Intelligent Design in Universities

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What does make something scientific, Mick?

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Testability, falsifiability, positive evidence, and predictive power.IOW, derived through methodolofical naturalism.(Actually, a theory can inclued everything above except the positive evidence part and still be scientific. It is just a falsified theory.)

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Is Newton's science now out the window because he was a creationist in your opinion? Who decides this?

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Newton used methodological naturalism in his scientific work. Anyone today, no matter what religion or lack thereof, can use Newton's calculations and get the same result.Newton did NOT require any supernatural mechanisms for his results.That is the difference between someone who is able to use methodological naturalism in their work and still hold whatever religious views they want, and Creationists who want to use whatever religious views they want to in science, instead of methodological naturalism.

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Conversely, Darwinism is a wishy washy conception (it seems that no two Darwinists can agree on much of anything)

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Uh, all the Darwinists here agree on nearly everything WRT Biology and the evidence for Evolution.

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that takes this area of biology and extrapolates it ridiculously outside the realm of any known science.

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Um, Darwin's ideas are the basis of all modern Biology.Common descent with modification was a biggie, and that was all Darwin. He was the first to propose a mechanism (RM + NS), and he was largely correct.

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Darwinism boldly concludes that man sprang from a common ancestor with apes,

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And this prediction has been very well-supported by a lot of evidence found in the last 150 years, especially the genetic evidence.Tell me, why do both homo sapiens and our closest primate relatives both have an identical broken vitamin C producing gene, yet more distant relatives do not?

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that huge land dwelling animals called pakicetus somehow had their legs morphed into flippers and crawled into the oceans to turn into what we know today as modern whales,

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I have seen much of this fossil evidence with my own eyes, as one of the world's foremost whale evolution researcher, Philip D. Gingerich, is based here at the University of Michigan and there is a wonderful exhibit of whale evolution at the university natural history museum.Here is a link to some of his research.Tell me, why should I consider your personal incredulity to be more convincing than the bones themselves?Oh, BTW, Pakicetus attocki was not "huge".It was about the size of a wolf. Exactly what whale ancestors do you think scientists say were "huge"?

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that reptile like organisms called therapsids almost ethereally evolved from reptiles into mammals

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link to info"Ethereally?" Again, why should I put more stock in your personal incredulity as opposed to the evidence?

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and that larger mammals such as horses and elephants slowly evolved from tiny, less complex ameboids in violation of some of the most well proven laws of science.

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Seem plenty plausible to me, especially if you understand that there was never any plan or guarantee that any particular outcome (horses or elephants, or anything else) was ever specified in advanceLet me explain.If we throw a deck of cards into the air, the chances of a specific pattern of cards ending up on the ground is astronomically low.However, the odds of any pattern occurring are very great.Perhaps you are under the mistaken impression that evolution has a end product or goal in mind? It doesn't. All evolution posits is that species will change in reponse to selection pressure from the environment. That is common descent with modification.There is no "desire" or "goal" of the environment to "eventually" produce a specific outcome, such as horses or elephants.

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No tenet unique to Darwinism has ever been shown to be true in laboratory or field experiments in a manner that is non-controversial to all observers (natural selection is not a tenet unique to Darwin as it pre-existed his writings and is basically little more than common sense).

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Darwin was the first to propose the theory of sexual selection. Darwin was the first of propose common descent for ALL life.So far, both of these predictions have been abundantly supported by the evidence.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 05-04-2005 09:03 PM

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Anyhow, I assume you have a point here and that point is that just because I am an IDist I am no longer capable of doing science because of a religious belief.

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No, not at all.You previously said:

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Is Newton's science now out the window because he was a creationist in your opinion?

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To which I replied: People advocating for ID have not been using MN.ID proponents have not proposed any testable predictions of real world natural systems, and ID is based upon a lack of a naturalistic explanation for certain mechanisms rather than upon positive evidence for it's claims.

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What religious belief would I hold that would prevent me from doing science using the philosophy of MN?

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I don't know.Show me any ID science that contains a testable prediction of some real world phenomena."If ID were true, then we would predict that observed mechanism X would have the following characteristics; A, B, C, and D."What positive evidence, if found, would falsify this prediction?

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And if this is a systemic problem, why is the science of Faraday, Newton, Lord Kelvin, blah...blah....viewed as valid science?

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Because they do follow MN.

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I mean these guys were strong creationist type critters.

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But they never used the supernatural in their work.ID inserts a "designer" into the molecular places that science hasn't yet (or perhaps never will) discovered a naturalistic explanation.

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I did not mention all the biologists in HERE, now did I.

