler for definitions, so I’d challenge this:
You probably mean belief in absence of sensory input. There are also many, many different definitions for the word “faith”, so one must watch out for shifting meanings during a conversation.
Believe it or not, a similar promise was the catalyst for my leaving the church. My local stake president, Ray Ashby, told Tooele members the Utah drought was due to members not keeping the Sabbath-day holy. That immediately set off my steadily-developing handy-dandy internal BS-O-Meter, but most members in the area appeared to accept the story hook, line, and sinker. It became the rallying-cry in Priesthood Leadership Meetings for re-activating less-active members and encouraging church attendance.
Later he claimed that heavier-than-usual spring rains were due to increased Sabbath observance. I immediately thought “counting the hits and ignoring the misses” followed by “non causa pro causa”.
For some people, the experience was faith-promoting. For me, it was eye-opening. I look back, though, and realize he’s just a pillock and can be safely ignored.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
You probably mean belief in
No, I meant just what I wrote. Let me give some examples.
Let’s say I want something–really bad. So I pray to God to get it. Then I get it. “Wow, prayer works,” I think. So I pray about something else I want just as much. I don’t get it. “Hmmm, God is answering that prayer in a different way than I expected,” I think. That’s opposition to empirical evidence, not absence of it.
Let’s say instead that I had a magic coin. If it came up heads, I would get whatever I had just wished for. If it came up tails, I wouldn’t. Let’s say I’m shooting about 50% with the thing, better with things within my control, worse with far-out stuff. If I have faith in it, does that really matter? No. This is identical to the aforemention situation, except that the Romans chose Christianity over Magic Coinism. If they hadn’t, we’d be debating coins instead. If you’re tempted to call such an analogy a straw man, think about the problem of Christian-centrism in this classic scene…
Ned: Homer, God didn’t set your house on fire.
Rev. Lovejoy: No, but He was working in the hearts of your friends
and neighbors when they came to your aid, be they [points to Ned]
Christian, [points to Krusty] Jew, or [points to Apu]…
miscellaneous.
Apu: Hindu! There are 700 million of us.
Rev. Lovejoy: Aw, that’s super.
Just because a person makes an assertion, that doesn’t make the assertion rational or worthy of scientific debate. If I think my brain is in a bucket of goo, and all of my reality is simulated, that’s nice, but it’s totally arbitrary. Is there evidence against it? Can it be disproven? No, but who cares? It’s the same with theism. You make an arbitrary assertion (God exists “outside of the universe”–He moves and acts out of harmony with thermodynamic laws, etc.) then pretend that the scientific method must respect that assertion. Poppycock. I should respect you as an individual, yes, and acknowledge that no one is perfectly rational, but that doesn’t make your brand of irrationality special. Even if it has been well-marketed (“Be baptized or die, infidel!”–what a tag-line.)
Tricky tricky man.
Matt, my friend, you may of course pick my argument apart every which way but the way in which it is presented. But, I must admit, it seems that you have picked apart an argument that is much different than my own.
At no point do I insist that Religion be synonymous with Belief System. On the other hand, to treat something religiously requires no religion. (i.e., “I Watch Buffy Religiously”). For the sake of argument, let us say that what I am asserting is that belief in “Evolutionism” is based on the idea that it must be true that life spawned through a coincidental convergance of unlikely circumstances, and that the idea of a deliberate design is immediately ruled out. I am asserting that a belief system begins when isogetical interpretation of evolution begins.
There’s nothing wrong with it.. and it is certainly not “falsifying evidence”, it is simply looking at the facts from a certain point of view. You look at the facts with the assumption that there must not be a Deity of any kind involved. Therefore, you come to the best conclusion you can excluding the possibility of a diety. I do assume a diety, and I look at the facts with that point of view. That does not mean I exclude science.
At this point, I would like to respond to those infuriating logical fallacies, by giving examples of some popular logical fallacies. After all, as Spock once said.. Logic is the beginning of wisdom.
