The Science of Intelligent Design is sort of like the Moderate Taliban or the fiscally conservative Democrat — a great hypothesis that happens not to reflect anything close to reality.
You apparently have not studied the subject very carefully.
Then why are the Evos constantly telling us that the Universe is not what it seems?...That it is really a master of illusion that dupes us into seeing design, when in reality it is merely a slight of hand (so to speak) that gives “appearance” of design?
Basically all the I.D. people have to do is to falsify neo-darwinism. They don’t have to create a new paradign.
“Gravitation is a theory, not a fact. It should be approached with an open mind.”
That one chunk of matter attracts another chunk of matter is observable fact. That its cause is “bent space” or “an exchange of particles” is theory.
Kneejerk true-believers in Darwinism love to assert that Darwinism is no longer a theory, but is as factually well established as quantum mechanics. Unfortunately for them, we never hear groups of quantum physicists asserting that quantum mechanics is no longer a theory, but is as well established a fact as Darwinian evolution.
We don’t hear them say that for good reason: they’re too smart to say something so stupid and so untrue.
Quantum mechanics is no longer merely a theory because it has been experimentally verified to fourteen decimals. Does Darwinian evolution have any observation, any experiment — ANYTHING — that remotely approaches that sort of precision?
The short answer is “No.”
The longer, more nuanced answer is “No.”
Everything in science is open to revision — Newton, Einstein, Darwin — all of it. The desire to hold one causal explanation for a set of phenomena as “unquestionably true for all time” and “established beyond all reasonable doubt for all time”, as the Darwinists want to do with their theory of random mutation plus natural selection, is unscientific.
That Darwinists also permit no questioning of their explanation by threat of force via the courts, is both unscientific and immoral.
Darwinists are not trying to protect the sanctity of science, as they claim. They are protecting a worldview that denies the existence — or even the possibility — of “Mind” in “Nature.” If they are Moderate Materialists, they will deny the existence of Mind in Physical Nature, but admit its existence in human beings (and, to a lesser extent, other animals); if they are fully consistent, Radical Materialists, they will deny the existence of Mind altogether, and will embrace some form of behaviorism in their psychological views.
Even a hardcore Darwinist like Richard Dawkins admitted in Ben Stein’s documentary “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” that humans could have been intelligently designed by, e.g., space aliens — he won’t rule out the possibility. However, for him, the space aliens themselves must have been intelligently designed by earlier space aliens, who themselves must have been intelligently designed by still earlier space aliens, etc. He balks at the infinite regress involved in the way he thinks about the process. What he objects to, even more than the infinite regress, is any sort of non-material, “supernatural” explanation for anything that might have started the process — a “prime mover” — God.
While many in the intelligent design movement believe in God, not all do; what unites them is the understanding that living things have solved certain problems to come into existence; problems that could not have been solved by any sort of random process.
"The Science of Intelligent Design" is a contradiction in terms.
The Science of Intelligent Design is sort of like the Moderate Taliban or the fiscally conservative Democrat — a great hypothesis that happens not to reflect anything close to reality.
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As a chemist, the most fascinating issue for me revolves around the origin of life. Before life began, there was no biology, only chemistry – and chemistry is the same for all time. What works (or not) today, worked (or not) back in the beginning. So, our ideas about what happened on Earth prior to the emergence of life are eminently testable in the lab. And what we have seen thus far when the reactions are left unguided as they would be in the natural world is not much. Indeed, the decomposition reactions and competing reactions out distance the synthetic reactions by far. It is only when an intelligent agent (such as a scientist or graduate student) intervenes and “tweaks” the reactions conditions “just right” do we see any progress at all, and even then it is still quite limited and very far from where we need to get. Thus, it is the very chemistry that speaks of a need for something more than just time and chance. And whether that be simply a highly specified set of initial conditions (fine-tuning) or some form of continual guidance until life ultimately emerges is still unknown. But what we do know is the random chemical reactions are both woefully insufficient and are often working against the pathways needed to succeed. For these reasons I have serious doubts about whether the current Darwinian paradigm will ever make additional progress in this area.
Edward Peltzer
Ph.D. Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (Scripps Institute)
Associate Editor, Marine Chemistry