Creationism/ID as Science

Are you going to lead us to this evidence? Sometime before the end of this thread, perhaps? (Threads at EvC Forum are closed when they reach 300 posts.) So while that's very good that "ID believing scientists are working on it," that means that ID doesn't yet possess the necessary qualities of science. This means the answer to the question posed by this thread's title concerning whether creationism/ID is really science is "no" at this time, but it poses another question about why ID is being promoted as science, for instance by the Discovery Institute and at Dover, at a point in time when it does not possess the necessary qualifications. You just finished conceding that ID doesn't possess the qualities of science at this time, so it can't be a theory. It can at best be a hypothesis, and a poor one at that since it has no supporting evidence. Behe's idea of irreducible complexity has been prominently falsified, and Behe himself put the final nail in the coffin of his scientific reputation when he testified at Dover. I'm sure Behe thanks God every night for tenure.But irreducible complexity is as close as you've come to evidence so far. We can discuss it if you like. You could start by providing a brief description of irreducible complexity.--Percy

Boggled? Not addled? I can't tell if you're talking about DNA replication or transcription, but how does whichever one it is provide evidence of design? Okay, so the nested hierarchy of classification is not evidence for ID, so no evidence there. Okay, so no evidence for ID in the fossil record either. And no evidence for ID detected within the genome so far, either.So that leaves you with only DNA transcription/replication and irreducible complexity as possible evidence for ID, I guess. Carry on.--Percy

Intelligent Design is not science because it is an inherently supernatural concept.Science adopts a methodological (as opposed to philosophical) naturalism. It also adopts as part of its method an epistomological approach. The premise is that knowledge is gained by the experience of phenomena through the human senses and the application of reason to these observations. Scientists adopt this approach not because they deny the validity of other ways of knowing. They adopt this approach for practical reasons: it works. Disease cures, technological advances, and environmental discoveries have been made possible through the scientific method. Previously existing methods and epistomologies were far less productive in this way.The American cultural phenomenon usually referred to as 'the intelligent design movement' is not science. It is a legal ploy.The 1980s movement known as 'creation science' or 'scientific creationism' attempted to introduce religious ideas in public school science classes. Specifically, it sought a 'balanced treatment' between the findings of science and a theology of creationism based on a literal reading of the book of Genesis. The effort was defeated when creationism was ruled unconstitutional in the case Edwards v Aguillard (482 US 578) as a violation of the Establishment Clause mandating the separation of church and state.Creationists hurriedly reached for secular-sounding synonyms to camouflage the (unchanged) religious nature of their ideas. 'Intelligent design' served at once. It provided a means, creationists hoped, of getting religion through the doors of schools and court rooms where 'creation science' had failed.In the early 1990s 'intelligent design' became the calling card of a creationist movement called The Wedge. Founding figures of The Wedge included Phillip E. Johnson, Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Stephen Meyer. Their organization, the Discovery Institute's Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture (the word 'Renewal' was later dropped), described its goals in a document called 'The Wedge Strategy.' This strategy achieved notoriety on the Internet as 'The Wedge document' after it was leaked to the public.'The Wedge Strategy' makes it clear that the goals of ID's backers were anti-science from the outset. The document's writers, like creationists generally, confused the methodological materialism of science with the philosophical materialism characteristic of many atheistic belief systems, such as Marxism. The opening page states: 'The center seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies.' The overthrow sought by ID's backers would ultimately require the overthrow of the scientific method.In public statements ID proponents distance their ideas from religion. But 'The Wedge Strategy' was intended for internal circulation. It thus did not shrink from stating the religious nature of the agenda: 'We also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, [conservative] Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars.'The first legal test of ID arrived in 2005 with the case of Tammy Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District in Pennsylvania. Barbara Forrest, a historian of the ID movement, provided key testimony. Forrest chronicled the history of 'intelligent design' and showed its origin in creationism's defeat in the 1987 Edwards case. Nearly all of ID's most vigorous apologists declined to appear at the trial. One who did appear, Michael Behe, admitted that ID would require the word 'science' to be redefined. Under cross-examination he admitted that his proposed redefinition of 'science' would allow the teaching of astrology.Judge John E. Jones III ruled 'intelligent design theory' unconstitutional, a violation of the Establishment Clause separating church and state. 'The ground rules of science' are violated by any attempt to introduce the supernatural, Jones ruled, and ID proponents had never been able to demonstrate why their idea was 'not an inherently religious concept.'Conclusion: 'we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.'
____Barbara Forrest interview with Americans United
Page not found - Americans United
Summarizes ID history as a political movement. Outlines key issues in science and law.Wikipedia article: 'Intelligent Design'
Intelligent design - WikipediaChart: 'Tracing ID's Ancestry'
CreationismsTrojanhorse
One of exhibits used by Forrest in the Dover case. Uses a proposed creationist science tetbook, Of Pandas and People, and shows how 'intelligent design' suddenly appeared as a substitute for 'creation' in 1987, the year creationism was ruled unconstitutional in the Edwards case.Chart: Of Pandas and People word counts
CreationismsTrojanhorse
Shows freqency of the word counts for 'creation' and 'intelligent design' in a proposed creationist science textbook. Established a clear reversal in 1987, after the Edwards case.Brauer, Forrest & Gey: 'Is It Science Yet?' Washington University Law Quarterly
http://law.wustl.edu/...r%20Forrest%20Gey%20book%20pages.pdf
Journal article surveying creationist efforts to surmount problems of law and science.Discovery Institute: 'The Wedge Strategy' (in-house document CRSC)
HTML - http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html
PDF - Wikimedia Error
Full text of the document by ID proponents outlining their goals and strategies.Decision by Judge John E Jones III, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District
CreationismsTrojanhorse
Full text of the decision that struck down ID theory as unconstitutional. Contains cogently stated criteria defining science and non-science.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Added a reference.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Concision.Edited by Archer Opterix, : Concision.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

