Creationism v. Intelligent Design v. Evolution

[shoe]

A number of ways:

1. The ID hypothesis is invariably put forward by theists. Theists believe in God, therefore they believe the “intelligent designer” to be God, even if some pretend otherwise. So in both cases, the existence of everything boils down to “God did it.” Neither variant offers any supporting evidence or explanatory power. They’re effectively the same thing.

Do you believe in ID? Who do you think the designer is?

1. From the horse’s mouth
2. It’s obvious. Science has disproved Creation as written in the bible - ID is the theistic response which allows the retention of God as the ultimate creator, while having to concede the irrefutable findings of science.

Actually, since atheists do not believe in God - the “Intelligent Designer” - they must put their faith in a worldview that is based on neither real science nor reason: namely, they must believe that from nothing comes everything.

 

[minkymurph]

Actually, since atheists do not believe in God - the “Intelligent Designer” - they must put their faith in a worldview that is based on neither real science nor reason: namely, they must believe that from nothing comes everything.

My problem with ‘intelligent design’ is it creates an image of God that humanizes God and reduces God to the status of an ‘intelligent creature,’ While I believe that God is imminent, I believe God is also transcendent, and cannot be defined in human terms; such as ‘intelligent,’ because God is not human.

I accept the findings of science. I also accept the supernatural; which cannot be explained in human or scientific terms. We who believe in God need to be brave enough to stand by our faith and say, ‘no, it can’t be proven in scientific/human terms’ and to me, this is what intelligent design attempts to do. I am ready to accept the criticism from non-believers that goes with that, because that is my belief and criticism because of that belief. is part of the territory. I don’t go for trying to explain the supernatural activity of God, his power and desire to generate life in a scientific way because it requires faith. If we could prove everything, we would have no need of faith.

 

[reggieM]

My problem with ‘intelligent design’ is it creates an image of God that humanizes God and reduces God to the status of an ‘intelligent creature,’ While I believe that God is imminent, I believe God is also transcendent, and cannot be defined in human terms; such as ‘intelligent,’ because God is not human.

While it’s true that we cannot fully describe God using human terms, those are the words and symbols we have to use. So, just as you’ve done in the quoted text above, using terms like “transcendent” – we try to explain what we know about God.

I have not seen anything in intelligent design research that reduces God to the status of a creature, myself – and I’m open to any examples you might have found that do that.

When we speak about God’s omniscience, we talk about His intelligence. We could say “God knows everything” – but that cannot be fully accurate because we only know what intellectual processes are through the use of human brains, and God does not have a human brain.

So, it’s an analogy – humans create and thinks in ways that are “like God”. Or conversely, God’s intelligent design is something we can recognize because it is “similar to” what we know of human design.

 

[wanstronian]

Why are you depressed? Of what possible consequence does this have for the world at large? No one has given me a straight answer on this. If I believe differently will l forget how to use my cell phone?

Peace,
Ed

I find miseducation depressing. I’d be depressed if my son came home from school having been taught that the sun goes round the earth, or that astrology is a reliable way of judging an individual’s character or predicting the future.

I also think that the propagation of miseducation is bad for the world at large. There’s the very real possibility for those in power to make decisions, based upon their erroneous beliefs, that affect and even oppress the citizenship of the society they represent. If, for example, judgements of right and wrong are allowed to be made according to a religious book, rather than for good objective ethical reasons, then there’s something deeply wrong.

Luckily, in the case of religion, most Western countries have had the foresight to put in place a secular constitution, or something like it. But this is the absolute minimum requirement, and certainly doesn’t afford anything like the amount of protection from religiously-biased governmental policy that people deserve.

 

[buffalo]

My problem with ‘intelligent design’ is it creates an image of God that humanizes God and reduces God to the status of an ‘intelligent creature,’ While I believe that God is imminent, I believe God is also transcendent, and cannot be defined in human terms; such as ‘intelligent,’ because God is not human.

ID the science, does no such thing.

 

[reggieM]

The difficulty is in accurately estimating the number of functional configurations. How would you do that? It is not difficult for simple cases, such as RNA-GTP binding, but it is extremely difficult for complex cases.

