Why Intelligent Design Isn't a Scientific Theory

[Jacurutu]

Intelligent design is not a scientific theory for several reasons.

1) Any scientific theory must falsifiable. This means that it has to be something that can be tested and proven wrong if it is indeed wrong. There is no means of doing this with the "theory" of intelligent design.
2) Any scientific theory must be parsimonious, in the sense that it must be the simplest and most realistic explanation. Now, I know that many people might say that it doesn't get more simple than saying "God created everything." However, based on scientific observation, does it seem more probable that the universe and all living things were spontaneously generated at once or that modern life is the result of the processes of natural selection and random mutation over the last three billion years? We can rule out the first simply by the chemical law that mass and energy are neither created nor destroyed (although they may be interchanged). The second possibility is supported by mounds of empirical evidence.
3) Any scientific theory should allow you to make predictions. With evolution, you can do this; with intelligent design, you cannot.
4) Any evidence must be reproduceable. There are countless experiments testing the tenets of evolutionary theory; for example, you could test random mutation by inducing mutation in yeast with UV radiation (the same radiation that comes from our sun) and observing the phenotypic variation after plating these samples and allowing colonies to grow. Likewise, you can induce mutation in more advanced animals and observing the phenotypic effects of those mutations. The results of these tests will be consistent over time. The other bases of evolution are quite testable and reproducable as well.

Anyway, I've seen plenty of people claim that evolution and intelligent design are equally viable scientific theories, but intelligent design does not meet the qualifications to be considered a scientific theory.

My question is: how do people still want to call ID a scientific theory and teach it alongside evolution when one is faith and the other is a true scientific theory?

[jcrawford]

Show me how anything may be considered to be scientific which has no element of intelligent design, purpose or plan in it.

btw: You neglected to answer the question of how scientists or engineers explain or account for their own intelligence if their brains are not designed to intelligently interact with the designs and blueprints created in their minds?

You are kidding right?
1) your blueprints have been addressed. They don't exist until they are learned.

Blueprints are intelligently designed by archictects and civil engineers.

2) Science addresses natural events, not supernatural.

Only those sciences which define and limit their interest to natural events can be said to address natural events alone. Without an epistemological or other metaphysical system of knowledge natural scientists can't even define what they know.

Evolution itself requires no element of Id or plan.

I know. That is why evolution is not an intelligently contrived science.

It operates by adaptation and natural selection.

In theory only.

It is validated through the convergence of evidence to include geology, paleontolgy, sociolgy, anatomy and physiology, genetics, etc...... Nothing supernatural involved.

That is the problem with natural pseudo-sciences which have no mathematical basis on which to substantiate their superstitious findings regarding evolution.

The purpose for these changes were survival. What part of this are you failing to understand.

How about the part where you just read a teleology into survival? That could be interpreted to mean that the purpose of genetic mutation in Australopithicine apes was to evolve them into human beings.

Before you attribute everything to a supernatural event, you should at least make yourself familiar with alternative view, especially if you are to debate them.

I do. In studying the history of mathematics, science, psychology and evolutionary theory, I know as much about Darwins' Disorder and Dawkins' Delusion as you do.

You hurt your own religion by trying to use supernatural to explain everything.

I can neither hurt my religion nor explain everything by it any more than you can hurt science or explain everything with it.

The fact of the matter is, if everything that happens is directly related to this designer, then this designer is fairly cruel. Allowing rape, murder, molestation, torturing, etc.... Without any other view than your designer, then we can attribute these horrible things to Him. Oops, I forgot, these are mankinds sins, since we are sinful in nature. Funny how everything grand and good in this world is a direct result of this Creator while everything bad, evil, and sinful is directly related to man.

Oops ... Here comes the religion evolutionists love to spout after claiming that science has nothing to do with religion. Talk about intellectual schizophrenia.

[jcrawford]

#3) You consider mind and mental illness issues to be left to religion. Ok, give me your local churches address and I will ensure that every patient here who is diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, depression, drug addiction, borderline personality disorder, disassociative disorder, anitsocial personality disorder, psychopathic diosrder, pedophilacs, necrophiliacs, etc.. are sent their for their cure since medicine obviously can't help but God can.

Thanks for the list of some of the psychosomatic disorders which afflict sinners like you and I, but neither my church nor I accept third party references without their agencies having been designated as reputable and their client's contacting us personally for a preliminary interview.

The problem with your view is that many of these disorders can be diagnosed and treated through the "soft" science of psychology/psychiatry. Medication available that have shown some efficacy in treatments lead to a natural cause as opposed to supernatural.

