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Is intelligent Design a scientific theory?

Is intelligent Design a scientific theory?

  • Yes

    Votes: 3 4.7%
  • no

    Votes: 61 95.3%

  • Total voters
    64
How often? Please provide links to these often attempts.

I guess you haven't figured out how to Google.

From Wikipedia:
Hoyle, a life-long atheist, anti-theist and Darwinist said that this apparent suggestion of a guiding hand left him "greatly shaken." Those who advocate the intelligent design (ID) belief sometimes cite Hoyle's work in this area to support the claim that the universe was fine tuned in order to allow intelligent life to be possible. Alfred Russel of the Uncommon Descent community has even gone so far as labeling Hoyle "an atheist for ID".
 
I guess you haven't figured out how to Google.

From Wikipedia:

I guess you haven't figured out how to behave. You're probably the biggest atheist on this board, and yet you consistently set the poorest example of trying to prove your point.
 
A relatively good synopsis of this issue:

"
Assume for a moment that you are a member of a local school board. At a board meeting one night, a parent stands and identifies himself as a spokesperson for a group of upset parents. They understand from their children that geography teachers in the district are teaching students that the earth is spherical—and are not giving the students any evidence at all for the contradictory theory that the earth is flat. The parents demand to know what you and other school board members are going to do about this dogmatic approach that is being taken to the question of the earth’s shape.
What should be the board’s response? Insist upon equal time for the flat earth theory? Drop the controversial subject of the earth’s shape from the geography curriculum? Or option C: Should the board tell the parents, “While you have every right to believe the Earth is flat and even tell your children that the earth is a big blue and green pancake, we have a job to do—and that is provide children with a view of reality that comports with our best scientific understanding”? I think—in this example, at least—we all know the right answer.
In this wonderfully diverse country of ours, it comes as no surprise that there is an outfit called the Flat Earth Society dedicated to making, in the words of its president, the United States “a flat earth nation.” (The president of the Flat Earth Society, until his death two months ago, was--some of you might find some irony in this—a man named Johnson from California. In this case the Johnson is Charles Johnson, not the Prof Phillip Johnson of Berkeley who has made Intelligent Design his crusade.) Charles Johnson was interviewed in Science Magazine in the 1980s—at a time when the Space Shuttle was making headlines. You might have thought that the space program would have created self-doubt among the flat-earthers, but no: Johnson was quoted as saying, “You can’t orbit the earth. The Space Shuttle is a joke—a very ludicrous joke.” As for the moonlanding, Johnson said he had information that the whole thing was scripted by Arthur C. Clarke and filmed in Hollywood. Flat earthers point to the Bible for their faith in the world’s flatness. Johnson noted in his Science Magazine interview that the New Testament says Jesus ascended up into heaven—not out into heaven. The Bible also refers to “the four corners of the earth” and tells of Jesus being taken to a mountain where he could see all the kingdoms of the earth—something clearly not possible on a spherical earth. Johnson says, “Wherever you find people with a reservoir of common sense, they don’t believe such idiotic things as the earth spinning around the sun. Reasonable, intelligent people have always recognized that the earth is flat.” The Society, in case you weren’t told about this in your school, also has scientific evidence to support their flat earth theory. They have checked water surfaces on Lake Tahoe and the Salton Sea without detecting any of the curvature you’d expect if the earth were really spherical.
Let’s return to our school board hypothetical. Would your view of what to do be any different if the parents’ complaints concerned teaching that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than what was to their way of thinking the correct view, that the sun revolves around the earth? After all, the parents point our, the Bible clearly suggests an earth-centered system: Joshua 10 tells of the sun standing still in the midst of the sky. In 2 Kings, God brings the sun ten degrees backward in the sky. And Ecclesiates tells of the sun going down and hastening to the place where it arises.
This, of course, was once a big-time controversy. Friar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for suggesting that the earth traveled around the sun, rather than the other way around. The same belief, published by Galileo, led to his conviction and arrest in 1631. Not until the time of Pope Leo XIII in the late 1800s did the Catholic Church back off its earth-centered view.
What should the school board do here? Same answer, right?—tell the parents that they have a constitutional right to believe whatever they want about the configuration of the solar system, but the board has a duty to recognize the scientific consensus in favor of the Copernicun system.
Next example: Creationism. Parents show up and demand that biology teachers present evidence that supports their view that Genesis, not Darwin, got it right when it comes to explaining the variety of life on earth. It all happened in six days about 6,000 or so years ago. The earth was created first, then a few days later, God got around to installing the sun and a few thousand stars. Anything that suggests a contrary view—like radiometric dating or radio telescopes--is a hoax or somehow flawed.
