ID taken to the end

One of the things I like to do with ideas (and their proponents) is to take them to their logical ends. Often I find the purists back away from their position when faced with the full extrapolation of the concept.Here's my train of thought on ID:It seems pretty clear to me that mutation does take place. We've all seen pictures of two headed turtles, etc. Is this the method by which the designer makes changes?If so, these mutations should not be random - that would be evolution. They must be deliberate.If that's the case, then it seems all birth defects should also fall under this designers control. Who are we to try and "correct" these deliberate choices?Doesn't ID dictate that a child with a liver disease was put here on purpose by the great designer? Same with a malfunctioning heart valve, etc?Are you sure that this is the theory you want to teach in churches let alone schools?This message has been edited by Nuggin, 08-09-2005 07:55 PM

Sure, let me rephrase.If Intelligent Design dictates mutations / copy errors in the genetic code, then it's the Intelligent Designer deliberately creating the people who have transferable afflications? (ie Hemophilia)And, why would the great Designer do this? Clearly these people aren't replacing "normal" people. Seems like a waste of the great Designers time.

I may be misunderstanding you, Ben.Are you suggesting this scenario:
"Designer creates life at the start, evolution takes over resulting in what we have today"?If so, that's Theory of Evolution. ToE doesn't comment on starting point, it's about process.Life created and placed on Earth by God, or Aliens, or abiogenisis, all of that works fine for ToE if we accept that once the ball got rolling, Evolution took over.However, that is not Intelligent Design. ID theory is that the changes have been guided. That a wing could not evolve, since half a wing wouldn't evolve on it's own. (false, but that's their theory).If the changes have been guided, and continue to be guided, then we shouldn't be trying to cure people with genetic disorders. Clearly the Great Designer has plans for them, and our muddling around in his plans is going to result in Wrath.

It's possible (likely) that there are different proponents of ID.However, I can't get my mind around this idea:Do IDers accept that mutation yields micro-evolution, but don't accept that macro-evolution takes place? Or is it that they accept macro-evolution as something takes place but only through the will of the Great Designer?

I don't mean for this to be demeaning, but... I've often found this to be a big source of problems for IDers / Creationists who disbelieve evolution. I really don't think that that group grasps the scale of time we're talking about.It's abstract and hard to deal with. Sort of like trying to explain how far away Saturn is. It's easy to get that it's far, it's just hard to wrap your head around how far.Same here. The scale of time we're talking about is so fantastically huge in compairison to what we experience that it's very hard to grasp.Humans study our own history and it gives us a sense of time, but it's illusionary. All of human history is a blink.What confuses me more about your post is that you say that IDers themselves can't agree on many very important factors within their own theory. (ie mechanics of, timeline of, cause of)What are we supposed to make teachers teach? It sounds like ID is less a theory than a collection of people who "don't like evolution" for either conceptual or religious reasons.

Well, seeing as ToE is not a method of dating the Earth and only suggests "old" as an age for the Earth, no they didn't.However, an exact age of the Earth isn't a needed piece of the ToE.The Designer IS the most important piece of Intelligent Design. So, a lack of agreement on who / what the designer is, that's a really big problem for the theory.

No. Survival of the Fittest (originally an economics theory) was then and still is the base foundation for ToE. The mechanics of heradity have likewise remained the same.We have a more nuanced understanding now than we did before, but from the start the mechanisms of evolution were apparent.ID doesn't have mechanisms, at least none that I've seen. To say, the theory is still young, give it time, just seems like an excuse. Either you understand the mechanics of the theory and can teach them, or you don't understand the mechanics of a theory and as a result it's just conjecture.

Godwin's law!

