Intelligent Design is Not Science
I have been arguing back and forth with several Christians and Creationists about the so called "Theory of Intelligent Design". For those of you not familiar with it. Intelligent Design is the theory that the complexity of life and the universe can only be explained by a designer. This designer is supposed to be an entity that can manipulate reality in such a way as to create living beings in all their complexity. I hope I have given a fair summary definition as I am not attempting to create a Strawman.
The ID proponents taut the theory as being a refutation or alternative to Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. I do not think this is actually true. It appears to me that most ID proponents think it replaces theories about the origin of life and theories about the origin of the Universe as well. I find that many of the Creationists that I debate do not understand that Evolution and the Big Bang are two unrelated theories from two unrelated fields of science. They also seem to miss the fact that Evolution does not, in any way, posit a solution to the origin of life question. I think this demonstrates the average Creationists ignorance on the science they are attempting to refute. On the other hand, the "scientists" that advocate ID cannot be said to be ignorant of the science that supports the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
These men are actually committing the cardinal sin of science. They are defining the principal that they wish to "prove" and working to prove it. Science does not work that way. In Science you come up with something you think should be true, given current knowledge, and then you test it with experiment or observation. If it is shown to be correct, great, but if it is not, you adjust the hypothesis or the theory that it was drawn from and try again. In some cases, a negative result leads to breakthroughs.
When the Institute for Creation Research was attempting to circumvent the scientific process to "prove" that the Bible is literally true, it was pretty obvious what they were doing. In the case of ID the problem is a little more subtle. They put forward the concept of "Irreducible Complexity" and have done significant work on describing what such a system would be like with mathematics from Chaos Theory. The problem is they still haven't defined how we can tell an "Irreducibly Complex" system from one that is not. They also have not yet discovered an example of an "Irreducibly Complex" system. They point to things like the Mammalian Eye or the Bacterial Flagellum but these have been debunked as examples of "Irreducible Complexity" by scientists.
However, all this talk about "disproving" "Irreducible Complexity" misses the point. ID fails to be science on two counts. One, even if one could find an "Irreducibly Complex" system, by their definition, it really only amounts to an argument from personal incredulity. aka. The Argument from Ignorance. We don't know how this came to be, so "God Did It". Two, the conclusion, "God Did It", does not actually answer the question. It just adds new ones. Let's suppose that the true answer is that "God Did It", the next question is "How?" and, possibly, "Why?". My guess is that the ID proponent would just want to stop with "God Did It" and not ask any further questions.
On the other hand, if a scientist were to encounter an, apparently, "Irreducibly Complex" living system, their first reaction would be to look for errors in the finding. Once satisfied that there are none the next step is to try and develop new principals and techniques for understanding the system. In the process, the "Irreducible Complexity" of the system will probably dissipate since greater understanding allows us to discover the ways in which the system can be reduced and still be useful.
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One More Nail in the Coffin
I have to look at this and chuckle. There's a social networking site which I participate in wherein this topic has been essentially talked to death, but I rather enjoy the trump card I've laid down more than once there, to wit:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/
For those of you who aren't aware of it, there was a considerable legal battle in Dover, PA about the issue of I.D. in schools a few years back. Said battle was very well documented by PBS and their excellent program, NOVA. The entire program is available on the above site and I recommend it heartily.
For those who want me to skip to the end, well, here it is: not only did the judge in this case rule that I.D. is not science, but, among other things:
* ID is the progeny of creationism
* Evolutionary theory is not antithetical to religion
* The goal of the ID movement is to foment a revolution
and most notably:
* It is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution
This was as thorough a smack-down of both I.D. and creationism that I am aware of to date, way overdue ... and very damned welcome to yours truly!
We don't know how this came
We don't know how this came to be, so "God Did It".
To my knowledge no proponent of ID has ever said that because they are arguing from a position of what is known and what can be observed. We already know that mind can influence matter and that intelligent beings can imprint conceptual codes or languages on matter, creating patterns of information which are irreducible. It's a bit arrogant to think that we are the only beings in existence capable of acts of intelligent agency, especially given the notion of multiple universes beyond the millions of galaxies we already know of and so on.
Take yourself for instance, you may think that you are thinking and that the words that you write here are an artifact of your intelligence (inter- + legere to select!) represented in patterns of information in your neural nets but Darwinian reasoning tells us that natural "selection" guides and shapes every organism to the point that intelligence is an illusion which actually reduces to biological brain events and so on. Given the supposed rules of knowledge used to prop up Darwinism we cannot admit to your capacity for intelligent selection in the use of symbols and signs of your own design and instead, as a "rule," we must shift to natural selection and so on. So given what really guides your biological brain events I’m writing to a complex illusion that actually reduces in an unbroken chain of cause and effect to natural selection operating on the reproductive organs of ancient ape-like creatures, back to the mating habits of ancient worm-like creatures. It seems that the words that you use to reason out the thoughts that you only think you are thinking given the illusion of sentience and sapience typical to Homo sapiens may as well be worms, which may as well be excrement. How do you know that the brain events which cause you to think that Darwinism is true are correct?
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