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Well, yes, you did include all Darwinists, including the ones here, in the following statement:

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(it seems that no two Darwinists can agree on much of anything)

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Darwin was a non-scientist college drop out

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There were no "scientists" back in Victorian England in the way we know it today. Science as a professional field had not yet been formalized and consisted mainly of a loose "society" of gentleman naturalists, many of them clergy.Also, where on Earth did you get the idea that he dropped out of college? Everything I have been able to find says that Darwin passed his final exams at Cambridge and was ranked 10th out of the 178 students who passed that year.

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that could not handle the math even with the help of tutors his father hired for him. There was not a single mathematical formula anywhere in OoS.

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Where on Earth did you get the idea that science had to have math in it to be of good quality?

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And funny, I have a BS with a biology minor, and I don't recall even discussing Darwin in most of those classes. If all modern biology is based on the musings of Darwin, no one seems to know this.

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All modern Biology is based upon Darwin's Theory of common decent with modification.Just is.

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Finally, there is no such thing as a scientific mechanism in Darwinism. Even stochastic mechanisms must have some degree of predictability via probability. So, unless you think you can mathematically determine what evolves from what, you need to drop the term mechanism from your vocabulary concerning this subject or note that you are defining the term differently than does most of science.

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Tell me, what does the field of population genetics study, what theoretical basis do they use, and how do they express their findings?Tell me, why do both homo sapiens and our closest primate relatives both have an identical broken vitamin C producing gene, yet more distant relatives do not?

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Because an environmental change occurred. When C came into the diet,

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What? When did vitamin C "come into the diet"? What does this have to do with a broken gene caused by a retrovirus?

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logic dictates that similar organisms would mutate via that environmental stimuli.

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But where is your evidence to show that vitamin c was "introduced" at a certain time into the environment, and why should a mutation by a retrovirus be connected to the appearance of a particular food source?

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The huge is my little tidbit and quite subjective, but you have never seen a huge wolf?

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I would never describe a wolf as "huge" in the context of whale evolution, no.

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My personal incredulity has little to do with the fact that you guys deduce this stuff without empirical evidence to support those deductions, IMHO.

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You (they?? not really trying to get personal with you) have not a single piece of evidence that suggests whales morphed from a land mammal called pakicetus, no matter if they dress it all up in a pretty package with flowing ribbons. Where are the breeding experiments that could deduce speciation in these transitions. Where is the DNA to draw genetic conclusions? Surely they have something other than few rocks that "look funny."

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So, what specific issues do you have with the Gingerich's research?You keep hand waving it away and expressing lots of personal incredulity, but why won't you actually discuss it?

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Tell me how, 1) what you have is testable in a laboratory considering this particular transition.

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Why do you require laboratory testing instead of field evidence?Here are some references for whale evolution:* Gingerich, P. D. et al., 1983. Origin of whales in epicontinental remnant seas: New evidence from the Early Eocene of Pakistan. Science 220: 403-406.
* Gingerich, P. D., B. H. Smith, and E. L. Simons, 1990. Hind limb of Eocene Basilosaurus: Evidence of feet in whales. Science 249: 154-157.
* Gingerich, P. D. et al., 1993. Partial skeletons of Indocetus ramani [Mammalia, Cetacea] from the Lower Middle Eocene Domanda Shale in the Sulaiman Range of Punjab [Pakistan]. Contributions from the Museum of Paleontology of the University of Michigan 28: 393-416.
* Gingerich, P. D. et al., 1994. New whale from the Eocene of Pakistan and the origin of cetacean swimming. Nature 368: 844-847.
* Thewissen, J. G. M. and S. T. Hussain, 1993. Origin of underwater hearing in whales. Nature 361: 444-445.
* Thewissen, J. G. M., S. T. Hussain and M. Arif, 1994. Fossil evidence for the origin of aquatic locomotion in archaeocete whales. Science 263: 210-212. See also Berta, A., 1994. What is a whale? Science 263: 180-181.Tell me, what laboratory or field evidence of ANY ID can you provide?

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2) How could this transition be falsified?

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Well, if we never found any whales or whale fossils with vestigial pelvises or hind legs, this idea that whales evolved from 4-legged land-dwelling mammals would be falsified.

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3) Can you now predict what will evolve out of the whale as this transition continues into the future?

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Not unless you can describe exactly and preciesely every environmental pressure and condition each species of whale is going to experience in the future.In paleontology, we make "retrodictions" of what kinds of features we should find in the various lineages based upon what we see in current populations and also related extinct lineages represented in the fossil record.

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You didn't produce any evidence in that posting. You produced someone's opinion. Does opinion now count as a theory of science that must be taken experimentally through the scientific method? Think about it!

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Do you trust the "opinions" of the scientists who research and test vaccines, antibiotics, and all other drugs and medical therapies and procedures? What about geneticists who study the origins and spread of genetic disorders?Why or why not?

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There are now no odds involved at all because a pattern MUST occur every time you turn the cards over.

