Difference between revisions of "Talk:Intelligent design controversy"

Revision as of 03:13, April 10, 2008

"In fact, evolutionists have no answer to ID's arguments and therefore refuse to deal forthrightly with it's proponents."

ID eventually comes down to a godlike figure, which is supernatural, science deals with natural phenomena, and thus ID is not science. Science has no arguements to "A creator designed us." because it is impossible to refute. No matter what evidence there is for evolution, "A creator designed us" can still be said. There is no way to disprove it, it relies on the supernatural.

As for dealing with it's proponents, the major push of intelligent design seems to rest far more on trying to find fault with evolution, as opposed to offering good decent evidence (such a signature saying "Made in heaven" "Intelligence Inside" etc etc). Now I'm not complaining about this. Irreducible complexity on the molecular levels is a superb attack on evolution, and absolutely scientific in it's approach. But don't mistake a good attack on evolution, with any sort of positive evidence for any other approach. Pushing scientists to think up feasible routes for these moleculer devices to evolve is excellent work. You cannot expect them to come up with answers instantly, but after time to think, consider and examine, these problems reach plausible solutions.

If you are talking about a general refusal to debate intelligent designists, it's not suprising, an ID proponent can throw a large number of molecular devices at a single scientist who is perhaps an expert in one of these areas, and even then would require a period of time, and access to materials to work out an acceptable path. So in the debate it appears that the scientist is lost for words, where in fact he just can't give you the answer like that. It's like me asking the non-savants of you out there whats the square root of 3042894.124 and expecting an answer immediately whilst you aren't allowed access to a calculating device.

Now I'm not going to bother editing the page, since I know it would merely be reverted, but i felt the need to point out the necessary Raggs 10:59, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

ID opponents generally pretend that they "don't get the point", but this is simply because to address what ID is saying would be the first of a series of lost battles which would end in their utter defeat. The comment above exemplifies this trend.

ID does not point to any godlike figure but makes the point that natural causes alone cannot account for the design of complex organisms, whether organs or cells. Materialism has no argument to account for the appearance of design for anything for complicated than salt crystals or snowflakes. "It evolved that way, and designs that can't compete are weeded out."

Materialists dismiss the appearance of design because their philosophical assumptions preclude any alternative. To distract attention from the weakness of basis of their atheism, they pretend that ID's anti-evolutionary critique is a front for Creationism. My advice to them is the same as what Raggs wrote above: "But don't mistake a good attack on evolution, with any sort of positive evidence for any other approach." ID is not an argument for creation; rather it is an argument against evolution.

It is because atheists and materialists don't want their arguments to be examined that they imprison, expel or fire anyone who dares challenge them. In the marketplace of ideas, their product would not sell, so they insist on having a monopoly.

Evolution cannot account for molecular devices. The rules of the "game" state that if you can't show how gradual changes could accumulate, then your theory doesn't hold water. It is the irreducible complexity of the eye and the flagellum, among many other examples, which show that natural forces alone are insufficient to account for the design of complex organs and cells.

By the way, a square root can be calculated without a machine, using procedures known to mathematicians centuries before the invention of electronic calculators. So "can't explain it" really does mean "the theory simply is no good"; see theory and fact. --Ed Poor ^Talk 11:15, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

"ID eventually comes down to a godlike figure, which is supernatural, science deals with natural phenomena, and thus ID is not science": This is wrong in two respects. First, although you are correct that ID eventually comes down to a god figure, other immediate (hypothetical) possibilities include aliens. They are not supernatural, so ID is within the realm of science.

Second, science only dealing with the natural does not preclude it from inferring a designer. Archaeologists find stone artifacts which they can determine are stone tools, fashioned by an intelligent being, and do not have to identify or study that being in order to come to that conclusion. Concluding that life had an intelligent designer is exactly the same thing in principle, and that designer possibly or probably being God does not prevent science from reaching that conclusion. However, that designer probably being God is a strong motive for misotheists to reject Intelligent Design—for religious reasons!

Philip J. Rayment 11:22, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

It is because atheists and materialists don't want their arguments to be examined that they imprison, expel or fire anyone who dares challenge them. Buwha? Who's gone to JAIL for blaspheming against the Gospel of Darwin?! Most of the time, us materialists prefer to just point and laugh. I do hope you're not talking about Kent Hovind (who went to prison for tax fraud), or Al York (who stabbed a man to death....for arguing with him about evolution).

