Verdict that Demands Evidence: Darwinists, not Christians, are stonewalling the facts

"Intelligent design's claim is not that nothing occurs through evolution, but rather that at pivotal points in the evolitionary process things happen by design and not randomly. For example, differentiation of sexes and development of diverse sexual organs might involve steps by design, as well as random evolutionary steps. "

[Quote - William Dembski]

Is Intelligent Design Testable?

William A. Dembski 01.24.01

" But isn't intelligent design just a stone's throw from fundamentalist Christianity and rabid creationism? Even if a theory of intelligent design should ultimately prove successful and supersede Darwinism, it would not follow that the designer posited by this theory would have to be the Christian God or for that matter be real in some ontological sense. One can be an anti-realist about science and simply regard the designer as a regulative principle -- a conceptually useful device for making sense out of certain facts of biology -- without assigning the designer any weight in reality. Wittgenstein, for instance, regarded the theories of Copernicus and Darwin not as true but as "fertile new points of view

[/quote]

Your answer coupled with Dembski's just equated ID with naturalism. How is that different from Evolution?

God, in fact any religion, is inconsequential to evolution; evolution cares nothing about the origin question nor whether some long forgotten designer initiated the process. The question of whether ID should be taught in schools hinges not on it's religiosity but on it's validity as science.

Thanks for the ping.

"Stark offers startling evidence that Darwinists have covered up mounting flaws in their theory"

Why should we take a Religious Sociologist's opinion about evolution seriously? He knows no more about science than does Johnson. His concept of a flaw comes down to the Theory of Evolution's inability to currently explain all facets of evolution. Current inability does not mean absolute inability.

"The question of whether ID should be taught in schools hinges not on it's religiosity but on it's validity as science."

But it will win, or be defeated, because of its "religiosity". Winning or losing in this area is political, and by definition, idiotic.

In my opinion, Intelligent Design is a speculative science just like evolution is. Both can point to the same fossil evidence and biological facts and offer speculative theories that match the known facts. Both theories will depend on a black box: evolution would have to explain how can irreducible complexities of life be formed wholly at random, and the ID will have to explain who the Designer is.

The fact that a designer is something religion also postulates is a corollary that is uncomfortable to the atheist; it should not be an impediment to teaching ID in schools, even if religious curriculum is excluded by law.

Back to the male nipple question, the best explanation is religious fundamentalist, and not naturalist. God created man first, then He made woman from the man. Male nipples, -- a minor sensory organ,-- were the original design. Female nipples are adaptation of an existing feature to the additional tasks the female body has.

"In my opinion, Intelligent Design is a speculative science just like evolution is. Both can point to the same fossil evidence and biological facts and offer speculative theories that match the known facts. Both theories will depend on a black box: evolution would have to explain how can irreducible complexities of life be formed wholly at random, and the ID will have to explain who the Designer is. "

So far, a plausible pathway has been postulated for every IC claimed. If you are really interested, check out www.talkdesign.org and www.talkreason.org.

"The fact that a designer is something religion also postulates is a corollary that is uncomfortable to the atheist; it should not be an impediment to teaching ID in schools, even if religious curriculum is excluded by law. "

The reason ID should not be taught is its inability to develop a workable theory.

"Back to the male nipple question, the best explanation is religious fundamentalist, and not naturalist. God created man first, then He made woman from the man. Male nipples, -- a minor sensory organ,-- were the original design. Female nipples are adaptation of an existing feature to the additional tasks the female body has."

Male features are a result of specific hormones during development. Everyone starts out morphologically female at conception, then either becomes male or stays female. How does this fit your hypothesis?

"But it will win, or be defeated, because of its "religiosity". Winning or losing in this area is political, and by definition, idiotic."

As much as that is true, I would like to get the anti-evolution crowd to stop making claims that aren't reflective of current science and education.

Most do not realize that education is just the tip of the wedge.

I am not an ID enthusiast. As a Roman Catholic I am entirely comfortable to let the science run its course as it explains the created world. If the Intelligent Design's central claims have all a random-evolution explanation, then it does not make evolution any less speculative, but it makes ID failing the Occam razor test, and so, prehaps, it should be reserved for higher levels of academia. As a bystander in this, however, I cannot escape the feeling that bigoted fanaticism is all on the evolutionists' side. I cannot account for it any differently than assuming that it is an anti-religion bias that is driving them, not a search for truth, and so I cannot take the evolutionists at their word.

The woman-first nipple theory is, of course, just as good at explaining male nipples as man-first. Neither has anything to do with evolution and they are not mutually contradictory either, because we only have scriptural knowledge of the order of creation, not the gestational order of development.

The C/E competition is not over, but it has been joined by another perspective that is neither C nor E. Call it L for Liptonism. He links thought to thought's obvious yet unexplained ability to motivate matter.

