Some prerequisites:
· I chose that link, specifically to counter the "not in school" argument, on a legal and philosophical basis. What is good for Darwin/Scopes is good for the proponents of ID.
· I cannot refute your link, because I agree with most of it and as I said it doesn't refute ID. I guess I could go through it and address all that, but, then you would not get this response until 2007. (haha)
· I would have to say I am an unspecialized scientist. I studied Chemistry for three years, biology for two - shifted to mechanical engineering and graduated "cum laude" from John's Hopkin's.
· I also do not support Biblical Genesis, nor a god with a white beard looking down from the heavens. I do believe in an omnipresent, omnipotent, universal force, I call GOD.
· I will rebut your rebuttal section by section.
Life appears designed.
While to you, this is rather subjective, to me, this is one of the strongest argument for ID. Everything is almost too neat. Your comparison to a man made clock is very appropriate. Man with all his tools and intelligence could not make a self-replicating clock yet we are supposed to believe that random chance produced self-replicating human beings, or a self-replicating ameba for that matter.
Is appearance of design just an illusion?
The SETI thing, I agree - have no idea why he kept bringing that up - who cares what SETI folks think.
Change your next paragraph to read: " If law and chance can adequately explain an apparently specified system. Then evolution is warranted." The rest of the paragraph reads the same. (Substitute evolution for design and vice-versa).
No known natural law appears to account for the semantic character of biological information…
Semantics: The study of the relationships between various signs and symbols and what they represent. (See genome projects - they have mapped it, but have no idea what 90% of it means).
Again you are stating what cannot be known as a denial of ID, but as support when the same premise applies to evolution.
Gene replication is well known and has been for years - what does that have to do with the question at hand?
The extreme complexity of biological systems tends to rule out chance as a reasonable explanation for the origin of life.
I agree one cannot make "a priori" assumption with probabilities - but when one is dealing with 10 to 124th or so it sort of makes sense (assuming that number is correct - it is beyond comprehension).
Conceptual Difficulties
Its strenght lies in the fact that it provides a consistant model, makes preditions which can be subsequently verified in many cases and can be potentially falsified.
Please give me a break, it can be verified, when, a million years from now and falsified then. How exactly could ID provide an explanation if an intelligence were behind it! That is not science.
Evidentiary difficulties
... this standard is impossible for any scientific theory to meet. But that is exactly the standard you insist ID to meet.
Darwinian Evolution has been protected from criticism.
If you cannot see that Darwin is one of the "new gods" and is totally protected from almost any decent, well what can I say.
I do not want to address any of the AAAS stuff because all of that has being pretty much been discussed, other than to say that parents have the right to have their children tought in a way they see fit and the government should not be taking their money by force to teach their children in a way they do not want so.
So here is my basic problem with all this. It has to do with sigularity events. I firmly believe in science, the study of the way things are - probing them to the fullest: chemistry, biology, math, classical physics etc. Once you start asserting (as fact) a singularity, whether it is "life" or the "big bang", I will hold that to be preconception and the denial of alternatives.
Thank you for your post, I scanned your link and it was what I had expected and as such did not refute ID - because one cannot, as you so noted.
Doesn't that in itself seem to bring up a red flag? Potential falsifiability is an essential characteristic of any scientific theory. That's the biggest problem with ID.
I'm not sure that I properly conveyed what I meant by the "predictive" ability of the theory. I mean not that one can predict the future direction of evolution (that really can't be done) - I mean that prediction of future data finds have come true. Example - evolutionary theory predicts that should be transitional fossil forms between land animals and whales; lo and behold, such fossils have been found. Evolutionary theory predicts that organisms in rapidly changing environments should have higher mutation rates; this also has turned out to be true; the list goes on. ID fails to make any specific predictions in this manner - that's another problem with it.
If you cannot see that Darwin is one of the "new gods" and is totally protected from almost any dissent, well what can I say.
Darwin's "revered" status comes from the fact that his theory has worked so well. People make the same accusation of Einstein, as well, but the same holds true for him. It's not as if Darwin's theory hasn't been scientifically challenged (I provided a short link that showed some of the legitimate challenges against it). Lynn Margulis is one of the most interesting; she proposed that lateral gene transfer, not natural selection, was the prime cause of microbial evolution; her challenge was taken seriously, though it now is not generally believed to be true (though certain cellular structures such as mitochondria and chloroplasts are believed to have evolved in this manner). Also, Darwin was certainly mistaken about how genetics worked; findings of Mendel and other scientists required modification of Darwin's ideas. Darwinian evolution is hardly a sacrosanct idea; in fact it has had to survive a myriad of scrutinizing attacks from within the scientific community. "Alternative" theories are a welcome idea in science, but only if they have a scientific basis.