Intellient Design

[SeVeR]

Well Said Astro.

 

If a faithful account was rendered of Man's ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word 'gods' has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods.... When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon ... does he, in fact, do any thing more than subs!@#$%^&*ute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?"

Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach

(12/08/1723 – 01/21/1789)

 

The German Philosophers always said it best.

[Aileron]

Erm...the Inquisition wasn't against science. It was against non-Catholics in the period just after the Moors were expelled from Spain. It wasn't even really as religious as it was cultural. You had a group of people who's country was occupied for centuries and their culture suppressed, and they just fought the occupiers out. What they then wanted to do is re-establish Spainish culture in Spain. Needless to say they went a little overboard.

 

The Church didn't oppress Gallileo. A few men who were appointed to positions they should not have been appointed to abused their power. It was these men, not the Church as a whole, that was oppressive.

 

If one put aside their bias, one would find that over most of history the church supported science, and in some times and places was the only ins!@#$%^&*ution keeping science alive.

 

 

 

Well said Astro, but you completely ignored my point. Intelligent Design doesn't start with the conclusion, it starts with the observations. It starts with the observation that life is complex, intricate, and complicated, and that nature tends to gravitate towards the simplist arrangement. This eventually leads to the conclusion that life had to be designed.

 

Take for example the planets. All planets are spherical. They are round due to entropy of gravity. Over time, matter condenses into a sphere because it is the most energy conservative arrangement. If you were flying through space and came accrossed an iron planet in the shape of a cube, one comes to the conclusion that that planet was designed, because the entropic arrangement for planets is spherical.

 

ID is indeed a scientific theorey, because lifeforms are the most unentropic objects known. Things that aren't entropic are usually designed. Thus, it is likely life was designed.

 

Really, ID isn't a theorey at all. Its really a corollary of the Law of Entropy.

 

 

Now I think I realise what's so hot about this issue. ID doesn't prove Catholicism, Christianity, Judeism, Islam or any other religion. It gives no indication about the designer(s), and infact implies polytheism because every man-made machine that rivals the complexity of the simplist bacteria was designed by a team of engineers. What ID DOES do though is disprove atheism. If life was designed, there would have to be some designer. If that designer was a mere extraterrestrial, some designer would have had to made the extraterrestrial. Thus, there would have to be some intelligent extrauniversal force guiding the course of events. If ID is true, it disproves atheism, and that's what is creating all this fuss.

 

 

You claim to be scientific and then you quote a philosopher. If you were a true scientist you would have lost respect for philosophy long ago. Note the "von" in this guy's name. That's a !@#$%^&*le. That man was probably a useless piece of nobility who produced nothing in his lifetime. He resorted to philosophy as a means of self-promotion, to make himself seem smart, but if he was smart he would have went into real science and discovered something following generations can use. Needless to say Dietrich got it wrong. Science is man's attempt to explain how nature works. Religion is man's attempt to explain why we don't quite seem to fit in with the natural world around us. Philosophy is for those who understand neither science nor religion, but still want to p!@#$%^&* themselves off as intellectuals.

[LearJett+]

Science is man's attempt to explain how nature works. Religion is man's attempt to explain why we don't quite seem to fit in with the natural world around us. Philosophy is for those who understand neither science nor religion, but still want to p!@#$%^&* themselves off as intellectuals.

 

Hmmm... very philosophical.

[»i88gerbils]

You cannot investigate religion and Intelligent Design. As I wrote before intelligent design is not a science because it goes against the scientific method. It's a theory about creation, but does not belong in a science-based class. It taught at all it belongs in the realm of humanities as that is where we can state opinions that do not need to based on the scientific method. Chuang Tzu's butterfly "theory" isn't based on scientific method and thus we do not try to teach it in a science class. His thoughts seem to explain that ANYTHING is possible yet we cannot have anyway of knowing whether we are dreaming or awake. It is logical, but not necessarily scientific.