Intelligent Design is NOT a "scientific theory". It makes no useful predictions, proposes no experiments. It only exists as a rather transparent attempt to get Creationism back into schools, where they think it belongs. And the courts have decided it fails at that, too.

And just so you know, those pesky Evilutionists have already done the flagellum.

AND the eye. --Gulik5 11:52, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

I can't at the moment think of anyone going to jail, but otherwise see Suppression of alternatives to evolution. Your claim about predictions and experiments is disputed, not self-evident truth, and your claim about the reason for its existence is rhetoric. The Talk.Origins explanations of the flagellum and the eye are just-so stories, not scientific descriptions. Philip J. Rayment 12:02, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

Gulik, are you trying to change the subject? ID says that evolution can't explain design, and you veer off into a quibble about whether my generalization about atheists and materialists applies to all cases of dispute about ID. That is specious reasoning, and it has no place on an article discussion page. Save it for the our Debate Topics, if you plan to stay around.

More to the point, you may already be aware of American scholars who have been fired from their jobs for - as you put it - "blaspheming against the Gospel of Darwin". Perhaps I should assign you to google this up and add it to Expelled.

Is the standard for a scientific theory that it must make predictions? Then how about plate tectonics? What predictions does it make? More to the point, name 3 predictions that the theory of evolution makes. Then explain what tests were conducted to see if those predictions came true.

If you are well verse in these matters, you may want to collaborate with me on such articles as Philosophy of science and Scientific method. Or at least Falsifiability. For example, name a kind of experiment or observation or discovery that could possibly "falsify" evolution. If you can't - indeed, if no one can - than we'd have to classify evolution as pseudoscience. --Ed Poor ^Talk 12:10, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

Experiment to falsify the currently-accepted model of evolution: Dig up a fossil of a Tyrannosaurus Rex that died from choking to death on a Homo Sapiens. There. Any other area with blatantly anachronistic fossils (such as modern birds mixed in with Trilobites, flowers in the Silurian age, etc.) would do the trick as well. Conversely, you could also disprove evolution with that old Creationist canard, a cat 'evolving' into a rabbit in one generation. So would verifiable proof of Lamarckian evolution--the inheritance of acquired traits.

As for Expelled--I'd want a biologist who taught Creationism moved to a non-teaching position for roughly the same reason I'd rather not be operated on by a doctor who rejected modern medicine in favor of the Four Humor theory of treatment.

Hope this helps you understand where I'm coming from, even it if is all a flimsy tissue of rationalizations over my seething hatred of God and America fnord.

I'd better go edit something now. Don't want a 90/10 block for disrespect towards my bettersunproductive edits, after all. --Gulik5 15:25, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

To add since this was removed from the original Intelligent design talk page during the moves of the article...

The International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) says that “intelligent design” is neither sound science nor good theology. Intelligent Design theorists do not have proper research programmes to make their points. In fact, what they believe is against science, according to the seven scientists who prepared the statement for the ISSR, a scholarly body devoted to dialogue between science and world faiths.

The whole of the society’s membership, many of whom are Christian, were involved in a consultation about the statement. The ISSR says it “greatly values modern science, while deploring efforts to drive a wedge between science and religion.”

Whereas Gulik provided much research to support evolution, Intelligent Design has yet to produce research or a mechanism outside of the mechanisms of evolution to support their hypothesis. Something to add is that most new concepts of science begin in the collegiate academic environment where they undergo testing and verification before being trickled down to the general public and secondary and primary education systems, therefore intelligent design is suspect of circumventing this practice do to a failure of meeting the standards necessary to be a competing theory in the aforementioned environment, which leads many to conclude that the proponents of intelligent design are trying to indoctrinate instead of allowing the application of rational debate for defense of their hypothesis. The major concern is that by allowing the circumvention of the testing and debate in the academic environment sets a standard for other untested, non qualified concepts to be taught with a scientific label. I personally feel it is fine for intelligent design to be taught in a theological setting not a scientific one. This debate with evolution is a bit unreasonable due to evolution's stance in the biological sciences, if intelligent design wanted to replace evolution then it should have followed the standard, much like string theory has been for the past 20 years. This motivation is also suspect since when has a scientific concept not taken more than 10 years to reach the public? Why push intelligent design on school children with less than 10 years of development, let alone testing and research? Like I said the motivations behind the intelligent design proponents are suspect. --Able806 16:44, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

Gulik5, can you unequivocally demonstrate that "Dig[ging] up a fossil of a Tyrannosaurus Rex that died from choking to death on a Homo Sapiens" would falsify evolution? Because I don't think it would. Rather, the evolutionists would simply (and finally) admit that T-rex must have survived longer than they have previously claimed, and not admit to any falsification of evolution itself at all. For more on this, see falsifiability of evolution and User:Philip J. Rayment/Creationism.