Again, I’m very sure you’re not saying that “it’s difficult and therefore impossible for science to ever accomplish”. Some progress has been made and we might see more in the future.

The Hazen calculations are starting with more limited examples. Origin of Life researchers have to make some assumptions at a starting point, and then build probabilities from there.

The goal is to rule out what appears to be improbable events. That’s the approach used by secular, atheist, mainstream researchers. It’s exactly the same approach that Intelligent Design research takes.

Here are some of the top Origin of Life scientists (all anti-ID atheists) discussing the problem of the origin of Functional Information. Notice that they realize their method and conclusions are exactly the same as used by Intelligent Design.

edge.org/documents/life/Life.pdf

The challenge is to show how specified-functional information can be generated by natural processes.

 

[minkymurph]

While it’s true that we cannot fully describe God using human terms, those are the words and symbols we have to use. So, just as you’ve done in the quoted text above, using terms like “transcendent” – we try to explain what we know about God.

I have not seen anything in intelligent design research that reduces God to the status of a creature, myself – and I’m open to any examples you might have found that do that.

When we speak about God’s omniscience, we talk about His intelligence. We could say “God knows everything” – but that cannot be fully accurate because we only know what intellectual processes are through the use of human brains, and God does not have a human brain.

So, it’s an analogy – humans create and thinks in ways that are “like God”. Or conversely, God’s intelligent design is something we can recognize because it is “similar to” what we know of human design.

What you say is true. However, We don’t speak of God in terms of how intelligent He is. We speak of humans in those terms. That’s what I mean by humanizing God. But I take your point that you see nothing in intelligent design that humanizes God and I appreciate humanizing God is not the intention of intelligent design theorists.

To my knowledge intelligent design was proposed as counter-argument to evolution. I personally don’t think it’s a good one.

 

[reggieM]

1. The ID hypothesis is invariably put forward by theists. Theists believe in God, therefore they believe the “intelligent designer” to be God, even if some pretend otherwise. So in both cases, the existence of everything boils down to “God did it.” Neither variant offers any supporting evidence or explanatory power. They’re effectively the same thing.

First - thanks for sharing your reasoning on this.

In your first point here, you equate ID with Creationism because “everything boils down to God did it”. What about anti-ID scientists who believe in God? More importantly, where in the ID literature do you see this equation?

Do you believe in ID?

Do I think that human beings can detect intelligent design? Yes.

Who do you think the designer is?

Intelligent Design doesn’t attempt to answer that question, so you might be mistaken about what ID is.

1. From the horse’s mouth

You’re equating ID research with the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.
I don’t know what that group is. Who belongs to it? Who wrote the paper you linked to? When was it written? Where does it say there that “ID is merely Creationism trying to appear scientific”?

1. It’s obvious. Science has disproved Creation as written in the bible - ID is the theistic response which allows the retention of God as the ultimate creator, while having to concede the irrefutable findings of science.

Could you explain that more? You mention the Bible. You mention ID and ultimate creator.

Where in ID research does it point to the Bible? Where does it indicate “ultimate creator”? Why do you oppose a group that “concedes the findings of science”?

 

[Rock_Happy]

I wonder how many of those who chose ID and Creationism would be satisfied with there medical care today, if the only thing the doctor had to offer was lacking modernity? I’ll take antibiotics over blood letting, thanks.

 

[rossum]

The goal is to rule out what appears to be improbable events.

Not quite. Appearances can be deceptive. The goal is to work out which really are improbable, and which merely appear to be improbable but are actually possible. Hence the need to know how many functional configurations there are.

The challenge is to show how specified-functional information can be generated by natural processes.

Hold it right there! Hazen is talking about “Functional Information”. You have added a “specified” in there. What is your objective definition of a “specification”. How can we objectively tell a valid specification from an invalid specification?

As Dr Dembski has found, introducing the concept of a “specification” is fraught with problems. As a simple example, if I use the specification: “A design for a working perpetual motion machine,” then I can easily show that there is no specified information anywhere in the universe.

rossum

 

[buffalo]

I wonder how many of those who chose ID and Creationism would be satisfied with there medical care today, if the only thing the doctor had to offer was lacking modernity? I’ll take antibiotics over blood letting, thanks.