 

That should clear up without a doubt in which class Intelligent Design should be taught.

[»Ducky]

!@#$%^&*, and all I have to fall back on is philosophy.

I'll have to choose a side if I'm going to be intelligent.

[MonteZuma]

Now I think I realise what's so hot about this issue. ID doesn't prove Catholicism, Christianity, Judeism, Islam or any other religion. It gives no indication about the designer(s), and infact implies polytheism because every man-made machine that rivals the complexity of the simplist bacteria was designed by a team of engineers. What ID DOES do though is disprove atheism. If life was designed, there would have to be some designer. If that designer was a mere extraterrestrial, some designer would have had to made the extraterrestrial. Thus, there would have to be some intelligent extrauniversal force guiding the course of events. If ID is true, it disproves atheism, and that's what is creating all this fuss.

No It is creating a fuss because ID is being presented as a scientific theory (or even a scientific fact) that has support from conventional scientific research. It hasn't.

 

You claim to be scientific and then you quote a philosopher. If you were a true scientist you would have lost respect for philosophy long ago.

Why? Philosophy and science go hand in hand. In some ways, religion and science simply reflect different different philosophical paradigms.

 

Note the "von" in this guy's name. That's a !@#$%^&*le. That man was probably a useless piece of nobility who produced nothing in his lifetime.

Heh. You couldn't be more wrong. He was a major contributor to Encyclopedia, or a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts. Probably the greatest encyclopedia of its time. He wrote the much of the science sections.

 

He resorted to philosophy as a means of self-promotion, to make himself seem smart, but if he was smart he would have went into real science and discovered something following generations can use.

He did. Type "Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers" (ie as a phrase/string) into Google and you get 25,000 hits.

 

Religion is man's attempt to explain why we don't quite seem to fit in with the natural world around us.

No. And who says we don't fit into the natural world around us? Didn't your God initially create everything in the world to serve man? And then he added a few nasties as punishment for breaking his rules. The bible says we fit in perfectly. Then again...so does quantum physics.

 

Philosophy is for those who understand neither science nor religion, but still want to p!@#$%^&* themselves off as intellectuals.

You couldn't be any 'wronger'. Jesus Christ was probably a great philosopher. I think GW Bush described Christ as his favourite political philosopher.

[SeVeR]

The Church didn't oppress Gallileo. A few men who were appointed to positions they should not have been appointed to abused their power.

Ah i see, so similarly it was the Iraqi soldiers and not Saddam who commited the atrocities in Iraq. Obviously not. What you've said here is not entirely true either. Galileo was condemned for heresy and placed under house arrest for the last 10 years of his life. This was fully justified by the Church as a body who believed Copernican theory to be false. In 1992 Pope John Paul II gave an address on behalf of the Catholic Church in which he admitted that errors had been made by the theological advisors in the case of Galileo. He declared the Galileo case closed, but he did not admit that the Church was wrong to convict Galileo on a charge of heresy because of his belief that the Earth rotates round the sun.

 

If one put aside their bias, one would find that over most of history the church supported science

The whole point of religion is to impose certainty. The whole point of science is to acknowledge doubt. Throughout history those who have doubted the certainty imposed by the church have been executed under heresy laws. Science is the study of the unknown but the Church already had their own set of answers sent down by God. Scientists were heretics whenever they investigated something that the Church called certain.

 

It starts with the observation that life is complex, intricate, and complicated, and that nature tends to gravitate towards the simplist arrangement. This eventually leads to the conclusion that life had to be designed.

Life does not gravitate towards the simplest arrangement. The birth of a child is not the simplest arrangement for the molecules that have bonded together to form that child. Life is complex but what other than your pre-conceived ideas of God's existence makes you think that complexity is something that cannot be reached without a designer? More importantly, what makes you think life is complex? Where is your scale?