Should the Board respond any differently? Is there significant support for a young-earth view among scientists? The only thing that makes this situation different from our flat earth and earth-centered solar system examples is that there really are (difficult though it may be to understand) substantial numbers of Americans who cling to this young-earth, Creationist view. To tell our students that there is serious scientific doubt about the age of the earth is to mislead them. There isn’t. And to spend class time discussing a young-earth view would be fully as preposterous as would wasting time presenting evidence that Neil Armstrong took his “giant leap for mankind” in a movie studio in southern California.
As a school board member, you’d have another reason not to accede to the parents demand that Creationism be given equal time with Evolution in the school’s curriculum: The United States Supreme Court has ruled, in a 1987 case called Edwards v Aguillard, that such so-called “Balanced Treatment” laws constitute an unconstitutional establishment of religion. The Court found that the only justification for requiring discussion of Creationism whenever evolution is discussed is a religious one—not an academic one. Creationism, the Court concluded, was a religious theory, not a scientific one.
Which brings us to the theory that has brought us here today. Once again you are working your way through a school board agenda when a group of parents rise to complain about the way biology classes are being taught in the district. They’ve learned in their churches, read books, visited websites, and seen videos that suggest biology teachers aren’t telling it like it is—they’re covering up evidence that suggests species don’t evolve into other species. They’ve learned, on the other hand, that scientific evidence shows that species do not evolve into other species: that species are separate and distinct and have all been put here as part of an intelligent design. They demand that you do something to insure this cover-up comes to an end. They want the school board to compel teachers to present scientific evidence that undermines Darwin’s theory of evolution. They want teachers, for example, to present evidence that some biological features are too complex to have evolved, and that the fossil record has failed to produce enough “missing links” to make the case for macro-evolution.
What do you do? Is this the Creationism controversy all over again? Is Intelligent Design (to use a KU biology professor’s description) just “Creationism in a cheap tuxedo,” or is it something genuinely different?
This is where it gets hard. And I want to be as fair as I can to those who believe in intelligent design. I have friends who believe in intelligent design. Our next-door neighbors—very nice people—believe in intelligent design. If by “intelligent design,” its proponents only meant that some intelligent designer (whether it be God, space aliens, or a giant slug) is using evolution to accomplish some intelligent purpose (one in which we humans might be major players), we wouldn’t be here. This evolution-is-part-of-God’s-plan view is, essentially, the view of the Catholic Church, most Jews, and most mainline Protestant denominations. There is no necessary conflict between a belief in evolution and a belief that God is real and working in the world. The theory of evolution says nothing at all about the existence or non-existence of a benevolent, intelligent designer. Evolution doesn’t require an intelligent creator, but it doesn’t exclude the possibility either. The theory of evolution simply provides a powerful scientific explanation for the variety of life on earth. It is the core concept of biology. It is not a disproof of religion.
Moreover, let me say this: If a school board were to compel its teachers to tell students that “evolution proves that there is no God; that everything is explained solely in terms of chemicals and natural processes,” that school board would be violating the First Amendment. To dogmatically teach Atheism in the public schools would be just as unconstitutional as teaching Fundamentalism. Science teachers should teach science.
The problem today arises because the proponents of Intelligent Design are not content with the weak view that accepts evolution. Instead, they argue that the evidence suggests individual species were individually and intelligently designed. Humans and the great apes, for example, did not have a common ancestor some 6 million years ago. The fact that humans and chimps share over 98% of the same genetic material proves little. The “missing links”—the early hominids that keep inconveniently popping up in Africa—all must be new and separate species. It’s just a coincidence that the most mammal-like of all reptile fossils appear just before the most reptile-like of all mammal fossils. The fact that no tenured biology professor (as opposed to law professors, hydrologists, or even a handful of biochemists) at any of the top-ranked universities shares their conviction in the folly of evolution shows only how widespread the Darwinian conspiracy is.
Public schools shouldn’t teach Intelligent Design for the very same reason that they shouldn’t teach flat-earth or Creationist theory. Because it is nonsense. We do our students a disservice by suggesting to them that there is a raging controversy among the world’s most prominent biologists about the basic explanatory force of evolution. There isn’t any such controversy. We know—just as surely as we know that the earth revolves around the sun—that evolution has spawned earth’s wonderful diversity. We have an obligation to tell our students the truth, not whatever a group of well-meaning but misguided intelligent design theorists think we should tell them.
Design theory is not science—at least not as we usually think about it. Scientists assume that the physical world operates through unbroken natural regularity. Every scientist who conducts an experiment assumes that neither God, nor the Devil, nor any other supernatural being will affect the results."

