The $5,000,000 ID Research Challenge

The Discovery Institute has a budget of several million dollars a year, so what do they do?They hire lawyers and PR flacks.Rather than building a research facility they built a propaganda mill.Hmmmmmm.

If it was a scientific question, it would be phrased as an hypothesis, and it would be addressed using the scientific method. It would define specific data that it would address, along with a proposed explanation for that data. And most importantly, to be a scientific question, it would have a proposed method to test that hypothesis.Unfortunately, to date, intelligent design has been addressed primarily through public relations and propaganda (i.e., the Discovery Institute) rather than through science. Even the most "scientific" of approaches, that of Behe, has been shown to be simply religious apologetics in disguise--and that in a Federal court and under oath! But is intelligent design a scientific hypothesis? What is the data set that it purports to explain? And how can it be tested against that data set? Can it successfully make predictions? Is the explanation more parsimonious than existing explanations (existing theories)?To date, the proponents of intelligent design have been peddling religion in disguise, and thinly disguised at that. Look at that text book, Of Pandas and People and how it evolved. Here is a good link:"Cdesign Proponentsists" | National Center for Science EducationAfter the Supreme Court decision banning creationism, the authors revised a draft of their book to replace "creationists" with "design-proponents." But they didn't do a good job and ended up with "cdesign-proponentsists" in one place. The rest of the text remained the same, but "creationists" was mostly replaced with "design-proponents."That's not only dishonest, but its a serious boo-boo on their part. Its not that the rest of us didn't know what they were trying to do, but they spilled the beans big time! Major egg on face!So until you can come up with something that relies on the scientific method more successfully than Behe, and is not just religious apologetics, such as the Discovery Institute and Of Pandas and People, don't expect for intelligent design to be taken seriously by scientists.It is religion dolled up and pretending to be science, and everyone knows it.

The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.(But don't say that! We've got to pretend we're doing science!)

A while back the Templeton Foundation solicited grant proposals to research "Intelligent Design," and funded quite a few of them. The results were very disappointing, leading to the following decision: So, what you are asking for was tried and abandoned nearly a decade ago.Face it: "intelligent" design is religion with the serial numbers filed off in a dishonest hope of fooling someone. (That hasn't and will not work.)

And what if there is some kind of natural universal energy field out there, of which all living things partake?And what if evidence were to be found of such an energy field? Conclusive evidence? Evidence that we could communicate with such a universal field?What do you think the reaction of the world's 40,000+ different religions, sects, denominations, etc. would be? You think they would say, "Aha! Now we have found the TRUTH at last?"Not a chance. There are too many egos involved, and too many folks making a good living. And too much belief in unevidenced dogma. There would be lots of good old fashioned "burnings at the stake" over such a discovery. And probably a few thousand more schisms. (That's what you get when you rely on belief instead of evidence.)Reminds me of Heinlein's comment, "Belief gets in the way of learning."

Perhaps before we go any farther, you would explain just what you mean by the term, "theory."

Creationists are always demanding "proof" as opposed to theory.They either do not know the meaning of "theory" in science, or are just dishonest (probably both).They must think that in science we progress from idea to hypothesis to theory to proof and then to law or something equally silly.But I'm not going to explain it (once again) as they are unwilling to learn and it is a waste of time on my part.Willful ignorance is its own self-inflicted punishment.

Is any of that "peer review" real peer review?You know, from real scientists?And are any of those five or eight publications something other than self-published?You know, like real publications?Oh, and in a previous post you were looking for the Nobel Prize in a bunch of different categories. A lot of those don't even exist. The Nobel Prize is awarded for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economic Sciences."Intelligent design" doesn't qualify for a number of reasons, one of which it is the exact opposite of real science.[This is not the best place for someone to be posting nonsense.]