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.
Materialist scientists expect physical answers to all questions.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Scientists seek to discover physical answers to physical phenomena.
In that case, I apologize. That statement was meant to assure the replier that, while I am not a scientist, I would probably be able to follow any logical argument s/he presented.
I apologize for not being more clear.
"Does this subject belong in a science class though? I am not that familiar with the topic but I heard it is based in Creationism. If that is true, then it belongs in religious type classes."
It has nothing to do with theology. It is mostly mathematics-based. Intelligent Design simply says, "there are certain marks that indicate that an object or system is the result of an intelligent designer". This includes humans or other creatures that are intelligent designers. To put the method shortly, Intelligent Design looks for systems that are organized within a chaotic system. Dembski has written extensively about the mathematics behind this in his books. I've written a short explanation of the idea here:
http://crevo.blogspot.com/2005/03/setting-facts-straight-on-intelligent.html
There is also another aspect of Intelligent Design which is focused on removing certain assumptions from science, namely materialism. Materialism is a rather bad philosophy anyway, for numerous reasons.
Darwinists can't prove evolution. They can't replicate it. That's why it's a "theory", which is just another word for "Faith".The thing I don't understand is why the monkey people are so hysterical about Intelligent Design. Why is your faith superior to our faith?
Perhaps the most difficult thing for non-scientists to understand is that science is NOT a matter of faith. The scientist who's doing her job doesn't 'believe in' her results in the way that a religious person 'believes in' a deity. Rather, she seeks to find out whether her results are real (that is, in the phenomena rather than in her mind or her instruments), and then attempts to connect those results to other results in the context of some theory about what she's seeing. If she's successful in that, she attempts to widen the scope of her investigations, always mindful that she might have to modify her explanations of what she's found in light of new evidence and/or arguments.
We're always on the way towards truth in empirical science, never there already. That unsettles lots of people, who long for absolutely certain answers to the questions that haunt them: What am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going? Why am I here? Because evolutionrather, than, say quantum electrodynamicsseems to offer unpalatable answers to some of these questions, people reject evolution, clinging to the answers that satisfied earlier generations.
Name one.
There are plenty of theories in science that are proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Name them. And how you know they've been proven beyond a 'reasonable doubt'?
I believe it was the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Prove me wrong!
Gravity
"Why is your faith superior to our faith?"
Are you a pastafarian then? I too have been touched by his noodly appendage. I insist that Flying Spaghetti Monsterism be given equal time with evolution and ID
Wrong.
I do happen to believe we're not random bits of matter that accidentally came together.
You mean your vanity will not permit you to consider the possibility.
Note that ice-core rings and varves and other tree-rings from other parts of the world (rather the Historical Edge of North America) also can be used. They all agree.
Because it pretends to be science. While not intentional, it's also a way to prevent the creation of future scientists. This will put us in the hands of foreigners or mark the end of our technological society.
We already have a problem because of the shortage of Americans going into health care, engineering or grad schools. Convincing students that science will cause them to lose their souls, will prevent many from entering any scientific field.
"Believing" was your problem. You don't believe a theory, merely accept it as the best that the scientific community has to offer as an explanation for what we see. If you're looking for "Truth" then science is the wrong place.
As far as unanswerable questions, you expect too much of science. Newton had unanswerable questions, and attributed his observations to acts of God, much in the same way ID attributes unanswered questions in evolution to God. In Newton's case, we later found out the scientific reasons. Give it time.
Still, 'local school boards under state supervision' is the primary model in the United States, it seems to me. And, after all, it's a local school board (in Dover, PA) that started this latest fracas in the ongoing science vs. nonsense feud.
Or the Euler-Mascheroni constant. Rational or irrational?
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