Biased accounts of intelligent design

I tried to insert the following protest on the discussion page for the Wikipedia article on intelligent design, but discussion is closed; so I vent by preaching to you folks. I have not altered my original wording at all.I have to protest the biased and ridiculous first paragraph of this article (as I have protested the similar lead of the Stephen C. Meyer article) even though no one here is listening. As with the Meyer article, it is unprofessional to include the controversial term "pseudoscientific" in the definition of a theory; it belongs rather in the discussion in the article under "Scientific criticism."Further, the paragraph makes itself contemptible with its failure to understand a distinction relevant to the issue, when its calls ID "a form of creationism." An encyclopedia that cannot distinguish design from creation (who designed the Saturn V rocket? Was it the same set of persons who built it?) has no business offering any remarks concerning these subtle questions.Further, the first paragraph asserts, as an uncontroversial fact, that "ID ...offers no testable or tenable hypotheses," without the writers apparently having glanced at testable hypotheses easily accessible in such articles as
A Positive, Testable Case for Intelligent Design | Evolution NewsThe issue is not whether you, the reader, like intelligent design. The issue is whether Wikipedia comes across as a source of knowledge or as a swamp of dogma. -- John Harvey

ID is the doctrine that the world (e.g., the genetic code or the values of physical constants) exhibits signs of having been designed by intelligence. A strong form would be: the world MUST be (partially) designed; a weak form would be the balance of evidence supports design rather than mindless genesis.Opponents of ID say, AHA! You’re REALLY trying to sneak God into this! I can even show that ID proponents A and B are *gasp* Christians! This is , of course, a fallacy. The religious affiliations of proponents are as logically irrelevant as, say, a Hindu physicist’s religion is ordinarily taken to be when it comes to criticism of a paper he has published. ID proponents such as Meyer and William Lane Craig do not cite scripture, they cite evidence. I even heard one ID person say that it’s possible that life on Earth was designed by extraterrestrials. ( I know that sounds like an infinite regress, but this point would require a separate discussion.)Creationism says that the world , or more often , living species were brought into existence by some voluntary act rather, than say, by evolution. Some ID proponents will tell you explicitly that they think living species have evolved; they might add that the first organism must have been designed ( so far as I know, C . Darwin never said that life came into existence by evolution, whatever that would mean), or that evolution has received some intelligent guidance along the way. A key question here is whether natural selection is adequate to account for evolution.Young earth Creationism holds that the world was made about 6 thousand years ago. I don’t encounter many people who say this. The Christian philosopher William Lane Craig whom I mentioned seems to accept that the universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago ( I never heard him take a position on when planet earth was formed).

See my statement elsewhere on this page of ID. For testing, I have nothing better to offer at the moment than the tests suggested in the article I have already indicated,A Positive, Testable Case for Intelligent Design | Evolution News

I would like to thank Faith for his/her intelligent comments and questions. For the designer, as you say, all I can think of is extraterrestrials, gods or God; but note that an ID proponent is not required fully to describe the designer or to say where it came from. William Lane Craig explains that in order for an explanation to be good, we don’t need an explanation for the explanation; seeRichard Dawkins’ Argument for Atheism in The God Delusion | Reasonable FaithBut even if God made the world, we still have many options. Does God make species as a person makes a pot ? — which is what Genesis suggests; or does God dream the world?The creator God does not imply religion. Emil Durkheim defined a religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden — beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church [French glise, admittedly an odd word ], all those who adhere to them.Here I want to stress the word "practices." A religion must include some form of worship, however broadly defined. God has long been discussed in philosophy without religious connotations. When the atheist philosopher Antony Flew came to believe in God, he became a deist ( which is different from theist) and , as far as I know, did not become religious. ID convinced him of a designer, not that worship was required or beneficial.As I suggested , an ID proponent might think that God only planned life in the beginning, or he might believe that God also guides the process. For example, can natural selection explain the huge growth of the capabilities of the human brain? Some have said that we are way smarter than is required for survival.

I want to mention that when I posted at 11:21 AM today I was not ignoring the link rule: I hadn't seen it yet.My posts contain much more than cries of distress; they contain arguments, however compressed.