Intelligent Design Theory and the Public Schools
 
The missing link controversy probably deserves a thread of it's own. Every so often someone claims they found it but nothing so far has been widely accepted by scientist as "the definitive missing link that proves Darwinism".

There is no missing link. Creationists want every single animal that ever lived fossilized and it just doesn't work that way. Every time science finds a new species, creationists jump up and go "Aha! You just created two new holes!" There really are no significant gaps in the human evolutionary chain and it's unrealistic to expect that every single species is going to be found, simply because fossilization is so exceedingly rare.
 
Keep irrational crap^ out of this thread. :roll:

the only "irrational crap" in this thread is Intelligent Design, as it is not based on science, or measurement, or evidence.

Its based purely on faith, and that is irrational.
 
The missing link controversy probably deserves a thread of it's own. Every so often someone claims they found it but nothing so far has been widely accepted by scientist as "the definitive missing link that proves Darwinism".

I'm willing to start such a thread. But just to clear things up, between which of these specimens would you consider to be the "missing link"? You know, that we know we are all on the same page. Thanks.

evo.jpg
 
sausage-links.jpg

Hey, there they are!

I was wondering where they went.
 
Two things to mention regarding a few of the recent posts:

1) It is funny that Hoyle gets brought up, he even has an informal fallacy named after him because of his inaccurate (ignorant?) assumptions used in his calculations.

Hoyle's Fallacy is rejected by evolutionary biologists, since, as the late John Maynard Smith pointed out, "no biologist imagines that complex structures arise in a single step."

Hoyle's fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2) The missing link is an outdated term and has been for 100 years or so, if we were to use this term then literally every single generation from the onset of life would be in itself a "missing link". As already has been pointed out, for every missing link found there are two new ones that suddenly "appear".

If the usage of the term "missing link" was supposed to be synonymous with the accurate term transitional fossils, then there are is a vast multitude that have been discovered for a multitude of separate lineages. If the term is being used to question why some chimera such as a crocoduck, or some such has not been found, then it is impossible to satisfy this request because they do not exist and would actually disprove evolution if found. It also demonstrates a woeful misunderstanding of the subject being debated if this is the case. Unless the person misusing the term actually takes the time to educate himself on the topic, then it is futile to engage this "argument", it is a straw man (regardless of whether it is made due to ignorance or not).
 
wow, you found a picture of Intelligent Design.

:)

Being so breathtakingly intelligent, myself, I decided that the arrangement of my missing links here should resemble that of my middle three fingers as I extend my warmest salutations to all those who have demanded the evidence for such.
 
Wow -- someone finally voted for option 1 (49-1)!

Talk about a champion of the underdog!

