Intelligent Design - another failure

[Beleg_Strongbow]

proof? of what, the bias? off topicness? use your noodle, the tiny gray one beside your name will do.

You made a claim, please support it.

 

[mythbuster]

Being picked up by Buddhists? Do you have any statistics for this? Buddhism is about the last place I would expect ID to go.

No functions of random variables to back this up.
William Dembski said that he was speaking to Buddists and Moslems.
ID theory has nothing to say about a designer(s). It is minimalist. You look at some object or objects and determine intelligent design. That is all.

 

[larry lunchpail]

proofs are for scientists, and/or people with time to amuse people of your ilk, im an artist, i can go around making all the outrageous unsubstantiated claims that i wish. in addition to my own general apathy, the fact that you took that site at face value without investigatings its claims on your own (hey if its online its gotta be true) leads me to believe that youre immune to proofs anyhow. theres some logic for ya, thatll hafta suffice.

"prove this, prove that wah, wah, wah" hahahaha dude you know what i said was true, youre just trying to get me to do your homework, so to speak.

 

[Beleg_Strongbow]

proofs are for scientists, and/or people with time to amuse people of your ilk, im an artist, i can go around making all the outrageous unsubstantiated claims that i wish. in addition to my own general apathy, the fact that you took that site at face value without investigatings its claims on your own (hey if its online its gotta be true) leads me to believe that youre immune to proofs anyhow. theres some logic for ya, thatll hafta suffice.

You are joking, right?

As for the validity of that site, I know the guy who made it. He posts on Internet Infidels under the name Oolon Colluphid, and many of the entries on his site are suggested to him by people on the boards. All are researched by many people before they are added.

As for you, if you're going to continue like this, I'm just going to ignore you.

 

[ForeRunner]

No functions of random variables to back this up.

Oh, I see how this works. You make a statement and it is up to the other person to show that you are wrong. In that case... ID is not making inroads in Buddhism, prove me wrong.

William Dembski said that he was speaking to Buddists and Moslems.

That doesn't mean they believe him. Besides, a few people of a particular group believing something doesn't mean that it is being intgrated into the teachings.

ID theory has nothing to say about a designer(s).

Sure it does, It says that there has to be one. Buddhists don't believe in a god (Theravada at least).

It is minimalist.

Nonsense is a better adjective.

You look at some object or objects and determine intelligent design. That is all.

Luckily nothing natural has been found that requires a designer.

 

[The Bellman]

ID theory has nothing to say about a designer(s). It is minimalist. You look at some object or objects and determine intelligent design. That is all.

No, you look at some object and state "intelligent design!" without any form of support whatsoever.

 

[Physics_guy]

The basic problem with ID is that no IDer has ever figured out a way to tell what is intelligently designed and that which is not designed. There is no test for it - despite Dembski's claims. Until he can make a significantly succinct definition of what is and what is not designed, he is no better than Paley. The problem with philosophers like Dembski is that they believe a lot of complex words can be substituted for real tests.

 

[Physics_guy]

You look at some object or objects and determine intelligent design.

Umm - how? Please show me a test that can be used to determine whether something is designed by and intelligence versus something "designed" by natural processes. No IDist has ever developed a sufficiently rigorous test yet.

 

[mythbuster]

Intelligent design makes no claim about the designer. Some designed objects are irreducibly complicated. Those that have this type of complexity point to a designer. This is not a proof, but an idea, or another way of looking at the world around us especially biology.

 

[Jimmy The Hand]

Some designed objects are irreducibly complicated

Name 'em

 

[Light in the Darkness]

Some designed objects are irreducibly complicated.

That's nice. Got any examples of an "irreducibly complicated" object?

 

[Western Deity]

That's nice. Got any examples of an "irreducibly complicated" object?

Oh pick me!! Eye do!! Eye do!!

 

[mythbuster]

That's nice. Got any examples of an "irreducibly complicated" object?

Sure. My car engine.

 

[Jimmy The Hand]

I was hoping for the US Tax System as answer.

It's the closest I've seen.

Just ask Kent Hovind. I've heard he is a big fan of the I.R.S. being too complex for common man to comprehend.

 

[ThePhoenix]

The IRS is an amazing organization, given the immensely wierd tax code handed down to them by congress. It wasn't the IRS who decided to make 17000000 exceptions to each tax bill to appease special interests.

 

[The Bellman]

As always, no examples of an "irreducibly complex" organism.

 

[lucaspa]

While it is a 'theory' in the general meaning of the word, it is not a scientific theory, because it:

- does not explain any facts or phenomena,
- has not been tested,
- is not widely accepted, and
- cannot be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.

We did this in another thread. ID is a scientific theory. It attempts all of the above. That is, ID makes testable statements about the physical universe. It is just that, when those statements are tested, they are shown to be false. Thus, ID joins YEC in the ranks of falsified theories.

Somehow the definition of "theory" has gotten skewed to mean valid theory. But valid theories are only a subset of theories. A theory doesn't stop being a theory when it is falsified. Geocentrism didn't stop being a theory. Neither did aether or proteins are hereditary material when they were falsified. They simply moved from the short list of currently valid theories to the much longer list of falsified ones.

However, since it claims to stand upon scientific, rather than religious grounds, it can and should be refuted on those same purely scientific grounds. Fortunately, this is rather easy to do:

See? ID is a scientific theory and you are showing how it is falsified.

