Biased accounts of intelligent design

Hm, you may be right. Where CAN you go with the concept of everything's appearing to be designed? If they could prove it then I guess they could say it disproves any theory that life has come about by purely mechanical processes, and that would be a huge coup; but once it's done it's done. I guess THEN we talk about the nature of the Designer?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Faith has no problem posting young Earth claims.

You may be right about the historical facts involved, but.... But the questions YEC addresses are not "religious" and the methods used have to do with the actual phenomena, not religious principles, so it's not quite fair to accuse them of trying to "fool" anyone by "pretending" something. If they address the stuff of science without reference to the biblical text, it's not establishment science we know that, but it isn't religion either.What bothers me most is accusing them of "hiding" the truth. If they focus on the facts without reference to any religious texts they aren't hiding anything when they call it science, even if there are problems with that term. YEC STARTS FROM the Bible but by exploring the external facts comes up with all kinds of stuff that may or may not be compatible with the Bible, so I can't impute any of it to God or the Bible and it's a big mistake to try to do that. I may think it's compatible but even that much can't be claimed for sure.

Creationism: God done it so you can't teach anything else.Federal Court: Separation of church and state. Get out of my court.Creation Science: OK, God done it but in a scientific way so we fit in the science class.Federal Court: Separation of church and state. Get out of my court.Cdesign proponentsists: OK, OK, how bout this. The Designer (who ever that is) done it and ... uh ... He done it with science, kinda.Federal Court: --Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 400 F. Supp. 2d 707 (M.D. Pa. 2005)Intelligent Design is a hidden god-centered creationism.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

Intelligent Design is also pointless, useless and significant only as a source of humor. If we look at the actual products it might be possible to make a case for Inept Design, Inelegant Design, Inefficient Design, Insane Design but certainly not Intelligent Design.Which is why humans have had to redesign and rework the original designs of everything from Bananas and wheat and corn and tomatoes and potatoes and cattle and chickens even humans themselves to try to fix the really piss poor designs.

Edwards v. Aguillard established that as false. As did you. Remember just recently trying to discuss those English drawings and repeatedly making it clear that your only reason for believing the Fludde was your religion? And the many times you claimed you had real-world evidence but all you had was unsupported assertions and the Bible?

Faith, please read what I actually wrote.I was talking specifically about "creation science", not about YEC in general as you took it to be. "CREATION SCIENCE". Even though "creation science" was derived from YEC, it is not the same thing. YEC is a religious belief, whereas "creation science" is a deliberately crafted legalistic deception. Not the same thing!Since I'm in a rush now to go meet my friend for her birthday dinner, I'll copy from my site's index page, DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION HOME PAGE (apologies for not having the time to correct for some loss of formatting, especially the loss of links):

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Basically, "creation science" is a form of YEC that is a deliberately crafted legalistic deception designed in the early 1970's to circumvent the US court system's then-new rules disallowing religious reasons for barring the teaching of evolution in public schools -- basically that killed the "monkey laws" that had been in effect since the 1920's. Since they could no longer use their actual religious reasons for opposing evolution, creationists invented the lie that they were opposing evolution for "purely scientific reasons, nothing religious about it." They created this deception by superficially scrubbing their materials and arguments of all overt religious references (eg, remove Bible quotes), even reducing God to "some unnamed Creator". Critics of this approach have long called it "the Game of 'Hide the Bible.'"

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The application of "creation science" is to provide a fake faade of opposing evolution for "purely scientific reasons". This was originally intended to circumvent the Lemon Test which blocks them from basing their opposition to evolution on their actual religious grounds, but they quickly applied it to make appeals to the general public's sense of fairness by calling for "equal time" and "balanced treatment" -- indeed, most creationist state laws and school board policies have been based on "equal time" and "balanced treatment" arguments.

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Their intellectual framework is the "Two Model Approach" (TMA) which posits two-and-only-two-mutually-exclusive "models", the "creation model" and the "atheistic evolution model". Even though many rank-and-file creationists have never even heard of the TMA, it does form the basis of almost all "creation science" strategy, tactics, and arguments. The application of the TMA is to make very vague statements about the "creation model" (being very careful to avoid any specifics) and then "prove" it solely by attacking their "evolution model" in order to "disprove" that, thus "proving" "the only alternative" without ever having to present, discussion, support, or defend that "creation model". The TMA has been described by critics as a book consisting of two chapters: Chapter One "Evolution", and Chapter Two "Everything That's Wrong with Chapter One." Evidence of its wide-spread use by creationists is in how many creationist books and debates (especially from the ICR) start out establishing the TMA and then consist almost entirely of attacking the "evolution model"; in debate, creationists are notorious for avoiding their own "creation model" even to the point of adamantly refusing to present it, to discuss it, or to defend it. Indeed, virtually their entire "mountains of evidence for creation" end up being nothing more than attacks against their "evolution model" (which bears almost no resemblence to actual evolution).