 

If you were flying through space and came accrossed an iron planet in the shape of a cube, one comes to the conclusion that that planet was designed, because the entropic arrangement for planets is spherical.

Yes. We have ample evidence that planets always form into spheres or near-spherical shapes due to angular momentum laws and gravity. But this is not an analogy because we do not have evidence that life always forms in a particular way (Gods way). We have no reason to assume that life is too complex to be understood by physical laws.

 

ID is indeed a scientific theorey, because lifeforms are the most unentropic objects known.

There are no reasons to believe that life is "unentropic". We can grow human ears and clone sheep whilst obeying the laws of entropy.

 

Thus, it is likely life was designed.

What actually makes it likely? There is nothing to suggest a God made life other than a lack of evidence for something else. Did God make the water molecule? Did God make amino acids? Did God make the first blade of grass Did God make the first bacterium? .....Where does your scale of complexity require God to intervene and why?

 

What ID DOES do though is disprove atheism.

If proven true it would disprove atheism. Atheism is not a scientific theory though. Science does not discount God, it merely puts it on the proper footing as a probability requiring evidence. Since there is no evidence FOR the theory of ID/creation it is not taught in science classes and is regarded as no more relevent than Santa Claus existing. Atheism makes the !@#$%^&*umption that God doesn't exist and is just as unscientific as religion.

 

If you were a true scientist you would have lost respect for philosophy long ago.

Not at all, I am almost bored of studying physics now and am venturing more and more into philosophy. Philosophy gave birth to science 2500 years ago and it was philosophical thought that inspired scientific exploration. Philosophy is for each and every one of us. It tells us to use our own experiences and logic to find justification for the way we live by choosing definitions for all the things that influence and govern our lives. It is a path towards clarity in thought. Religion is someone elses philosophy.

 

Philosophy is for those who understand neither science nor religion, but still want to p!@#$%^&* themselves off as intellectuals.

Great Philosophers tend to have incredible mathematical skills as well as a healthy knowledge of religion. It is a subject that is never clearly defined and is renowned as one populated by intellectuals. So for this reason you are probably right to assume that many people do go into the subject because it sounds clever. However the reasons for this are clearly due to the reputations of philosophers otherwise there would be no cause for them to do it.

[»Ducky]

Religion is someone elses philosophy.

I like that.

[Bak]

There is no up or down.

 

Yeah my roommate and I were talking about this point before. It is strange that squirrels and bacteria are just as adapted to survive as we are. I mean they've survived thousands of generations just like use.

 

Maybe it's better to not be intelligent, since it seems like humans are the only species with large scale wars and the capability to destroy every other human alive (h-bombs), a recipe for extinction.

 

-------------

 

As for ID, it seems like the strongest evidence that it has going for it are that evolution doesn't explain some things very well. However, this is just evidence that evolution is not a complete theory (or we are missing some evidence). How you make the jump from this to saying that it must have been an intelligent agent is beyond me. Imagine if our ansestors did the same with things they lacked explanations for. They would have thought that the sun rising or lightning during a storm were acts of gods (oh wait, they did)! Lack of explanation is not evidence for the existance of an intelligent agent.

 

On the other hand, I do see what you're saying with the dice example. If you come across a cubic iron planet with buildings and cars on it, it seems very likely that it was designed by someone. One theory of the origin of the planet would be that it was designed. However, whether it's a scientific theory depends on other factors, such as whether you can test this theory with experiments (required for it to be called science). This is indeed the reason the U.S. National Academy of Sciences rejected ID as a scientific theory. Teach ID in schools if you want, but not as science.

[Aileron]

Just because something can't be practically experimented upon doesn't mean that its unscientific. For example, the leading scientific theorey about the extinction of dinosaurs involves the Earth being his with a big meteor. There is a lot of evidence supporting this claim, but in order to do an experiment we would have to find a planet full of dinosaurs and slam an asteroid into it.

