paper against evolution, for intelligent design

Unfortunately, the supporters of ID seem to be a bit thin on the ground. They stop trying to answer questions after a bit. I'm not expert on ID (or anything else for that matter ) but I'm interested in the topic.Correct me if I'm wrong, sweetstuff383, but it is my understanding that most, if not all proponents, of ID also support evolution. They even support neo-darwinian evolution as an explanation for a great deal of the development of life. Where they part company from the great majority of scientists is in suggesting that life could not have arisen in the first place and/or that there are a few specific things that could not have evolved by the neo-darwinian mechanisms.So if you are supporting ID you may not be arguing with much of evolutionary theory at all, just some bits of it.

By creationist do you mean young earth creationists who only think evolution happened much, much faster than any scientists do? Or do you rather mean that they are creationists because they think God created the universe. (which suggests some significant percentage of scientists are that kind of creationists too).Could you list a few of the more influential of the proponents of ID that are both young earthers and do not think any evolution happened (other than hyperevolution for a millenium or so after the flood).added by edit
While you at it could you list some of the "most" that are creationists of the YEC type?The names that come to mind to do with the ID idea are Behe, Demski, Johnston and Denton. I think they are all old earthers who agree that evolution has happened but they think, to varying degrees that the ToE needs to be modified or replaced. That is not what most people call "creationism" is it?[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 12-09-2003]

To back up to where we started.If ID is true do we still have evolution or not? Isn't ID simple an acceptance of evolution with a different mechanism added to the neo_darwinian mechanism?

In any case, whatever God's motivation for it is, there is still the overwhelming abundance of evidence for an old earth and the occurance of an evolutionary process.So you would, in the end, be completely happy with all of science is in front of every statment about what we take as being the best available explanation for anything we put the phrase "God has made it appear that...."?In other words you agree that God has made it appear that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. And to satisfy some older interpretation of the Bible; "God has made it appear that the Earth revolves around the Sun". And to satisfy others; "God has made it appear that germs are the cause of some human diseases."If this was inserted into a preface to all texts of biology would you be happy?

Be careful making the kind of recommendation that you are making. I'm guessing that this is a religious school. Doing too good a job on supporting evolution could very well produce a vindictive response. Some teacher's, without any particular axe to grind, don't like being corrected. The kind of possible correction you are suggesting may produce a very strong reaction.

Oh, marvelous! No one else has managed that before. Are you going to supply the data and logic of that? That would be very interesting.[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 12-11-2003]

This is a place where I have a problem. In the grand scheme of things I'd have to say ID is closer to a "speculation" than a "theory". It is, if you want to push it a long way, a "hypothosis".It hasn't progressed any further than the speculative level because it hasn't yet offered any way to test anything. This is an example of where something testable would have to be proposed. If all the intelligence is built in at the beginning (which is one way of translating the above, clearly there are others) then where is it stored? To say that God set up the laws of the universe to allow for the understood evolutionary processes to have eventually arisen is not an alternative to the ToE.To say that it was "guided" all the way through to today requires some suggestion for the mechanism of the guiding. Some detectable, testable mechanism. None has been proposed. So we are still at the speculative stage.

Why don't you browse this thread on ID?
http://EvC Forum: A thought on Intelligence behind Design -->EvC Forum: A thought on Intelligence behind DesignI think it has all been covered.And now your job is to "generate the testable hypothosis" that ID "theory" is supposed to be able to. It needs to be, as any new hypothosis must supply, something which will distinguish between this new theory and the old one. That is the test needs to be something which will give different answers under the two theories.I'm afraid this has been asked for again and again and nothing has yet been produced.

I've lost that, and can't find it. Could you link to it please?As for the request for a difference, how useful is an additional approach that does nothing but give the same results as an existing one? I don't get that.

It's going to take awhile to read that. If you have specific parts that you think are most telling it would help hurry things up if you gave them to me.BTW, here's my prediction:ID will carry on much as it does now. It will not, even after decades, produce any insights, it will not offer anything to test and it will continue to be more of a political movement than anything else.It is difficult to come into a well studied area second. You do have a much higher first step. There has to be something specific that you can answer that the existing paradigm can not. Einstein was accepted quickly not because he matched Newtonian mechanics at low speed but because he dealt with things that it didn't and got better answers. It's always tougher to over turn a paradigm that has done well for decades. That's just the conservative nature of the scientific process.------------------
Common sense isn't

Science frequently has to deal with more than one theoretical framework for generating testable hypotheses. And those promoting one side or the other keep trying to use their framework to find something which it predicts and the other does not. Some way of separating the two so that the best one can be found. Sometimes it takes a lot of additional data gathering.The underlying mechanisms of the ToE clearly work and operate at least part of the time. Just as Newtonian mechanics worked and still are useful.However, the IDists seems to be suggesting that the ToE is not right all the time. There needs to be additions to it. This would, perhaps, allow the evolutionary theory to continue to be useful but it would be a shift as great as the shift to relatavistic mechanics has been.As a sort of an aside:I'd like to clarify what you see ID as being.I'll try my own wording of your position and you can correct it as needed.You accept all of physics, cosmology and geology as science today accepts it. Science today doesn't know the answer to why the laws of physics are as they are. You say it is because an intelligence made them that way. (The intelligence may be so superior to us that we would think of it as being god-like just as we might appear to be god like to the people of Palestine 2 millenia ago)You accept all of biology and evolutionary theory except that there have been some specific places where the original (or another ) intelligence has intervened in some as yet to be described way.Different IDists might now pick and choose where those places are depending on personal preferences. Some (most?) at the origin of life, others for some very detailed complex developments in biochemistry but nowhere else. Others (most) in the step from earlier hominids to H. sapiens.Have I covered it?