I think you just said that observation of descent with modification wasn't evidence of descent with modification. But this is weird. You're speaking as though having testable consequences was a flaw in Darwin's theory.The theory of evolution did indeed need for genetic tests to show that life could be grouped by genetic cladistics. And this is what the tests show. Chalk one up to Darwin. You, however, boast that Intelligent deign is superior because it makes no reference to this evidence.You say that Darwin required vast periods of time. Very true. And it has been proved that those vast periods of time have elapsed. Another successful prediction from my main man Charlie.You say that Darwin required the fossil record to back him up. And it did. Score another point for Darwin. When he wrote, no-one had seen an intermediate form in the fossil record. Yet, obedient to the theory, there turned out to be thousands of them.I call your attitude weird because, dammit, it is, as you would see if you tried to apply it to anything but your bugbear, evolution.Sherlock Holmes: This man has been shot!
Inspector Lestrade: No, he's been struck down by God.
Sherlock Holmes: I think you'll find he's been shot. In fact, let me take this pair of long-bladed tweezers, and, there, you see, there's the bullet!
Inspector Lestrade: Well then, my theory is better than yours, 'cos your theory needs there to be a bullet.
Sherlock Holmes: No, my theory is superior to yours, because my theory needed there to be a bullet and there was one.You can see, surely, that it is Lestrade who is being the duffer here.Even weirder than this is the way you speak of drawing inferences from data as though this were a bad thing. This is what scientists are for. This is their job.Your idea of the fossil record is similarly bizarre. I mean, what?(1) A fossil is not evidence that an animal died "suddenly". What on earth gave you that idea?(2) The fossil record does not merely tell us that "an animal died". It tells us the form of that animal, or at least its hard parts. This allows us to test the fossil record against the predictions of the theory of evolution.(3) I have no idea what point you are trying to make about "living fossils", but their existence is certainly not evidence against the theory of evolution, since that theory does not predict that such organisms will not exist. If you think that the theory of evolution is unfalsifiable, perhaps you should explain this to some other people on these forums. They keep trying --- you'll laugh when you hear this! --- to prove the theory of evolution false!But seriously, you know damn well that evolution is falsifiable, and I know you know this, because you have pointed out several times (correctly) that the theory needs certain things to be true. If those things had turned out to be false, this would have falsified the theory.This is precisely how we test a theory: we see if the things which would be true if it was true are true.Meanwhile, the boot appears to be on the other foot. You boast that Intelligent Design does not place any contraints on what we should find in the fossil record or genetic record. What does it say we should find in nature?However, Intelligent Design is not completely unfalsifiable. Although it is void of predictions in geology or natural history, it is incompatible with events that we know actually happened.--------Anyway, I guess this answers the question of whether Intelligent Design is science. If the first thing you people have to do is turn the scientific method itself bass-ackwards, then it's all going to be downhill from there, isn't it?

