ID as Religion

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holmes:
If the ID movement wants to be taken seriously, scientifically, it has to stop jumping to the next level.

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ID doesn't jump to the next level. All I see are accusations with nothing to support them, Why is that?

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holmes:
The first thing that must be set up is a solid criteria for design.

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That has been done. Please read Nature, Design and Science: The Status of Design in Natural Science by Del Ratzsch.

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holmes:
You then go on to undercut Behe's scientific legitimacy by acting as if he is wrong about the possibility (even under his own evidentiary claims) that evolution may be completely responsible for changes we have seen.

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Where and when did I do that? Behe believes in common descent. He does NOT say that the acceptable mode of evolution, NS acting on random mutations was responsible.

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holmes:
And even if such a thing were to be discovered there would need to be much more positive evidence regarding the mechanisms of design and about the actual designer before discussing teleology at all.

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That is total BS.

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holmes:
And ONLY THEN, with a PROVEN designer, with a PROVEN design, with a PROVEN goal for specific entities, can ID theorists discuss implications on social agendas.

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ID itself does not do that. What IDists do or want to do has no bearing on ID. This is about ID not IDists.I would suggest that you too read about ID by IDists.

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"...the most habitable place in the solar system yields the best view of solar eclipses just when observers can best appreciate them." from "The Privileged Planet"

Perhaps you are having a hartd time understanding. I will slow it down for you.1) First a clear and consistent set of criteria for detecting design must be proven and established as useful. This means getting it into USE. Proven by actually differentiating between known manufactured and known nonmanufactured entities (both biological and nonbiological).One cannot use one's own analogies to "prove" it is working.2) ONLY AFTER that, can this be applied to organisms. Criteria proven as a reliable standard, THEN application. IDIOTs (including Behe) have not done the work to get the criteria extablished and instead jump to this category: application. If you have any knowledge of a quantified measure of SC, or "information" being used to detect a manufactured biological entity from a nonmanufactured one in some test of the criteria, please let me know. I have not read that specific book, but I will look for it and read it.But before I do can you tell me how it differs from the work set up by Behe and Dembski? That is using "information" or "specified complexity".And are you saying that this book includes citations of experiments which have shown that this criteria has been able to differentiate between designed and nondesigned organic structures? If so, maybe you could share some of those citations before I get the book? Well we can begin by noting that you have said you are not on board with common descent. Without further explanation that seems to be a major disconnect between the two of you.But we can move beyond that. If you are trying to imply that Behe has disproven, or suggested that he has called into question standard evolutionary theory's mechanisms at all, then I suggest you reread Behe. Specifically Darwin's Black Box.He acknowledges that once complex organs and organisms exist, that it would be just about impossible to determine if a thing was IC or not. Thus evolutionary mechanisms are NOT invalidated, ESPECIALLY at the level of eukaryotes which is what we are talking about, and the limit of that method for detection is capped. Oh, then I must be wrong.Perhaps you can explain to me how you determine the teleological purpose of an organism based solely on the knowledge that a certain part of that organism has been designed?For example, let's say that the flagellum of a certain bacteria was proven to have been designed. I mean for the purposes of this hypothetical there simply is no question about this from any corner of science.What then was the reason the designing entity created that structure? Or failing that, what would you NEED to know to make such a determination? I have already stated that ID itself does not, that it is the people running ID which are. Perhaps you are having problems reading my posts?That said, what IDIOTs do with ID theory proper, does have a bearing on the state of ID as a whole. IDIOTs are wasting time jumping to the next two issues instead of working on the first. As a consequence there is currently no set of established and proven criteria for detecting design, and that is a major problem for ID as a theory. That's funny because I am reading your posts, and I have read works by Behe, Dembski, Wells, Johnson, and more... Are these not IDists.I mean I know they are all actually IDIOTs and not true ID theorists, but I assume you would be refering to them as ID theorists.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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Even though IDists attribute the design to a designing intelligence, ID says nothing of the designer.

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Why not?Why is that very logical, natural question deemed off limits by IDists?I mean, if we look at Archeology, that is exactly the question that is asked all the time:When and Archaeologist finds pots, tools, buildings and other artifacts, they study them to figure out the nature of the culture that created and made them. That's kind of the whole point.

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Even though IDists attribute the design to a designing intelligence, ID says nothing of the designer.
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schradinator:
Why not?

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Whay doesn't the theory of evolution concern itself with life's origins? Because it wasn't formulated to do that. ID doesn't say anything about the designer because it was not formulated for that purpose.