I had neglected to vote, and even though option 2 is where I'm at, I was beginning to consider voting for option 1 just because I was feeling sorry for it.

I mean, nothing should ever be mauled this badly.

So .. who was it that voted for option 1? -- I want to shake your hand, you great humanitarian!
 
I'm willing to start such a thread. But just to clear things up, between which of these specimens would you consider to be the "missing link"? You know, that we know we are all on the same page. Thanks.

View attachment 67126631

The problem is skulls prove nothing, they can be apes that look human but in reality are apes or neanderthals. Theres alot more to it than that. Following is a small excerpt from an interesting site on the subject.

Notice how Darwin coupled Negroes and Australian Aborigines with gorillas and contrasted them with Caucasians (despite the fact that Negroes, Aborigines and Caucasians are all 100% human, while gorillas are 100% ape). Essentially, this is what modern Darwinists do with groups like the Neanderthals. Neanderthals appear to have been just another race of humans with superficial “ape-like” characteristics like the Australian Aborigines. They appear to have suffered from pathological conditions like rickets and arthritis which exacerbated their superficial ape-like characteristics (rickets is a vitamin D deficiency which softens the bones and can cause people to hunch over). Not only can humans be born with “ape-like” traits like heavy brow ridges and large, jutting jaws, but pathologies like cephalic disorders, syphilis, scurvy and rickets can make them look even more ape-like later in life. But everything we know about Neanderthals suggests that they were just as human as modern-day Australian Aborigines. They were skilled hunters, lived in complex societies, buried their dead, and practiced religion.

The Missing Link - has it been found?

Probably should start a separate thread though, this subject could derail this one, I'd participate.

This is from that site, I never heard this before, YIKES!

Some 19th- and 20th-century Darwinists thought that all non-Caucasian people were ape-like and therefore inferior to whites. Darwin himself wrote that “at some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.
 
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The problem is skulls prove nothing, they can be apes that look human but in reality are apes or neanderthals. Theres alot more to it than that. Following is a small excerpt from an interesting site on the subject.

Notice how Darwin coupled Negroes and Australian Aborigines with gorillas and contrasted them with Caucasians (despite the fact that Negroes, Aborigines and Caucasians are all 100% human, while gorillas are 100% ape). Essentially, this is what modern Darwinists do with groups like the Neanderthals. Neanderthals appear to have been just another race of humans with superficial “ape-like” characteristics like the Australian Aborigines. They appear to have suffered from pathological conditions like rickets and arthritis which exacerbated their superficial ape-like characteristics (rickets is a vitamin D deficiency which softens the bones and can cause people to hunch over). Not only can humans be born with “ape-like” traits like heavy brow ridges and large, jutting jaws, but pathologies like cephalic disorders, syphilis, scurvy and rickets can make them look even more ape-like later in life. But everything we know about Neanderthals suggests that they were just as human as modern-day Australian Aborigines. They were skilled hunters, lived in complex societies, buried their dead, and practiced religion.

The Missing Link - has it been found?

Probably should start a separate thread though, this subject could derail this one, I'd participate.

Yep, Darwin got some things wrong. It was the 1800s after all. But unlike Darwin, we are not just limited to the physical skeletons. We also have DNA. So we can most definitely tell if something is just an "ape that looks human". I'll set aside the fact that humans actually are apes.

What I find when I continue along this discussion with many creationists (not saying you are one), is it eventually becomes evident that there is no potential discovery that they would accept as definitive. So what characteristics would you expect to see in a specimen that meets your definition of a "missing link"?
 
Does absolute truth exist?

To my understanding....No.

Truth is subjective, and often directly linked to belief. Thus an absolute is impossible...Facts however, most certainly do exist.
 
I did see Redress, above, and replied. I await a response. You're clearly not engaging my posts, which leads me to believe you really don't have an argument. If I'm really incorrect, it would be, or should be, quite easy for you to say why. That you don't is a good indication that you have no real argument.

