Creationism/ID as Science

Some useful articles and links: On whether "evolution is an atheist theory"On whether "evolution is losing support among scientists"

You do not say how a mere description of a cell is evidence that that cell was designed rather than evolved. But this is exactly what you don't seem to have.Moreover, if this is the standard we're using, then archaeologists and forensic scientists both know the difference between a designed artifact and a living creature (or the remains of one). Digging up a pot, an archaeologist asks "Who made it, and why"; he does not ask this question when he digs up the shinbone of an antelope. The ability to tell a manufactured device from a natural one is, indeed, a necessity in his field: do you mean to claim there is no such distinction?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

A mere description of a cell by a micro-biologist is not an argument that it was designed rather than evolved.A mere description of a cell by a quorum of Nobel Laureates is not an argument that it was designed rather than evolved.A mere description of a cell is not an argument that it was designed rather than evolved. Ah, petitio prinicipii. If you mean to include cells among "manufacturing plants", then I've seen billions of 'em. Right. And archeologists place plant and animal remains amongst those things which do not have an intelligent source, do they not? If ID is right, then archeologists are wrong, are they not? If ID is science, then archeologists cannot determine "with great accuracy" what is and is not from an intelligent source, can they? But here we go again.Imagine an archeologist, a forensic scientist, and a biologist dig up the skull of a saber-tooth tiger. We ask them if it's a product of intelligent design.Archeologist: No. ("With great accuracy", remember?)
Forensic scientist: No.
Biologist: No.Now I think you're slurring over your reasoning slightly. It is true that in archeology, the question: "Is it designed or natural?" is always a legitimate scientific question. But it is not always correct to answer "designed".ID does not consist of asking the question of whether organisms are designed, which is a legitimate scientific question to which the answer is "no"; rather, ID consists of pretending that the answer is "yes".The question of whether the Giants' Causeway was really built by giants is a fair question to which geologists can give a clear answer; but this does not make the Giants Really Built It OK Hypothesis science.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

"Evolve as in come alive"? Just as an archeologist infers the origins of a potsherd from data he can collect. This is a far cry from observing those origins. Just as a forensic scientist infers the cause of death based on data he can collect. This is a far cry from witnessing the crime.Yet you admit that archeology and forensic science are sciences. And the whole point of these sciences is to find out about events which we didn't witness: that's the whole shebang. Yes, you do, don't you, because you're a creationist, and one of your more pointless rituals is to use the word "faith" as though it was a dirty word.I guess it's easier than putting up substantial arguments for intelligent design or against evolution; but then, so is saying nothing at all. From the evidence; the same way I know the answer to the legitimate scientific question of whether pigs are capable of flight. Yes, you're right, if I'm sure pigs can't fly, that's my religion. Yup. Yes indeed.You guys ... Not that they cannot: merely that in fact they do not.

I think you just said that observation of descent with modification wasn't evidence of descent with modification. But this is weird. You're speaking as though having testable consequences was a flaw in Darwin's theory.The theory of evolution did indeed need for genetic tests to show that life could be grouped by genetic cladistics. And this is what the tests show. Chalk one up to Darwin. You, however, boast that Intelligent deign is superior because it makes no reference to this evidence.You say that Darwin required vast periods of time. Very true. And it has been proved that those vast periods of time have elapsed. Another successful prediction from my main man Charlie.You say that Darwin required the fossil record to back him up. And it did. Score another point for Darwin. When he wrote, no-one had seen an intermediate form in the fossil record. Yet, obedient to the theory, there turned out to be thousands of them.I call your attitude weird because, dammit, it is, as you would see if you tried to apply it to anything but your bugbear, evolution.Sherlock Holmes: This man has been shot!
Inspector Lestrade: No, he's been struck down by God.
Sherlock Holmes: I think you'll find he's been shot. In fact, let me take this pair of long-bladed tweezers, and, there, you see, there's the bullet!
Inspector Lestrade: Well then, my theory is better than yours, 'cos your theory needs there to be a bullet.
Sherlock Holmes: No, my theory is superior to yours, because my theory needed there to be a bullet and there was one.You can see, surely, that it is Lestrade who is being the duffer here.Even weirder than this is the way you speak of drawing inferences from data as though this were a bad thing. This is what scientists are for. This is their job.Your idea of the fossil record is similarly bizarre. I mean, what?(1) A fossil is not evidence that an animal died "suddenly". What on earth gave you that idea?(2) The fossil record does not merely tell us that "an animal died". It tells us the form of that animal, or at least its hard parts. This allows us to test the fossil record against the predictions of the theory of evolution.(3) I have no idea what point you are trying to make about "living fossils", but their existence is certainly not evidence against the theory of evolution, since that theory does not predict that such organisms will not exist. If you think that the theory of evolution is unfalsifiable, perhaps you should explain this to some other people on these forums. They keep trying --- you'll laugh when you hear this! --- to prove the theory of evolution false!But seriously, you know damn well that evolution is falsifiable, and I know you know this, because you have pointed out several times (correctly) that the theory needs certain things to be true. If those things had turned out to be false, this would have falsified the theory.This is precisely how we test a theory: we see if the things which would be true if it was true are true.Meanwhile, the boot appears to be on the other foot. You boast that Intelligent Design does not place any contraints on what we should find in the fossil record or genetic record. What does it say we should find in nature?However, Intelligent Design is not completely unfalsifiable. Although it is void of predictions in geology or natural history, it is incompatible with events that we know actually happened.--------Anyway, I guess this answers the question of whether Intelligent Design is science. If the first thing you people have to do is turn the scientific method itself bass-ackwards, then it's all going to be downhill from there, isn't it?