“argumentum ad ignorantiam” – The fallacy that if something has not been proven true, it must be false. Conversely, that if it has not been proven false, it must be true. i.e. – “Science cannot prove intelligent design (and I think the jury’s still out), therefore it must be false”
“False Analogy” – A and B are shown to be similar. Then it is argued that since A has property P, so also B must have property P. An analogy fails when the two objects, A and B, are different in a way which affects whether they both have property P. – i.e. “A computer model works in this way, and is not random when logic is applied. In the same way, it is not so random, the chances of life springing up, because nature has logic (anthropromorphizing there, BTW).”
“Straw Man” – The author attacks an argument which is different from, and usually weaker than, the opposition’s best argument. i.e. “I can’t consider weighted selective pressures resulting in mathematically-predictable population genetics and distribution to be equivalent to legends of Priapus spawning demi-human offspring via his enormous penis” – C’mon.. this isn’t the argument, nor was I arguing for the 6 day Christian model (a bit of a composition fallacy there too) this argument is trying to make the other argument look ridiculous by adding flourish instead of honest debate.
Your argument then changes the rules and state that the opposing argument is that “An Unknowable Sky-God is Meddling with DNA” (which is implying that I am arguing meddling with DNA and a literal creation, which I’m not, is the fallacy of Inconsistency). Whether or I believe that, your argument here is based on asstertions I never made. I never asserted that there was an an unknowable Sky-God (The god I believe in is neither Unknowable, nor does he live in the Sky), and I never asserted that it was He that was responsible for intelligent design (Straw man, Composition) – The argument is implying that because some believers in intelligent design believe in a literal creation story or in a meddling unknowable God, that the argument for intelligent design must hold true to these beliefs. And if it isn’t then its a bunch of non-sequitur.
Also..your argument is misusing “argumentum ad populum”. I am not asserting that intelligent design must be right because lots of people think it is. I am asserting that these many people have had experiential evidence that your argument chooses to ignore as valid in any way. I am not saying that it is right or true because of this, only that it must be considered and that the evidence for intelligent design is not “zero”, it is circumstantial.
It is also untrue that we may both be wrong. Either Intelligent design was involved in some way, or it wasn’t. The details for either are less relevant. Also, to suggest that believers in intelligent design have not adjusted their theory to fit the evidence is absurd. The fact that i am not sitting here arguing a literal 6 day creation story is evidence enough to disprove that claim.
Again, your argument distorts my own when it misrepresents the meaning of “Both have some evidence for and against them” – I am arguing that there is evidence for and against the idea of intelligent design (which may include evolution – as presented as Macro-Evolution). Your argument has obfiscated this idea by asserting that I am instead arguing against evolution. I know there is mountains of evidence for evolution. It is an immutable fact. Meddling Sky-God.. well, we ‘ve already covered that.
You have said “By your logic, twelve million Mormons can’t be wrong” – No, by my logic, 12 million Mormons must not be arbitrarily discounted, especially where their beliefs coincicde with Christians, jews, and muslims.. there are an awful lot of what you call “Mutually Exclusive” faiths that believe in a particular theory of the origin of life – one that supports a form of intelligent design. In that case, objectivity must consider some form of intelligent design as a possibility alongside the coincidental convergence of life-favoring conditions. I’m not saying that the numbers make them right.. but only that the numbers make them worthy of inclusion in the debate.
Disallowing supernatural explanations in science is to assume without evidence that the supernatural does not exist.
Allow me to step outside my argument. I believe that the supernatural does exist, and has played a hand in science. I do not believe in throwing my hands up and declaring “its magic”, but rather that understanding the mechanisms we do not understand is to better understand God’s handiwork.
I understand that many are hostile toward theism of any kind. I understand that many are prejudiced against believers in the supernatural and will declare they have a tendency to reject science, call evolution “just a theory”, “throw their hands up” and say “its magic”, worshipping an “unknowable Sky-God” and his “enormous penis”, with “zero evidence”, interpreting evidence as they see fit. We are a surly bunch.
