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I fired off an e-mail to the Cornell IDEA club pointing out in no uncertain terms some of the errors they have at their website and have recieved a reply
Richard,
Thank you for your letter. Unfortunately it is finals season here at Cornell, so we won't be able to join you in debate at your forum. But to answer some of your questions:
Cornell IDEA website writes:
Isn't intelligent design theory completely unproductive?
No; in fact, intelligent design has already demonstrated itself as an extremely productive element of science. (Are you surprised?)
Belief that the universe was intelligently designed spurred Kepler on to make sense of the previously very confusing astronomical observations. Likewise Newton did not believe that "mere mechanical causes" could give rise to the solar system but declared that "This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." Time and space is not sufficient to name all those including Copernicus, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein who acknowledged a designer and were motivated to uncover that design.
In general intelligent design expects that as our understanding of biology grows, information-rich and irreducibly complex structures will continue to be discovered, and predicts, for example, that there are purposes for "junk-DNA".
sidelined email writes:
I am surprised by the curious lack of clarification on the last sentence wherein you state that there are purposes for junk DNA. Please specify what the the actual purposes of junk DNA will be that we may be assured that the statement is not suspect by way of generality. You made the claim please back it up.Since junk DNA is already recognized as being that DNA for which no function has yet been identified the statement that functions will be found does not constitute a prediction.
Cornell IDEA response writes:
The statement in question isn't meant to be anything more than general; this is a one paragraph answer in a faq response to a very involved question. To quantify it one would determine the amount of "junk" expected from a natural process and contrast that with the amount expected from an intelligent process (and yes, we have intelligent processes available to us to examine). Our prediction would be that the amount should be found closer to that of a designed object than one which was undesigned.
sidelined email writes:
Onto the next question answer unit here
Cornell IDEA website writes:
Isn't intelligent design circular reasoning?
Intelligent design begins with observations about the type of information which intelligent agents tend to produce when they act. Therefore, when we find that type of information in the natural world, we have confirmed our observation-based predictions about what we would expect to find had an intelligent agent been at work.
sidelined email writes:
Excuse we but are you suffering from a logic impairment? This is indeed circular reasoning because the conclusion includes the premise. You state. " ID begins with observations about the type of information which ID agents tend to produce."
What type of information do intelligent agents produce? Those observations that ID begins with. You do not tell us what those observations entail without referencing the thing you are trying to establish by observation as valid in the first place!
Cornell IDEA response writes:
No; the step you are missing is in our initial observation, we are looking at the sort of intelligent design we are all familiar with and no-one needs to prove, i.e., the kind where we have an independent evidence of a designer at work. An example here might be a textbook someone wrote, or a machine designed by an engineer.
So, to go slowly: ID begins with observations about the sort of information produced by things known to be intelligently designed. This would primarily be observations of the sort of information produced by human designers. We also make observations of the sort of information produced by natural processes; so we can tell what are the distinguishing features of the intelligently-designed sort. Then we go and bring this knowledge to bear on "information" of unknown origin, such as that present in the bacterial flagellum.
Does this make any more sense?
Hannah
IDEA Cornell
Anyone care to comment?
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