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The TMA is a form of fallacy called a false dichotomy (AKA "false dilemma"), which is a contrived either-or argument whose sole purpose is to deceive your audience. Its problems are many; here are just a few:

• Although it's described vaguely as "any ideas about a Creator", their "creation model" is actually highly specificly fundamentalist Christian young-earth creationism -- refer to my page, The Creation Model, which quotes directly from an ICR article describing their "creation model". All other "ideas about a Creator" get consigned to their "atheistic evolution model", though creationists will usually avoid talking about those with a lot of mumbled equivocation.
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• Everything that does not belong in their "creation model" goes into their "atheistic evolution model". According to the late Dr. Henry Morris of the ICR (President and co-founder), that includes "most of the world's religions, ancient and modern." So the irony is that their "evolution model", which they describe as being "atheistic", is predominantly theistic! Furthermore, since most Christian ideas about creation do not agree with the strictly young-earth-creationist tenets of their "creation model", then they end up in the "atheist evolution model" which leads us to a double irony of Christian ideas being deemed "atheistic."
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• Even the non-religious elements of their "evolution model" bear almost no resemblence to actual evolutionary theory or teachings. Instead, they're a horrendously huge mish-mash of old abandoned ideas and misconceptions about evolution that have nothing to do with actual evolutionary theory. Therefore, despite all the creationist attacks on these elements of their "evolution model", they never actually strike anywhere near evolution. All they end up disproving are those wrong ideas and misconceptions. In addition, they are able to misrepresent scientists criticizing and rejecting those wrong ideas and misconceptions as them rejecting evolution.
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  Make no mistake about it, actual evolutionary theory is part of their "evolution model". They just leave it completely alone and never go near it.
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• You cannot possibly prove their "creation model" through the TMA. The only way you could do that would be to disprove each and every single individual element of their "evolution model" -- this would be necessary since none of those elements depend on each other and even contract each other. Given the vast number of those individual elements, that task would be intractable (ie, theoretically possible, but it would take so much effort and time as to be practically impossible). Given that the vast number of those elements are theistic and given our inability to test or disprove the supernatural, that makes that task impossible.
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  It would be far easier and much more practical to prove their "creation model" by presenting it and presenting actual evidence for it. But that is one approach that they avoid like the Devil.
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• The TMA is a sword that cuts both ways and can be used far more easily to disprove the "creation model". This can be done in two ways:
  • Since every part of their "creation model" depends on each other, showing just one of them would be enough to disprove the entire "model". Since the claims of young-earth creationism are false (eg, the earth being young, Noah's Flood), that would be easy to do. And, by the logic of the TMA, disproving the "creation model" automatically proves the "evolution model."
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  • Since showing just one part of the "evolution model" to be true would prove the "evolution model", by the logic of the TMA that would automatically disprove the "creation model." Actually, I think that creationists do realize this possibility, which is why they are so strongly motivated to keep it from happening, even though they're the ones who created this logic bomb to begin with.
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  But of course, since the TMA is a fallacy, its logic is invalid. Though that's little comfort for creationists who have bought into it.
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• The creators of the TMA had a fundamental misunderstanding of what a model is. Basically a model is a detailed description of how something works. A model is constructed from an understanding of the mechanism it is to describe based on actual evidence gathered. Key to the development of the model is repeated testing and confirmation against actual evidence. Therefore, an inevitable by-product of model-building is the accumulation of evidence.
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  The TMA's two "models" are not proper models. If they were, then in the construction of their "creation model" they would have ended up with a large body of actual evidence for creation (as opposed to false attacks against their misconceptions about evolution). But their inability to ever present any such evidence very strongly suggests that none exists.
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  We should note that another name for "model" is "theory".

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In 1987, the US Supreme Court exposed the "creation science" deception (Edwards v. Aguillard (1987)), thus eliminating its usefulness in court. At that point, creationists quickly adopted a parallel creationist movement, Intelligent Design (ID), in what has been described as a new game of "Hide the Creationism." Now most of the arguments presented to the public are about complexity and there is almost no mention at all of young-earth claims, but among the faithful the same old YEC claims and arguments continue to circulate and be presented. Although ID has been exposed as nothing but a smokescreen for creationism (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005)), no replacement for ID has appeared yet.

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Conclusion
While young-earth creationism is an actual religious belief, it has the unfortunate feature of making strict demands on how the real world must be in order for their faith to survive. Since those demands are contrary-to-fact, that creates serious problems for believers such that they must either keep themselves ignorant or they must engage in serious self-delusion in order to keep their faith. Unfortunately for them, they cannot always succeed in those efforts.