I sacrificed a cow once.. well, part of a cow, on my grill. It was tasty. Filet Mignsacrifice. With onions.
Ahh, semantics…
The problem with that equivocation is that you used the two synonymously. You and I both know that such a position is unsupportable. It’s very difficult to express in writing what even a phone conversation can get across: mood, tone, inflection, etc. That’s why writing must be precise, and it’s important to point out confusing ambiguities so that we can avoid them.
I was not saying you’re insisting that religion is synonymous belief system, but disambiguating the terms to make certain of the definition because they’d been used synonymously. We should invent a new language which is more precise than English 🙂 It appears the language didn’t evolve well to handle complex concepts.
You made me look up the word “isogetical“. It appears that this word is a Christian theological colloquialism meaning something along the lines of “based on current events rather than scripture”. Is that right? I can’t figure out quite what you’re saying.
The easy problem with the “deliberate design” question was voiced by my daughter when she was four: “If God made us, who made God?” Science is concerned with how things happen, not why (in a metaphysical sense) they happen. There is a remote possibility that some super-being designed all the living stuff on the planet, but since there is no evidence to that effect, it seems even less likely than a “coincidental convergence of unlikely circumstances”.
Correction: replace the word “must” with “is probably”, and you’re correct. It’s impossible to prove a negative, as you know, so assuming a deity “must” not exist would be flawed. Assuming that such a being is involved, however, doesn’t seem to be a useful assumption.
We’ve covered that territory here. Every analogy is, ultimately, false. The only analogy which is not false is the thing itself, which is a useless tautology. The analogy can be worthwhile insofar as the things which it compares are similar in the way being discussed.
The useful aspect of the analogy I used is the similarity of mathematical probabilities involved, not that there is a logic to nature. If the selective pressures which led to a type of speciation are correctly inferred, the progression is clear, logical, and anything but “random”. I began to use another analogy to attempt to explain the analogy, but I thought that would be stupid, so I didn’t.
But you gotta admit, it was clever 🙂 Come on, it’s like a game of “who is that obscure Roman God?”.
Wait. You’re saying that the Intelligent Designer designed without meddling with DNA? I’m confused.
Where does God live, then? I’d like to hop on a bus and go visit Him, because I have a lot of questions that need answering.
I know you. I’ve met you. I’ve never met this God guy except in my imagination. The “unknowable” part was mine, I admit.
Are you saying, then, that the ostensible Designer:
If that’s the case, then I really need to get to know this totally disinvolved, non-creating Creator. A Christian god that didn’t do the things the Old Testament said he did would be really interesting to me. That whole “summoning bears to slaughter children because they made fun of Elijah” bit bugged me.
No, evidence for ID is anecdotal. The plural of “anecdote” is not “evidence”, it is “testimony”, which is useful for establishing the validity of corroborating evidence, but as any lawyer knows, is useless for establishing objective truth.
To use a fictional example, dozens of people saw Sirius Black murder thirteen Muggles and Peter Pettigrew according to the “Harry Potter” novels. Yet they really just experienced something they didn’t understand, and their conclusions were entirely wrong.
You’re ignoring the possibility that both Intelligent Design is totally wrong, and evolutionary theory is wrong. There may be a third choice which nobody has realized yet. Perhaps we materialized out of nothingness for no apparent reason, and we’ll pop back there one day. Perhaps the entire experience is illusory, or an autonomous computer simulation. There are millions of possibilities, most of them far-fetched. Organic evolution seems the most likely to me.
Macro-evolution is the occurrence of large-scale changes in gene frequencies in a population over a long period of time, which may culminate in the evolution of new species. Are you saying macro-evolution does or does not happen?
If you agree that speciation occurs without divine involvement, I don’t think we have a disagreement other than at some obscure point back in history when the first bacteria evolved. Since there really is no fossil record of those primitive organisms, it will remain a subject of conjecture for some time.
Right there with you. Intelligent design is exactly as likely as any other Creation myth.