Christians being treated for all mental disorders have the right to choose their own mental health practitioner whether or not they believe in secular forms of mental health treatment or spiritual ones.

[Furrowed Brow]

#3) You consider mind and mental illness issues to be left to religion. Ok, give me your local churches address and I will ensure that every patient here who is diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, depression, drug addiction, borderline personality disorder, disassociative disorder, anitsocial personality disorder, psychopathic diosrder, pedophilacs, necrophiliacs, etc.. are sent their for their cure since medicine obviously can't help but God can.

Thanks for the list of some of the psychosomatic disorders which afflict sinners like you and I, but neither my church nor I accept third party references without their agencies having been designated as reputable and their client's contacting us personally for a preliminary interview.

The problem with your view is that many of these disorders can be diagnosed and treated through the "soft" science of psychology/psychiatry. Medication available that have shown some efficacy in treatments lead to a natural cause as opposed to supernatural.

Christians being treated for all mental disorders have the right to choose their own mental health practitioner whether or not they believe in secular forms of mental health treatment or spiritual ones.

So if a child had cancer would their parents have a right to choose a faith healer over non christian chemotherapy.

[Confused]

jcrawford:

Blueprints are intelligently designed by archictects and civil engineers

.

Correct, after being taught the basic skills. They don't just design them from thin air without any training. Once can't build a brick house unless they know how to make the mortar, how to stack the bricks and how to leave air holes.

I know. That is why evolution is not an intelligently contrived science.

Perhaps not intelligently by your creator, but by science standards it is. Your ID isn't science as has been pointed out multiple times in multiple threads by multiple sources, to include justice systems, scientific communities, even religious scientists (Richards Collins).

In theory only.

Now you are grasping at straws. At least it has a theory. Genesis only has a book.

That is the problem with natural pseudo-sciences which have no mathematical basis on which to substantiate their superstitious findings regarding evolution.

Sorry, genetics and physics both have a solid foundation in mathematics and neither would consider evolution superstitious. Once again, perhaps you should read up on what you are attempting to debate.

How about the part where you just read a teleology into survival? That could be interpreted to mean that the purpose of genetic mutation in Australopithicine apes was to evolve them into human beings.

Once again, share a common ancestor.

Thanks for the list of some of the psychosomatic disorders which afflict sinners like you and I, but neither my church nor I accept third party references without their agencies having been designated as reputable and their client's contacting us personally for a preliminary interview.

Without knowing your church, I would hazard a guess that based on your church would have been one of the 5 that rejected my son. But hey, religion of convenience. Since I neither see myself or you as a sinner, I think I will stick with medicine on these physical and psychiatric disorders. Perhaps you should review what a psychosomatic disorder is. It is one in which objective evidence fails to determine an illness exists so it is one that is based soley on subjective symptoms. Usually these disorders are emotional based: depression, anger, guilt, etc...... However, some of these are not psychosomatic: schizophrenia can be viewed in some cases by a PET scan, depression by levels of serotonin and norepinephrine, etc...... Psychosomatic disorders in an nutshell are ones that are caused by "mental stressors" as opposed to actual physical or organic causes.

Christians being treated for all mental disorders have the right to choose their own mental health practitioner whether or not they believe in secular forms of mental health treatment or spiritual ones.

I agree that they should be able to choose their method of treatment, until their disorder or treatment infringes upon the rights of other mankind. If a psychopath chooses prayer to attempt to curb his desire to kill, and mostly is successfull except that one or two times a month in which he does heinous acts, but confesses his sins to make it all ok, then no..... he doesn't get to pick his own treatment. If a paranoid schizophrenic harrasses anyone passing by a certain corner or spits on every person who walks past him, or just screams all day long, he is infringing upon others rights and therfore relinquishes his right to claim he has the ability to make the best decisions for himself thereby making it experts choices on what is the best course of his treatment.

[micatala]

Before you attribute everything to a supernatural event, you should at least make yourself familiar with alternative view, especially if you are to debate them

.

I do. In studying the history of mathematics, science, psychology and evolutionary theory, I know as much about Darwins' Disorder and Dawkins' Delusion as you do.

jcrawford seems to know a lot about things that don't exist. This must be why he knows so much about creation science.

Only those sciences which define and limit their interest to natural events can be said to address natural events alone. Without an epistemological or other metaphysical system of knowledge natural scientists can't even define what they know.

Those sciences which define and limit their interest to natural events alone would be the same as all sciences. Science actually is very good at determining what is known, what is only probably known, and what is unknown. The epistemology has been shown to work very well, as scientific knowledge has been shown to be more reliable than most other forms of knowledge, not to mention useful besides.

