What is Intelligent Design

[HagiaSophia]

What is intelligent design? Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent designer? To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory – creationism dressed up as science – its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point. As one Pennsylvania teacher observed: ‘‘The first question they will ask is: ‘Well, who’s the designer? Do you mean God?’’’

From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims – that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.

But if we can’t infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock’s tail or the human male’s nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

“…And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined. …”

nytimes.com/2005/02/20/magazine/20WWLN.html?

 

[Jodi]

Any mathmatician will tell you that life on this world is mathmatically impossible. It just couldn’t happen on its own. The chemical conditions to make just one peptide chain are exact and have to remain very stable. Man still hasn’t managed to reproduce many of them in very controled labarotory enviroments. I find the fact that 99% of animals and species die out aceptable. The mind of God in infinately creative and is very expresive in the sheer diversity of life presented for us. Intelligent design means that an intelligence designed what we enjoy. I like the idea. Evolution doesn’t really plug all of the holes that this earth presents. And as far as theory goes intelligent design has many evolutionary elements and natural selection available to it. I like the theory of god creating and nudging along creation. Like any well designed machine it goes on and on and on. With God watching, and helping it along.

God did not create our bodies in their present form. Our bodies are in a fallen state so they do not work as well as he originally intended. We get old , we die, we get sick.

As for poorly designed giraffs I wouldn’t say that the nerve is completely without use. Man himself thought the gray mass between its skull was unecissary for many years until modern medicine discovered its true function. I think that our knowledge of the sciences is so embrionic in form that we had better be carefull not to rush to judgement when we don’t understand the totality.

As a disclaimer, I am not a babtized catholic I am still learning allot so the views here may not be in total harmony with catholic teaching because I am still so ignorant.

 

[Steve_Andersen]

HagiaSophia:

What is intelligent design?

It is what is known as an “argument from incredulity”

Jodi:

Any mathmatician will tell you that life on this world is mathmatically impossible.

No mathematician would tell you that!

It may be improbable but hardly impossible

After all there is life on the planet so it can’t be impossible

Jodi:

It just couldn’t happen on its own. The chemical conditions to make just one peptide chain are exact and have to remain very stable. Man still hasn’t managed to reproduce many of them in very controled labarotory enviroments.

We’ve been making autocatalyzing, self replicating peptides in the lab for 10 years
look here

 

[jdnation]

Ah, the ol’ “hey look at how badly this works, you’re telling me God made this?” argument. There are lots of things we still don’t know about the human body, creationists never claimed to posess knowledge about every single thing. Anybody remember the circus concerning vestigial organs? Turned out many of them had a critically important use after all! Some we’d say are simply efficient design incorporations. For example male nipples may not have a known use, but are a part of embryonic development:

Human embryos are sexually dimorphic at first (i.e. contain characteristics of both sexes), because they all have basically the same genetic information, and this information is expressed as efficiently as possible as the embryo develops. This is design economy. For example, in all human embryos, at first both the müllerian duct system (female) and the wolffian duct system (male) develop, because both sexes have the genetic information for these structures. Incidentally, this refutes the urban myth that human embryos ‘start off female’. The subsequent differences are the result of designed chemical signals that control the expression of the information. E.g., a gene set usually found on the Y chromosome controls the levels of testosterone and dihydroxytestosterone (DHT) secretion. Above a certain level, these hormones suppress the development of the müllerian duct system and promote the wolffian duct system, so the embryo takes on masculine characteristics. Below a certain hormone level, the opposite happens, and the embryo takes on female characteristics.

Similarily most other ‘problems’ cited in this article (though I couldn’t read the rest because the site requires a subscription) have been addressed by creationists, just google it or use the site search engine if it has one. As well this like many other similar articles like it before it complain about a lot, but it would be great if they could offer a better biological design for reproduction, digestion, even the eye which was working quite well last time I checked…

Concerning the ID movement, I wouldn’t tie it in with Biblical Creationism. ID leaves evolution open and acceptable. Biclical creationists deny macro-evolution altogether. ID also leaves the question of which religion’s god created everything. Biblical Creationists are biased and promote the Biblical God and worldview. Oh, and by the way, Darwinism is also virtually impossible to test, for the past can’t be recreated, and any attempts to prove evolution by engineering it in a lab is laughable because human intelligence and technology is making something to occur which cannot be carried over into the natural world.