 

 

Intelligent design does have a similar experiment. We would need a planet covered in a lot of primordial chemicals, wait about 50 billion years and check to see if a lifeform spawned out of it. Since that is cleary impossible, the scientific thing to do is rely on the evidence. Relying on observations rather than experimentation does not make the theorey any less scientific.

 

I'd also like to point out that evolution itself is also a religious theorey, because the groundwork was laid by a monk who bred peas in the medieval period (I forget his name, I'm no historian or biologist). May I also point out that he was not tried for heresy, put in prison or anything of the like.

 

Don't forget the biggest hole in evolution. Where did the FIRST life-form come out of? Sure, birds evolved from reptiles, and reptiles evolved from amphibians, but it does not explain how a paramecium evolved out of rocks and water.

 

This doesn't mean evolution is wrong. This only proves that evolution is an incomplete theorey. Evolution explains how life-forms change genetically over time, but not how the first life-form was created. Other than ID, the only other theorey is the Primordial Soup theorey. This theorey states that before life, the Earth was covered in a "primordial soup" of organic chemicals, and that somehow that soup mixed together into a life-form.

 

Now keep in mind what I said about entropy. According to the Law of Entropy, non-homogenious fluids spread out into homogenious fluids. For example, if you sprinkle salt from a shaker into a gl!@#$%^&* of water, over time the crystals will dissolve, and the salt molecules will spread evenly throughout the glass If you sprinkled salt into water, and the crystals instead came together to form one big crystal, that is not entropic, thus you could come to the conclusion that it is unnatural, and if its not natural, it must be artificial, and if its artificial, an intelligent being is messing with your experiment. Ofcourse there could be other explainations for this case. The salt might not be dissolving because the water may have had too much salt in it already, and it might be gathering in one crystal due to pressure.

 

Now take out the salt and put in some adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, the four chemicals that make up DNA, which by the way really aren't found anywhere else in nature that often. Now, these chemicals aren't salts, so they won't really dissolve (please don't ask me what exactly they do in water - I'm not a chemist and do not know), but like every other fluid in the universe they will eventually settle into a even mixture.

 

Now, our observations on the other hand was that instead of spreading out, they condensed into a double helix arrangement that was a properly functioning genetic code. Keep in mind that this code had to be of a lifeform that had to be fully fuctional on its own, had to have some method of reproduction, and that reproduction had to atleast once in a while have a different code that would also be fully functional. The point is that DNA is not just a mere molecule, it is also a correctly compiled piece of programming.

 

The fact that our four acids condensed into a molecule in and of itself seems to violate the Law of Entropy, and the probability of them condensing into a CODED molecule is astronomically small. To the Primordial Soup theorey's credit, the world did have a lot of time to spit out this code. Also to its' credit, once we have the code, it is entropic for the rest of the cell to form around it (provided the code had that as part of its design). Still, the odds of success certainly are much much less than .01%, so we need a new theorey.

 

That's where Intelligent Design comes in, which states no more and no less than we know with atleast 99.99% certainty that the first DNA code was encoded by one or more intelligent beings.

[Aileron]

No It is creating a fuss because ID is being presented as a scientific theory (or even a scientific fact) that has support from conventional scientific research. It hasn't.

Actually, many in the scientific community support Intelligent Design. It has a lot of support from a lot of conventional research. What's confusing is that after scientists created it, a bunch of people in the religious community supported it, and these people had a tendancy to make rash and unscientific statements.

Have you ever had someone on your side who was on your side for entirely the wrong reasons?

 

 

 

Ah i see, so similarly it was the Iraqi soldiers and not Saddam who commited the atrocities in Iraq. Obviously not.

Obviously my point. The world holds Hussein and the Baathists accountable, not all of Iraq, for the atrocities. The world holds Hitler and the Nazis accoutable, not all of Germany, for the holocaust. Why then you you hold the entire Church accountable for the actions of a few rogue bishops, who were appointed in the first place because secular authorities interfered with the Church on a regular basis?

