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

Thread copied here from the Biased accounts of intelligent design thread in the Proposed New Topics forum.

In your own words how would you state the ID hypothesis and how would you test it?

The relevant Talk Page provides useful context.

Welcome to the fray, Jedothik It is rather obviously a source of knowledge. Here's the first paragraph:

quote:

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Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins".[1][2][3][4][5] Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection."[6] ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, so it is not science.[7][8][9] The leading proponents of ID are associated with the Discovery Institute, a fundamentalist Christian and politically conservative think tank based in the United States.[n 1]

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Sounds accurate to me, unlike the article you linked (it makes several logical errors). The best way to show ID is not a pseudoscience would be to do some actual science based on this concept. This step has not been taken.Please see Is ID properly pursued? for my take on ID (note signature).Enjoy Edited by RAZD, : st

With others here I'd like you to spell out exactly what ID is, especially as compared with creationism, or Young Earth Creationism.Thanks.

I don’t think they are coming back

Nah, it's drive-by spam. If he doesn't come back it should be deleted.

I prefer the term from Mrs. Doubtfire: "It was a run-by fruiting!"

Too bad. I've never been very clear what the differences are between ID and YEC.

ID is pretend science but even pretend science could not sign up to a young earth, so my guess would be that there ain't no YEC IDists.If there are, their heads are in a very bad place.

That tells me absolutely nothing. I wonder if the author of the thread can offer something more illuminating.

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

If the main thing is that *things* look like they were designed by an intelligence, what are the options: a creator God or extraterrestrials? Anything else? I don't see how you can avoid the Creator God myself and doesn't that automatically raise the specter of religion?So those IDers who accept evolution merely postulate the Intelligent Designer as the initiator of the process?By the way, I'm a YEC.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.