Is ID a right wing conspiracy?

The issue has gotten into the courts because the creationist side has insisted on using their idiosyncratic pseudoscientific views as a vehicle to inject their idiosyncratic religious views into public schools. This is unconstitutional.Creationists are as free as anyone else to not only found private schools, but do something else that should be obvious, if their views had scientific merit: Start their own program of applied science, funded by religious donations.Where is the ID based medical research institute that has produced new drugs or treatments for infectious disease based on applied ID principles?Where is the YEC oil company that has discovered new reserves using YEC geology?Such entities don't exist. Because the "science" doesn't work and has no practical applications. The only thing the DI and ICR have ever produced is polemics. No science, no technology. QM deals with physical entities like metals, nuclei, quarks, etc. and has been verified by experimentation with physical systems, so I don't see how it helps your case. It is an entirely physical theory.If anything, it hurts your case. You make a strawman arguemnt against Newtonian deterministic materialism using QM ? It even more strongly refutes the 18th century notions of a need for a "divine watchmaker", by demonstrating that the physical universe has more than enough indeterminacy to accomodate something like evolution.

If you're saying ( as it seems) that QM implies matter/energy don't really exist, but only a "design", well, that's just not correct.At the QM level, physical entities are described by a wave vector representing a superposition of possible quantum states. The physical observables correspond to Hermitian operators operating on the wavefunctions, such as the Hamiltonian energy operator. The physical entity's existence and the observable, are quite real. The result of a measurement is indeterminate until the measurement is made, but this does not mean the measured quantity is unreal.Written language, in any case, is really not adequate to express QM concepts, for that you need to go to the mathematics.In any case, I don't see how this helps the intelligent design case. ID'ers seem to treat evolution as a macroscopic process that they assert is not possible, trying to construct macroscopic arguments. Philosophizing about QM does not even seem germane to the problem.If you want to argue that QM renders evolution impossible, I'd need to see the math, or references thereof.If you are trying to refute the Newtonian clockwork concept of the universe, you've succeeded, but ID seems to be a reversion to that viewpoint, not something that takes into account 20th century physics.

There is a serious misconception here as to what QM entails. The operator on the wave vector that represents the physical observable (e.g Hamiltonian, which represents energy) is as fundamental as the wave vector itself. Further, you're overlooking field theory and the existence of symmetries which lead to conserved quantities.If you want to say that all those things together represent a "design", I suppose you could, but it's kind of tautological. It's essentially saying "everything observable is a design" which get you nowhere scientifically- it just begs the question.Or if you want to say a designer operates through QM and its actions are not observable, that's interesting philosophy, and maybe standard theistic evolution. But it's content-free scientifically.And QM, philosophically speaking, is closer to liberal Christian theology e.g process theology, or even Buddhism, in its implications, than it is to the type of Evangelical theology the proponents of ID seem to advocate. But QM processes aren't non-material processes. Again, you're arguing against the Newtonian universe. But Behe/Dembski ID asserts that a designer has to make macroscopic (in the QM sense) interventions in biological system at (unspecified) times. IMO at least this is a very Newtonian notion, and we've been there, done that, didn't work, with Paley.So your version of ID is, at least, rather different from the Behe/Dembski version. Which may be interesting, but if you want to base it on QM, you need to get much more mathematical.Back on the thread topic. Is ID a "right-wing" conspiracy? If the term "right-wing" refers to the Evangelical social conservatives, maybe. There is certainly a defined agenda behind ID with social and political goals.Is "conspiracy" too strong a word? To gore some oxen, and stimulate thought, is the ACLU a conspiracy on the same grounds? The Left and Right both have many movements with defined political and social agendas. Many aren't good ideas. Are they "conspiracies" ?

But scientifically, this begs the question. Science is all about trying to elucidate physical mechanisms for physical phenomena. So this form of ID may be of philosophical interest, but it isn't science.Nor, as I've discussed, can the notion of a designer imply the kind of conservative theology the Discovery Institute has in mind. Even if one could scientifically infer design ( a tall order at present, to say the least), the design could easily be the product of some sort of emergent universal consciousness nothing like the Abrahamic God concept, and the arguments to resolve that issue would be purely philosophic and theological. Although I am not a metaphysical materialist, I recognize that whatver arguments of a metaphysical or theistic nature I might make are not scientific arguments, as they do not deal with observable, repeatable physical phenomena.Again, this really begs the question of where one detects design. I agree that I find certain arguments in favor of reality showing evidence of design or higher consciousness compelliing (although of a quite different nature than the Discovery Institute ID arguments).I do not regard these arguments as scientific.

I think the trouble here is in terminology. I'd call the above viewpoint "theistic evolution", i.e. accepting the scientific evidence that evolution occurs by processes in the physical universe, while maintaining that there is a theistic cause for the conditions that allowed this to happen.What most people here are criticizing when they criticize Intelligent Design is a more restrictive notion that asserts that processes in the physical universe cannot account for what we observe in biology, and that therefore some supernatural , macroscopic intervention with biological systems is necessary. Such a notion is not testable or falsifiable and cannot fall under the realm of science. It is also an argument from incredulity.

I think we are on the same side here as far as not wanting ID or theistic evolution in the science curriculum.Our new poster wondered what all the fuss is about. IMO the fuss is about trying to put the Discovery Institute style of ID in the science classroom. The Discovery Institute thinks they are making scientific assertions, we think they aren't. I don't entirely agree. Theistic evolution accepts the science of evolution and leaves the theistic part to theology. Discovery Institute style ID tries to conflate the two, or worse, undermine evolution.