I've been thinking about this a bit. How about calling their bluff? Let's talk about ID. But lets do the one thing these school boards don't seem to want to do and look at in scientifically.
When looking at the history of life on Earth, we have the following facts to account for:
(1) Life has changed over time (the 'fact' of evolution).
(2) All life works the same way (common biochemistry).
(3) Genetic relationships between species generally seem to match the patterns seen in the fossil record (common descent).
All evolutionary theory does is look at how life works now (imperfect replication generating variability, high reproduction rates creating selection pressures), and extrapolate over long periods of time/large numbers of generations, and variable conditions.
How about ID then? You can think of several different scenarios for intelligent intervention, in increasing order of directness:
(a) Creation of the first replicating population.
(b) Insertion of new traits into the genome at a particular point or points in time.
(c) Manipulating the whole shebang at a quantum level (the only one, incidentally, which formally requires 'God-like' ID).
(a) is related not to evolution, but abiogenesis. Also, you can't really test for this except by looking for life on other planets. If they had, say, the same genetic code, we might get suspicious.
(c) Is the theist/deist position. God is behind natural processes. Nothing to add scientifically then; all we can do is study these processes and go 'wow' a lot.
Which leaves (b), which could potentially have testable consequences. For instance, intelligent intervention need have no respect for species barriers when tinkering; we might therefore expect intelligently inserted sequences to play havoc with the generation of phylogenetic trees. No-one has found anything like that yet, but there's no harm in looking. Oh dear, no-one who claims to be interested in ID 'science' is. Clearly rather than playing around with mathematically dressed up arguments from incredulity, Dembski et al. should reach for their cladistics primers....
There you go kids. This will hopefully set you on the path to concluding that if God exists, he's a scientist. And much smarter than we are.
{lots added by edit 'cos' I accidentally pressed the submit button}
This message has been edited by gengar, 01-14-2005 02:55 AM
This message has been edited by gengar, 01-14-2005 02:56 AM
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