Well, of course the weasel words here are "too complex to have evolved". How do you determinte that something is "too complex to have evolved"? Please show your reasoning. But this is merely petitio principii. You are claiming the very thing that you should be proving --- that such systems are only the product of intelligent design.

On the other hand, it may turn out to be the case that the so-called "theory" of Intelligent Design consists of talking exactly the the same nonsense about evolution that the creationists talk; and that, like creationism, it is not in fact a theory. Maybe this is all that "Intelligent Design" is: creationist ignorance under a new brand name.Well, if this is really all they've got, we can, of course, prove them wrong. We've been doing that for the last 150 years, how hard can it be?To return to your pont of whether this is off topic: maybe "Intelligent Design Theory", like "Creation Science", and like "Flood Geology", just consists of getting real science wrong. Then to do so, in a discussion of Intelligent Design, is not off topic --- it's the only thing the poor guy has to talk about.If ID consists of getting science wrong, then ignorance of science is the topic whenever we discuss ID.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Heh, I guess that applies to me.OK, I'll stop arguing with his rubbish, but I too would like to challenge him do defend one word of his gibble on another thread.I would like again to raise the question of whether this stuff might, in fact, be on topic.So far as I understand it, ID consists of creationism shorn of nearly all its testable claims. The ID crowd don't claim that the Earth is young, 'cos there's no evidence for this. They don't claim that the Earth was created in six days, 'cos there's no evidence for this. They don't claim that snakes used to be able to talk, 'cos there's no evidence for this. They don't claim that snakes eat dust, 'cos there's no evidence for this. They leave out the bit about the magic fruit, 'cos there's no evidence for this. They leave out the Noachim flood, 'cos there's no evidence for this.They abandon almost every single one of the positive claims that creationists make, 'cos there is no evidence for them, and a mountain of evidence against them.There then remains to them one positive argument, the so-called "Argument From Design": i.e. "it looks like someone designed it, so someone did".But of course we know this is rubbish, because we know many ways to produce the appearance of design: actual design; a brute force algorithm; a genetic algorithm; simulated annealing; a Monte Carlo algorithm; a Las Vegas algorithm ... many ways.So the only way to prop up the argument from design is to argue that these algorithms, and specifically the genetic algorithm, don't actually work and can't produce the results that one sees in nature. Any argument that some organism was designed has to incorporate an argument that it hasn't evolved instead.So there is no way to support Intelligent Design except to try to discredit science; and so there is nothing these people can do except throw the same ol' creationist bricks against the same ol' bulletproof glass of science.So there can be no positive defense of Intelligent Design. Its advocates must assault science. What else can they do?Hughes, or any other poster, may of course prove me wrong by making one single post in favor of Intelligent Design which does not depend on arguing or assuming that the theory of evolution is false. Don't hold your breath.

So, in a thread in which you are asked to prove that creationism/ID is science, all you can do is recite the same boring old lies about real science.Thanks for proving my point.Don't you have anything to say in favor of creationism/ID? Anything at all?Go on, surprise me.And, OMG, did you just complain that real science makes extrapolations and predictions? As though this were a bad thing?You did.It's almost as though ... as though you don't know the first thing about science.What am I doing here? Isn't there one smart creationist I can debate with?Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Another good example is the mammalian ear. Remove the incus, and it stops working. Yet the fossil record shows a series of functional intermediate forms.Fans of the Dover Pandas Trial will remember Behe refusing to answer any questions about the human hand on the grounds that he was a microbiologist and didn't know anything about it. I suspect that the lawyer had some similar argument in mind.The notion that IC can't evolve is therefore falsifiable and known to be false.ID remains a rather vacuous concept.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

But it is a failed science, since it repeatedly identifies as having been designed things which we know not to have been designed.Whereas the successful science of archaelogy correctly identifies natural productions as not having been designed. Or alternatively: "On a microscopic level, biological structures are manufacturing plants. An objective observer would say that a manufacturing plant doesn't have a genome nor reproduce with variation. So too, the same conclusion can be made about the biological manufacturing plants."You notice how this is rubbish?We know that organisms are not the same as manufacturing plants in every respect. In particular, we know that they have the capacity to evolve.The notion that if two things are similar in some respect they are similar in some other respect is not science, nor logic, nor within the bounds of common sense, nor anything but a device for reaching false conclusions when you have no real arguments to back you up.The fact that ID seeks to base itself on this childish error in logic proves beyond doubt that it is not science.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.