Now concerning mathematics, it IS impossible according to the odds, you’d only argue it’s only improbable based on the fact that we are, indeed… here, which is basically circular reasoning. And as for RNA, peptides etc. the issue is tackled here:
answersingenesis.org/tj/v11/i1/enzymes.asp

 

[philipmarus]

The liberal New York Times today carried the following article today on Intelligent Design

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
Unintelligent Design

**By JIM HOLT **

Published: February 20, 2005

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/dropcap/r.gifecently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth-grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent designer? To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory – creationism dressed up as science – its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point. As one Pennsylvania teacher observed: ‘‘The first question they will ask is: ‘Well, who’s the designer? Do you mean God?’’’

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifAdvertisement


From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims – that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.

But if we can’t infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock’s tail or the human male’s nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.

Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction?

The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases – cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis – the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless.

And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined.

 

[philipmarus]

<<<>>>>

It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait – benevolence or omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three. But what if the designer did not style each species individually? What if he/she/it merely fashioned the primal cell and then let evolution produce the rest, kinks and all? That is what the biologist and intelligent-design proponent Michael J. Behe has suggested. Behe says that the little protein machines in the cell are too sophisticated to have arisen by mutation – an opinion that his scientific peers overwhelmingly do not share. Whether or not he is correct, his version of intelligent design implies a curious sort of designer, one who seeded the earth with elaborately contrived protein structures and then absconded, leaving the rest to blind chance.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/spacer.gifAdvertisement

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
One beauty of Darwinism is the intellectual freedom it allows. As the arch-evolutionist Richard Dawkins has observed, ‘‘Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.’’ But Darwinism permits you to be an intellectually fulfilled theist, too. That is why Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been ‘‘proven true’’ and that ‘‘truth cannot contradict truth.’’ If God created the universe wholesale rather than retail – endowing it from the start with an evolutionary algorithm that progressively teased complexity out of chaos – then imperfections in nature would be a necessary part of a beautiful process.

Of course proponents of intelligent design are careful not to use the G-word, because, as they claim, theirs is not a religiously based theory. So biology students can be forgiven for wondering whether the mysterious designer they’re told about might not be the biblical God after all, but rather some very advanced yet mischievous or blundering intelligence – extraterrestrial scientists, say. The important thing, as the Pennsylvania school administrator reminded them, is ‘‘to keep an open mind.’’

 

[philipmarus]

I read that article in the NYT this morning. It bothered me all day. I find two things most disturbing.

1. The willingness of critics of Intelligent Design to extend their attacks beyond ID and to attack the christian idea of
   Original sin directly. The article writes:

“Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined”

• I’ve seen this same argument used by those trying to justify contraception and abortion as morally acceptable. I myself find small imperfections in the design possible evidence that further demonstrate the reality of original sin.

1. The attempt to draft Pope John Paul to support the authors views. I have heard that these short quotes are taken out of context but I have been unable to find the complete text of the Pope’s remark’s to read them in context. I myself am a little suspicious when the writer only quotes two or three single words of the Pope without even giving us the complete sentence in which they were said. Nevertheless, whatever the context the Pope’s remarks, I think there is a problem when scientific materialists don’t simply confine themselves to their area of expertise and try to practice theology as the above quote demonstrates. There is an agenda here that involves more than simply vindicating evolution over ID objections.

 

[HagiaSophia]

philipmarus:

I read that article in the NYT this morning. It bothered me all day. I find two things most disturbing.

1. The willingness of critics of Intelligent Design to extend their attacks beyond ID and to attack the christian idea of
   Original sin directly.