C/E/L

As in CELlular.

This is a crock.

". . . For example, nine years ago biochemist Michael Behe published Darwin's Black Box (Free Press, 1996). Behe argued that complex structures like proteins cannot be assembled piecemeal, with gradual improvement of function. Instead, like a mousetrap, all the parts—catch, spring, hammer, and so forth—must be assembled simultaneously, or the protein doesn't work.

Behe's thesis faced a challenge from the nation's leading expert on cell structure, Dr. Russell Doolittle at the University of California-San Diego. Doolittle cited a study on bloodletting in the journal Cell that supposedly disproved Behe's argument. Behe immediately read the article—and found that the study proved just the opposite . . ."

I have no idea what Russell Doolittle may or may not have said, and I seriously doubt the claim that he admitted Behe's arguments were correct, but that really doesn't matter. A more useful critique may be that of Kenneth R. Miller who, like Behe, also believes the universe reveals "a world of meaning and purpose consistent with a divine intelligence," but, unlike Behe, doesn't pretend -- and ID advocates only pretend -- to argue that this viewpoint is scientific.

The Flaw in the Mousetrap
Intelligent design fails the biochemistry test.

By Kenneth R. Miller

To understand why the scientific community has been unimpressed by attempts to resurrect the so-called argument from design, one need look no further than Michael J. Behe's own essay. He argues that complex biochemical systems could not possibly have been produced by evolution because they possess a quality he calls irreducible complexity. Just like mousetraps, these systems cannot function unless each of their parts is in place. Since "natural selection can only choose among systems that are already working," there is no way that Darwinian mechanisms could have fashioned the complex systems found in living cells. And if such systems could not have evolved, they must have been designed. That is the totality of the biochemical "evidence" for intelligent design.

Ironically, Behe's own example, the mousetrap, shows what's wrong with this idea. Take away two parts (the catch and the metal bar), and you may not have a mousetrap but you do have a three-part machine that makes a fully functional tie clip or paper clip. Take away the spring, and you have a two-part key chain. The catch of some mousetraps could be used as a fishhook, and the wooden base as a paperweight; useful applications of other parts include everything from toothpicks to nutcrackers and clipboard holders. The point, which science has long understood, is that bits and pieces of supposedly irreducibly complex machines may have different -- but still useful -- functions.

Behe's contention that each and every piece of a machine, mechanical or biochemical, must be assembled in its final form before anything useful can emerge is just plain wrong. Evolution produces complex biochemical machines by copying, modifying, and combining proteins previously used for other functions. Looking for examples? The systems in Behe's essay will do just fine.

He writes that in the absence of "almost any" of its parts, the bacterial flagellum "does not work." But guess what? A small group of proteins from the flagellum does work without the rest of the machine -- it's used by many bacteria as a device for injecting poisons into other cells. Although the function performed by this small part when working alone is different, it nonetheless can be favored by natural selection.

The key proteins that clot blood fit this pattern, too. They're actually modified versions of proteins used in the digestive system. The elegant work of Russell Doolittle has shown how evolution duplicated, retargeted, and modified these proteins to produce the vertebrate blood-clotting system.

And Behe may throw up his hands and say that he cannot imagine how the components that move proteins between subcellular compartments could have evolved, but scientists actually working on such systems completely disagree. In a 1998 article in the journal Cell, a group led by James Rothman, of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, described the remarkable simplicity and uniformity of these mechanisms. They also noted that these mechanisms "suggest in a natural way how the many and diverse compartments in eukaryotic cells could have evolved in the first place." Working researchers, it seems, see something very different from what Behe sees in these systems -- they see evolution.

If Behe wishes to suggest that the intricacies of nature, life, and the universe reveal a world of meaning and purpose consistent with a divine intelligence, his point is philosophical, not scientific. It is a philosophical point of view, incidentally, that I share. However, to support that view, one should not find it necessary to pretend that we know less than we really do about the evolution of living systems. In the final analysis, the biochemical hypothesis of intelligent design fails not because the scientific community is closed to it but rather for the most basic of reasons -- because it is overwhelmingly contradicted by the scientific evidence.

Though the above critique is rather short in length, and omits much I would like to see added, it points out the most basic flaw in Behe's work -- it is simply not supported by the known facts of biochemistry.

And with that you have your answer to the question "just who is holding back" the Enlightenment.

"I am not an ID enthusiast. As a Roman Catholic I am entirely comfortable to let the science run its course as it explains the created world. . . ."

Well put annalex. As a Roman Catholic I also have no fear of science because nothing it produces can deny the metaphysical truth of God I know by faith. And I refuse to let anyone tell me that science can provide the proof of God because that demeans my faith.

Good post. Thanks for the ping, but I've been ignoring this thread.