- ID claims that because evolutionary theory cannot explain the origin of (some) organisms, they were therefore created by an intelligent designer. Even granting (for the purposes of argument) that evolutionary theory cannot explain the origin of some organisms, this does not take into account the possibility that advances in evolutionary theory or other sciences will discover a natural method by which these organisms could have come into existence.

This isn't quite accurate. What ID claims is that it is impossible for natural selection to account for either organisms or parts of organisms. Corollary to that is that these parts or organisms have to be directly manufactured in one piece. This claim has been falsified.

- ID is self-fulfilling.

This is hardly a scientific refutation that you promised. However, what ID has to do is falsify all other mechanism we can think of to account for the entity. However, that is what we do when we conclude that some rocks were not formed naturally but were manufactured by humans. And once that falsification is done, we do indeed stop looking for "naturalistic" causes. So this is hardly a valid point.

- ID is limiting. If ID were the governing paradigm, humanity would never have discovered anything about the natural world. Every phenomena for which there was not an instantly available natural explanation (such as rain) would have been labelled "too complex to happen via naturalistic causes" (since our knowledge of natural causes was extremely limited) and, therefore, intelligently designed. Research into those naturalistic causes would never have taken place.

True but again, not a refutation of the theory. Rather, a philosophical objection. I have the same objection to militant atheists who want to shut down research into intercessory prayer and near death experiences, for the same reasons -- it shuts down scientific inquiry because you aren't going to like the results. This is an objection applied to the imposition of any philosophical belief about ultimate reality on science.

- ID cannot propose any objective criteria for what is "too complex to have happened via naturalistic causes".

So far, they haven't. Altho Dembski has tried ... and failed. So, it's not that they can't propose the criteria, but that the criteria haven't been successful. That failure is a refutation of the theory.

In the end, their claims always come down to "I think that organism is too complex...therefore, it was created by an intelligent designer." There is - and can be - no objective criteria.

The reason IDers fail is because they look only at the object. In reality, when we decide that an entity is manufactured by an intelligence, we look at both the entity and the environment. Only if there is no process in the environment that can produce the entity do we conclude it is manufactured. For plants and animals, there is a process that will produce the entities: natural selection. Which is why so much of ID is taken up with trying to find parts of biological organisms that can't be explained by natural selection.

Apart from the above scientific reasons, ID is also rather bad theologically. It uses the "god of the gaps" argument..."god exists because of these phenomena which we cannot explain without postulating a god." As soon as, through scientific advances, we CAN explain the phenomena in question, another reason to believe in god's existence ceases to be. The "god of the gaps" has long been recognised to be bad theology.

Very good. Something the Christians here should keep in mind before they jump on the ID bandwagon. However, notice that gotg is used not for science, but as a weapon against atheism. ID is really in the theism vs atheism fight.

 

[lucaspa]

Sure. My car engine.

Sorry, but no. For instance, you don't need your fuel injector system; there is a simpler system that will do it. Your car engine also doesn't need the spark plugs -- diesel engines don't use them.

We can go on and on.

Besides, I'll leave you with a thought from Michael Behe, the inventor of the concept of IC. IC systems can form by chance. Once that happens, you can't use them as criteria for a designer!

"Let me inject a note of caution: some systems require several pieces but not ones that need to be closely matched. For example, suppose you were walking in the woods and came across an old log, where the wind had blown a tree branch onto it, and the branch was perpendicular to the log. Here you have an irreducibly complex system -- a lever and a fulcrum. If there were a boulder nearby, you possibly could use the lever and fulcrum to move it. So some systems require several parts but not closely matched ones." Michael Behe, Intelligent design theory as a tool for analyzing biochemical systems in Mere Creation, Science, Faith, and Intelligent Design edited by William A. Dembski, 1998, page 179

Notice that, once you have an IC system by chance, even Behe's strawman version of natural selection will make that system as complex as you can imagine! So, Behe just destroyed IC as a means of guaranteeing the existence of an Intelligent Designer!

Pretty cool, huh?

 

[mythbuster]

Lets use my motorcycle engine (since you did not like my car) , fewer cylinders, same principle.

And lets say to function we need a crank, piston, rods, cylinder, bearings, valves and so on. Maybe 20-30 specific parts, or whatever minimum such that absent any one part and the motor will not work.

It is clear that the crank is worthless by itself, is very specified, and was assembled in a specific order. All the functioning parts together point to design.

But I would like to ask the question. For you, what is the design limit of natural selection? Is there any level of engineering sophistication beyond which you would rule out RM&NS doing all the work?

 

[Jet Black]

machines are a bit of a strawman analogy anyway since one always thinks of how the machine would work in totality. Nature doesn't work like that. Take the flagellum, carious parts of the flagellum did completely different things before they eventually got together to act as a propulsion device.

In some ways though, machines are like that, but you have to think a little more abstractly; the internal combustion engine was an amalgamation of a whole host of technologies from thermodynamics through to metal work, that were originally used for entirely different purposes. Steam was originally used for firing things, engines were originally used for pulling coal out of mines and so on - so intelligent design isn't really as clear cut as it seems, we simply just have the amalgamation of many varied technologies, just like how in evolution we have the amalgamation of various solutions to problems, which later lead us to something completely novel. The guy who first melted a bit of metal by chucking some ore in a fire did not do so with the aim of his far ancestors making a ferrari.

hmm... maybe I should collect my thoughts more clearly and write an essay on why intelligently designed things aren't really intelligently designed.