The ID proponents I have read say rather that the God of the Bible is not part of the hypothesis they are proposing. I am sure that many of them, in conversations with friends, express the belief that Jehovah designed the world. That's not hypocrisy, it's a sort of compartmentalization that is also found in the principle of separation of
church and state. A historian who describes how Rome was unique in Italy need not express the difficult thesis that the Romans' ancestors came from Troy, even though that might be what he believes .

I appreciate this; I think you have read Karl Popper; but recall that Popper said also ,The proper answer to my question ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ is, I believe, ‘By criticizing the theories or guesses of others and if we can train ourselves to do so by criticizing our own theories or guesses.’ (The latter point is highly desirable, but not indispensable; for if we fail to criticize our own theories, there may be others to do it for us.)So though an individual may lack the self-discipline to criticize his own theory , the scientific community as a whole will act to address the proposal critically. In the case of the ID proponents, surrounded by a mob howling that they are not only mistaken but irrational, it is not human to suggest that they should be seeking evidence against their own theories. The ID opponents, when they take a break from throwing mud, make sufficient attempts to present evidence to disconfirm the hypothesis. ( Lest there be misunderstanding, I acknowledge that RAZD makes a rational case in the article to which he, in violation of his own imperious precept, links.) It is natural and expected for a scholar to seek and present evidence that buttresses his case. I do not recall that Newton in the Principia made an effort to present evidence against his own theories; that was the task of the larger scientific community.

AZPaul3's post is the most illogical of all the contributions to this thread hitherto. We learn from it that AZPaul3 does not like the ID folks; he thinks their motives are creepy. Please forgive me if I am not interested. I have been trying to direct people’s attention toward the critique of the arguments publicly presented for ID (as distinct from assertions about the private doings of ID people). Even if AZPaul3 is hopeless, I trust that some others will respond ( as some have) with logic and evidence.

JonF, your trust in the scientific community is touching; but it might prod your intellectual growth more if you were to examine the arguments for yourself.

RAZD refers to my trust in the ID; but I have not exhibited such. I have pointed out the biased and illogical character of some opposition to ID.I cannot give an account of how, e.g., the genetic code is implemented once it has been intelligently designed. Such lack of knowledge would appear to an open-minded investigator not as disproof of the hypothesis, however, but as an opportunity for further research. Some who read Newton’s Principia correctly inquired how gravity worked; but the scientific community would have been wrong if it had said, we don’t know how this works, so we’re going to ignore it ( or even assume it’s false).( If any of you feels that I am ignoring your posts, it’s just that I do not have time to answer everything.)

My point was that my post to JonF does not apply to me , since he has expressed trust in the scientific community ( see e.g., his post of 8-18-2019, 1:05 PM) whereas I have expressed no trust in the ID people, merely disdain for bad characterizations and evaluations of ID.

Would you care to explain that seeming? I think you will be unable to support that seeming with a single quote from what I have posted.

That's what I began by doing. See the post that started the thread. My point was not that the evidence for ID was overwhelming but that Wikipedia's beginning its article on ID with the term "pseudoscientific' was biased and juvenile. The discussion of whether ID is science should have appeared ( as it did , in addition , to an inadequate degree ) in a separate section such as "Reaction form the scientific community."

(I know nobody's reading this thread anymore, but just in case...)
I didn't say "ID is not pseudoscience"; I was acknowledging that the question of whether ID is pseudoscience is controversial and should have been treated (with both sides quoted) exclusively in a section of the article labeled something like "controversy". By characterizing ID as pseudoscience in the lede Wikipedia was surrendering any pretense it might have to be objective or ( if the following is different form objective) unbiased.
On the other hand , I do not want to seem to be concealing my own views. I believe that the work of (e.g.) Stephen C. Meyer is science, as an unbiased reader will find by examining his arguments.

Sketches (if not fully elaborated expositions) of ID arguments that don't boil down to "Evolution is false, therefore it was intelligently designed" can be found athttps://www.discovery.org/...ligent-Design-Stephen-Meyer.pdfI excerpt a brief passage to indicate the character of the arguments.I argued — based upon our uniform experience — that sequences that are both complex and functionally-specified (rich in information
content or specified information) invariably arise only from the activity of intelligent agents.
Thus, I argued that the presence of specified information provides a hallmark or signature of a
designing intelligence.