 

The whole point of religion is to impose certainty. The whole point of science is to acknowledge doubt. Throughout history those who have doubted the certainty imposed by the church have been executed under heresy laws. Science is the study of the unknown but the Church already had their own set of answers sent down by God. Scientists were heretics whenever they investigated something that the Church called certain.

Science imposes certainty. Take Newton's laws. If you went to any physics convention and made a claim that Newton's Laws were wrong in the macroscopic scale, they would laugh at you. Newton's laws are certain. If somehow this was done in a dark-age unenlightened culture, the scientists would try you for heresey and execute you. Executions of those who did not follow with the mainstream was a SECULAR action in the dark ages. The only reason the Church did that is because the secular state did not seperate itself from the Church.

 

For example, it was typical practice for nobles to give the eldest son a !@#$%^&*le use their influence to get one of the younger siblings appointed as a bishop. Thus, they wouldn't allow people to disagree with the bishop, because the bishop was the baron's brother, and if someone spoke back against one brother he might speak back to the other.

 

Really, throughout history it was the state imposed itself on the church. Examples of this are Henry VIII's rule as well as the case when France kidnapped the pope to convince the Church to adopt a French policy. Ofcourse both these actions were in retalition to the Church making their own policy, so depending on your point of view it may be the opposite. With Henry VIII, did the king impose a religion on England so he could get a divorce, or was the Church imposing a belief against divorce on the king? It seems like a relativist question, but it really is not and comes down to who controlled the military. When Henry VIII got divorced, the church could not forcibly stop him. However, when citizens of England wished to remain Catholic, the king did have the force to change their religion.

 

Life does not gravitate towards the simplest arrangement. The birth of a child is not the simplest arrangement for the molecules that have bonded together to form that child.

Wow, that was the exact point I was making. Life does not gravitate towards the simplist arrangement, but everything else in nature does.

 

Life is complex but what other than your pre-conceived ideas of God's existence makes you think that complexity is something that cannot be reached without a designer? More importantly, what makes you think life is complex? Where is your scale?

The Law of Entropy states that systems move from more complex to less complex arrangements. That implies that complexity cannot be reached in positive time without a designer.

 

The scale I'm using is that "simple" is the lowest energy state the system can be at, and "complex" is anything else signficantly above that.

 

Yes. We have ample evidence that planets always form into spheres or near-spherical shapes due to angular momentum laws and gravity. But this is not an analogy because we do not have evidence that life always forms in a particular way (Gods way). We have no reason to assume that life is too complex to be understood by physical laws.

But if you don't look at life specifically and broaden into the catagory to just generic masses of biomatter, the entropic arrangements for that due to various laws of fluids is a well evened mixture. It just is strange that a m!@#$%^&* of biomatter came together to make a life-form.

 

What actually makes it likely? There is nothing to suggest a God made life other than a lack of evidence for something else. Did God make the water molecule? Did God make amino acids? Did God make the first blade of grass Did God make the first bacterium? .....Where does your scale of complexity require God to intervene and why?

I didn't mention God. I mentioned one or more intelligent designers. It could be one divinity. It could be a group of divinities. It could be aliens from another planet. It could be that our universe just has an intelligence of its own. All ID states is that it wasn't mere random action.

 

The level of complexity that would require an intelligent designer would be the first genetic code. Water and amino acids are relatively stable molecules.

 

 

My apologies to the philosophers...its just that I found economics and philosophy to be easy subjects so I pick on those people every chance I get.

[»Ducky]

I'd also like to point out that evolution itself is also a religious theorey, because the groundwork was laid by a monk who bred peas in the medieval period (I forget his name, I'm no historian or biologist). May I also point out that he was not tried for heresy, put in prison or anything of the like.

Wasn't his pea cross breeding more inline with basic genetics rather than evolution itself.

Marking the ratio of pea characteristics when a plant of one type was mated to antoher.