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"Creation science" is a deliberately crafted legalistic deception that had been used to deceive the courts, the public, school boards, and state legislatures in order to advance their agenda of removing evolution from the schools (and now other science they don't like, such as climate change). Those efforts continue in the present, albeit under the guise of "Intelligent Design".

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This form of creationism depends on false and deceptive claims and on misrepresenting science and evolution and it makes its followers' faith dependent on those false claims. Over the years, I have encountered many ex-creationists, many of whom either lost or nearly lost their faith because of YEC and its false claims. In addition, it presents Christianity as depending on lies and deception, which drives many people away. Use of those false claims are not only counterproductive, but also destructive. It not only does not serve their cause, but it also works against it.

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Edited by dwise1, : Restored the unsorted list format

This is why ID is a weak form of Deism. They stop there, "the Designer (god/s) dunnit" pleased with their accomplishment. The Deist says "now let's see how it was done" -- what does science say these things happened, what does the evidence say.Enjoy

and define their terms, such as information and complexity, and how they are measured. The open-minded skeptic will say it may look like design, but how can we be sure? If it can be explained by natural processes, then it can't be design. If it can't be explained, then there is a possibility, but not a probability -- more information is needed before it can be concluded one way or the other, because it is also possible that we just don't know how it was done naturally.We are limited in our ability to understand, by our ability to understand. It's the incomplete understanding we have that limits our understanding.Enjoy

There is no way to prove such a thing one way or the other; it's a subjective judgment. You can make up a string of supposed natural processes and convince yourself that's enough to disprove design but to someone else, like me for instance, it looks like a flimflam. All sorts of such sequences have been invented to explain how, say, the eye could have evolved, although the different eyes in the sequence come from all over the taxonomic tree in no particular relation to each other. Just the fact that you can imagine a sequence out of them is enough to persuade some despite the complete lack of any evidence that an evolutionary track from one to another ever happened.\Again, it can never be objectively established I suppose, but design always looks to me open and shut: there is no way natural processes could bring it about no matter how cleverly different variations may be arranged to suggest the possibility. The bug that has a complex rotating part has no known genetic relationship to another bug that has some but not all of the elements of that rotating part, nor that one to another with a few of those elements and so on, but just their existence convinces some that the insect with the rotating part evolved rather than being designed.But have you in fact "explained" the appearance of design by these purely imagined sequences of natural processes? Is this science? Really?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But that is simply not what scientists do as has been explained to you a brazillion times.Science asks what could have caused something and then looks at the evidence, develops a hypothesis and the tests the hypothesis. Mendel did not just make up a string of natural processes, he did the tests and recorded the results and published the results and then others tested his explanation and when they all got the same results, a theory was presented.That is what the Intelligent Design Snake Oil Salesmen never do.

What I described, however, is not testable.

Yet what science claims is testable and has been tested.There has never been any evidence to support design or the existence of any designer.

Of course not. As I said there can't be any evidence for or against, it's all subjective. No it's NOT testable.

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There is no way to prove such a thing one way or the other; it's a subjective judgment. You can make up a string of supposed natural processes and convince yourself that's enough to disprove design but to someone else, like me for instance, it looks like a flimflam.

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The claim, of course, is not that design is disproved, but that the alternative explanation is better. You, of course, being prejudiced, and having no great regard for the truth may dismiss it without bothering to understand it - as you are clearly doing. But that simply shows the poverty of your thinking.

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All sorts of such sequences have been invented to explain how, say, the eye could have evolved, although the different eyes in the sequence come from all over the taxonomic tree in no particular relation to each other. Just the fact that you can imagine a sequence out of them is enough to persuade some despite the complete lack of any evidence that an evolutionary track from one to another ever happened.

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Which only shows again that you have not understood. We have plenty of evidence for evolution. The existence of numerous different eyes illustrating a possible sequence of evolutionary development is not taken as proof in itself that the mammalian eye evolved - rather it shows that is is possible. The conclusion that it evolved comes from the whole weight of evidence, not that single fact.

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Again, it can never be objectively established I suppose, but design always looks to me open and shut: there is no way natural processes could bring it about no matter how cleverly different variations may be arranged to suggest the possibility.

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And yet we have evidence that is better explained by evolution than design, no working design-based theory, very strong evidence that the mammalian eye could evolve. Evolution is clearly the stronger position unless you wish to drag theology into the issue - and even that won’t help you much.

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But have you in fact "explained" the appearance of design by these purely imagined sequences of natural processes? Is this science? Really?

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Explaining things according to the evidence, using known processes? Yes, it very much is.