Many thanks to Dr Adequate for an excellent post. Cogently reasoned and presented.I especially liked the Sherlock Holmes bit. I look forward to the TV series.
Hughes writes: Fossils tell us many things, but not this, as Dr A informed you.Big Al (an allosaur who left this world far too soon) died of dehydration and exposure near a riverbed when seasonal rains came late. When they finally arrived, the sediment they carried gently covered his remains and preserved them. Today Big Al's skeleton represents the most complete we have for a member of his species.His story is the subject of a very informative BBC TV show. Check it out.We have many fossils from tar pits, too. Animals that die in tar pits rarely go suddenly. It's a leisurely, if none too pleasant, path out the exit.The causes of death recorded in fossils differ, as happens in nature. Some animals choke on a meal, some die giving birth, some die in sandstorms. You could argue that fossils often show remains that were preserved quickly--before they could be dispersed by scavengers and natural elements. But it's not clear what the point of the observation would be. That's just how fossils are made.Your comments only apply to a certain kind of fossil anyway. Many fossils do not document deaths at all. They record lost teeth, footprints, shed exoskeletons, burrows, turds--things living creatures leave behind as they go about their business.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Yes, ID does use the same principles. For example: SETI mentions regular and complex pulse pattern, which are an indication to these scientists that they are from an artificial source. ID identifies irreducible complex structure, as being sourced from an artificial source. And 2 and a half pages of which are guys arguing over Newtonian physics. Ha ha ha ha!!!I'm doing the best that I can (admittedly I'm no scientist). And when Darwin wrote his non-pier reviewed book, was it science? And was it the Institute that promoted ID in the classroom or misguided school board members? I've conceded no such thing.
Evidence as I see it right now.
- Irreducible complexity - (on Widipedia) :"Irreducible complexity is the controversial idea that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved naturally from simpler, or "less complete", predecessors, usually based on the idea that a structure's constituent parts would be useless prior to their current state. An "irreducibly complex" system is defined as one that could not function if it were any simpler, and therefore could not possibly have been formed by successive additions to a precursor system with the same functionality."- Communication systems - As I mentioned, Message->encode->transfer->Decode->Asimilate (or feedback). As seen in the genetic transfer of information from one generation to the next, and from one cell to the next. Such complex communication indicates an intelligent source. Communication or transference of information is only found to originate from intelligent agents.

Can you specifically tie the steps of that process to DNA replicaton either transgenerationally or in a cell lineage. The only bits I can see are some decoding followed by some transfering, it doesn't seem to be a congruent system.TTFN,WK

Um, is the answer both?TTFN,WK

Largely irrelevant? Are you kidding? A 4% difference between chimps and humans means they are 96% similar. NINETY-SIX percent! And you call that irrelevant? For someone who recognizes design in nature (rightly so, I think), and who concludes a designer (erroneously, I think), you are remarkably blind to the biological implications of the huge similarity between chimps and humans. Complexity in nature simply is what it is, based on the millions of years it took for that complexity to evolve. Sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it? Again, you must be joking, right?Biologists are not only able to reconstruct from a fossil what an animal probably looked like when alive (and although they may be wrong at times, they are getting better at it as more biological knowledge is coming in from different disciplines), but they're also able to put togeher, from the fossil record, complete models of ecosystems of the past, which, by the way, also give us valuable insights in our own present ecosystem.Please, do not project your own ignorance on others.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Hughes asks: Darwin's idea had to establish itself as mainstream science before it could be taught in science classrooms. No one got a special break.When originally presented in 1859 the idea could be said to be a hypothesis. As hypotheses go it was a potent one, though, because a sizable amount of research could already be cited in support of it. Still, the idea went through a process of testing to establish itself as a valid scientific theory. This process included peer-reviewed research, of course. Research topics of the time focused on fossil discoveries. The discovery of the first Archaeopteryx skeleton in 1861 validated the theory's prediction that transitional species could be found in the fossil record.Darwin's 'non-pier reviewed book', as you call it, was first published in 1859. But his theory was still a new idea in many US science classrooms over fifty years later. The Scopes trial took place in 1927.It's silly to suggest Darwin's theory was somehow 'rushed through' without an adequate research foundation. The facts are not behind this.Your attack on Darwin is off topic. The subject is ID. Casting doubts on one theory does not in itself validate a rival idea.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