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schrafinator:
Why is that very logical, natural question deemed off limits by IDists?

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Correction. It is not off limits to IDists. It is off limits to ID. If we follow the theory of evolution to its logical conclusion we would have to ask similar questions- where did life come from? where did nature come from? etc.

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schrafinator:
I mean, if we look at Archeology, that is exactly the question that is asked all the time:

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When and Archaeologist finds pots, tools, buildings and other artifacts, they study them to figure out the nature of the culture that created and made them. That's kind of the whole point.

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That is what I have been posting but your evo-brethren say we are both mistaken. The point to ID is to detect and understand the design. I have posted that by doing such we MAY be able to gain some insight as to the designer(s). But again we may not. By studying an airplane I doubt I will find out about the Wright brothers.

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"...the most habitable place in the solar system yields the best view of solar eclipses just when observers can best appreciate them." from "The Privileged Planet"

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Even though IDists attribute the design to a designing intelligence, ID says nothing of the designer.
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schrafinator:
...and this is where it fails as science and becomes bad philosophy.

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What is your reasoning behind that assertion? Did we have to identify the designers of Stonehenge before we looked at it as the product of some intelligent agency? No.

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schrafinator:
Why conclude "intelligence" out of a lack of knowledge?

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We don't. We infer "intelligence" from our current state of knowledge.

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schrafinator:
Why not say "we don't know", and "let's investigate further"?

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Because what is being said that only explanations with materialistic naturalsim implications will be considered.

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schrafinator:
In other words, how can I tell the difference between an Intelligently Designed system and a natural one that we:

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1) don't understand yet, but will in the fututre, or
2) don't have the capability to ever understand?

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Science is not done on what we may or may not know in the future. Science is done with our current knowledge base. Future knowledge may falsify materialistic naturalism.

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schrafinator:
Just because we can't figure out a problem doesn't mean an Intelligent Designer didit. It only means that we don't understand, nothing more.

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Then why do people like you already attribute what we don't know to some unknown natural phenomena?"The neo-Darwinian concept of random variation carries with it the major fallacy that everything conceivable is possible" Ho and Saunders.[/b]

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"...the most habitable place in the solar system yields the best view of solar eclipses just when observers can best appreciate them." from "The Privileged Planet"

Correct, which is why questions are raised when people like Dembski right books on the connection between ID and the Xian Bible. Or people like Steve Jones and Phil Johnson readily refer to the designer as God and make no bones about their connection to the Xian God. You are both mistaken. I'm not sure why schraf thought you had to study a culture to identify design... those would be too different fields. Forensics vs Archeology.That said, until you have criteria (established and proven criteria) you cannot move on toward an archeological style investigation of an entity. That is what was its purpose for the designer. That may be true. But studying an airplane you will discover that it's purpose was to fly through the air, and more than that to carry humanoids as a form of transportation through the air.Thus we know that the designer(s) was humanoid in shape and at least in part incapable of longterm flight and so needed an object to do so.You will also be able to come up with a number of mechanisms that the designer(s) used to build the object, as well as where the parts came from.Now let's return to ID. Supposedly the flagellum was designed. How do we get from that to statements that humans were the teleological goal of this designer and that (apparently) it is the goal to be good Xian republicans.I'm a fervent reader of ID material, especially the discovery institute. You can't pull the wool over my eyes.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

holmes, you bring up interesting points. Could you please start another thread. I see that no one has refuted the points I made showing that ID is not a religion so I take it this thread has run its course.Aren't you the one who posted a link to the rules? See ya in another thread and yes Del's book sets the parameters for detecting design, even supernatural design. It is a very good book- he gets into Dembski too. Nature, Design and Science...

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"...the most habitable place in the solar system yields the best view of solar eclipses just when observers can best appreciate them." from "The Privileged Planet"

