What exactly is ID?

Message 1261 of 1273 (628146) 08-07-2011 12:35 AM

Reply to: Message 1260 by Portillo 08-07-2011 12:23 AM

But the basis for that claim is religion, not empirical evidence. ID is exactly opposite the scientific method as its conclusions come first and its goal is to find evidence that supports those conclusions, while ignoring or misrepresenting evidence that contradicts those conclusions.

The history of ID is well known. It came into being shortly after the US Supreme Court tossed creation "science" out of the schools, so creationists had to find another dodge to try to fool the courts.

See Missing link: “cdesign proponentsists” for some of the sordid details.

Message 1262 of 1273 (628159) 08-07-2011 5:32 AM

Reply to: Message 1260 by Portillo 08-07-2011 12:23 AM

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ID is no different to any sciences except for the fact that it claims that things are designed, not random accidents. For example, if you study a computer and you learn that the computer has a designer, does that mean that science no longer works when researching a computer? One ameba cell equals 1000 sets of an encyclopedia. So if you spelled out the information in English and printed it in books, it would fill out 1000 sets. If the simplest forms of life have so much complex information, it can be argued that it is the result of an intelligent mind. Would you ever believe me if I told you that my encyclopedia set created itself or would you insist that there was a designer?

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If I spelled out that information in English (translation difficulties aside) and printed it in books, then yes, that would presumably be ID, but only because books themselves are intelligently designed. And where did you get the idea that the lowly amoeba is the simplest form of life? Some amoeba genomes are considerably larger than the human genome.

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A living cell is much more complicated and ingenious than any manmade machine. In a pinhead of DNA, the information stored would take 15 million million books to contain the information. There would be enough information to go from here to the moon 500 times.

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Are these (x number of books in English, or x number of lunar round trips) supposed to be measures of information content?

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SETI, which looks for intelligent life in space are looking for signs of intelligence.

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This is precisely not what SETI is looking for; what they are actually looking for is narrow-band electromagnetic transmissions, which might (or might not) be an indication of artificiality. Unlike IDists, SETIists do not claim (so far) to have discovered any such transmissions outside of human-generated signals.

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How exactly would they determine intelligence? If they got a reply with the numbers 1-100 neatly written out, do you think it would infer intelligence?

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If SETIists ever found such a signal embedded in an extraterrestial transmission, I'm confident that knowlegeable IDists will get the first crack at determining its information content and would be capable of answering that question themselves. Oh, wait, the IDists would need to develop a usably-quantifiable measure for information content first (along with a minimum threshold value of such that would indicate "intelligence"), which they have been repeatedly asked for to no avail. No rush, though.

Message 1264 of 1273 (628300) 08-08-2011 3:27 PM

Reply to: Message 1260 by Portillo 08-07-2011 12:23 AM

Two mistakes. First, you are pointing to organisms that are products of over 3 billion years of evolution as "the simplest forms of life". Obviously, that is seriously wrong. The simplest forms of life would have been the first life, not the life that is at the 3 billion year end of a natural process that produces information in genomes (i.e. evolution).

Second, you never offer evidence of a designer. Instead, we just get an open ended question. That really doesn't help much.

If encyclopedias reproduced and did so imperfectly while being subject to natural selection, no I wouldn't believe you.

Perhaps that's because manmade machines did not evolve.

They face hostility because they dissent from the theory of evolution because of their religious beliefs, not because of the evidence. That hostility is well earned.

Message 1265 of 1273 (628302) 08-08-2011 4:22 PM

So, once again, it is closing time. Post your summations over the next couple days, one summation per person, no responding to summations. I will close the thread on Wednesday morning.

Defining ID is still an interesting discussion that would be well served by starting afresh, so if someone would like to propose a continuation thread over in Proposed New Topics I will try to give it prompt attention.

Edited by Admin, : Get thread proposal forum link correct.

Message 1267 of 1273 (628307) 08-08-2011 5:29 PM

Reply to: Message 1266 by jar 08-08-2011 4:31 PM

IMHO: The complete refusal to even try and describe how ID works is indicative of intellectual dishonesty.

Message 1268 of 1273 (628389) 08-09-2011 9:31 AM

Edited by Son, : No reason given.

Edited by Son, : No reason given.

Message 1269 of 1273 (628517) 08-10-2011 5:54 AM

Reply to: Message 1259 by Panda 07-31-2011 7:02 PM

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"How do I tell if it is designed?"

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William Dembski proposes three possibilities: law, chance or design.

1. Natural Law explains regularity: For the filter to eliminate regularity, one must establish that a multiplicity of possibilities is compatible with the given antecedent circumstance (recall that regularity admits only one possible consequence for a given antecedent circumstance); hence to eliminate regularity is to establish a multiplicity of possible consequences.

2 Chance explains real randomness: For law to explain an outcome there must only be a limited number of possible outcomes all predictable from the circumstances. These are events of high probability. If there are many possible different outcomes, then law cannot explain it.

3. Only after law and chance have been excluded is design assumed to be the cause. These events are characterized by patterns that are both specified and of vanishingly small probabilities. Specified events of small probability do not occur by chance.

Message 1271 of 1273 (628526) 08-10-2011 7:58 AM

Reply to: Message 1269 by Portillo 08-10-2011 5:54 AM

Also note that "multiplicity of possible consequences" (which is precisely the same as "number of possible outcomes") is left undefined and will vary depending upon what it takes to achieve the pre-determined result. It's bogus.

This "Specified events of small probability do not occur by chance" is also bogus. Someone won the lotto last Wednesday against 500,000,000 to 1 odds. Events of small probability happen naturally all the time. Look in the mirror. Considering the numbers of eggs, sperm and timing, against the remote possibility that your parents even met, multiplied by those same factors for your grandparents, great grandparents and back through the hundreds (actually tens of thousands and beyond) of generations and the probability of YOU is staggeringly small and yet here you naturally be naturally achieved.

Take a million decks of shuffled cards. Randomly take one card from each deck and record its value. What are the possibilities that you will re-draw all 1 million cards in the same sequence precisely as you did the first round? Staggeringly small. And yet you managed to do it quite easily the first round. All million of them. Staggeringly small possibilities happen naturally in this universe all day long.

Your rendition of Demski's "filter" is bull.

Message 1273 of 1273 (628539) 08-10-2011 9:04 AM

Again, if anyone is interested in continuing the discussion they should propose a new thread over at Proposed New Topics.