Biased accounts of intelligent design

ID proponentists swear up and down that the intelligent designer is not the god of the Bible.YECs seem to be honest about what their beliefs are.

I guess they could have an intelligent designer that ISN'T the God of the Bible but it's not clear what that is.Beyond affirming that the God of the Bible is our starting point, and some of the information the Bible gives, most YECs focus on the physical evidence just as the IDers say they do. The Bible is the launching point but beyond that there's no way to talk about the world except through the facts we know ONLY through the world.

Fair enough.Reading through that link we come to the predictions of design.What measurements of complexity are you using? I could not find it?

I think that many people lump ID and YEC together because the approach they take is putting the cart before the horse.The scientific method will seek evidence to attempt to disconfirm a hypothesis. What ID and YEC do is to seek evidence to confirm the hypothesis.So from the position of someone adhering to the scientific method the method the ID and YEC use is not the scientific method. Edited by Larni, : No reason given.

Yes of course but there's no place else to start. It's quite clear that if you just start by observing nature you can avoid God completely.Actually many would say that's a self deception because the nature of the facts themselves demands a creator or an intelligent designer. If this is more or less the position of ID I think it's an argument that can be made, and I agree with it myself. But before I was a Christian I couldn't have made the case for it so I have to admit we're all subject to that particular self deception.So no matter how complex and finely organized reality is most people persuade themselves all that really could have happened by chemicals just mindlessly bashing around.Anyway, once you believe in the God of the Bible that's where you have to start, there's no other rational place to start. And then you have the job of showing that the observed world fits the outline the Bible gives.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Just so you know, it is against forum policy to argue by posting a link. If you think the information in the link is viable (as apparently you do), then quote from it (see my prior Message 5 for how to do that) and then support the argument.Again I looked at your link briefly and found it contained logical fallacies. Like equivocation. When I have some time to waste I might look at it in greater detail.Also, I posted a link to another thread here I posted in 2004, Is ID properly pursued?, because my concern -- as a Deist -- is that ID is a weak form of Deism. Here is a quote from that thread:

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Stated simply Intelligent Design ("ID") is the concept that the universe is designed by an [active \ creative] agent and that there are, perhaps, observable traces, evidence of such design in the product of that work.

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This assumes a fair degree of development, capability, education and intelligence on the part of the observer. A "Poison Dart" Frog cannot look at a watch and discern that it is a designed object, and neither could a native person unschooled in the concepts of manufacturing such products ... yet he is capable and intelligent enough to discern the cause and effect (and how to make use of) the frog's venom. There are, in fact, historical documents recording where explorers showed watches and the like to such unschooled natives and the natives thought that they were magical objects rather than manufactured things.

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Deism is a religion, and this pretty well shows that ID also is a religion, or at best a philosophical pursuit, rather than science.So far you have offered nothing but distress at perceived bias, and this link. Surely there is more to your argument than this.Enjoy

I would like to thank Faith for his/her intelligent comments and questions. For the designer, as you say, all I can think of is extraterrestrials, gods or God; but note that an ID proponent is not required fully to describe the designer or to say where it came from. William Lane Craig explains that in order for an explanation to be good, we don’t need an explanation for the explanation; seeRichard Dawkins’ Argument for Atheism in The God Delusion | Reasonable FaithBut even if God made the world, we still have many options. Does God make species as a person makes a pot ? — which is what Genesis suggests; or does God dream the world?The creator God does not imply religion. Emil Durkheim defined a religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden — beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church [French glise, admittedly an odd word ], all those who adhere to them.Here I want to stress the word "practices." A religion must include some form of worship, however broadly defined. God has long been discussed in philosophy without religious connotations. When the atheist philosopher Antony Flew came to believe in God, he became a deist ( which is different from theist) and , as far as I know, did not become religious. ID convinced him of a designer, not that worship was required or beneficial.As I suggested , an ID proponent might think that God only planned life in the beginning, or he might believe that God also guides the process. For example, can natural selection explain the huge growth of the capabilities of the human brain? Some have said that we are way smarter than is required for survival.

I want to mention that when I posted at 11:21 AM today I was not ignoring the link rule: I hadn't seen it yet.My posts contain much more than cries of distress; they contain arguments, however compressed.

