Posted on 04/11/2005 10:25:55 AM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
"Intelligent design." It's been in the news a lot lately. Lawsuits over textbook stickers, the presentation of evolution and the legality of presenting alternatives, have thrust the term into public awareness.
But just what is intelligent design? To hear some folks talk, you'd think it's a scam to sneak Genesis into science classrooms. Yet intelligent design has nothing to do with the six days of creation and everything to do with hard evidence and logic.
Intelligent design (ID) is grounded on the ancient observation that the world looks very much as if it had an intelligent source. Indeed, as early as the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher and astronomer Anaxagoras concluded, "Mind set in order … all that ever was … and all that is now or ever will be."
After 2400 years, the appearance of design is as powerful as ever. That is especially true of the living world. Advances in biology have revealed that world to be one staggering complexity.
For example, consider the cell. Even the simplest cells bristle with high-tech machinery. On the outside, their surfaces are studded with sensors, gates, pumps and identification markers. Some bacteria even sport rotary outboard motors that they use to navigate their environment.
Inside, cells are jam-packed with power plants, assembly lines, recycling units and more. Miniature monorails whisk materials from one part of the cell to another.
Such sophistication has led even the most hard-bitten atheists to remark on the apparent design in living organisms. The late Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA's structure and an outspoken critic of religion, has nonetheless remarked, "Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved."
Clearly, Crick (and others like him) considers the appearance of design to be strictly an illusion, created by naturalistic evolution. Yet it's also clear that this impression is so compelling that an atheistic biologist must warn his colleagues against it.
In contrast, ID theorists contend that living organisms appear designed because they are designed. And unlike the design thinkers whom Darwin deposed, they've developed rigorous new concepts to test their idea.
In the past, detecting design was hampered by vague and subjective criteria, such as discerning an object's purpose. Moreover, design was entangled with natural theology--which seeks, in part, to infer God's character by studying nature rather than revelation. Natural theologians often painted such a rosy view of nature that they became an easy mark for Darwin when he proposed his theory of evolution. Where they saw a finely-balanced world attesting to a kind and just God, Darwin pointed to nature’s imperfections and brutishness.
Since the 1980s, however, developments in several fields have made it possible to rigorously distinguish between things that "just happen" and those that happen "on purpose." This has helped design theory emerge as a distinct enterprise, aimed at detecting intelligence rather than speculating about God's character.
Dubbed "intelligent design" to distinguish it from old-school thinking, this new view is detailed in The Design Inference (Cambridge University Press, 1998), a peer-reviewed work by mathematician and philosopher William Dembski.
In contrast to what is called creation science, which parallels Biblical theology, ID rests on two basic assumptions: namely, that intelligent agents exist and that their effects are empirically detectable.
Its chief tool is specified complexity. That's a mouthful, and the math behind it is forbidding, but the basic idea is simple: An object displays specified complexity when it has lots of parts (is complex) arranged in a recognizable, delimited pattern (is specified).
For example, the article you're now reading has thousands of characters, which could have been arranged in zillions of ways. Yet it fits a recognizable pattern: It's not just a jumble of letters (which is also complex), but a magazine article written in English. Any rational person would conclude that it was designed.
The effectiveness of such thinking is confirmed by massive experience. As Dembski points out, "In every instance where we find specified complexity, and where [its] history is known, it turns out that design actually is present."
Thus, if we could trace the creation of a book, our investigation would lead us to the author. You could say, then, that specified complexity is a signature of design.
To see how this applies to biology, consider the little consider the outboard motor that bacteria such as E. coli use to navigate their environment. This water-cooled contraption, called a flagellum, comes equipped with a reversible engine, drive shaft, U-joint and a long whip-like propeller. It hums along at a cool 17,000 rpm.
Decades of research indicate that its complexity is enormous. It takes about 50 genes to create a working flagellum. Each of those genes is as complex as a sentence with hundreds of letters.
Moreover, the pattern--a working flagellum--is highly specified. Deviate from that pattern, knock out a single gene, and our bug is dead in the water (or whatever).
Such highly specified complexity, which demands the presence of every part, indicates an intelligent origin. It's also defies any explanation, such as contemporary Darwinism, that relies on the stepwise accumulation of random genetic change.
In fact, if you want to run the numbers, as Dembski does in his book No Free Lunch, it boils down to the following: If every elementary particle in the observed universe (about 1080) were cranking out mutation events at the cosmic speed limit (about 1045 times per second) for a billion times the estimated age of the universe, they still could not produce the genes for a working flagellum.
And that's just one system within multiple layers of systems. Thus the flagellum is integrated into a sensory/guidance system that maneuvers the bacterium toward nutrients and away from noxious chemicals--a system so complex that computer simulation is required to understand it in its entirety. That system is meshed with other systems. And so on.
Of course, what's important here is not what we conclude about the flagellum or the cell, but how we study it. Design theorists don't derive their conclusions from revelation, but by looking for reliable, rigorously defined indicators of design and by ruling out alternative explanations, such as Darwinism.
