Intelligent Design

[CHRISTINE77]

I think if a competent panel of judges were assembled, the unbiased evidence for certain assumptions would fail. If materialists could posit aliens or a multiverse are part of the answer, I think they would be comfortable with those claims, but couldn’t provide any credible evidence. The only truth being offered here are dogmatic materialist statements, followed by gentle, or not so gentle, admonitions, that materialist only forces created living things and religious/supernatural claims are nonsense. There is only one source of knowledge.

An old debate but one that will continue until all succumb… agree to the a priori assumptions.

Ed

very accurate assessment!

 

[edwest2]

Applying your own standards, why should we accept your dismissal of a scientific paper by you (an avowed atheist) on the superficial grounds that the paper is of no merit purely because the presenters are theists? Why should your atheism be the presumed neutral ground from which to dismiss “Creationist” papers without a proper reading merely because YOU (as an atheist with your own axe to grind) claim they were written by those who must necessarily be biased by their Creationist views? The knife cuts both ways, Bradski.

You see, this is where you are advantaged by their disadvantage since you can claim your atheism directly aligns with the disavowal of the supernatural by science. You can hide the bias of your atheism behind the scientific method at the same time as you go around discrediting theists for being biased by their theism.

That is why I claim the work of Axe, et al, ought to be judged on its own merit, just like any other scientific paper. We do not dismiss the work of atheists on the pretext that their work is biased by their atheism. Neither should we - unfairly, I might add - dismiss the work of theists merely because their work could be contaminated by their theistic views.

There ought to be a clear neutral ground. You seem to be claiming that ground is determinably the atheistic one merely because the method is constrained to naturalistic assumptions.

From my perspective you are using the scientific method as a cudgel to beat up on theists BEFORE they have the opportunity to defend their views using the method itself.

Pace, Al.

I don’t recall seeing any peer-reviewed papers online in respected journals that stated the religious status of the submitter(s). The data and conclusions should be reviewed in accordance to the method used to evaluate any paper.

Ed

 

[Bradski]

Applying your own standards, why should we accept your dismissal of a scientific paper by you (an avowed atheist) on the superficial grounds that the paper is of no merit purely because the presenters are theists?

Now that’s not my position, is it…

I’m not rejecting it because they are theists. That would indeed make me biased. It’s not like I reject scientific papers purely on the grounds that the author happens to believe in a god or two. I’ve read quite a lot of Talk Origins over the years and I can’t say for certain, but I probably read what Al has had to say on that site before I was a member here. The fact that I now know he is a Christian doesn’t make me question what he has written. I don’t now review those papers in the light of his theistic beliefs.

It isn’t Christians v Atheists in the great ID Debate. It’s people concerned with the direction fundamentalism might take us, especially in the area of education, versus those who wish to take us there. I’m not even sure that you want what they want. But you support them.

… YOU…claim they were written by those who must necessarily be biased by their Creationist views?

I do so claim. As would any reasonable person, whatever their personal beliefs.

 

[Charlemagne_III]

I’m not rejecting it because they are theists. That would indeed make me biased. It’s not like I reject scientific papers purely on the grounds that the author happens to believe in a god or two.

You reject ID because its advocates imply a god or two.

You have to do this because you are an atheist.

You are biased.

 

[Al_Moritz]

You reject ID because its advocates imply a god or two.

You have to do this because you are an atheist.

You are biased.

No, he rejects ID because it’s bad science/not science. And so do I.

If we’re biased towards good science, regardless of worldview, yeah call us guilty

 

[Al_Moritz]

It isn’t Christians v Atheists in the great ID Debate.

Exactly.

 

[edwest2]

Now that’s not my position, is it…

I’m not rejecting it because they are theists. That would indeed make me biased. It’s not like I reject scientific papers purely on the grounds that the author happens to believe in a god or two. I’ve read quite a lot of Talk Origins over the years and I can’t say for certain, but I probably read what Al has had to say on that site before I was a member here. The fact that I now know he is a Christian doesn’t make me question what he has written. I don’t now review those papers in the light of his theistic beliefs.