[»i88gerbils]

Aileron can state whats all he wants but until Intelligent Design explains how it still needs to answer this question:

 

Why should philosophy or religion be taught in a Science class?

 

Oh wait, they aren't. Duh. Philosophy & Religion are perfectly acceptable methods of their own in discussing topics therein like Intelligent Design, the 7-fold path, Taoism, Nietzche (sp), etc ... Science is based on its own methods and it should stay that way.

 

and then we all need to answer this question:

 

Why is this one school board in Texas only concerned with Science and not Humanities?

 

Intelligent Design is a philosophy, not a science. You cannot explain God under the scientific method. Doesn't work. Thus you cannot explain "*poof* it happened". Or "it could have happend this way". I'm starting to get pissed off and am about to go into flame mode. This thread should have ended on page 1. And as I stated before logic does not necessarily equal scientific method.

 

This post is not a science even though it is logical. I wouldn't teach FORUM POSTING in a science class would I?

 

Okay, let's talk Entropy. Entropy does not mean that a helix is not stable. Maybe a helix is a stable form. But how could it have formed in the first place? We do not know yet. However, let's look at minerals. There is no one configuration of molecules to form a stable mineral. Silicates form all sorts of minerals included diamonds. In a particular environment the molecules re-arrange and form how they should. This is peculiar because when we find diamonds we have no idea how they could have ended up that way. However we do not necessarily say that "some higher being must have created diamonds". No, that's PHILOSOPHY. Science would say "we do not know how diamonds are created here, but let's try our best to find out".

 

Big difference. Pretty easy to understand really.

[MonteZuma]

Just because something can't be practically experimented upon doesn't mean that its unscientific.

If a person draws conclusions from an idea that cannot be tested, then that person is probably being unscientific.

 

For example, the leading scientific theorey about the extinction of dinosaurs involves the Earth being his with a big meteor.  There is a lot of evidence supporting this claim, but in order to do an experiment we would have to find a planet full of dinosaurs and slam an asteroid into it.

That theory has been tested with experiments many times. An experiment might involve measuring the age of rocks and recording their chemical composition. Another experiment might involve looking for possible impact sites. Another might involve looking at evidence of climate change and another might involve computer simulations that give an indication of what might have happened to the Earth's climate following an big impact. These are all experiments. You do not need to create an exact copy of an event to to experimentally test a theory.

 

Intelligent design does have a similar experiment.  We would need a planet covered in a lot of primordial chemicals, wait about 50 billion years and check to see if a lifeform spawned out of it.  Since that is cleary impossible, the scientific thing to do is rely on the evidence.

This is not a test of intelligent design. This is a test of the currently accepted scientific theory. I'm not so sure that this kind of experiment is impossible. Scientists have been mixing chemicals together and drawing large scale conclusions for centuries.

 

Relying on observations rather than experimentation does not make the theorey any less scientific.

Agreed. But recording observations in a systematic way to test a theory actually can be a scientific experiment.

 

I'd also like to point out that evolution itself is also a religious theorey

No. It isn't.

 

Don't forget the biggest hole in evolution. Where did the FIRST life-form come out of? Sure, birds evolved from reptiles, and reptiles evolved from amphibians, but it does not explain how a paramecium evolved out of rocks and water.

There are simpler forms of life than paramecium. Bacteria or virii (for example) are not evidence of ID. The 'gap' between no life and life is also not evidence of ID.

 

This doesn't mean evolution is wrong. This only proves that evolution is an incomplete theorey. Evolution explains how life-forms change genetically over time, but not how the first life-form was created. Other than ID, the only other theorey is the Primordial Soup theorey. This theorey states that before life, the Earth was covered in a "primordial soup" of organic chemicals, and that somehow that soup mixed together into a life-form.

As far as Earth goes, there is also the theory that life came from outer space, but I agree that that also leaves the origin question unanswered. Yep. there is a gap in knowledge.