When someone from a secular scientific background is writing I think one must be prepared to understand that they are questioning rather than attacking - it’s simply their POV - and partially because we live in an age where the true God has been replaced for many with “scientism” as the new religion of men.

philipmarus:

1. The attempt to draft Pope John Paul to support the authors views. I have heard that these short quotes are taken out of context but I have been unable to find the complete text of the Pope’s remark’s to read them in context. I myself am a little suspicious when the writer only quotes two or three single words of the Pope without even giving us the complete sentence in which they were said. Nevertheless, whatever the context the Pope’s remarks, I think there is a problem when scientific materialists don’t simply confine themselves to their area of expertise and try to practice theology as the above quote demonstrates. There is an agenda here that involves more than simply vindicating evolution over ID objections.

Check out this thread and there are quotes in it which I think you will find helpful:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=41439

However I am still puzzling myself over a response in it which says the pope allows belief in evolution because he is ecumenical - still scratching my head over that one.

 

[Catholic2003]

One interesting aspect of Intelligent Design is that it only attacks the mechanism of evolution through random mutation and natural selection, and argues that that mechanism cannot be based on random processes having a particular probability distribution. Nothing in Intelligent Design contradicts the theory of universal common descent, i.e., that all life on Earth is descended from a common ancestor.

 

[john_doran]

Steve Andersen:

It is what is known as an “argument from incredulity”

all arguments are ultimately arguments from incredulity, since they are all based on our being incredulous that sound and deductively valid arguments could be false.
Steve Andersen:

We’ve been making autocatalyzing, self replicating peptides in the lab for 10 years

but that’s precisely the point: we’ve been making them…

who was around to make them 3 billion years ago?

 

[hecd2]

ID is a scientifically and intellectually bankrupt movement, religiously motivated and unashamedly political in its objectives. Its roots lie in the newly-minted religious opinions of a law professor, Phillip Johnson, who still represents the figurehead for the movement, a man whose zeal arises from his conversion as an adult, and who lacks any scientific credentials. In the words of Barbara Forrest and Paul Gross, whose excellent book ‘Creationism’s Trojan Horse’ is a thorough expose of ID, and its ambition, methods and failings: ‘ID, by now quite familiar among scientifically qualified and religiously neutral observers as the recycled, old-fashioned creationism it is, drapes its religious skeleton in the fancy-dress language of modern science, albeit without having contributed to science, at least so far, any data or any testable theoretical notions.’

The scientific and intellectual integrity of ID has failed at every turn. Its most promising ideas, Behe’s Irreducible Complexity and Dembski’s Design Inference have been thoroughly debunked. They claim the imminent demise of neo-Darwinism at a time when every discovery in biology and palaeontology adds richness and weight to the Theory of Evolution. They constantly fail to provide alternative explanations for the empirical data, new and old, that Evolutionary Biology triumphantly explains. The proponents of ID, whilst smarting at these reversals, are not defeated, because their agenda is not scientific or intellectual, but political, and so long as they can create enough of an apparent scientific controversy through their pretension to scientific thinking to fool the scientifically naive and to manipulate the media and politicians, they are satisfied. They have no intellectual ambition beyond the destruction of a science that is an affront to their religious sensitivities.

The fact is that, underneath the undeniably slick skin in which ID presents itself to the public and the media, there lurks a rotten body of thinking. ID has no more substance than the politically naive Young Earth Creationism that it has replaced in the forefront of anti-evolution propaganda. It contributes nothing to our body of knowledge, either empirically (it carries out no experimentation) or hypothetically (resting as it does on nothing other than William Paley’s long-refuted 18th century argument from design, and on gross Creationism); on the contrary its anti-science and anti-Enlightenment arguments promote mumbo-jumbo and magic at a time when competent scientific thinking is critical to the future of humanity.