In any case, I don't see any resemblance to what I've said and anything an IDer has said. Intelligent Design is a critique of adduced mechanisms of evolution. I'm making some remarks about how science itself is to be defined. The two are obviously different theses, related only insofar as my remarks relate to all of human endeavor. Moreover, I don't support ID, so why my remarks would have any resemblance is rather unclear.

I have engaged your posts. I did not, however, feel like repeating myself. The no you didn't yes you did type of thing is less than satisifying. Science is defined. I gave you definitions. You gave exampels and said they didn't get to define, and I pointed out they do. Each field does in fact define the tenets of their field. What sicence is by definition is what science is. It makes no difference how much you ponder it, the definition is still the definition.
 
I guess you haven't figured out how to behave. You're probably the biggest atheist on this board, and yet you consistently set the poorest example of trying to prove your point.

You asked a question, I provided an answer, something you could have done yourself in 3 seconds. Actually, it took Google 0.16 seconds to find it. Maybe you don't understand this debate stuff.
 
Yep, Darwin got some things wrong. It was the 1800s after all. But unlike Darwin, we are not just limited to the physical skeletons. We also have DNA. So we can most definitely tell if something is just an "ape that looks human". I'll set aside the fact that humans actually are apes.

What I find when I continue along this discussion with many creationists (not saying you are one), is it eventually becomes evident that there is no potential discovery that they would accept as definitive. So what characteristics would you expect to see in a specimen that meets your definition of a "missing link"?

The jaw seems to be a sticking point, no real transition jaw. By the way I am not a creationist nor a Darwinist nor a warmer nor a Christian nor an atheist nor ......, I am a questioner of everyone that says they know the absolute truth about anything.

Ramipithecus%20teeth%202.jpg


From a very informative site. The Evolution of Early Man
 
The "Missing Link"....can be a thousand different things, depending on how far back we decide to go:

"May 19, 2009—Meet "Ida," the small "missing link" found in Germany that's created a big media splash and will likely continue to make waves among those who study human origins. "

090519-missing-link-found_big.jpg

It is rather obvious that evolution is a better explanation than Some old white guy waving an enchanted potato as he scooped up a chunk of clay he made out of nothing the day before.
 
Here's how the missing link argument goes:

 
The "Missing Link"....can be a thousand different things, depending on how far back we decide to go:

"May 19, 2009—Meet "Ida," the small "missing link" found in Germany that's created a big media splash and will likely continue to make waves among those who study human origins. "

View attachment 67126643

It is rather obvious that evolution is a better explanation than Some old white guy waving an enchanted potato as he scooped up a chunk of clay he made out of nothing the day before.

The concept of a creating entity may be so far beyond what we can comprehend that we just make up an old white guy with a magic wand.
 
The concept of a creating entity may be so far beyond what we can comprehend that we just make up an old white guy with a magic wand.

Okay...let's just say you are correct. Why then, would I dismiss massive actual Data, in favor of something I will never comprehend?
 
I suppose depending on how you dice it, it could be several theories. But I would agree that special relativity was the result of the 1905 paper, general relativity the result of the 1916 paper.

That is more accurate. Special and General Relativity cover two different areas. While Special Relativity was the more groundbreaking, General was the most important since it applied in all situations.



Really? It doesn't seem so to me. My interlocutor wasn't saying anything about testability; he was talking about testing (i.e. practice, not conceptual) and basing propositions on observations. My point was twofold:

1) Plenty of science originates from untested propositions.

2) Other disciplines do testing and revision all the time; if that's what's supposed to distinguish science, it doesn't do a very good job.

And again you have a failed understanding of the scientific method. Untested is not an issue. To be a scientific hypothesis it has to be testable, ie it has to be falsifiable. It does not have to be already tested. Science is applying the scientific method to natural phenomena. It is possible to apply the scientific method to unnatural phenomena, but they would not still be science.

Anyway, before we continue, you seem to have the idea that I'm somehow anti-science. This is not correct. I have a great deal of respect for science. I am very critical of certain interpretations of science, however, and I believe I have good reason to be.