 

According to the Law of Entropy, non-homogenious fluids spread out into homogenious fluids.

Not necessarilly. Your ideas on entropy are a philosophical generalisation. Self organisation and self !@#$%^&*embly (in chemistry and biology) do not contradict the 'law of entropy'.

 

Now take out the salt and put in some adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, the four chemicals that make up DNA, which by the way really aren't found anywhere else in nature that often. Now, these chemicals aren't salts, so they won't really dissolve (please don't ask me what exactly they do in water - I'm not a chemist and do not know), but like every other fluid in the universe they will eventually settle into a even mixture.

 

Now, our observations on the other hand was that instead of spreading out, they condensed into a double helix arrangement that was a properly functioning genetic code. Keep in mind that this code had to be of a lifeform that had to be fully fuctional on its own, had to have some method of reproduction, and that reproduction had to atleast once in a while have a different code that would also be fully functional. The point is that DNA is not just a mere molecule, it is also a correctly compiled piece of programming.

The Earth was not a gl!@#$%^&* of water with no inputs other than ambient heat.

 

The fact that our four acids condensed into a molecule in and of itself seems to violate the Law of Entropy, and the probability of them condensing into a CODED molecule is astronomically small. To the Primordial Soup theorey's credit, the world did have a lot of time to spit out this code. Also to its' credit, once we have the code, it is entropic for the rest of the cell to form around it (provided the code had that as part of its design). Still, the odds of success certainly are much much less than .01%, so we need a new theorey.

Even if you are correct and the 'chances of success' are much less than 0.01%, there could still be billions of planets with life in the universe.

 

That's where Intelligent Design comes in, which states no more and no less than we know with atleast 99.99% certainty that the first DNA code was encoded by one or more intelligent beings.

LOL. Where did you pull the 99.99% certainty figure? What empirical evidence do you have for that? A gap in knowledge is not evidence of a creator.

[MonteZuma]

Science imposes certainty.

No it doesn't. The best that science can do is reduce uncertainty. From a sociological point of view, science can actually increase uncertainty by adding complexity or challenging norms - but that's another story.

 

Life does not gravitate towards the simplist arrangement, but everything else in nature does.

No it doesn't. Look up self organisation and self !@#$%^&*embly. The birth of a child does not contradict the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (or entropy if you want to call it that). As far as entropy is concerned, the increasing organisation of molecules and cells in a developing embryo or fetus is more than compensated for by the increasing entropy of small molecules. People are open biological systems that feed from the environment and dump waste into it. Entropy is transferred to the environment surrounding the person.

 

The Law of Entropy states that systems move from more complex to less complex arrangements. That implies that complexity cannot be reached in positive time without a designer.

The 'law of entropy' refers only to closed systems. People on their lonesome are not closed systems. They are part of a larger system - the solar system. Entropy in the solar system is increasing daily.

 

The scale I'm using is that "simple" is the lowest energy state the system can be at, and "complex" is anything else signficantly above that....

...But if you don't look at life specifically and broaden into the catagory to just generic masses of biomatter, the entropic arrangements for that due to various laws of fluids is a well evened mixture. It just is strange that a m!@#$%^&* of biomatter came together to make a life-form....

The Earth has had a steady supply of low entropy energy for billions of years. Come back to this forum in 10 billion years and you will find that the level of entropy in the solar system has increased substantially. The timescales that you are using to justify your ideas are inappropriate.

 

Aileron can state whats all he wants but until Intelligent Design explains how it still needs to answer this question:

 

Why should philosophy or religion be taught in a Science class?

 

Oh wait, they aren't. Duh. Philosophy & Religion are perfectly acceptable methods of their own in discussing topics therein like Intelligent Design, the 7-fold path, Taoism, Nietzche (sp), etc ... Science is based on its own methods and it should stay that way.