A recent leading article in Nature, the world’s premier science journal, is about the relationship between science and religion (an introduction to a news feature on the subject). It is a wise and thoughtful editorial, which rightly supports the idea that scientists should not be the final arbiters of what science should be done when ethical and moral issues are at stake. Not all things that can be done should be done, and the editor acknowledges the role of religious and secular ethicists in forming society’s views on what science should be permitted to do. Nevertheless the editor, like me, is contemptuous of ID: “Consider the political battles over the teaching of ‘creationism’ and ‘intelligent design’ in schools – an attempt by some religious people to foist their beliefs, masquerading as science, on others.”

Alec
evolutionpages.com

To be continued…

 

[hecd2]

Continued…

It is a key tactic of the Intelligent Design political movement to promote the belief that ID is scientific (in fact the IDers suggest the outrageous and insulting - to scientists - idea that ID is more scientific than the science of professional biologists.)

In fact, ID is no more scientific than astrology or a belief in the literal existence of Santa Claus. There is, in fact, no such thing as an ID theory (in science the term ‘theory’ refers to a detailed coherent explanation for a complex interlocking set of phenomena). I read the primary literature of science every week. Every week there are dozens of papers that rely on the Theory of Evolution for an explanation of a wide range of biological phenomena. It is quite plain to anyone who reads and understands the primary literature that Theodosius Dobzhansky’s (a devout theist, by the way) statement is as true today as when he first composed it 40 years ago: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of Evolution.’

Let us look at what ID has to offer. First, let us note that ID offers no hypothesis other than the preordained hypothesis that the existence, diversity and complexity of life on earth requires the direct intervention of an external Intelligence. That is it. There is no more to ID than that unhelpful idea. Contrast that with the detailed biological Theory of Evolution, that combines zoology, botany, ecology, palaeontology, genetics, genomics, protein science, developmental biology,geology and so forth in a great interlocking and explanatory net, that is self consistent, illuminating and predictive. For example, when I look at protein synthesis in different organisms and the phylogentic structure of 5s, 5.8s, 16s, 18s, 23s and 28s ribosomes, evolution gives me a sensible context for the evolution of different ribosomal structures - ID gives me no insight whatsoever. ID’s hypothesis is simply that an Intelligence ‘did it’ (actually the underlying movement wants to promote the idea that a Deity ‘did it’ by direct intervention, but, dishonestly and for reasons of public relations ID shies away from explicitly identifying the Intelligent Designer with a miraculously intervening God.)

ID proponents spend all their time and effort creating hypothetical (and empirically and logically unsupported) criticisms of biological science. They do NO research of their own. They add nothing to the sum of human knowledge. They are, fundamentally, intellectual parasites.

I illustrate below the barren intellectual landscape that would result from a broad acceptance of ID’s dumbed-down hypothesis that masquerades as science. Let’s say we accept ID’s proposition, well, what then? What follows? What predictions can we make? What insight can we throw on the relatedness and nested hierarchy of species? If we think that all species are the result of special creation then we condemn biological science to return to the 17th century and the mere description and cataloguing of forms; we deny biological science its true legacy which is to explain how life, and the diversity and complexity of life on earth, arose through natural processes. Indeed, once we accept divine intervention as an explanation for an important phenomenon, we destroy science utterly. How is that? Well, once we accept one miraculous set of explanations, we are impotent to postulate natural explanations for hitherto unexplained phenomena. If miraculous intervention is once accepted in science then, logically, it must always be an acceptable hypothesis, and since we have no way of distinguishing between natural processes and miracles, then science would be fatally undermined. This consideration leads all real scientists, whatever their theological beliefs, to be methodological atheists when doing science. It is the only way for science to work. An acceptance of ID would fatally undermine all science. I can think of of no more dangerous and undesirable undertaking.