No, it’s necessary for science to be science! The purpose of science is to explain things. If you say something can’t be explained in a provable way, that’s not useful anymore — therefore not science! Science is about figuring out how stuff works and making use of that knowledge.
Science and supernaturalism are naturally opposed. Where the light of science exposes how something works, supernatural explanations for that same phenomenon will inevitably retreat. Not because they are impossible, but because they aren’t useful.
Ad hominem, assuming a prejudice that does not exist. Since you’re responding to me, I assume I’m part of the “many”. I am not hostile toward theism of any and every kind. Works for them, good for them. I am hostile towards pseudoscience and superstition masquerading as legitimate science, which intelligent design is.
Intelligent Design “theory” (as canonized by the ICR) is baloney. It cannot be taken seriously by the scientific community, because it’s unsupportable, lacks any evidence other than anecdotes, and is not consistent with empirical observations. There is no evidence that any supernatural entity has ever interfered with natural selective processes.
Your explanation of intelligent design seems to be significantly at variance with that promoted by the leading apologist organization, the “Institute for Creation Research“. The existence of the Intelligent Design movement is specifically explained in moralistic terms having nothing to do with science:
According to ID’s leading proponents, then, evolution is responsible for homosexuallity, abortion, drug abuse, and promiscuity.
Those are specific claims I would love to see logically supported.
Now, if you disagree with ICR, and if you’re saying that ID actually means that a being laid down the rules for how stuff works, and allows that stuff to happen, I’m down with that. There’s an inexplicable order to the universe, and more than enough room to find reverence, majesty, and awe in contemplating the simple fact that everything works.
But you might want to choose a different term than “Intelligent Design” for your belief, because the chief proponents of this point of view are seriously whacked out.
— Matthew P. Barnson – – – – Thought for the moment: Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more. — Stephens
Telephone..
In the interests of maintaining sanity and not letting my new Papa john’s Pan Pizza get cold, I invite a phone call to continue the debate.. but as far as this thread is concerned..
I like pie.
I Think It’s Fine
I think the intelligent design theory is fine. What’s wrong with people having the ability to freely think, and develop their own beliefs?
Just as long as it isn’t taught in a school system that purports to be educating children on fact.
Junk science
Intelligent Design theory, as promoted by the ICR, deserves precisely as much serious scientific consideration as alien abduction, Holocaust denial, and the flat-earth theory.
It is apologetics, not science. Apologetics, I agree, should not be taught in the public school classroom.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
One more thing
Don’t forget about chemtrails.
Keep in mind
Here we go with definitions again, but here are mine…
Science = that which can be shown as true or false based on observed, repeatable evidence
Religion = believing in something regardless of whether or not it can be proven.
I believe in a form of intelligent design simply in the fact that I think someone/thing put the universe in motion. I don’t necessarily think that person/thing interferes, and I’m fully ready to accept a more scientific reasoning behind the creation of the universe should one come down the scientific pike anytime soon. However, I don’t think we should be teaching children my theory, since it’s just a bridge for me to explain where the Big Bang came from.
The problem is that how can you get someone who believes in the scientific method to make a leap of faith? Just as how do you make someone who believes in God recognize that science disproves a lot of things they’re taught to believe in?
As the general standard of living increases, I theorize that belief in religion will go down. Not because we have more things and become meterialistic, but because we the standard of living has increase due to science, and science shines a light on a lot of dark corners religion needs to exist.
My $.02 Weed
It’s simple, really
ID can qualify as a rival theory to evolution as soon as it puts forward some testable propositions.
So far, ID is nothing but a Theory of Proportionate Ignorance. That is, ID proponents take whatever elements of the Theory of Evolution that they are ignorant about and claim that lack of knowledge as support for ID. The greater the ignorance, the greater their claim of support.
ID proponents typically have a very poor understanding of the Theory of Evolution – thus maximizing their opportunities to believe in ID. However, the greater understanding one has of the Theory of Evolution, the less need they have for ID.