The ID proponents I have read say rather that the God of the Bible is not part of the hypothesis they are proposing. I am sure that many of them, in conversations with friends, express the belief that Jehovah designed the world. That's not hypocrisy, it's a sort of compartmentalization that is also found in the principle of separation of
church and state. A historian who describes how Rome was unique in Italy need not express the difficult thesis that the Romans' ancestors came from Troy, even though that might be what he believes .

Except we have the history of cdesign proponentsists.We know intelligent design is religious creationism dressed up in lab coat with black horn rimmed glasses and a fake beard in an attempt to appear as science in a vain attempt to circumvent the Constitution and push their religious indoctrination into the public schools.We have the transcripts from the Dover Trial where the revealed truth of ID’s religious subterfuge was put on display. The Wedge Document has not been forgotten nor Discovery Institutes continued attempts to infiltrate public schools with religious creationism.The OP is nothing more than a shill for Discovery Institute and this submission is yet another attempt to further the wedge strategy.Intelligent design is religious creationism regardless of the cdesign proponentsists protests to the contrary.This thread is nothing more than religious SPAM.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

The first two are compatible with mainstream science. The third is falsified; genes and functional parts are not shared between unrelated organisms. The fourth has not been established, and requires an assumption about the motives of the designer. Why should a being that powerful care about efficiency?

In public, at least. Nudge, nudge, wink wink. But there's few honest ones.

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"We are taking an intuition most people have [the belief in God] and making it a scientific and academic enterprise. We are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as creator.".

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Phillip Johnson quoted, Enlisting Science to Find the Fingerprints of a Creator, The LA Times, 3/25/2001.

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The world is a mirror representing the divine lifeIntelligent design readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

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- William A. Dembski, Touchstone Magazine, July/August 1999Lots more at http://web.archive.org/...xtr/download/HorsesMouth-BP007.pdfEdited by JonF, : No reason given.

Correct, but one thing that is required for science is to describe how the design is implemented. A design sitting on the shelf serves no purpose until it is implemented. How is this done? What is the process?You said in Message 13: So how is/was the design of the genetic code implemented? What is the process?When were the designs of the physical constants done -- at the creation of the universe? What was the process that made the whole universe comply? You are describing Deism and Theism, not ID. Let's stick to ID. Not alone, but then you are committing an error common to YECs and other theists (as well as an argument from incredulity). Evolution contains two basic elements, not one: This is a two-step feedback response system that is repeated in each generation: Like walking on first one foot and then the next.This gets back to my argument in Is ID properly pursued? that the IDologist must have a thorough understanding of all sciences in order to be able to discern design rather than natural system processes. If you are going to make claims that evolution cannot explain certain things then behooves you to become thoroughly familiar with the science of evolution.Mutation and selection explain the growth and development of the human brain quite adequately. Here for example is a set of skulls:

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Figure 1.4.4. Fossil hominid skulls. Some of the figures have been modified for ease of comparison (only left-right mirroring or removal of a jawbone). (Images 2000 Smithsonian Institution.)

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This clearly shows the increase in brain size. When we talk about brain ability we can note that the Chimpanzee has many abilities comparable to humans, and that the differences between these two species is more a difference in degree than in kind. They are also comparable to the differences seen between chimps and monkeys.Now if you want to know what caused this growth, my explanation is sexual selection.What else do you have?Enjoy

I appreciate this; I think you have read Karl Popper; but recall that Popper said also ,The proper answer to my question ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ is, I believe, ‘By criticizing the theories or guesses of others and if we can train ourselves to do so by criticizing our own theories or guesses.’ (The latter point is highly desirable, but not indispensable; for if we fail to criticize our own theories, there may be others to do it for us.)So though an individual may lack the self-discipline to criticize his own theory , the scientific community as a whole will act to address the proposal critically. In the case of the ID proponents, surrounded by a mob howling that they are not only mistaken but irrational, it is not human to suggest that they should be seeking evidence against their own theories. The ID opponents, when they take a break from throwing mud, make sufficient attempts to present evidence to disconfirm the hypothesis. ( Lest there be misunderstanding, I acknowledge that RAZD makes a rational case in the article to which he, in violation of his own imperious precept, links.) It is natural and expected for a scholar to seek and present evidence that buttresses his case. I do not recall that Newton in the Principia made an effort to present evidence against his own theories; that was the task of the larger scientific community.

A sufficient number of the scientific community has examined ID and found it wanting.