This is where you guys have it all wrong.What is being said is that the most reasonable, logical area to focus investigation is purely mechanical phenomenon on the materials present, until there is positive evidence for intentional mechanisms having been used and even better positive evidence for there being designers beyond humans.We don't know the mechanical mechanisms responsible for a phenomenon is NOT the same as positive evidence intentional mechanisms were employed.And as I said, when we are talking about hyperadvanced designers as is required by ID, one would like to see at least some evidence for such a thing besides the circular argument "life is evidence." In a way that could be true. But we ought to wait until that time and not assume the possibility of such a thing makes such a thing plausible.Indeed, many things including the discovery of an advanced designer would not necessarily refute methodological naturalism (that is the correct term by the way). And there is no such guarantee that that discovery would remove MATERIALISM.I am still at a loss for how such self-proclaimed sceptics assert the existence of entities beyond the material as such a possibility that they can be included in investigations which have barely scratched the surface of material explanations... designer or not. Given that the sun rises every morning, it is a pretty good assumption it will rise again tomorrow. The possibility that the sun does not actually rise, but is a figment of our perspective does not make a chariot carrying a flaming torch more likely.The revelation that the sun actually does not rise, but instead that the illusion it does is a product of our standing on a rotating planet, neither undercuts methodological naturalism, nor materialism.Yet all along a person could have claimed that the possibility of the chariot was there and any questions were "controversies" within natural explanations.In a similar fashion, the only experiences we have had in this life, which have been studied and DOCUMENTED, are of natural processes.While it may turn out that our current understanding of mechanisms driving biological life may turn out to be inaccurate, there is every reason to trust that they will continue to function as they do today when tomorrow comes, and that they did the same yesterday as well.The idea of a chariot carrying in new kinds or mechanics to fix kinds, just does not seem like a valid plausible theory.And in the case we discover that mechanisms other than the ones we know of now are in play, it is more than likely (given the pattern of history) that they will remain natural mechanisms.Even a designer will more than likely have worked through a natural mechanism... and it would be absurd to assume otherwise until evidence accumulates towards that end.Doesn't this make sense to you?Don't you see that the only reason to overturn methodological naturalism, is in order to make a conclusion plausible where it logically would not be. That in fact that shows such a severe lack of faith that they need to undercut reason to try and get a conclusion they think they must have accepted, accepted?

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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holmes:
1) First a clear and consistent set of criteria for detecting design must be proven and established as useful. This means getting it into USE. Proven by actually differentiating between known manufactured and known nonmanufactured entities (both biological and nonbiological).

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And how about a clear and consistent set of criteria for showing what nature acting alone can (or can't, would or wouldn't) do? This means getting it into USE.

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"...the most habitable place in the solar system yields the best view of solar eclipses just when observers can best appreciate them." from "The Privileged Planet"

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holmes:
In a similar fashion, the only experiences we have had in this life, which have been studied and DOCUMENTED, are of natural processes.

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That depends on what you are calling natural processes. I use the term to mean that nature acting alone did it. In that sense you are wrong. In any other sense it is too ambiguous to be meaningful.

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"...the most habitable place in the solar system yields the best view of solar eclipses just when observers can best appreciate them." from "The Privileged Planet"

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Even though IDists attribute the design to a designing intelligence, ID says nothing of the designer.

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What is your reasoning behind that assertion?

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I go on to explain it in the rest of my post.

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Did we have to identify the designers of Stonehenge before we looked at it as the product of some intelligent agency? No.

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Ah, but we had the demonstrated knowledge of people making things out of stone and aranging them in a particular way, so we have some good, positive evidence that people were likely to have constructed Stonehenge.We know that people are likely to have constructed Stonehenge, so now we investigate to figure out who, and how, and why.What you are doing is saying "We can't currently figure out how this biological structure appears as it does. Even though this is a lack of knowledge, and an absence of positive evidence exists for an Intelligent Designer, we will conclude;1) That an Intelligent Designer exists, and2) That it "somehow" caused these things that we don't currently understand to appear as they do, even though we have no evidence on this Intelligent Designer and cannot describe the method by which the Designer did what it did.

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We don't. We infer "intelligence" from our current state of knowledge.

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So, you have positive evidence that there was an Intelligent Designer?What are the mechanisms by which this Intelligernt Designer works?What is the nature of the Intelligent Designer?Surely, you must have positive evidence of the existence of an Intelligent Designer before you can claim that it is the cause of anything, don't you?

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Because what is being said that only explanations with materialistic naturalsim implications will be considered.

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Well, right.Methodological naturalism is science. If you aren't using methodological naturalism, you aren't doing science and are doing philosophy.Sorry, that's the rules.

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Science is not done on what we may or may not know in the future.

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Science is done with our current knowledge base. Future knowledge may falsify materialistic naturalism.

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Right."Science is done with our current knowledge base".So, answer my question.How can I tell the difference between an Intelligently Designed system and a natural one that we:1) don't understand yet, but will in the future, or
2) don't have the capability to ever understand?

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Then why do people like you already attribute what we don't know to some unknown natural phenomena?

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"The neo-Darwinian concept of random variation carries with it the major fallacy that everything conceivable is possible" Ho and Saunders.