[QED]

Blueprints are intelligently designed by archictects and civil engineers.

Ultimately a "Blueprint" (as a recipe for assembling something out of atoms) is something that can take many different forms. This allows us to consider what agencies might be capable of generating blueprints. jcrawford's entire ID argument rests upon there being only one possible type of agency that's capable of generating blueprints in general -- namely a conscious, sentient mind of the sort us humans possess (and which some philosophers have told us is a supernatural gift from our supernatural father).

I have taken the trouble on many occasions to present jcrawford with alternative agencies also capable of generating blueprints. On each occasion I have tried to explain that once we have an example of an independent, artificial, intelligence going about the business of creating the appearance of design in things then his assertion that design can only be a product of supernatural intelligence can only be wrong. It may be sufficient, but I have shown that it is not necessary.

When is jcrawford going to take an interest in this I wonder? I'm well aware that there are countless insoluble riddles that we can generate for ourselves (e.g. what happens to our sense of being when we die). In such cases there's nothing in principle to differentiate the valid questions from the invalid ones. This in itself creates an opening for supernatural solutions -- of which we can say nothing more than maybe if we are being intellectually responsible.

However, an assertion that it requires a supernatural intelligence to devise a blueprint is not even a provisional solution -- as is easily demonstrated by the existence of Artificial Intelligences that can achieve the same results by natural means.

[Jose]

Pardon me if I get back to the topic at hand. I'll respond to Jester's comments of some pages back.

And so long as you bring up the gender of God issue, how can I not comment?
I’ve always personally wondered why most adherents of my religion are so adamant on the gender of a God which has both male and female names in the Bible and, more to the point, doesn’t have a body (as long as we're discussing biology, that's a problem for thier argument).

I'll start with the fun part... I've wondered the same thing. It's probably because the BigWigs in the religious hierarchy are men. The guys who wrote the bible were obviously men, also, since they say things like "it's forbidden for women to teach men." (Our paper had an article recently about a female professor being fired [not given tenure...same thing] at a Baptist college for precisely this reason. They decided to go back to god's law, meaning men's law.) I like to refer to god as "she" just for amusement.

But there’s always one more question, I guess. Wouldn’t this imply that the abundance of oxygen initially would have to have come from some source other than photosynthesis, however?

There aren't any good candidates. Oxygen is so reactive that it gets used up pretty quickly by "ordinary" chemistry. The current thinking seems to be that there really isn't any other way to get oxygen out of its various oxides except for photosynthesis. It's a tricky thing, though--oxygen is so toxic that its buildup started killing things. The survivors are either restricted to anoxic environments (underwater mud, animal intestines, etc) or have antioxidants (enzymes like catalase, peroxidase, and superoxide-dismutase, or chemicals like vitamin C and vitamin E). Where things stand now, there's a sort of balance between oxygen production and oxygen consumption. There are enough producers to keep the level of oxygen at about 20% of the atmosphere. That's a whole heck of a lot of photosynthesizers... most of 'em are cyanobacteria that we don't think much about.

I suppose the fossil record is the only reasonable way to set up a timeline.

I think so. Early paleontologists had no big problem doing it by "relative positions" in strata. They could even imagine that it fit with the idea of a Flood, or at least that it wasn't in serious conflict. The difficulty comes when we start putting ages on the strata. Charles Lyell convinced Darwin (and most of his contemporaries) that if normal processes are responsible for shaping the topography, then it had to take a very, very long time. Mountain building by earthquake uplifts, and canyon formation by erosion, are very slow processes. It was studying the geology of Patagonia where Darwin concluded that this had to be true--and therefore, there really is plenty of time for slow changes in what species look like.

The second clincher for ages of strata is the ability to date some of them directly by radioactive decay (and some other methods). From these quantitative methods, we come up with consistent numbers, but dang! The earth is old.

But your basic point is the main one. Molecular biology and even Linnaeus's systematics give us a pattern of relationships that whispers "evolution." We don't know the path that evolution followed, or the timeline, without the geology added to it.

What I find astonishing is that Linneaus's systematics pretty much matches the relationships we get strictly from DNA comparisons, and that the predictions from DNA comparisons pretty much match the geology. Three very different, and independent data sets match, and give the same basic answer. Such agreement from such different domains is rare in science.

I would wholeheartedly agree that this explains many of the situations. I am not sure of some others. It seems that there should, ultimately, emerge a different explanation for this. My example of the caterpillar was due to the fact that it seems particularly puzzling. It possesses the ability to turn to jelly inside the cocoon, and reform as a butterfly. I personally feel that it is a safe assumption that the final scientific explanation for this will not rest primarily on microevolution principals.