It isn’t Christians v Atheists in the great ID Debate. It’s people concerned with the direction fundamentalism might take us, especially in the area of education, versus those who wish to take us there. I’m not even sure that you want what they want. But you support them.

I do so claim. As would any reasonable person, whatever their personal beliefs.

It definitely is Christians v Atheists in the ID debate. Why else make it illegal? Why else make it so a college professor could be censured for even mentioning it? Darwin forbid that anyone might even consider it.

Why would the National Academy of Sciences even address science and religion?

nas.edu/evolution/Compatibility.html

The above link contains a document that says two different things at the same time.

What is fundamentalism and what does it have to do with the topic?

Ed

 

[Bradski]

You reject ID because its advocates imply a god or two. You have to do this because you are an atheist. You are biased.

We are all biased, Charles. We all have our preferences, our little foibles, our beliefs. We cannot live our lives in isolation from other views. We cannot help but be persuaded by others who write well, speak eloquently and who tell us that they have our best interests at heart. None of us are immune from this.

So we need honesty. We need to be on our guard against declarations of opinion that are given as fact. We need to know when there are conflicts of interest. We should give our trust to others grudgingly.

There aren’t many liars around these days, Charles. At least, not that you could call them as such. There’s too much information available at your fingertips. Long gone are the days when I could claim something without having to back it up with facts or as near to a fact as the internet now allows. So people bend the truth. They use euphemistic language. They prevaricate and obfuscate and slip in what they want to tell you inside of a whole lot of what you want to hear.

This is what the Design Institute does. If you support them you are supporting Christian fundamentalism. You are not supporting Christianity.

And hey, ID doesn’t advocate a God in any case. Didn’t you know…? Someone should have pointed that out. God is never, ever mentioned in the literature. It’s A Designer. So if you really do believe that I am rejecting God by rejecting ID, then you have to accept that ID’s designer is God. Are you telling me that the DI is, how shall I put this, bending the truth?

Now excuse me. There’s someone at the back door again…

 

[Al_Moritz]

We are all biased, Charles. We all have our preferences, our little foibles, our beliefs. We cannot live our lives in isolation from other views. We cannot help but be persuaded by others who write well, speak eloquently and who tell us that they have our best interests at heart. None of us are immune from this.

So we need honesty. We need to be on our guard against declarations of opinion that are given as fact. We need to know when there are conflicts of interest. We should give our trust to others grudgingly.

There aren’t many liars around these days, Charles. At least, not that you could call them as such. There’s too much information available at your fingertips. Long gone are the days when I could claim something without having to back it up with facts or as near to a fact as the internet now allows. So people bend the truth. They use euphemistic language. They prevaricate and obfuscate and slip in what they want to tell you inside of a whole lot of what you want to hear.

This is what the Design Institute does. If you support them you are supporting Christian fundamentalism. You are not supporting Christianity.

And hey, ID doesn’t advocate a God in any case. Didn’t you know…? Someone should have pointed that out. God is never, ever mentioned in the literature. It’s A Designer. So if you really do believe that I am rejecting God by rejecting ID, then you have to accept that ID’s designer is God. Are you telling me that the DI is, how shall I put this, bending the truth?

Now excuse me. There’s someone at the back door again…

I agree with you. But you are too nice. Yes, there are plain liars in the ID field:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=12451283&postcount=229

 

[buffalo]

No, he rejects ID because it’s bad science/not science. And so do I.

If we’re biased towards good science, regardless of worldview, yeah call us guilty

Design exists. Why not study it through science?

 

[edwest2]

Design exists. Why not study it through science?

