Comments like this demonstrate why our young people should at least be exposed to the basics of this theory in school Looking at your "about" Free Republic page, it appears you are firmly planted in the God camp. You just may have a bias.
The threads I usually see from the Intelligent Design proponents nearly always knock Darwin. The little I know about Darwin is he advanced the idea of natural selection. As part of his evidence, he made many references to changes brought about by animals through breeding by man. He also presented evidence from his experiments and field observations and those of his contemporaries. I would accept his work as science. For some reason Darwin sends the ID people into a tizzy. The ID people should really be directing their ire at Marx who insisted upon a material cause for life. He invoked Darwin, true, but for his own purposes.
Back to ID. Einstein was able to pare his Theory of Special Relativity down to two a priories, that the speed of light is constant and that relative motion is true. Darwin was able to sum up his Theory of natural selection in one sentence. Can you sum up intelligent design in no more than several sentences? I just don't have the time to wade through all the complaints about Darwin to understand what the ID people would like us to believe.
Can you sum up intelligent design in no more than several sentences? It is all laid out in the Wedge Strategy.
Governing Goals
- To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
- To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and hurnan beings are created by God.
Five Year Goals
- To see intelligent design theory as an accepted alternative in the sciences and scientific research being done from the perspective of design theory.
- To see the beginning of the influence of design theory in spheres other than natural science.
- To see major new debates in education, life issues, legal and personal responsibility pushed to the front of the national agenda.
Twenty Year Goals
- To see intelligent design theory as the dominant perspective in science.
- To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its influence in the fine arts.
- To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.
One of the most pertinent sentences:
Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
ID is a political movement, centered around an old idea, designed to promote a particular religious viewpoint.
Yes, I am indeed a Christian, but as far as I know, that does not mean I have less gray matter than other humans. Were I to prove that, I would indeed need to look at the empirical evidence. Whereas I am not yet willing to give my body to science, I will attest that my tested IQ is above average, as is the case with all Freepers, I'm sure. You're point that I may be biased is right on. Aren't we all?
I also do not profess to be an expert, but I have enough background in science to follow the main arguments. (I have a BSN & MSN (Nursing).) I'll just cut & paste some quotes from those who have more background in the field.
To address your question, here's a brief definition of Intelligent Design:
A theory about the origin of life that holds that intelligent causes best explain the origin of many features of living systems. The theory is based on the testable assumption that structures that exhibit high information content are more likely to be the result of intelligent design than of undirected natural causes.
Here's one amazing video, showing of how much our scientific knowledge has changed since Darwin first wrote "the Origen of the Species" in 1859- This describes simple cell division, which Darwain believed to be a relatively uncomplicated process.
Here's what Francis Crick, who I believe is an atheist, has to say about this process:
"To produce this miracle of molecular construction all the cell need do is to string together the amino acids (which make up the polypeptide chain) in the correct order. This is a complicated biochemical process, a molecular assembly line, using instructions in the form of a nucleic acid tape (the so-called messenger RNA). Here we need only ask, how many possible proteins are there? If a particular amino acid sequence was selected by chance, how rare of an event would that be?
This is an easy exercise in combinatorials. Suppose the chain is about two hundred amino acids long; this is, if anything, rather less than the average length of proteins of all types. Since we have just twenty possibilities at each place, the number of possibilities is twenty multiplied by itself some two hundred times. This is conveniently written 20200, that is a one followed by 260 zeros! This number is quite beyond our everyday comprehension. For comparison, consider the number of fundamental particles (atoms, speaking loosely) in the entire visible universe, not just in our own galaxy with its 1011 stars, but in all the billions of galaxies, out to the limits of observable space. This number, which is estimated to be 1080, is quite paltry by comparison to 10260. Moreover, we have only considered a polypeptide chain of a rather modest length. Had we considered longer ones as well, the figure would have been even more immense." Francis Crick, [Crick received a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA.] Life Itself, Its Origin and Nature (1981), pp 51-52.