your views on the Intelligent Design Movement?

[jtippell]

Hi

i've been reading a little on this topic, heres a primer:



in a sentence:

What then is Intelligent Design? Intelligent Design begins with the observation that intelligent causes can do things which undirected natural causes cannot. Undirected natural causes can place scrabble pieces on a board, but cannot arrange the pieces as meaningful words or sentences. To obtain a meaningful arrangement requires an intelligent cause. This intuition, that there is a fundamental distinction between undirected natural causes on the one hand and intelligent causes on the other, has underlain the design arguments of past centuries.

i have a view on this, but would like your input first.

oh and please: if you have something non constructive, then please don't click that "reply" button

cheers

j

 

[jtippell]

sorry, can't post the primer until i have 15 posts, but copy and paste that text into google and you will get the rest of the article

 

[toff]

Hi

i've been reading a little on this topic, heres a primer:



in a sentence:



i have a view on this, but would like your input first.

oh and please: if you have something non constructive, then please don't click that "reply" button

cheers

j

ID is just another attempt to get scientific acceptance for creationism. It fails inherently because there is no way we can tell what is "intelligently" designed. It ALWAYS comes back to "well, *I* can't believe such a thing could have arisen naturally" - which is not a basis for a science.

 

[Jet Black]

http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.08.Encyc_of_Relig.htm

I assume this is the link.

of course it is fundamentally flawed and is essentially god-of-the-gaps theology. I might type some more tomorrow unless it gets torn down by others first. One major failing is that ID forgets that we already have a method for getting design and complexity without intelligence; Evolution.

 

[Arikay]

My response to that is that there are many natural causes that are "dirrected". Like evolution, or snowflake creation, or chemical reactions, etc.

 

[Bushido216]

Hi

i've been reading a little on this topic, heres a primer:



in a sentence:



i have a view on this, but would like your input first.

oh and please: if you have something non constructive, then please don't click that "reply" button

cheers

j

ID is a waste of valuable paper, honestly. It's lots of fluff with a little 'IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY!!!111ONE' tossed in.

 

[jtippell]

this is what i expected.

i am aware that i may have "extreme" beliefs (pro string, pro anthorpic principle, pro ekpyroptic, pro possibilty of a multiverse "creator", minus intelligence, minus freewill, minus god interactive with humans), but:

it seems to me that the human mind has a very general purpose brain. it seems to me that the "intellingent" actions that we carry out are simply an extrapolation of the mundane tasks in which we do not differ from animals.

Interesting point: young children often get the letters "p," "b," "q" and "d" mixed up. This is evidence for a hypothesis that our brain has evolved to recognise objects from any viewpoint. From different viewpoints, each of these letters can look identical. Now would you say that simply "viewing" an environment is an intelligent task? Does it not simply look as thuogh we have evolved the ability to manipulate language simply from the ability to view an environment visually?

Cheers

j

 

[danaman5]

Intelligent design seems to be a purely subjective idea. As has been said, the movement basically says that since its proponents can't visualize something being made step by step and being useful every step of the way, that something was designed as is by God. No real scientific backing there at all.

 

[Loudmouth]

The ID movement seems to be lead by creationists who have realized that the evidence for evolution is indeed very strong. Most agree that common ancestry is well supported and probably accurate. However, hanging on to their creationist roots, they have found a few gaps that evolution has left for them to insert supernatural causes. As others have said, ID theory is often no more than "I can't believe it." Or even worse, an appeal to emotion, such as "Although we share ancestry with apes, we are still a special creation through intelligent design."

The modus operandi seems to be taking on scientific sounding words and bending them into a pseudoscience. One moment sounding scientific, but in the end, untestable and untenable. It is an inference lacking a solid base in observation, nothing more than a thought experiment really. Their cries for evidence in support of every last evolutionary pathway for the blood clotting system, for example, rings hollow. There will never be enough evidence for them, but rather an insistence that they are right. If they want positive support for IC, then they will have to show that the blood clotting system has always been the same, and came into being in one fell swoop. Not very likely to happen. Better yet, how about the emmergence of an IC system brought about by supernatural design which is observed in the lab. I wonder if they are running those experiments right now . . .

 

[Arikay]

I agree. Inteligent design is basically one step away from theistic evolution, they just aren't willing to let go of those final straws.
The problem is that theistic evolution is both more scientifically and theologically sound than ID. Especially since many ID groups seem to still rely on their readers having a poor understanding or misunderstanding of the theory of evolution.

 

[Bushido216]

It's like creationism mixed with orthogenesis.

 

[professor frink]

Undirected natural causes can place scrabble pieces on a board, but cannot arrange the pieces as meaningful words or sentences.

False. If you throw the scrabble pieces on the board repeatedly, you will form words. The odds of this happening are related the comlexity of the words. If you have at least a complete alphabet, you are gauranteed to form at least two words every time. I and a. Words like on or in will take a few more throws, but aren't that difficult to make. Given enough throws, and sufficient letters, you can form any word or sentence, the likelyhood decreasing as the complexity increases.

 

[Hydra009]

If you had a few billion years, could you form the word, "Adam".

 

[professor frink]

If you had a few billion years, could you form the word, "Adam".

hahaha

 

[Cantuar]

Since you asked about the intelligent design movement, as opposed to intelligent design, my response would be that the intelligent design movement is part of a wider political and cultural movement whose aim is to renew American (and eventually world) culture along evangelical or fundamentalist Christians lines and is using science as the first step. The idea of intelligent design is to show that the Christian God is objectively true; a number of social and cultural consequences follow from that finding. Intelligent design creationism is not really about science, in the same way that young Earth creationism is not really about science.

 

[rihu76]

http://www.designinference.com/documents/2003.08.Encyc_of_Relig.htm

I assume this is the link.

of course it is fundamentally flawed and is essentially god-of-the-gaps theology. I might type some more tomorrow unless it gets torn down by others first. One major failing is that ID forgets that we already have a method for getting design and complexity without intelligence; Evolution.

Yes exactly. Evolution is directed, but not clearly not intelligent.

 

[jluke]

the ongoing process of creation

 

[rihu76]

the ongoing process of creation

*nods*

 

[Philosoft]

If you had a few billion years, could you form the word, "Adam".

If you had some dirt, you could do it in, like, 6 days.

 

[Vinegar]

My view? "Intelligent Design Theory" isn't very intelligently designed at all. It's just the same old circular argument thing: start with Creation, chuck a few scientific-sounding words around, call evolutionists names, end with Creation, and, hey presto, what have you got? The end of thinking as we know it. ID started with back when Darwin first began to irritate the Anglican clergy. Back then, it was "Let us marvel at the miracle of the entire living world, its complexity and inscrutability". Then scientists started scrutinising morphological similarities and differences between lifeforms and making up family trees, and ID became: "Let us marvel at the miracle and inscrutability of all the separate kinds of plants and creatures of creation." Then scientists started scrutinising and comparing physiology, behaviours and ecosystems and ID became: "Let us marvel at the miracle and inscrutability of organs such as the eye, which surely cannot have but been created with intent to see with." Then scientists began to work out how the eyes and other organs of many creatures worked and how their constituent parts could have developed through evolutionary adaptation, and ID became" Let us marvel at the inscrutability and absolute integrity since life began, of individual cells". Then scientists began to work out that cells functioned is all sorts of interesting ways and that there were remarkable similarities in the function of cells between animals, and even between plants and animals, and ID became: "Let us marvel at the irreduceable complexity of organelles within the cells". Then scientists blew that one apart when they proved that sections of these organelles could function independently, and there were clear evolutionary pathways to their development from organelles with simpler functions. So, what is ID left with? No IDea.