I think design has been recognized but the issue is that it can never be called that. Say I find an obviously ancient device buried deep underground. It has parts that could not have occurred naturally, so it certainly did not make itself. Looking at DNA, the assumption must be that all the coding, and related functionality, which exceeds chance by a large number, must have occurred without any designer. It all came about by “natural” means. The end.

Ed

 

[Bradski]

…which exceeds chance by a large number…

If I have a pack of cards and turn one over in turn, the chances of me getting a sequence of hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades, each from deuce to Ace in sequence is factorial 52. That’s 1 chance in (wait for it):
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.

If there were millions of people on millions of planets circling millions of stars in millions of galaxies, all dealing a hand every second of every year, there hasn’t been enough time since the universe began to even begin to come close to dealing such a hand.

Now let’s say that getting a heart was beneficial in some way. And a deuce of hearts is the most beneficial. It confers some advantage that would be kept. This is what evolution does. It keeps the small advantage (just 1 in 52) by keeping the entity alive just long enough to pass on that beneficial deuce of hearts gene.

Let’s say it takes me 30 seconds to deal the cards. No luck first time so I keep dealing until I get that deuce. It will take me, on average, 26 deals until it makes an appearance as the first card. That’s 13 minutes. I put it to one side and deal again until I get the three of hearts. It takes me another 13 minutes. I have an even greater advantage. I keep going until I have a full sequence. And I’m gaining benefits with every card.

It doesn’t need to be a mathematical genius to work out that it takes me just over 11 hours to get that full sequence. Compare that to the number above and try to understand that that is how evolution works. It doesn’t start from scratch each time. It keeps the benefit, however small and builds on that.

Enough already about ‘exceeding chance’.

 

[rossum]

Design exists. Why not study it through science?

It is. Both archaeology and forensic science study design through science.

An archaeologist can tell a naturally formed rock from a designed/constructed stone tool.

Where is the ID list of tested designed objects? Here is Dr Dembski speaking in 2002:

Because of ID’s outstanding success at gaining a cultural hearing, the scientific research part of ID is now lagging behind. I want therefore next to lay out a series of recommendations for rectifying this imbalance.

1. Catalog of Fundamental Facts (CFF)
One of the marks of a disciplined science is that it possesses an easily accessible catalog of fundamental facts. Think of the magnificent star cluster catalogs in astrophysics. ID needs something like this. It would be enormously helpful if we had and could make publicly available a catalog of irreducibly complex biological objects or processes. The catalog should contain as complete a list as possible, organized more or less as a table, with very complete descriptions. Under the bacterial flagellum, for instance, the catalog would list: found in the following; involving these biochemical parts; requiring this level of energy; these substrates, etc. etc. The catalog should move from simple to profound examples of irreducible complexity (such as the mammalian visual system).

The criteria governing entries should be very strict and should be stated explicitly: such and such is IC if and only if fill-in-the-blank. The catalog should be widely distributed to the biological community. No mention of intelligent design, nothing about naturalism. Just a catalog of the fundamental facts as they are now known. Such a catalog would do more than any number of forums or debates to persuade biologists that Darwinism is in trouble and that ID is a live possibility. Right now most of them don’t even see that there is a problem. Irreducible complexity is for them not a problem urgently in need of resolution but a detail to be shelved indefinitely. Such a catalog would put an end to the current complacency.

– Source: Becoming a Disciplined Science, RAPID, 2002

ID has signally failed to follow Dr Dembski’s advice and produce such a catalog. As he, correctly, points out, producing such a catalog would, “put an end to the current complacency” on the other side.

ID is currently failed as science, even though it has been given good advice as to how to recover from that failure. To succeed as science, it needs to do the actual work of science.

rossum

 

[edwest2]

If I have a pack of cards and turn one over in turn, the chances of me getting a sequence of hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades, each from deuce to Ace in sequence is factorial 52. That’s 1 chance in (wait for it):
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.

If there were millions of people on millions of planets circling millions of stars in millions of galaxies, all dealing a hand every second of every year, there hasn’t been enough time since the universe began to even begin to come close to dealing such a hand.

