Posted on 09/08/2005 1:33:48 PM PDT by snarks_when_bored
Five critiques of Intelligent Design
John Brockman's Edge.org site has published the following five critiques of Intelligent Design (the bracketed comments following each link are mine):
Marcelo Gleiser, "Who Designed the Designer?" [a brief op-ed piece]
Jerry Coyne, "The Case Against Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name" [a detailed critique of ID and its history, together with a summary defense of Darwinism]
Richard Dawkins & Jerry Coyne, "One Side Can Be Wrong" [why 'teaching both sides' is not reasonable when there's really only one side]
Scott Atran, "Unintelligent Design" [intentional causes were banished from science with good reason]
Daniel C. Dennett, "Show Me the Science" [ID is a hoax]
As Marcelo Gleiser suggests in his op-ed piece, the minds of ID extremists will be changed neither by evidence nor by argument, but IDists (as he calls them) aren't the target audience for critiques such as his. Rather, the target audience is the millions of ordinary citizens who may not know enough about empirical science (and evolution science in particular) to understand that IDists are peddling, not science, but rather something tarted up to look like it.
Let us not be deceived.
Darn, didn't work: Hilary Clinton looks just the same
Don't sell The Smartest Woman In The World short. She's got Babs as a consultant.
Logically, I consider the notion of design to make much more sense than the alternative.
Would you care to speculate as to the physical means whereby the designer brought his designs into being, and at what time (precisely) in the history of our cosmos he acted?
Never mind. I saw your profile and see you are in College in Oklahoma.
BTW why don't you clear up the foul language on your profile page?
Admin - does Free Republic allow such language on the profile pages?
I think of the idea as rather humbling, not vain.
To think that God created man in his likeness is vain.
I'll give the IDists this at least, they haven't explicitly claimed that man is the end all and be all of the 'Intelligent Designer's' efforts. I guess they're open to the idea that we are a failed experiment that will be left to self destruct. This is as plausible as the other implications of their 'theory'.
Theories and law are not differing points on a scale of certitude. Although there is some overlap and interplay, they are basically different kinds of entities. To be brief theories are explanatory (they propose some model or mechanism[s] which account for why things happen a certain way) whereas laws are descriptive (they predict what will happen in a certain kind of system).
There is no instrinsic reason that a law must inspire more confidence than a theory (or vice versa). Furthermore laws certainly ARE open to criticism in science. All scientific claims are. Even facts.
Thats a puzzler.
You need some hints?
Newton described an inherent property of matter manifesting as a force of attraction between matter related to their combined mass and distance between their respective centers of mass.
works fine, until you get to very great distances and masses and very very small distances and masses
Did you know Frank Beach?
I had heard of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach from some enthusiastic students at Calgary, but not seen it, when I visited the Tarski's in summer 1979 in Berkeley. Noticing the Hofstadter book in Alfred's bookcase I asked him what he thought of it and he exclaimed: "awful, of course it's awful". When I asked whether he had read it he said "of course not". But when I asked him to let me borrow it he got annoyed; the publishers had sent it to him, it belonged to him, and I could not borrow it, of course not.I must add that I had been working with Tarski, that we were old friends and that it is not too far fetched to call Tarski and Gödel the two pillars of modern mathematical logic. They were of the same generation and had come to America during the late thirties from Poland and from Austria respectively. But they were temperamentally totally different personalities. Tarski was an empire builder.
Anyway, I went straight to Cody's and bought the Hofstadter book, fervently hoping that I would find it wonderful and could teach Alfred a lesson about his prejudices. Well, Alfred had been right after all. When I returned to Calgary at the end of the summer I found a copy of the Hofstadter book waiting for me with a note from the Canadian Journal of Philosophy asking me to review it. I actually had fun doing that review, I was younger then and instead of getting upset I enjoyed making it into a twin enterprise of a parody and a minimal no-nonsense account of Gödel's proof.
I wonder how Hofstadter, an Edge.org contributor, feels about these remarks by Huber-Dyson, also an Edge.org contributor?
Did you know Frank Beach?
Hmmm, the name doesn't ring a bell. Should it?
"For instance, now that Britain has found that its soil is releasing carbon due to global warming, wouldn't it be prudent to question the method of carbon dating? Isn't the "given" that carbon gets released at a steady rate over the millenia now debunked, and that the rate is determined by the warming and cooling cycles of the earth?"
Nope it has nothing at all to do with the total amount of carbon in an ex living thing - it has to do with the rate of radioactive decay of Carbon 14.
Apples and Oranges.
Does it belong in a science class ?
Nope!
But Darwin must be taught honestly also - it IS a theory and it does NOT explain mankind's existance even though it, so far, follows along on to changes in lesser species.
Nice to meet a member of the profile police.
What, exactly, is a "lesser" species? How is this determined? How is the evolutionary process involving mutation of DNA and natural selection different in "greater" rather than "lesser" species?
Then I suppose it is safe to assert that if ID is correct, we can safely discard glorious structure of the universe as evidence for God, since an infinite number of far less impressive entities could have created it.
Except it is wrong. Again will post more this evening when I have more time. :-( Sigh.
Not random, unpredictable. The chasm between the two is vast.
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