This is a bogus argument.

 

[reggieM]

I wonder how many of those who chose ID and Creationism would be satisfied with there medical care today, if the only thing the doctor had to offer was lacking modernity? I’ll take antibiotics over blood letting, thanks.

I’ll take medical science by a Catholic doctor versus that of an abortionist – especially if I was an infant waiting to be born.

 

[Rock_Happy]

This is a bogus argument.

Really? Try life without modern antibiotics or antivirals, and no understanding of genetics of viral and bacterial mutation. How about moving cancer treatment back ten or more years? Let’s forget about treating many of the autoimmune diseases. OK? The list is too long to mention in this thread… You will not find a biologist who would not tell you that an understanding of evolution and natural selection is the foundation of biology as we know it today. Would your point be that medicine does not rely on the biological sciences as its foundation? Please inform us on how you would exclude the science of biology from the study and advance of the science and practice of medicine.

 

[Rock_Happy]

I’ll take medical science by a Catholic doctor versus that of an abortionist – especially if I was an infant waiting to be born.

No doubt, ethics is important in science and medicine. Understanding biology does not make you an abortionist. It is a minimum for understanding medicine. Every Catholic MD has a pretty good understanding of biology as it pertains to medicine. This means he or she also understands genetic mutation, and its importance to congenital conditions, and cellular mutation in cancer, and viral and bacterial growth and drug resistance, etc…

 

[reggieM]

Hold it right there! Hazen is talking about “Functional Information”. You have added a “specified” in there. What is your objective definition of a “specification”. How can we objectively tell a valid specification from an invalid specification?

I added the word “specified” because it’s essential in the proposed defintion. Function itself is a specification – that’s what separates Functional information from Shannon Information.

The information that has to encode a function is specified. It has to communicate certain instructions and not others. That’s what origin of life researchers are testing.

Szostak & Hazen explain …

Functional information, which we illustrate with letter sequences, artificial life, and biopolymers, thus represents the probability that an arbitrary configuration of a system will achieve a specific function to a specified degree.

Notice that they talk about “letter sequences”. So, this is not just a raw quantity of information, but rather “sequences” – and those are specified enough to produce a function.

This is not really the same as what Dembski was proposing – and Dembski’s research is proving to be very much more innovative and correct than his critics gave him credit for.

What Szostak and Hazen have changed is that the specificity of the information is related to the function it has to perform. The problem remains – how can natural processes create functional information? It is possible?

Here’s more from the paper (with my emphasis added):

The Functional Information of Letter Sequences.

Systems of many interacting components can occur in a combinatorially large number of different configurations. Functional information depends on the fraction of all possible configurations that achieve at least a specified degree of function. Sequences of letters provide a conceptually familiar example.

Consider various **sequences of n letters that convey the message: “A fire has just started in a house at the corner of Main Street and Maple Street.” **Many different sequences of letters are capable of conveying that information. To determine the functional information of any particular sequence we must specify three parameters:

n, the number of letters in the sequence.

Ex , the degree of function x of that sequence. In the case of the fire example cited above, Ex might represent the probability that a local fire department will understand and respond to the message (a value that might, in principle, be measured through statistical studies of the responses of many fire departments). Therefore, Ex is a measure (in this case from 0 to 1) of the effectiveness of the message in invoking a response.

M(Ex ), the total number of different letter sequences that will achieve the desired function, in this case, the threshold degree of response, ≥Ex .

The functional information, I(Ex ), for a system that achieves a degree of function, ≥Ex , for sequences of exactly n letters is therefore
Note that 26 n is the total number of possible arrangements of 26 letters in a sequence of n letters, and in this treatment we assign equal probability to all possible sequences. The important more general case of configurations of unequal probabilities is a straightforward extension of the treatment of Shannon (38, 39), as discussed by Carothers et al. (34). Greater clarity of expression can be added through additional characters such as “space,” “capital,” and “period”; however, in this example we use only 26 letters. As in all combinatorially large emergent systems, most sequences convey no information (i.e., have no discernable function). Functional information is determined by identifying the fraction of all sequences that achieve a specified outcome.