Now let’s say that getting a heart was beneficial in some way. And a deuce of hearts is the most beneficial. It confers some advantage that would be kept. This is what evolution does. It keeps the small advantage (just 1 in 52) by keeping the entity alive just long enough to pass on that beneficial deuce of hearts gene.

Let’s say it takes me 30 seconds to deal the cards. No luck first time so I keep dealing until I get that deuce. It will take me, on average, 26 deals until it makes an appearance as the first card. That’s 13 minutes. I put it to one side and deal again until I get the three of hearts. It takes me another 13 minutes. I have an even greater advantage. I keep going until I have a full sequence. And I’m gaining benefits with every card.

It doesn’t need to be a mathematical genius to work out that it takes me just over 11 hours to get that full sequence. Compare that to the number above and try to understand that that is how evolution works. It doesn’t start from scratch each time. It keeps the benefit, however small and builds on that.

Enough already about ‘exceeding chance’.

I’ll keep it simple. There is no way to show, conclusively, that human beings were assembled that way or that the code used to allegedly modify humans beings from some ancient form to the form we possess today was conserved, bit by bit, toward any sort of goal. So human beings are just fortuitous accidents that render them an unremarkable end result of a process that did not have us in mind in the first place.

A few examples: A creature possesses a beneficial trait but dies before reproducing. Or the trait is passed on but the resulting offspring are killed by predators.

Ed

 

[Charlemagne_III]

It doesn’t need to be a mathematical genius to work out that it takes me just over 11 hours to get that full sequence. Compare that to the number above and try to understand that that is how evolution works. It doesn’t start from scratch each time. It keeps the benefit, however small and builds on that.

Enough already about ‘exceeding chance’.

It would be one thing to argue this with evolution, quite another to argue it with abiogenesis, which is not evolution. You have no way to show or prove that every step in abiogenesis was “keeping the benefit.” This is not science but pure guesswork built upon the notion that there is no One who designs, so how could abiogenesis have been intelligently designed. It had to happen by “keeping the benefit.” Begging the question even more so than Intelligent Design.

At least, as Dawkins admits, life does appear to be designed. That is not a negligible trait.

What proof do you have on the other side? Accidentally “keeping the benefit”?

 

[tonyrey]

…This is what the Design Institute does. If you support them you are supporting Christian fundamentalism. You are not supporting Christianity.

And hey, ID doesn’t advocate a God in any case. Didn’t you know…? Someone should have pointed that out. God is never, ever mentioned in the literature. It’s A Designer. So if you really do believe that I am rejecting God by rejecting ID, then you have to accept that ID’s designer is God. Are you telling me that the DI is, how shall I put this, bending the truth?

The Design argument was proposed by Plato and Aristotle thousands of years before the Design Institute existed. They were certainly not Fundamentalists. If belief in Design is unChristian St Thomas Aquinas was a heretic. Why then did the Catholic Church canonise him for his sanctity and magnificent contribution to Christian theology and philosophy?

There is an excellent article on Design online:

uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/thomas-nagel-vs-his-critics-has-neo-darwinian-evolution-failed-and-can-teleological-naturalism-take-its-place/

 

[tonyrey]

It would be one thing to argue this with evolution, quite another to argue it with abiogenesis, which is not evolution. You have no way to show or prove that every step in abiogenesis was “keeping the benefit.” This is not science but pure guesswork built upon the notion that there is no One who designs, so how could abiogenesis have been intelligently designed. It had to happen by “keeping the benefit.” Begging the question even more so than Intelligent Design.

At least, as Dawkins admits, life does appear to be designed. That is not a negligible trait.

What proof do you have on the other side? Accidentally “keeping the benefit”?

I like “Accidentally”. What are conclusions worth if they have such an unfortunate origin? uch:

 

[buffalo]

If I have a pack of cards and turn one over in turn, the chances of me getting a sequence of hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades, each from deuce to Ace in sequence is factorial 52. That’s 1 chance in (wait for it):
80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000.