Your whole point here is that the hypothesis of an intelligent designer suggests a "rational" agent. One question that might be asked is how smart, how rational is this agent? Would the design be as good or better than a human would do?This is something testable. Can humans do a better design for any part which IDists suggest is one of the places where a rational agent acted? How would we determine that?Would the resulting design look like something designed or something that is generated by specifically "undesigned" outputs of genetic algorithms. Would that distinguish between them?If none of this can distinguish between them then there is no need for the rational agent. It starts to sound like a god of the gaps approach. Exactly how is this a "darwinian" view of the cell? What exactly does this mean? Isn't it simple saying that the details of cell structure were not known at the time. Since all evolutionary theory needs is a faulty replicator it doesn't need to dig further into the cell.Cell biology, on the other hand, strives to understand the functioning of the cell in greater and greater detail. The advances in understanding from the "bag of goo" was made without any help from ID.As another possible value to using ID as an underlying way of looking at problems. Could we consider the origin of life question?Today, there is work going on in this area. We don't have even a candidate pathway to the original replicators.How would ID help here? Would it not say: "The intelligent designer put the original self replicators in place"?At that point we could stop the lab work as being as waste of time? What would we look for instead? We certainly wouldn't look for any pathways from pre biotic material to biological material would we?

You have so much scrambled up it is getting hard to sort it out. But I'll try again.Why would the detailed supporting structure of the cell have anything specifically to do with evolutionary theory? Could you explain that again? You are acting as if this is some amazing finding on your part. It still evokes a "so what?" to me.The "reachable" bit is still tangling up abiogenesis and Darwinin evolution. Why would you do that if you're supposed to know a thing about the subject?Also I get the strong impression that you think the "bag of soup" thing means the cell was taken as being something sort of uncomplicated and undifferentiated. That is NOT what the article you have quoted is talking about. What do you think it means? The "bag of soup" analogy used in the article was in reference to a particular characteristic. Do you know what that was? In any case it was an analogy to describe a situation. Not a real description of the view of the cell at the time.The whole, and only point, you seem to have is that an individual must be careful about what bagage they bring into the examination of any questions. We all talk about "thinking outside the box" but we all have a lot of trouble doing that. I will certainly give you that point. It is absolutely true.Ok, now we have ID included. Now what? As soon as we see that space aliens guiding the evolution of life on earth enables some insight or progress in our understanding then it will have some credibility. Until then I will go along with the idea that it is not impossible. It has just proved to be completely useless as an approach so far.I have read over some of your site and haven't seen anything yet other than the point of being careful about being too blinkered when looking for a solution to something. I had asked for your suggestions as to what parts had something really telling to say.The steps used for "creating life" in the lab will most likely be like a lot of other descriptions of the necessary chemical steps. So I guess your prediction has a high chance of being right if you take that as like assembling a machine. However, a lot of people would liken that to a reciepe for soup. Neither analogy is meaningful anyway.Another possibility is that we may uncover a good candicate replicator by using the "forced evolution" process I took from "American Scientist" in the thread about what has come from evolutionary science. This would be fitting to neither analogy.
It is here:
http://EvC Forum: What has evolution theory produced? -->EvC Forum: What has evolution theory produced?

But it isn't the scientifically inclined here that say this. It is the young-earth creationists who arrive at this point because they insist that while the universe, earth etc. look old they aren't. Sometimes they come right out and say "it just looks that way" but otherwise they just say that is an interpretation. Unfortunatly they never explain why there can be any other interpretation but that.You comments about fast sedimentation etc. etc. are all attempts at a different interpretation of course. However as you will find when you to to the appropriate theads, they all fall apart when examined in any detail or when evidence is asked for. As this happens only the trickster explanation is left.

It is because we recognize that everyone has biases that the process of science is used. Nothing important is decided by one experimental result, it takes confirmation and reconfirmation. Medical experiments especially are suspicious of anything that isn't just blind but double-blind because of the recognition of bias.When the evidence and logic are supporting a view then I'm not sure that "bias" is the correct word anymore. Everyone has biases, scientists included. They can be very stubborn in giving up a view point but in the end, over and over, the majority are biased in favour of the evidence. A couple of things to note:The old earth position and the occurance of evolution was forced on scientists who were creationists until faced with the evidence. For 200 years work has gone on and noone has managed to over turn what they were finally forced to conclude by the evidence.From the original origins of science as we know it in Galileo's day the religious scientists have understood the point that he made. If what we learn appears to be in conflict with scripture it is not scripture that is wrong but man's interpretation of it.If you are interpreting scripture as saying the earth is young and created in a week then your interpretation is wrong. That is all. God has not deceived.If you continue to insist that it is not your interpretation but it is actually what scripture is saying then you are saying scripture is wrong. That is unfortunate if you think that it's true message is therefore also wrong. However, many can understand that the Bible is not a geology or biology or astronomy text so it doesn't matter if it does happen to be based on a primative understanding of those areas. That is not what the Bible is really about.[This message has been edited by NosyNed, 12-15-2003]