Intelligent Design and Parasites

Hi Phostos, welcome aboard!What you say is fine for those who prefer explanations consistent with their religious beliefs, but the claim of intelligent design is that it is legitimate scientific theory deserving a place along side other major theories of science like the theory of relativity, plate tectonic theory and the theory of evolution.So let's imagine that you're going to make a presentation about intelligent design theory at a conference of scientists or to a local school board, your goal being to convince them it is truly scientific. Are you really going to include the Bible, Adam and Eve, the serpent and the Fall? Scientists don't "theorize...according to their theory." They create theories to explain bodies of evidence, then they make predictions based upon those theories and test the predictions to see if they're correct. Making correct predictions is how theories are proven.The theory of relativity provides great examples of testing a theory's predictions. Einstein's general theory of relativity held that space and time were actually a single entity called space/time, and there was much debate concerning whether Einstein's theory represented the true structure of our universe.Einstein focused on two relatively simple predictions. One concerned the orbit of Mercury, but was post hoc because the deviation of the orbit of Mercury from Newtonian physics was already known, and Einstein could have crafted his equations to yield a correct answer for Mercury's orbit.But the other prediction was of a previously unknown phenomenon, the bending of light by gravity. General relativity predicted that light passing by a body with sufficiently large gravity would be bent by a precisely calculable amount that could actually be measured. The sun qualified as a body of sufficiently large gravity, and so an experiment was designed to test this prediction.The experiment required a total eclipse of the sun, something that is always in ready supply as they occur at irregular periods every couple years or so, though often not in convenient locations.The experiment worked like this. First, at night astronomers would take very precise pictures of the region of the sky where the total eclipse would occur in order to very precisely record the exact position of all nearby stars. Then, during the exact moment of the total eclipse when the stars were again visible they would again take very precise pictures of the identical region of the sky.Once at home the astronomers would measure the exact position of every star in the total eclipse photograph to see how it compared with its position in the night-sky photograph when the sun wasn't present. They found that not only were the stars in slightly different positions, those positions corresponded precisely, within experimental error, to the predictions of general relativity.So to sum up, Einstein introduced his theory of general relativity, he made a couple predictions based upon his theory. The prediction about Mercury was already known to be correct. Astronomers tested his solar eclipse prediction, the prediction was found to be correct producing headlines in the New York Times and Einstein's theory became an accepted scientific theory. (The original test was performed by Sir Author Eddington in 1919, but the test was repeated a number of more times during the 1920's, most persistently by scientists reluctant to accept Einstein's theory, but they continued to obtain confirming results.)So if the goal of intelligent design theory is acceptance as science, then IDists must make predictions based upon their theory, and then they must test those predictions. Successful tests will cause their theory to become accepted by the scientific community. This is, in fact, the way all theories become accepted.--Percy