To be continued…%between%

 

[hecd2]

Continued…

But ID is also appallingly bad theology. How is that? Well, it seems to me that if you believe in God, you would also beliieve that God is connected with, influences, wills into being moment to moment the entire universe. But ID attempts to draw a line between what they call naturalism and their theistic explanations. In practice, what that means, is that IDers are happy to surrender to natural science scientific explanations that have strong empirical support, and seek to reserve to themselves phenomena that cannot, as yet, be fully explained. The intellectual posture of ID is basically the argument from personal incredulity - IDers say: ‘I cannot personally understand how, say, the bacterial flagellum could have evolved, so, an Intelligent Designer must have done it.’ So IDers accept scientfic explanations for phenomena that HAVE explanations, and claim that phenomena that currently lack detailed explnations must have been directly caused by God. (Since the time when the bacterial flagellum was first used as an example of ‘irreducible complexity’, considerable progress has been made in explainig its evolutionary roots and pathways - in fact, ‘irreducible complexity’, a major plank of ID, has been utterly discredited as an intellectual concept.)

This is also terrible theology, because it limits God’s actions to those areas of the Universe in which there are gaps in our scientific knowledge. The problem for such an approach is that our scientific knowledge continues to expand, and expand rapidly. The gaps are getting narrower and narrower. This approach condemns the concept of God to a process of constant diminishment as the areas for God’s action, defined by ID as those thngs that we cannot explain scientifically for the moment, become smaller and smaller.

So, not only is ID an insult to science, and it is also a theological disaster. ID and science are utterly imiscible. There is no reconciliation possible between them.

Alec
evolutionpages.com

 

[Tallow]

HagiaSophia:

From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test.

I’m not so sure about that. Intelligent design is a body of observations that seems to have gotten mixed up in peoples’ minds with Creationism. That’s both unfair and inaccurate.

As I understand it, a bunch of physicists beginning several decades ago began noticing some oddities about the way their picture of the universe was developing. That’s what physicists do–you know, they watch Jeopardy and then they sit at the kitchen table and doodle with their calculators, asking themselves stuff like, “What would happen if…?” Several of them noticed, for example, that if the gravitational constant were ever so slightly different in value, that the galaxies and stars would not have formed. Very odd. There’s virtually no tolerance for that value being any different than what it is. Then they noticed that the same sort of thing appeared to be true for the “strong force” in the atom, and the electromagnetic force. Then someone noticed that if the thermodynamic properties of water were not precisely what they are–and they are exceedingly odd–that life would not have been possible on earth.

It goes on and on. One weird coincidence after another. Only comparatively recently has it been discovered that undreamed-of complexity exists in the cellular and bio-molecular world. The whole thing developed in a way that really had nothing to do with Creationism and was very much rooted in pure science.

But to return to the issue, all of these things are emimently testable and veriviable. Unlike Darwinism, I might add, which has been credibly referred to as a collection of ingenious “just-so stories.”

 

[buffalo]

ID is in its infancy. It is trying to develop methodology to test its ideas. No harm in that is there? If it tanks so be it. But if it gains ground watch out.

 

[Brad]

The article makes the typical flawed assumption regarding knowledge.

That assumption is this:

If we can’t test it, it’s not science.
If it’s not science, it’s not true.

By ignoring divine revelation, the source of knowledge is ignored.

Darwininsm can be tested but it has never been proven.

So, we are to base all our knowledge about metaphysics on something we can test but not prove and not base any of our knowledge about metaphysics on something that makes an equally strong case for truth but can’t be tested because we aren’t smart enough.

Why don’t we just ignore gravity and jump off buildings because we don’t know exactly how it works (for example, we cannot turn gravity off or reverse it’s direction).

The ID theory assumes the designer is more intelligent than the created. So, any assessment of giraffes or the reproductive system as being unintelligent is paradoxical because it ignores the fact that we do not have all knowledge. I think this is clearly demonstrated in taking on the reproductive system as something “unintelligent”. The author is a product of this “unintelligent” reproductive system and therefore must also be “unintelligent” and incapable of making an intelligent assessment of the reproductive system.

