The $5,000,000 ID Research Challenge

Some people claim that ID researchers are ignored and persecuted, the result of which is that ID researchers can not get research money to study ID.So what if they did get $5,000,000 to spend on a new research facility? What would they spend it on? That is the challenge for this thread. Show us what the ID research program would actually need to do, what equipment would be needed to do this research, and how you would prioritize the money in this laboratory. Show us what a real ID research program would look like.Now mind you, this money is not to be spent testing evolution. It is meant to study ID, not evolution. Any experiments that test evolution will not meet the guidelines set out in the challenge.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.Edited by Admin, : Change Title

Thread copied here from the The $5,000,000 ID Research Challenge thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

If I were an ID-ist, I would spend it on trying to create life in the lab. That, in my mind, is their best chance of keeping alive the argument that life can be intelligently designed.

While that is certainly an interesting line of reasoning, it falls short of the challenge. I think we can all agree that an intelligent species could create life. What we are actually interested in is if life on Earth was produced by an intelligence in the past.

I doubt that they could catch up to what has already been done in that area.Science has already reached the point of creating self-replicating molecules that evolve.

Yeah, it's not really to the point, is it. We can create snowflakes in a laboratory, but this doesn't suggest that they're usually intelligently designed, or constitute evidence for Jack Frost.

Perhaps they should spend it on getting themselves a good education in science.At present, most of them are abysmally ignorant. They badly need that education.

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

quote:

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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 Templeton Foundation say they didn't actually offer any research grants to IDists ... see here for details.

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

It's not clear whether they mean real research or just writing nonsense about research done by real scientists. "Research" in the mouth of a creationist usually means: "A literature review, only done by a partisan idiot".

First of all I'd want to buy a small portable secondhand god ...

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.

That sounds like more of a historical question than a scientific one. "Could it happen?" is easier to detemine in the lab than "Did it happen?"But I think IDists are far from conceding that it could happen. Their desired outcome is that intelligence is necessary but our intelligence is insufficient. Any research they did would be shooting themselves in the foot.

From what I can tell, it is just a wordy way of saying "we are going to try and disprove evolution/abiogenesis". A good example is this quote:"The difficulty of interconverting the functions of structurally similar enzymes (Kbl and BioF) has been assessed experimentally by Ann Gauger and Douglas Axe." Panda's Thumb has a great write up on it. What it boils down to is a crocoduck argument. They tried to show that one protein can not evolve into another through a stepwise change in sequence. However, they didn't start from the ancestral protein. They used the two evolved protein sequences.What it boiled down to was "not evolution, therefore ID". It was a study on evolution, not ID. It would seem that the rest of their vague research goals are the same, to show that evolution can not occur, therefore ID. In the OP I directly stated that the research money can not be used to test evolution, so it would appear that we are still on square one.