If there were millions of people on millions of planets circling millions of stars in millions of galaxies, all dealing a hand every second of every year, there hasn’t been enough time since the universe began to even begin to come close to dealing such a hand.

Now let’s say that getting a heart was beneficial in some way. And a deuce of hearts is the most beneficial. It confers some advantage that would be kept. This is what evolution does. It keeps the small advantage (just 1 in 52) by keeping the entity alive just long enough to pass on that beneficial deuce of hearts gene.

Let’s say it takes me 30 seconds to deal the cards. No luck first time so I keep dealing until I get that deuce. It will take me, on average, 26 deals until it makes an appearance as the first card. That’s 13 minutes. I put it to one side and deal again until I get the three of hearts. It takes me another 13 minutes. I have an even greater advantage. I keep going until I have a full sequence. And I’m gaining benefits with every card.

It doesn’t need to be a mathematical genius to work out that it takes me just over 11 hours to get that full sequence. Compare that to the number above and try to understand that that is how evolution works. It doesn’t start from scratch each time. It keeps the benefit, however small and builds on that.

Enough already about ‘exceeding chance’.

The search space is much than for a deck of cards. I specify I would like the cards to be shuffled and to lay out ace through K by suit.

 

[Bradski]

I’ll keep it simple. There is no way to show, conclusively, that human beings were assembled that way or that the code used to allegedly modify humans beings from some ancient form to the form we possess today was conserved, bit by bit, toward any sort of goal.

There go the goalposts again. It really would be better to put them on some sort of track.

We have seen that something that you describe as impossible as it ‘exceeds chance by a large number’ can be reduced from a length of time that is literally unimaginable to a just few hours. Now your claim is that, oh well, it doesn’t work that anyway. Despite the fact that it has been proven to act just in that way.

So human beings are just fortuitous accidents that render them an unremarkable end result of a process that did not have us in mind in the first place.

Badda bing! Give that man a cee-gar!

A few examples: A creature possesses a beneficial trait but dies before reproducing. Or the trait is passed on but the resulting offspring are killed by predateors.

Wow. Evolution can be discounted because things die. That is one on the most inane comments I’ve read this year. And that is really saying something. A ten year old child would be able to demolish that proposal without using words longer than two syllables.

It would be one thing to argue this with evolution, quite another to argue it with abiogenesis, which is not evolution.

Brilliant, Charles. But at least I’m reasonably pleased you accept it is entirely valid for evolution. Please tell Ed.

You have no way to show or prove that every step in abiogenesis was “keeping the benefit.”

Indeed not. As someone recently said in this very thread – abiogenesis is not evolution.

What proof do you have on the other side? Accidentally “keeping the benefit”?

Do you have children, Charles? Do you notice any similarity between them and you? If you were a good runner, then the chances are that some of your children will also be able to run faster than the average child. Now if you are in the woods and a bear chases your kids and the kids of that guy down the road, who is really smart, but couldn’t run to save his life, which children would be more likely to survive?

Doesn’t the answer make any sense to you whatsoever?

 

[Bradski]

The search space is much than for a deck of cards. I specify I would like the cards to be shuffled and to lay out ace through K by suit.

Didn’t you read what I wrote? You can shuffle the cards any amount of times you’d like. If you can keep just one card at a time (and this is how the process of evolution works), you can reduce the chances of something happening from being nothing short of impossible given all the time that has ever existed to something I could do before the end of the day.

And we are looking for one specific card at a time. When the genetic advantage for a living organism could be anything at all. And it’s just me dealing the cards whereas we have every living thing on the planet that has ever lived doing this every time they reproduce. And I’m only doing it for a few hours whereas the actual process has been going on for millions upon million upon millions of years.

Surely, I mean surely, that must make you wonder.