 

[philipmarus]

hecd2:

Continued…

But ID attempts to draw a line between what they call naturalism and their theistic explanations. In practice, what that means, is that IDers are happy to surrender to natural science scientific explanations that have strong empirical support, and seek to reserve to themselves phenomena that cannot, as yet, be fully explained. The intellectual posture of ID is basically the argument from personal incredulity - IDers say: ‘I cannot personally understand how, say, the bacterial flagellum could have evolved, so, an Intelligent Designer must have done it.’ So IDers accept scientfic explanations for phenomena that HAVE explanations, and claim that phenomena that currently lack detailed explnations must have been directly caused by God. (Since the time when the bacterial flagellum was first used as an example of ‘irreducible complexity’, considerable progress has been made in explainig its evolutionary roots and pathways - in fact, ‘irreducible complexity’, a major plank of ID, has been utterly discredited as an intellectual concept.)

So essentially you’re asking me to accept certain parts of the theory of evolution that you are presently unable to prove on faith?

 

[HagiaSophia]

Intelligent design is the theory that the universe follows a precise, purposeful blueprint that is not fully explained by evolution, and that perhaps is the work of a divine draftsman. On March 1, Sir John Polkinghorne, a physicist and Anglican priest who believes in both evolution and God, is to talk at a private dinner/discussion at the CfA on Garden Street.

Given that in some parts of the country, religious believers are using intelligent design as a battering ram against the teaching of evolution in schools, some CfA scientists worry that this is a dangerous topic to broach. Others fear that by mentioning ''Smithsonian" on the invitation, the organizers might have left the inaccurate impression that the center is sponsoring the event.

''The announcement seems to imply that the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is in some way hosting this event, which is not true, and which is not appropriate for a federal organization," astronomer Lee Hartmann, who is traveling abroad, said by e-mail. The CfA is a collaboration between the Smithsonian and Harvard observatories.

But Owen Gingerich, another astronomer who is chairman of the Polkinghorne event, said the dispute is a supernova in a teapot.

boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/02/19/signs_of_intelligent_design_emerging/

 

[jdnation]

One ought to wonder what evolutionists are so afraid of about the ID movement. It’s just as valid an assumption as their own speculations and doesn’t necessarily deny evolution, though it opens the question that if there is the possibility of a God then why not 6 days? Please keep in mind that the ID movement is not trying to dismiss evolution and keep evolution from being taught, simply to have a place beside it for those who wish to consider it and study it. Just another direction. The only reason evolutionists seem to be worried is because macro-evolution has become unchangable dogma, something undesirable in Science, just as creationists hold to the dogma of 6 days of creation. All evidence is interpreted to suit the paradigm and hammer the square peg into the circle if they must. Naturalistic evolution, theistic evolution and creationism are all part of something called ‘Origins Science’ built upon an initial philosophy. Depending on which philosophy you adhere to, the evidence is interpreted and suits the starting version of ‘truth’ these are all religious in nature and therefore undisprovable. One will have to examine each model and worldview in light for what they really are and decide for themselves.

 

[ISABUS]

A Mouse Story

A mouse looked through a crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife opening a package. What food might it contain?

He was devastated to discover that it was a mousetrap.

Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed a warning:
"There’s a mouse trap in the house! There’s a mouse trap in the house! There is a mouse trap in the house!

The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, “Mr. Mouse, I can tell this is a grave concern for you, but it is of no consequence to me. I cannot be bothered by it.”

The mouse turned to the pig and hold him, “There is a mouse trap in the house.”

The pig sympathized but said, “I am so very sorry Mr. Mouse, but there is nothing I can do about it but pray. Be assured that you are in my prayers.”

The mouse turned to the cow. She said, “Wow, Mr. Mouse. I’m sorry for you, but it’s no skin off my nose.”

So the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected, to face the farmer’s mousetrap alone.

That very night a sound was heard throughout the house, like the sound of a mousetrap catching its prey.

The farmers wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see that it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer’s wife.

The farmer rushed her to the hospital. She returned home with a fever. Now everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient.

But the farmer’s wife continued to decline, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.

The farmer’s wife did not get well. She died. And so many people came for her funeral the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide meat for them all.

So… the next time you hear that someone is facing a problem and think that it doesn’t concern you, remember that when the least of us is threatened, we are all at risk.

Author unknown

[Can you figure out why the above story disproves Behe’s ‘MOUSE TRAP’? ]