Notice the specified informaton here:

Consider, for example, sequences of 10 letters that have a high probability (Ex ≅ 1) of evoking a positive response from the fire department. Such sequences might include “FIREONMAIN,” “MAINSTFIRE,” or “MAPLENMAIN.” Additionally, some messages containing phonetic misspellings (FYRE or MANE), mistakes in grammar or usage (FIREOFMAIN), or typing errors (MAZLE or NAPLE) may also yield a significant but lower probability of response (0 ≪ Ex < 1). Given these variants, on the order of 1,000 combinations of 10 letters might initiate a rapid response to the approximate location of the fire.

Only specific combinations of letters will work.

 

[reggieM]

This means he or she also understands genetic mutation, and its importance to congenital conditions, and cellular mutation in cancer, and viral and bacterial growth and drug resistance, etc…

True, and much of what is discovered in that research contradicts and refutes the claims of Darwinian theory. They see mutations damaging cells, not creating new multicellular organisms. They see limits to what mutations can do – and basically pay no attention to the absurd claims of Darwinian speculations about the origin of man or the origin of the species.

 

[buffalo]

Really? Try life without modern antibiotics or antivirals, and no understanding of genetics of viral and bacterial mutation. How about moving cancer treatment back ten or more years? Let’s forget about treating many of the autoimmune diseases. OK? The list is too long to mention in this thread… You will not find a biologist who would not tell you that an understanding of evolution and natural selection is the foundation of biology as we know it today. Would your point be that medicine does not rely on the biological sciences as its foundation? Please inform us on how you would exclude the science of biology from the study and advance of the science and practice of medicine.

The bogus part is the claim that all this came about as a result of evolutionary theory.

Medicine mimics nature as well as trial and error.

 

[Rock_Happy]

True, and much of what is discovered in that research contradicts and refutes the claims of Darwinian theory. They see mutations damaging cells, not creating new multicellular organisms. They see limits to what mutations can do – and basically pay no attention to the absurd claims of Darwinian speculations about the origin of man or the origin of the species.

You must be kidding. The mountains of evidence directly contradict this claim. The whole point of evolution and natural selection is that it is the only explanation to date for the high functioning of organisms. But I am not going to debate you. It would be a bit like trying to convince someone that the Sun doesn’t rotate around the Earth.

 

[edwest2]

I find miseducation depressing. I’d be depressed if my son came home from school having been taught that the sun goes round the earth, or that astrology is a reliable way of judging an individual’s character or predicting the future.

I also think that the propagation of miseducation is bad for the world at large. There’s the very real possibility for those in power to make decisions, based upon their erroneous beliefs, that affect and even oppress the citizenship of the society they represent. If, for example, judgements of right and wrong are allowed to be made according to a religious book, rather than for good objective ethical reasons, then there’s something deeply wrong.

Luckily, in the case of religion, most Western countries have had the foresight to put in place a secular constitution, or something like it. But this is the absolute minimum requirement, and certainly doesn’t afford anything like the amount of protection from religiously-biased governmental policy that people deserve.

Thank you for your reply. It concerns me when scientists use their standing and credentials to argue their philosophy. Richard Dawkins is a good example. He uses the same ‘mountains of evidence’ to tell people watching on TV that God did not do this or that. There are no peer reviewed papers like “Scientific Analysis of Claims Made in the Book of Genesis in the Christian Bible.” Yet there are scientists out there who are using science to deny God.

All citizens vote their beliefs, whatever they may be. Catholics certainly do not want to force anyone to believe what we believe but we will propose our case. If you have read any Papal Encyclicals, the case is often made from natural law and Divine revelation.

Peace,
Ed

 

[reggieM]

The whole point of evolution and natural selection is that it is the only explanation to date for the high functioning of organisms. But I am not going to debate you. It would be a bit like trying to convince someone that the Sun doesn’t rotate around the Earth.

That’s pretty amazing to see. I sometimes think that there aren’t any more people left who still believe that natural selection and mutations are the only explanation to explain high functioning of organisms. Darwinian theory is falling apart – but you’re claiming it is as certain as the sun rotating the earth. Ok, people have their opinions on these matters.