Take Michael Behe, for example. He wrote Darwin’s Black Box about the supposed biochemical challenges to the Theory of Evolution. He’s a leading proponent of ID. But if you ask him about the Theory of Evolution, he agrees with all of it – including the common ancestry of man with primates – excepting the biochemical bits that he personally doesn’t see how they could have come about via Evolution (although other scientists do see how it could work and have written peer reviewed papers to that effect). He then takes his personal ignorance about how Evolution explains those biochemical pieces to equate support for ID.
This is “God of the Gaps” thinking. Whatever perceived gaps one sees in the Theory of Evolution, one fills in with God.
Other ID proponents less scientifically minded than Behe, draw the line for the designer in direct proportion to how much or how little they know about the theory. Some ID’ers think man was specially created, but the rest evolved. Some think various broad species were specially created and then evolved within them. Some think that some specific chemical mechanisms were specially created. Some think that the ID agent works only on the quantum level. It all depends upon how much or how little they know about the Theory of Evolution. And none of them can agree on what gaps there really are and where they want to draw the line.
The only thing they do agree on is that they want to make sure God is in the picture somewhere.
But ignorance isn’t testable and its a horrible thing to try and hang a scientific theory on. In fact, as ignorance recedes, your ID theory gets weaker. There are fewer gaps and god must retreat.
All ID theory amounts to is: “We don’t know how the Theory of Evolution can account for Observation X. Therefore, we will say God (ID) did it and move on.”
But that conclusion is both illogical and untestable. And, consequently, with no way of being tested, not a rival theory much less a science of any kind.
(It is interesting to note that in the Dover case now being tried that the book at the heart of the controvery is called “Of Pandas and People.” This book used to be a Creationist text. The Supreme Court already struck down Creationism as being inappropriate for a public school science classroom. Edwards v. Aguillard case.
So, all the ID’ers did was take their old book and replace words like “Creationism” with “Intelligent Design” and “Creator” with “Designer” and come around for another go.)
Article referenced…
Article referenced by Troylus:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/09/27/evolution.trial.ap/index.html
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Matthew P. Barnson
Gotta love the NCSE!
I think the National Center for Science Education websiter run by Eugenie Scott is a great way to keep tabs on this debate.
See:http://www.ncseweb.org/
I’ve met Ms. Scott and was impressed not only by her voluminous knowledge about the Evolution v Creationism debate, but also her compassion, wit, charm, and good humor.
One more comment…
An acquaintance of mine, Mike Halcrow, had the following to say on a similar topic:
Darwin himself said:
He chose to illustrate a dichotomy: the origin of life, and the gradual change and descent from that origin are two separate things. The gradual change and descent from that origin, including mankind, is inescapable and as close to “fact” as science ever gets. Abiogenesis — or the creation of life from non-life — is a hot area in research, and although there are some promising leads, there is nothing confirming that “life” can spontaneously originate from non-living substances.
According to Sonleitner’s “What’s Wrong with Pandas?”,
(Science note: I understand the creation of organic compounds in the lab from inorganic, and there’s nothing “spontaneous” about it: you first create self-replicating molecules, and those get increasingly complicated in their relationships over a great deal of time. The hypotheses involved are very cool, but not yet proven.)
Another article about Intelligent Design in this week’s news: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/9/27/124915/892
As far as the “intelligent design debate” goes, I’ve found that satire brings across the point much better than other methods. This hits the nail on the head:
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Matthew P. Barnson
The Human Jaw
Regardless of who made the human body, or the evolutionary path of the human body, I’m amazed by the durability and reliability of certain parts of the human body, mainly the jaw bone.
I’m amazed that my jaw bone hasn’t needed a tuneup in order to continue servicing my body. I must have open and closed my jaw, what, at least a million times since birth? Never gone out on me. That little open-and-close function never fails. Totally reliable.
I can’t say the same thing for the mechanical parts in my furnace. Hinges on cabinet drawers in the kitchen snap. Light bulbs burn out.
You can depend on the jaw bone.