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You said:

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and that larger mammals such as horses and elephants slowly evolved from tiny, less complex ameboids in violation of some of the most well proven laws of science.

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You clearly think that somehow, horses and elephants MUST be the end product of evolution, which would make the odds of this occurring from single-celled organisms very unlikely indeed.However, this is not at all how evolution works, so your incredulity is unwarranted because you have created a false argument.Like I explained, Do you now understand that you were presenting a incorrect characterization of how evolution happens?

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Yet, you have no evidence to show this, you just accept it seemingly by faith.

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I can't show evidence of a negative.If you are making the positive claim that the environment has, in fact, a "desire" or "goal" to eventually produce a specific outcome WRT evolution of species, then it is up to you yo produce this positive evidence.

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You seem to follow the natural philosophy which you are quite welcome to do, thus you see no purpose in this process. I however, espouse teleology and thus DO see a trend of purpose had this process occurred.

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What specific observation would you predict to see for a given species if there was some goal of a Designer for that species?

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Wow. Your entire tedious post contains basically nothing, expressing no science at all, just your opinion.

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Well, if my mere opinion is contradicted by some evidence that you have, why not present it?I mean, I repeatedly asked you to show me very reasonable evidence, and also asked you to address current evidence that didn't seem to jibe with your ideas.Apparently, you are not able to, and all people reading this can certainly see that this is the case.

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You don't even seem to know that oranges contain V-C.

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And you can't seem to explain what the vitamin content of oranges has to do with the common ancestor of modern apes and modern humans having the retrovirus-caused mutated/broken gene responsible for the sysnthesis of vitamin C.

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Our conversation is over. Thank you for your contributions and go ahead and have the last word.

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You know, there seems to be a never-ending supply of creationists who keep trying the exact same arguments, decade after decade!

Well, sort of.100 years ago, the Creationists were much more honest.

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He is a classic creationist, ducking and running when challenged. I am pretty sure you are the same, but I will give you the benefit of the doubt.

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Well, don't give it to him just yet...Check out his reply to my message #78.

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Soundly refuted by his suddenly getting the heck out of Dodge and no longer addressing my posts to him on the subject? Boy. If that's how you guys refute things in here then I suppose I must have been refuted a 100 times or so thus far.

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Jerry, a reply to meassage #78 in this thread please, especially after your above comment.

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I can see how it looks that way, sort of how it can look like atheists and/or secular humanists support darwinism.

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You know what other groups accept the evidence for the Theory of Evolution?Catholics
A large majority of Protestants
A large majority of Mulims
Hindus
Buddhists
A large majority of JewsIt's only a very small minority of radical fundamentalist protestant Christians, Orthodox Jews, and some radical fundamentalist Muslims who reject science in favor of religion.In summary, there are people of many, many religions, and also of no religion at all, who accept evolution.What is the common denominator of the people who reject evolution?Do we see a trend here?

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Seems to me that they would be equally entitled to accept evidence for ID. If they were to do so, would it mean that ID is creationism in disguise?

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But there is no positive evidence for ID.It is only philosophy at this point.Can you show me an ID hypothesis that has been tested on a biological system.Something like:"If ID were true, we would expect observed biological system X to display certain characteristics; A, B, C, and D."What Biological system has been tested this way, and what positive evidence for ID has been obtained?As I said in a previous message to you, there are people of many, many religions, and also of no religion at all, who accept evolution.What is the common denominator of the people who reject evolution?

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There simply has not been any science in your posts that I can address.

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You are entitled to hold opinions as we are all and I grant you that right. But I cannot scientifically refute opinions as those are subjective. So you win. Your opinions stand as your opinions!

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Are you sure we are talking about the same post, in which I asked the following questions and made the following requests for information? I was actually looking for actual information and answers to these questions, you know.Why won't you answer them?Why or why not?This message has been edited by schrafinator, 05-07-2005 08:13 PM

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Emotion is everywhere in this debate. One MUST empty the mind of emotion when dealing with issues like this. Otherwise you are on the path to the Dark-side.