Very puzzling indeed. It turns out, though, that we can kinda understand what's going on. As the embryo develops, it builds each body segment (about 8 segments in the abdomen, 3 in the thorax, and "a bunch" in the head). Each segment could develop directly into something similar to the adult form the way grasshoppers and crickets do--and some cells are dedicated to doing this. There are 4 such groups of cells per segment, top right, top left, bottom right, and bottom left. These cells tend to divide and make bigger groups during larval development. Meanwhile, embryonic development causes most of the cells of the segment to form the caterpillar (who knows why?).

When the caterpillar forms a pupa, the hormonal signals tell the larval cells to go through programmed-cell-death. The hormonal signals tell the set-aside pre-adult cells to finish embryonic development. These cells then wake up, and proceed to build the adult. As I said above, they could have built an adult right away, but because of whatever quirks of history occurred, they stop and wait for a hormonal signal that comes much later.

This doesn't explain anything about your question. It merely describes what we see when we look. But, perhaps, knowing how it works makes it easier to understand how evolution could have brought it about. A "normal" developmental program starts during embryogenesis, then receives a signal that says "wait a bit, guys." After some length of time, another signal comes along and says "OK, proceed." There's some complicated cellular choreography going on, all right, but at least the basic mechanisms are garden-variety developmental biology that we already know quite a bit about.

The more I study science, the less I trust anyone who makes bold statements. “We’re looking into that” seems to be part of any valid answer about a specific situation. I suppose I’ll just have to be satisfied with that.

Either "we're looking into that" or "they looked into that a while back and got as far as existing technology allowed" or "we'd sure like to look into that, but we need some new technology to make it possible." All along the way, though, it's the same game of connect the dots. Every generation of scientists does its best to connect the dots that exist at that time, producing a "connected dot picture" that, if you squint at it right, looks pretty good. When the new technology arrives, and you get a whole lot of new dots, then the picture may be much clearer, and look just like what it kinda seemed to be when we squinted at it. Or, it may turn out to be a picture of a fish, when we thought it was a picture of the Ghost of Vermier of Delft. What makes it so frustrating for people who want certainty in their answers is that we never know when we have enough dots to have the picture exactly right. One more dot might change it.

My hobby, however, is sci-fi writing. So I suppose the personal upshot for me is that this gives me quite a few “what if”s to work with.

Wonderful! I wish you the best in getting published, creating best-sellers, and getting rich. [Does anyone get rich from writing sci-fi?]

I feel that RNA could not have been developed more or less randomly, even with self-replications. I’d be more willing to believe that it was formed based on outside pressures- a very simple form of a biological substance that influenced its design over time. (Of course, that’s a personal guess, not science).

We call it "a creative leap" rather than a guess. All you have to do is test the idea, and if it flies, it's "science--" and your wild guess was "tremendous insight." But, to the substance of your comment: a very simple form of a biological substance that influenced its design over time...is probably what it was. It is known that nucleotides can polymerize, and self-replicate if the reaction is catalyzed on the surface of a clay particle (SiO2). Hmmm...how can this work? How can silica particles catalyze reactions? Well, catalysis requires some kind of surface complementarity--the shape of the surface must somehow match and hold the shape of the chemical. What if silica particles happen to be a good match for the shape of nucleotides, and that's what makes them good catalysts? That would also, I suspect, make them capable of "templating" the construction of nucleotides in the first place.

This is speculation--or wild guess--or insight, depending on whether it turns out to reflect reality. The bottom line is this: it looks like we're dealing with surface chemistry in hidden cracks, where "interesting things" can happen--and not be destroyed by oxygen. We really can't rule out anything. Your idea may be right on the mark, and chemists may produce an example of it any day. Or, maybe someone else will come along with a different idea--more dots for the picture--and change our thinking.

Perhaps I am somehow misunderstanding the ID claim, but I am left with the thought that the probability argument works equally well against the idea that these were a collection of changes acquired over long periods of time. It does seem to stand to reason that there must be some mechanism that brought changes this specifically (whether slowly or quickly). I see the trouble with calling that mechanism an Intelligent Designer, but feel that self-replication without some guiding force does not answer the dilemma. I suppose the real question is: can we apply principals of biological evolution to these earliest molecules, or do we need to seek some other explanation?