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I have no idea what they are talking about from just this isolated single sentence, so it is not useful as an illustration of anything as you are using it, nor does it seem to support the point you are trying to make.Why don't you go find the entire paragraph that the quote appears in and paste it here?

We definitely have moved off topic. But I will not start another thread. I've done that enough to have no ID person show up, or bother to address what I am talking about.If you want to start a thread on specifics of ID I will be more than happy to take part in it. I guarantee I will be there... unless I get hit by a car or something. Only to the ISCID rules, not the EvC ones. I did mention some specific parts of our debate were moving off topic. All the above noted, Dembski is pertinent to this thread. He clearly pulls ID into religion as do many (I'd say most) ID theorists.If the movement has pervasive references to the designer being supernatural and the Xian god in specific, if not the Bible in specific as a reliable text science must square with, then people like RAZD have a perfect reason for assuming that ID is religion based.The ID movement is big on pushing "the controversy" within evolutionary theory, yet the religion problem seems to be an even larger controversy within ID. If it is wholly nonreligious, why are so many pushing religion and even political agendas right along with the science.And remember I am not talking about what these guys are doing on their own time. They stitch religion directly to ID, with the promise that that ID is the gateway to allowing in theological implications. There is no guarantee of this whatsoever. To make such claims is to move out of science.

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

Careful schraf. You have made two errors so far. There is no reason for ID to have to address the nature of a designer (though I agree that that makes there criteria a longer haul).And then there is... He said that nonnatural explanations would never be considered. This is not true, even under methodological naturalism. What happens is they won't get considered first, and until current natural mechanisms are exhausted.That is unless there is some positive evidence that a nonnatural designer or mechanism exists beyond "we can't tell what happened here".

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holmes
"...what a fool believes he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.."(D. Bros)

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And how about a clear and consistent set of criteria for showing what nature acting alone can (or can't, would or wouldn't) do? This means getting it into USE.

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Wouldn't those be scientific theories which have been tested and survived?Those have been in use for hundreds of years, and have been exceedingly useful.

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Did we have to identify the designers of Stonehenge before we looked at it as the product of some intelligent agency? No.
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schrafinator:
Ah, but we had the demonstrated knowledge of people making things out of stone and aranging them in a particular way, so we have some good, positive evidence that people were likely to have constructed Stonehenge.

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That's is NOT the point. The point is we didn't have to know anything about those alleged people before we inferred Stonehenge was the producy of an intelligent agency.

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schrafinator:
We know that people are likely to have constructed Stonehenge, so now we investigate to figure out who, and how, and why.

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By your logic I can assume that beavers built all the dams in the world or is that people are building the dams for beavers?Wrong. What IDists are saying is that based on our current level of knowledge ID is the best explanation for what we observe.

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schrafinator:
So, you have positive evidence that there was an Intelligent Designer?

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Yes. The evidence is life, the bac flag, IC, specified complexity and information-rich systems

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schrafinator:
What are the mechanisms by which this Intelligernt Designer works?

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What is the nature of the Intelligent Designer?

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Neither are relevant to detecting and understanding design.

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schrafinator:
Surely, you must have positive evidence of the existence of an Intelligent Designer before you can claim that it is the cause of anything, don't you?

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The evidence has been given. Do you have any positive evidence that nature acting alone brought life from non-life?

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schrafinator:
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Because what is being said that only explanations with materialistic naturalsim implications will be considered.
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Well, right.

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Methodological naturalism is science. If you aren't using methodological naturalism, you aren't doing science and are doing philosophy.

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Sorry, that's the rules.

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Not if the rules are also in debate:
In any case, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out, debate about methodological rules of science often forms part of the practice of science, especially during times when established paradigms are being challenged. Those who reject the teach the controversy model on the grounds that ID violates the current rules of scientific practice only beg the question. The present regime of methodological rules cannot prevent controversy for the simple reason that those rules may themselves be one of the subjects of scientific controversy. John Angus Campbell, pg. xxv 3rd paragraph of [I][b]Darwinism, Design and Public Education[/I][/b].However materialistic naturalism is NOT the same as applying methodological approaches to science:
IDists’ (yes led by Behe on the molecular front, or even Denton before him) base our conclusion (that an intelligent agency played a role in the design of our universe, including life) on our knowledge of present cause-and-effect relationships (in accord with the standard uniformitarian method employed in the historical sciences) that the molecular machines and complex systems we observe in cells can be best explained as the result of an intelligent cause.If you want to tell the difference use Dembski's design explanatory filter.

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"...the most habitable place in the solar system yields the best view of solar eclipses just when observers can best appreciate them." from "The Privileged Planet"