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You know, you're right. But maybe I can tell you a story to help you understand why the evo side is getting a bit irritated in this thread.I work in the specialty food industry. I have been training my palate for the last 10 years, with a concentration in olive oil and cheese. I just recently was told by an Italian professional olive oil taster (who tastes and evaluates olive oil for a living) that I had a great palate and would likely pass the certification process to become a professional olive oil taster in Italy.Now, I also sell olive oil in a retail setting every day, and as ours is a very casual shop that also sells great deli sandwiches, we get a very mixed clientele, many of whom have never had fine olive oil in their lives, some who buy it occasionally, and others who buy from us regularly.There exists a category of people whom I call the "prestige foodies". Those are people who are into food because they like it and are interested in it, but a big part of the draw for them is the cache and the "exclusiveness" of it and the message of affluence and high class is sends out to others.Every so often a person who fits the "prestige foodie" category comes into my section who wants to impress me or the people they are with regarding how much they know about olive oil, and they are almost always wrong about many facts. They clearly love olive oil, but they love being "the expert" even more. I am sure they are "the expert" in their circle, but they give out wrong information left and right.The people they are with are impressed, but I am not, of course, because I have been doing this professionally for years and they are just an enthusiastic, and very sloppy, amateur.They have a little knowledge about food, but are certainly not at a professional level. They think that because they read the NY Times food section and own a bunch of cookbooks and have paid a whole bunch of money to eat in expensive restaurants, they know everything there is to know about food. They sometimes spend a lot of time trying to "educate" me, and I then am forced to figure out a way to tactfully inform them of their errors and try to help them towards correct information. Sometimes I do not even bother because for certain people, it is much more important for them to feel that they are correct than to actually find out if they actually are from someone who actually IS a professional and has some expertise.Those people can be terribly irritating because they are basically telling me that the 10 years I have spent working hard to learn what I now know is irrelevant and that their amateur, untrained, error-ridden thoughts, that contradict the consensus of many thousands of people over hundreds of years, are correct.This is a very good analogy to JDB's performance in this thread. He is a very enthusiastic, and very convincing to people who are not experts in the fields he is discussing (that would be you) but not at all to people who actually ARE professionals.He is also very irritating because he knows just enough to be very wrong, and is very smug and condescending despite the fact that I don't think he even understands the claims he is making enough to address the corrections the professionals are trying to show him.Thus, you see him simply refuse to continue a discussion when presented with questions he can't answer.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 05-07-2005 09:21 PM

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Couldn't be anymore irrelevant. I spend hours on my riding mower and have no idea what the designer of that looks like.

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Come on now, of course you do.You know that the designer is a fellow human being. Therefore, you know almost everything there is to know about them from a "What sort of intellegent thing designed this mower?" standpoint.You do realize that the phrase, "they have no idea what a supernatural intelligent design would look like" has nothing to do with the actual visual appearance of the designer, don't you?It is referring to the fundamental nature of the designer.It's that you deem it off limits to ask any, "what sort of intelligent thing designed this frog" sorts of questions.(Edited to fix quote box)This message has been edited by schrafinator, 05-07-2005 10:49 PM

C'mon, Ned, I like your posts, please contribute.

Global Warming is not a good example because there really is a great deal of valid, but contradictory, evidence to support either view.The problem with ID is that it is not valid science.It is only philosophy at this point.

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It is only philosophy at this point.

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IF that is proven to be the case, I would then say that philosophies are like lenses through which science...and by extention all of humanity...views reality.

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Yes, that is the role of all philosophies.Philosophies ask the "why" questions, where science asks the "how" questions.

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Naturalism is the philosophical lens through which mainstream science would like to view the origin question.

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Now, do you mean methodological naturalism or ontological naturalism?Methodological naturalism is the tenet of science that one can only use naturalistic, rather than supernaturalistic, explanations within scientific enquiry because there is no way to falsify supernatural explanations, and therefore no way to improve or correct errors.The supernatural is not specifically denied by MN; it could exist, but MN has no way of detecting the supernatural.MN makes science universal, as no scientist must accept a a priori belief in any supernatural entity to repeat another's research.Ontological Nnaturalism is the philosophical belief that "Nature is all there is", and may or may not be adhered to by a given scientist.Scientists are not required to accept Ontological Naturalism as a personal philosophy, but they must adhere to Methodological Naturalism in their scientific work for it to be considered science.

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The question is, which lens brings the origin question into focus better?

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Which method has the most positive evidence to support it?

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It seems to me we cant find that out until we try both lenses. We have tried the naturalism lens for long enough. For science to say, "No! we refuse to try that lens!" seems somehow...evasive.

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Limbo, humans have used the "supernatural lens" for most of our existence on the planet.It has only been in the last few hundred years that scientific inquiry has been able to proceed largely unfettered by religious entities demanding that scientific findings conform to their preferred religious view of how the world must be.Perhaps you can explain to me how inquiry will benefit by going back to allowing supernatural explanations?I especially would like to hear your thoughts on the issue of how we would correct errors.For example, let's say that supernatural explanations were permitted in science tomorrow, and it was decided that phenomena X was designed by God because we currently do not understand how it could have come about naturally.Does that mean that we should stop trying to understand how phenomena X works? Do we just stop asking such questions?What if there really is a naturalistic explanation for phenomena X but we just haven't thought of it yet, or perhaps we don't have sophisticated enough instruments to facilitate our understanding but could be built in the future.Do we just stop inquiry?This message has been edited by schrafinator, 05-08-2005 07:43 AM

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Couldn't be anymore irrelevant. I spend hours on my riding mower and have no idea what the designer of that looks like.

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