I don't think the complaint is that ID can't settle on 440 million vs 450 million. The complaint is that ID can't settle on 450 million vs 6 thousand. That's kind of a BIG range.The reason they can't settle is because ID is a political movement, not a theory. And as a political movement, it needs a support base. Saying 450 million would knock out the Fundies, and saying 6 thousand would forever destroy any impression of scientifostity on their part. No. We can say who build them. People did. And, what's more, we can tell you how they built the buildings, what tools they used, what materials. We can tell you what metals were used in the coins. What process was used to mark the coins.ID can't say what or who the designer is, or how the designing was implimented. That's pretty important stuff when it's the core of the theory. Sometimes they are rocks that look like manmade structures. Let's take the face on Mars as an example. A lot of people saw a Roman soldier in the image. They were convinced that this was evidence of an advanced civilization having built this giant monument.A closer look shows that it's a couple of mountain peaks and some shadows - nothing more.Clouds aren't intelligently designed to look like a fire truck. That particular cloud happens to look like that.I think at its heart there are two different types of IDers.Type 1 - The intellectually dishonest propagandist of religious dogma. These are the people who say things like "Evolution means we're all just animals and have no morals. That's wrong. Design means we have a soul."There's no science there at all.Type 2 - The intellectually honest people who have mistaken apparent pattern for actual pattern.Man is very good at finding patterns. We excel at it. So much so that we often find cause and effect patterns between totally unrelated things. Most superstition is exactly that. Horoscopes, same thing.But when you study the cause and effect relationship, when you examine the "cause", you often find that it's not related in any way to the effect.In this case, we have an apparent effect (highly evolved species with complex features), but an assumed cause (Great Designer) and no methodolody to connect the two.I'm not saying that IDers shouldn't pursue their line of study. By all means, have fun. Just don't expect it to be taught in schools until it can be explained. After all, we have to have something to teach.

Yeah, I took no offense. I had been trying to remember the name of that law for like 3 weeks now and it popped into my head.

Darwin published in 1859. Mendel published in 1866. So we're talking about a seven year gap in a time before computers, globalization, etc.

I believe your point was that early ToE didn't have heredity to rely on. Of course, it's also late, so I may have completely misunderstood your point.The basics of heredity had been understood for a lot longer that ToE. After all, people have been breeding animals for centuries. It just took Mendel to really quantify it.But my greater point was, IDers have a lot of advantages that weren't available in 1850s, so what's the hold up?I don't remember if it was your point or Ben's that the designer is the mechanism, but where does that take us?If the theory is God did it and the mechanism is God did it, and the proof is God did it, what's there to talk about?

Hey all,What the hell are you talking about?I'm big on going off topic and all, but you totally lost me.My original point was this --My understanding of Intelligent Design dictates that since the Grand High Designer set things up a certain way, we shouldn't be dicking around trying to fix them. (ie, if you get appendisitis, it was all planned for, you're F-d)

If a Non-God designer (let's say aliens). Are you suggesting that Aliens put every species on Earth all at once? That they dropped things off from time to time? Or that the swing by ever few years and zap one species into another?

Your response would be great if any of it were actually correct.Let's take it a bit at a time. Except that ID doesn't actually have any examples of these "features". Even Behe himself has caved on the few he proposed.So, the BETTER statement is: "ID SPECULATES that there COULD BE features in the biological world which IF THEY ACTUAL EXIST MIGHT BE more adequately explained by an intelligence".Until you actually FIND one, it's really really really premature to draw conclusions based on rank speculation. There is no "theory" of intelligent design. ID doesn't fit any of the criteria set out by the scientific term "theory". Dembski has gone on record that the design is "the Christian God". The DI's wedge document which explains WHY they invented ID in the first place makes it clear that its the "Christian God". The "cDesign Proponentists" typo makes it clear that its the "Christian God".Claiming that ID doesn't "define" the designer is pretty amateur. Nice try but you should actually brush up on your history. You can not detect "work" if you don't know who the worker is and/or the mechanism through which the work was completed.If you lack both of these, you have no way of distinguishing work from non-work.A crystal looks very precise and if you don't have any idea how they are created, you would conclude they are the work of a craftsman - you would be wrong.Modern art is often quite messy. If you don't know about paint and are only assessing it on its "organization", you would conclude it is not created - you would be wrong again.If you can't identify the designer and can't identify the mechanism, you have NOTHING to evaluate. LOL. A nice (if sadly pathetic) twist on the "space aliens" joke. Who "designed those designers"?Oops, back to "The Christian God" - nice try though. Seeing as the "standpoint of design" is a political agenda to relabel Christian Creationism as something the masses can be confused by, the identity of the designer is really the ONLY relevant thing.