This is not what I have said, I do not think you are anti-science, but ignorant of how science works.

With that out of the way, let's discuss this



a little more carefully.

First, I'm not sure I understand why you'd say special relativity isn't a theory (at least here, though you seem to say that it is elsewhere). But that aside, those two postulates were not determined by the available observations. By that, I just mean that the available observations didn't make the postulates inevitable (indeed, how could they?). Before the experiments that are taken to confirm relativity occurred, it was just as likely (and was in fact proposed) that the MM aparatus was faulty. Or that the properties of the aethyr were not sufficiently understood. Or even that the data was falsified, or etc.

Einstein revived Galileo's proposition of relative inertial frames, and mixed in the notion that light in a vaccuum has an absolute velocity. From there, as you note, he deduced what might be observed. But just what role can deduction, which is entirely independent of observation, play in science? If it is to play a role, it seems perforce that philosophy plays a role in science. Since my initial point was simply that science is much more difficult to distinguish from other areas than most people believe, this is a relevant point.

Further, if all it takes for something to be science is to be "based on" observations, then of course special relativity was science. But then, so is a lot of stuff that I bet you wouldn't want to see counted as science. For instance, was Locke's philosophy of mind, "based on" the notion of the mind as Tabula Rasa at birth which was in turn "based on" the best available observations science? I suspect you'd probably think not. But how is that case distinguishable from relativity in principle? If you're going to try to define science, you'll have to do better than this.

I did not say that Special Relativity is not a theory. I said the paper presented in 1905 was not a theory. It had at that time not been tested. To be a theory, a hypothesis must undergo testing. It is all part of the scientific process. Theories do not leap whole form from observation. That does not mean that prior to being a theory it is not science. Also the postulates where derived from observations at that time, most importantly the Michelson-Morley experiments(which where a wonderful set and the mechanism used was simply brilliant). While the things you mentioned where possible, they where also not nearly as likely. Further, if the Michelson-Morley experiments where faulty, then the predictions made by the 1905 paper would have failed experimental testing. See how wonderful the scientific method is, it checks itself.

Deduction itself is not science, but deduction that lends itself to testing is. That is in fact what the scientific method is. Make a deduction based on current observation. Make a prediction that can then be tested, test. Again, the problem is not with science, the problem is with your faulty understanding of what science is and how it works. I am not familiar with Locke's work so cannot comment, but did his observations lead to a testable hypothesis that could falsify his hypothesis? If so then it does qualify as science. Whether I agree with a theory or hypothesis is irrelevant to whether it is part of the scientific process.



Where did I say otherwise?

Any time you argue that an untested hypothesis, such as the 1905 paper is not yet science.


Again, this seems either to be false, or to include too much.

How so?



Well, I came up with all of it, and didn't visit any websites to find it. I did spend about ten years in undergraduate and graduate courses at reputable and accredited universities in the U.S., several of which were devoted to the practice, history, and philosophy of science, from which I managed to distill most of my views. In any case, I made no similar remarks to my interlocutors; your words here are rather insulting.



What does that even mean? How do you build something from observation? It seems rather that we build hypotheses from symbols which encode interpretations of observations. Which goes to my point about Quine-Duhem.



This approach hardly seems fruitful. I might just as easily lambast your entire post, and we could just exchange that way. But what would be exchanged? Certainly not ideas, and it'd hardly be a debate. So I can hardly credit this tactic. And I don't think the moon landing was faked.

The rest of this is just nonsense. You are trying too hard to sound smart, while espousing a grade school level of understanding of the scientific process.
 
The concept of a creating entity may be so far beyond what we can comprehend that we just make up an old white guy with a magic wand.

Obviously the concept isn't far beyond what we can comprehend because humans made up various gods to explain what they couldn't. They became ingrained in the human psyche, not as something real, but as something emotionally comforting. That's why people still believe in gods today, even though we've answered just about all the questions that prompted their invention in the first place.
 
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