I don't find the Talk.Origins examples convincing. Some of them appear to assume evolution in order to demonstrate evolution. For example, human evolution in Africa assumes that humans have evolved, but that has not been demonstrated. Also, some of the examples give too little information to judge them.

I also suspect that some of the "evolutionary" predictions have little if anything to do with evolution at all. That is, the same predictions could also be made by creationists. This likely applies to the one about high mutation rates, for example.

Certainly the plate tectonics example falls into the category above. Plate tectonics was originally proposed by a creationist, partly on the basis of the account in Genesis. And the scientist with what is acknowledged as the best computer simulation of plate tectonics is a young-Earth creationist (who believes that it happened quickly, during Noah's Flood). So, plate tectonics is not an evolutionary prediction at all, but a prediction made by both camps.

And this highlights a very large part of the creation/evolution/ID controversy: The evolutionists have almost no idea just what creationists (and ID proponents) actually propose, so a large part of their "rebuttal" of creationism and ID is straw-man arguments, pointless arguments, and plain nonsense. The fact that you repeated this nonsense here shows that you don't know what you are talking about either, so have little credibility in this discussion. Your comment about creationist biologists is more such nonsense. Creationist biologists accept all the biology that an evolutionist accepts, but disagrees on how living things came about. That is, they agree on the observable facts, not on the unobserved history. So comparisons with doctors who don't accept modern observations are totally invalid and merely show your ignorance of the issue.

And by the way, one of your points copied from Talk.Origins, the magnetic striping bit, provides an example of a successful creationist prediction (see here).

The ISSR statement is nonsense too. It says that "Intelligent Design theorists do not have proper research programmes to make their points", ignoring that because ID is not considered science, nobody will give them funds to have such research programs! Thus "ID is not science > therefore it is not funded for research > therefore, having no research, it is not science" = circular argument.

Further, it says that it "[deplores] efforts to drive a wedge between science and religion", ignoring that ID is not aiming to do that, and in fact the ISSR is doing that by trying to argue that the two are totally unrelated.

Able806 omits mentioning that many new ideas in science are rejected by the majority initially, and only after fighting against the establishment for many years do the new ideas become accepted. And because the establishment is against these new ideas, the ideas have to be promoted in other avenues than the normal academic avenues. Again, it is a circular argument that ID is not scientific because it's not discussed in the "proper" channels, but it's not allowed to be discussed in the proper channels because it's not scientific!

As for claims of indoctrination, this is a case of when pointing the finger at someone, you have three pointing back at yourself. It's the evolutionists that have a stranglehold on the school system, with even efforts to tell students that they should keep an open mind about evolution being taken to court and stopped. When evolutionists prevent students being told that they should keep an open mind, they are indoctrinating. When they then accuse their opposition of indoctrination, they are being hypocrites. And Able806 has the gall to question the motives of ID proponents!

Philip J. Rayment 23:30, 8 April 2008 (EDT)

Gulik5, can you unequivocally demonstrate that "Dig[ging] up a fossil of a Tyrannosaurus Rex that died from choking to death on a Homo Sapiens" would falsify evolution? Because I don't think it would.

Yeah, it pretty well would. It would mean that modern science is dead wrong about fossil formation, sedimentation, the timeline of Earth's history, when humanity evolved, and about twenty other things. Alternately, it COULD just mean someone developed a time-machine and wasn't very cautious, which would be equally huge, but more a matter for physicists. But, since on Planet Conservapedia, scientists are just the High Priests of the First Atheistic Church of Darwin, I'm sure you just expect them to take a gravel-crusher to the evidence, and burn as heretics anyone who claims to have seen it fnord.

Let me turn that around on you, Phil: What would it take for YOU to admit that Creationism/ID was wrong? Preferrably something scientists could conceivably come up with, short of God Himself coming down and saying "DON'T BLAME ME FOR YOUR BADLY DESIGNED CARCASSES, I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT."?

If the IDers don't have any funding, who keeps bankrolling groups like the Creation Museum?

If you want scientists to tolerate 'alternatiove theories', Come up with some. Velikovsky-style efforts to rewrite the laws of physics in order to treat the Book of Genesis as a science textbook don't convince anyone who isn't already a True Believer. --Gulik5 23:13, 9 April 2008 (EDT)