Remember, ID "works" because it appeals to those of us who are already pre-disposed to the idea that there is such a thing as god. If you take away that assumption, and replace it with "show me," you'll lose the argument. Christians find this concept preposterous, because their fundamental worldview includes god as a given. Others of us, not having been raised in that tradition, find it preposterous that one could believe in something that could be entirely fantasy. A meeting of minds becomes difficult.

Now, the probability argument seems reasonable as you suggest. BUT, there is a hooker that the ID folks don’t mention. Consider the probability of the first simple sequence to be pretty good, so that we've gotten that far. We now need only 100 new mutations to get to something "workable." The probability of each is 1/1000. The total probability is 1/1000 e100--it ain't guano happen.

BUT, if we make the chemistry/biology realistic, and allow our self-replicating things to replicate, we'll have a population of billions of individuals. (A single bacterial colony that you can see on a Petri dish contains 10 e8 bacteria, so "billions" is a small number for a population size.) For one of those mutations to occur at a rate of 1/1000, when we have 1,000,000 chances, isn't a big deal. It's very likely to happen.

We don't just sit there and ask the next mutation to occur right away in the very same individual in which the first mutation occurred. Evolution doesn't work that way. Rather, that first individual has kids--it replicates. Its offspring replicate. We get back to a population of 1,000,000. Again, out of 1,000,000 individuals, one of 'em is pretty likely to acquire a mutation that has a rate of 1/1000. And so it goes. Replication is the key. Each new mutation, or new "trait" if we prefer that term, becomes common in the population, and then another mutation occurs.

Your last question about applying evolutionary principles to the earliest molecules is an interesting one. At the level of "change over time" applied to self-replicating entities, the basic principles apply. At another level, they don't -- a self-replicating RNA molecule will not acquire a lipid membrane around it solely by making imperfect copies of itself. There are additional kinds of changes that would have to occur. It might, for example, need to be trapped inside a vesicle of lipid-like stuff formed from ocean scum. But, if this addition didn't prevent self-replication, and if it actually enhanced it, then these new vesicle-trapped complexes could out-compete guys without vesicles. So, the basic idea of evolution holds--descent with modification--even if the mechanism of "modification" applies to vesicle entrapment rather than mutation of the "genome."

To extrapolate: there's no fundamental reason to reject chemistry and the basic principles of descent with modification. We may not have figured out the precise series of events that occurred, so we can't describe it in detail. But, we cannot reject the possibility. The principles are valid.

Where creationism/ID goes astray here, logically, is in rejecting the possibility because we don't have the precise series of events. It's very much like rejecting the possibility that I drove back from Phoenix in early January, by saying I'd have slid off the road during the great ice storm on I-40 and I-44 -- rejecting the possibility on the basis of not knowing what roads I actually took to avoid the ice.

---------

A note on "irreducibly complex" structures. There is a tremendous amount of information on the operation of the mammalian inner ear. There is lots of paleontological evidence of the derivation of the inner ear bones from bones that were previously a part of the jaw. The descent with modification is clear. The evolutionary history is clear. The irreducible complexity of the ear is clear--if you take away one of the bones it doesn't work. But its failure to work without one of its bones clearly does not indicate that it could not have arisen by modification of something else.

Of course, Behe likes to talk about biochemical thingies rather than structures that have a fossil record. It's easier to trick people into thinking you're saying something important if you use words they don't understand to talk about things they know little about.

[jcrawford]

Christians being treated for all mental disorders have the right to choose their own mental health practitioner whether or not they believe in secular forms of mental health treatment or spiritual ones.

So if a child had cancer would their parents have a right to choose a faith healer over non christian chemotherapy.

Christians have the same right to choose medical or non-medical solutions to their problems as adolescent teenage girls have the right to choose whether to get an abortion or to give birth, provided there is no legal intervention by the courts in a specific case.

Cancer, of course is a recognized physical disease whereas many mental health problems have no physical or medical basis and many alternative forms of mental health treatment and therapy are available which do not consist of drugging a person into a worse mental condition than they were originally experiencing.

[Jose]

Moderator Intervention

The topic is the scientific/non-scientific nature of "Intelligent Design."

Start a different thread for the christian/non-christian nature of illness/non-illness and treatment.

[Furrowed Brow]

...many mental health problems have no physical or medical basis and many alternative forms of mental health treatment and therapy are available which do not consist of drugging a person into a worse mental condition than they were originally experiencing.

I kind of agree that the realm of mental health is prone to fads that can be reversed or re-evaluated. But what makes christians or practitioners of christian based therapies anymore qualified to criticize standard methods than non christians? Moreover what checks and balances are in place to ensure these christian alternatives are effective; or more pertinently do not worsen the situation.