The $5,000,000 ID Research Challenge

Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker - The New York Times

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The Templeton Foundation, a major supporter of projects seeking to reconcile science and religion, says that after providing a few grants for conferences and courses to debate intelligent design, they asked proponents to submit proposals for actual research.

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"They never came in," said Charles L. Harper Jr., senior vice president at the Templeton Foundation, who said that while he was skeptical from the beginning, other foundation officials were initially intrigued and later grew disillusioned.

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"From the point of view of rigor and intellectual seriousness, the intelligent design people don't come out very well in our world of scientific review," he said.

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The Biologic Institute lists a number of areas in which they intend to do research in support of ID.Research - Biologic Institute

No, we don't know. But regardless of what DI/BI will actually do, we might ask the question as to whether any apparently viable research paths are identified that might constitute science.For example, I am highly skeptical that any analysis of human designs of machines will be useful when applied to living things, and we have no way of checking any predictions that the research leads to. In fact any conclusions would have to involve circular logic that coms close to assuming the conclusion.

Please connect the dots. How would studying the brain and communication within the brain lead to an understanding of God? Why should we expect that studying the brain is going to lead to a greater understanding of the world we inhabit than directly studying the world we inhabit?

I am.

Yes, that's mostly true. Except the part about every living species using a human brain. A closer to being correct statement our human brains are a part of us and we inhabit the world that we live in.However, I don't expect it to be productive to study communications in a human brain in an attempt to learn how God created the universe, which is what your original post seemed to imply.What I am asking you to do here is to link studying of the brain to anything remotely related to Intelligent Design of the universe. If instead you want to say studying the human brain will allow us to design things like prosthesis units, and to study human behavior, well 1) we already spend money on those things such that 5,000,000 dollars is a drop in the bucket, and 2) that spending is not on topic regardless of your attempts to equivocate on the meaning of ID.

So you are postulating an intelligent designer that has a brain based consciousness like ours or analogous to ours but on a larger scale? So we study our own brain processes and then we will understand the designer. Is that your proposal?

There are about 60 messages in this thread. I think you should take time to puruse them. You can take the shortcut of reading only Taq's messages.But the short answer is that you have not even addressed what was asked for in the original post (message 1).

Then you don't get the five million dollars, because you'd spend the entire amount trying to figure out how to spend five million more dollars.The complaint that inspired the OP is that the Discovery Institute claims to be doing research into Intelligent Design, but appears to be doing nothing more than what you are doing, namely talking trash about where they want to look. Then you come along and do more of the same trash talking, but with even less specificity than we can find at DI's Biologics Institute. I think I saw one of those things on 'The Jetsons'.

Yes I see what you've posted. But you've posted nothing that changes my mind. Perhaps an example of something from DI would be helpful here.Once you get past the 'Perspectives' PR on the front page, uou can find the following discussion at the Biologics Institute webpage:Research - Biologic Institute

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To address these questions, we are measuring the functional information in proteins by examining their ability to withstand sequence alterations. We are teaming up with mathematicians, like William Dembski, to examine the issue of fundamental constraints on search-based acquisition of information. And we are building and testing computational models that mimic the role of genetic information in specifying functions by means of structure-forming sequences.

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So we have some idea of what DI would spend money on if they were really doing research. Or at least we would have an idea if "fundamental constraints on search based acquisition of information" wasn't just "poke and hope" (a phrase often used to describe my miserable aim on a pool table.) This is the kind of stuff that I and others are complaining about (well that and the fact we know the kind of malarkey some Dembski has produced in the past). In fact, these guys seem much like me at the pool table; talking much game -- pocketing very few balls.Yet your proposals are even more sketchy. With the kind of hints you've given out, it would seem more productive to fund Wile E. and Acme than to give you the 5 million.See?

Mram graces us with yet another weekend PRATT fest. Here we see Claim CB010.1 followed by CA202.

No one can provide such proof. But it's not necessary to do that in order to show that Creationism is wrong. Creationism requires that human beings were formed directly from earth. The evidence that man evolved is enough to show that proposition to be wrong.Abiogenesis is not even theory, it is at best a hypothesis. But evolution is fact.