Calling their work religious is just a cheap way to dodge the issues. The public--and our students--deserve better than that.
Mark Hartwig has a Ph.D. in educational psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, specializing in statistics and research design.
Might want to remember that in the future, as you bend a knee to the person who headed ID.
I must point this out:
Does finding it on the web make it truth? Does not finding it on the web make it a lie? What is the name of the fifth child born in the Sudan? Find it on the web. Provide a link.
Oh, wait...
"The Military won't put Atheist on dogtags, They put down "No Preference" or if the troops want Atheist on their dogtags they have to go out and buy their own in which they would be listed as "unknown"."
I'm not sure if you have any military background, but my family does. My dad put "no preference" on his, and he's a Methodist. Just meant he didn't care if he got a preacher or a minister.
As for laughing at the assertion of Hindus stating "my God" you missed a VERY important term. "MY"
Hindus rever the god(s) of their customs or preferance. They see them all as simply an aspect (incarnation) of the supreme Shiva. For a Hindu to say "Oh my Karttikeya" in a battlefield is the same.
> How studiously post 32 has been ignored.
That's because the page it links to is scientifically poor. It proceeds from the wrong mathematical assumptions regarding the odds of amino acids forming the right enzymes. Their approach is a purely random one, like calculating the odds of getting a certain layout of cards through random shuffling. It doesn't work that way.
The page fraudulently states:
"To duplicate a bacterium, one would have to assemble 2,000 different functioning enzymes. The odds against this event would be 1 in 10 to the 20th power multiplied together 2,000 times, or 1 in 10 to the 40,000 power... "
The problem with this is, one *wouldn't* have to assemble 2,000 different functioning enzymes ALL AT ONCE. Start with a group of, say ten. Enough for replication. If another is added and that helps, great. You've grown by one. If one is added and it hurts, that organism dies. Which is no loss since there are innumerable copies of it already in the primordial ocean, since it's capable of replication and all.
Through this simple approach, attaining 2,000 different functioning enzymes is a matter of time, not a matter of cosmic unlikelihood.
And the authors know this.
> If you're talking about the Biblical interp of Creationism I would disagree. If you're talking about "6 days and God said 'poof' and that was it" then yes, I would go with you.
The two are not distinct. When one says "Creationism," one is almost invariably referring to the obsolete notion that God said "poof." The other meaning you seem to attach to the word is not often called "Creationism," instead the idea is known as "theological evolutionism." I.E. God created the diversity of life on Earth via the physical process of evolution. Few evolutionists would take issue with this stance. Many Creationists would, however, and would gleefully declare anyone who held that view to be Biblically flawed.
I'll be sure to keep that in mind while running computer simulations of RSRM performance. They've always been within 0.5% of actual test data in the past... i guess that's a lie.
Theological Evolutionism, Intellegent Design, Creationism. Identical in my eyes and most of my friends who claim "creationist" standings. Evolution is admissable in all camps I'm aware of.
Strong's Ref. # 7451
Romanized ra`
Pronounced rah
from HSN7489; bad or (as noun) evil (natural or moral):
KJV--adversity, affliction, bad, calamity, + displease(-ure), distress, evil([-favouredness], man, thing), + exceedingly, X great, grief(-vous), harm, heavy, hurt(-ful), ill (favoured), + mark, mischief(-vous), misery, naught(-ty), noisome, + not please, sad(-ly), sore, sorrow, trouble, vex, wicked(-ly, -ness, one), worse(-st), wretchedness, wrong. [Including feminine raaah; as adjective or noun.].
And, a replacement for SIN in your life!
Just WHO needs a Savior if you're just 'sick'?
NO one's an Atheist in a foxhole!
We don't want 'good' people in our churches; but BAD ones!
Leave the ninety and nine behind to rescue the one.
The well have no need of a Physician.
You're right here!
It's not 'religion' that people need, but a Relationship with the Savior of the world.
Yeah....
wait 'til the BULLETS start flying, NOT when yer butt is stateside at a desk!
So... all we need is a LINK and you'd believe it??
Why would Democrats write an article about there being more people going to vote for them in the military if there aren't???.
You are correct. My bad.
A suggestion. A little less arrogance and condescension. Not all mistakes are malicious or deceptive.
The counterproof in your link is not terribly convincing.
Secondly, the idea of irreducible complexity is physical and mathematical fact. There are many systems in physics, chemisty, mathematics, engineering, etc. that are irreducibly complex. To maintain that biological systems are the only systems where irreducible complexity doesn't exist is an unwarranted assumption.
I'm sorry, but this is simply not correct. There have been some attempts to show that the flagellum is not irreducibly complex; they are not convincing arguments.
The arguments that irreducible complexity doesn't exist at all are even weaker. As I mentioned in another post, irreducible complexity is a physical reality in many mathematical, physical, chemical, engineering, etc. systems. To maintain that biological systems are the only systems where it doesn't exist is an unwarranted assumption.
He is. It was my mistake.
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