What SETI is actually looking for is radio sources that cannot, by their nature, be of natural origin. SETI has occasionally identified potential candidates of intelligent radio sources, but in each case investigation revealed the source was natural. Gradually over time the library of types of radio sources of natural origin has grown.The irreducibly complex structures described by Behe have all been shown to have natural pathways for their construction, and so IDists are forced to add them to the library of structures of natural origin. Irreducible complexity itself is a questionable concept without a real world example at this time. I imagine some people did read it while on a dock, so of course it was pier reviewed. Oh, wait a minute, you mean *peer* review! No, there was no formal peer review of Origins. Formal peer review, indeed scientific journals themselves, did not exist at the time. Will you next be criticizing Darwin for not having his children vaccinated? And this is all off-topic anyway. As Wounded King has already pointed out in his inimitable way, yes, of course. Have you been under a rock? It would seem a shame to turn this thread into yet another discussion of information theory, so I'm going to keep this brief and declarative for now. Information is produced everywhere throughout the universe without the need for intelligence. The complex chemistry of DNA transcription and replication that involves decoding and encoding and recoding of information during division and protein production is consistent with the same ad hoc make-do approach of much of evolution.The question of whether the microbiological processes within the cell are too complex and intricate to have developed naturally must be considered scientifically, otherwise we're left with you saying "It couldn't possible have arisen naturally," and us saying, "Of course it could have arisen naturally." Not very constructive.So how are you going to put consideration of this question on a scientific footing?--Percy

Well, of course the weasel words here are "too complex to have evolved". How do you determinte that something is "too complex to have evolved"? Please show your reasoning. But this is merely petitio principii. You are claiming the very thing that you should be proving --- that such systems are only the product of intelligent design.

On the other hand, it may turn out to be the case that the so-called "theory" of Intelligent Design consists of talking exactly the the same nonsense about evolution that the creationists talk; and that, like creationism, it is not in fact a theory. Maybe this is all that "Intelligent Design" is: creationist ignorance under a new brand name.Well, if this is really all they've got, we can, of course, prove them wrong. We've been doing that for the last 150 years, how hard can it be?To return to your pont of whether this is off topic: maybe "Intelligent Design Theory", like "Creation Science", and like "Flood Geology", just consists of getting real science wrong. Then to do so, in a discussion of Intelligent Design, is not off topic --- it's the only thing the poor guy has to talk about.If ID consists of getting science wrong, then ignorance of science is the topic whenever we discuss ID.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Two things.Would you say that if an irreducible complex system can be demonstrated to be able to evolved naturally, it will falsify ID?andHow do you detect and measure information? If I give you some numbers, can you detect which numbers have information in it, and which ones are random?

Michael Denton is a biologist (IIRC) who, back in 1985 published a highly-touted (by creationists) anti-evolutionay screed entitled Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler, MD). What the creationists refuse consistently to admit is that he wrote a completely 'nother book in 1998 which utterly refuted his own work: Nature's Destiny (Free Press, NY). Here is my favorite quote from the introduction to Destiny:

quote:

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It is important to emphasize at the outset that the argument presented here is entirely consistent with the basic naturalistic assumption of modern science - that the cosmos is a seamless unity which can be comprehended ultimately in its entirety by human reason and in which all phenomena, including life and evolution and the origin of man, are ultimately explicable in terms of natural processes. This is an assumption which is entirely opposed to that of the so-called "special creationist school". According to special creationism, living organisms are not natural forms, whose origin and design were built into the laws of nature from the beginning, but rather contingent forms analogous in essence to human artifacts, the result of a series of supernatural acts, involving the suspension of natural law. Contrary to the creationist position, the whole argument presented here is critically dependent on the presumption of the unbroken continuity of the organic world - that is, on the reality of organic evolution and on the presumption that all living organisms on earth are natural forms in the profoundest sense of the word, no less natural than salt crystals, atoms, waterfalls, or galaxies." (Nature's Destiny, page xvii-xviii).

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In other words, Denton has gone from "anti-evolutionist" to "evolution based on fine-tuned universe". Destiny is a rather interesting (albeit not all that well-written) expose of a sort of deist, fine-tuned-universe view of evolution. Basically, he's been corrupted by the evidence, and is now something of a very weak IDist - but not a Grand Designer of Biological Novelty like Behe IDist. Rather, the very weakest version of "designed the physical laws of the universe and got everything started" kind of IDist.I always find it fascinating that creationists continue to cite Denton's earlier work, when the man himself has repudiated it. I guess whatever sells. So much for this particular "argument from authority".