Yep. That pretty much sums it up. I believe that ID is a philosophical notion with no scientific foundation. It ranks up there with the idea that nothing that we experience really exists - it is all just a dream. Its a logical (though highly improbable) idea that can neither be proven nor disproven using science. Keep ID out of science and keep it in philosophy where it belongs. Nice post.

[SeVeR]

Relying on observations rather than experimentation does not make the theorey any less scientific.

Exactly, so what observations are there for Intelligent Design?

 

Science imposes certainty. Take Newton's laws. If you went to any physics convention and made a claim that Newton's Laws were wrong in the macroscopic scale, they would laugh at you.

Obviously when you found philosophy "too easy a subject" you didn't choose to venture beyond high-school physics. Look into the work of good old Albert Einstein who proved Newton wrong. Today, if you walked into a physics convention and claimed that Einstein was wrong I guarantee they'd listen to you just like they did to Einstein a hundred years ago. Scientists never impose certainty. We can find out whats very likely but we never assume absolute certainty because then we'd never find out if we were wrong.

 

As for your whole Entropy argument... please pick up a text-book and read it before buying into the garbage thrown at you by Christian and Catholic websites.

 

The Law of Entropy states that systems move from more complex to less complex arrangements.

Do you understand the word system? Do you understand that the system doesn't have to be uniform in its level of complexity?

 

Okay rather than proceeding down a route of humiliation (i'm a nice guy really) i'll just ask you how you get ice from water when this is an apparent drop in entropy.

[»Ducky]

Just a quick note.

 

Frazier Mountain Highschool (California?) sacked it's Intelligent Design Philosophy material with recent outbursts from the community that it was closely bordering state/religion issues.

 

 

This isn't the main story; but probably one of the main reasons the school just said "!@#$%^&* it."

http://www.woio.com/Global/story.asp?S=4351485

[LearJett+]

!@#$%^&*ed Left-Coast

[Aileron]

To Monte:

Life is slowing entropy down though. If plantlife didn't collect light, that energy would both heat up the Earth faster and would be reflected and conducted into space faster. It is possible to build any machine and still add entropy, as a matter of fact its impossible not to. However, building a machine always does not add the most possible entropy with the given matter and energy. With the energy it takes to build an automobile, one could easily blow the lump of steel into a million peices and spread it all over a mile radius. Not only does nature always add entropy, but a series of random events usually tends to be closer to the maximum amount of entropy possible. Its not that life doesn't add entropy, its just that it adds entropy at much slower rate than a planet without life on it.

 

For example, a sculptur requires carfully cut strokes in a sequence. If instead of a careful series of actions, the stone was cut with a series of random strokes, it would most likely end up as a pile of gravel.

 

The Primordial Soup theorey makes the claim that a series of random events created a machine, whatever was the first life-form. This machine had to do certain functions in order for the rest of life to evolve from it. The fact that this machine was constructed successfully implies that the events were not random but were carefully planned strokes.

 

Maybe the machine was built in a physical factory, or maybe nature itself is not random, but has an intelligence of its own.

 

Maybe I'll take a shortcut and make a different arguement. DNA is a code with a language. Language implies intelligence. Sure, the DNA we know and love today may have been a byproduct of evolution, but the first DNA strand could not have been evolved. Since current life evolved from that strand, it must itself have been coded in the same language. That strand had to have been designed.

 

 

To SeVeR:

Einstein didn't prove Newton wrong. First off, it was the scientists who came before Einstein that found the gaps in classical physics - Einstein created the theories that filled in the gaps. Secondly, Newtonian physics is right in the classical scale. The opinion of physicists is that both theories are correct, but they apply to two different types of systems. Einstein himself described the situation "The arguement between classical and modern physics is like a battle between a shark and a tiger, each dominant within its own environment but helpless within the other."

 

Science may not always impose certainty. Infact the Uncertainty Principle in modern physics is one case where it does not. On the other hand, if I did give a high school level projectile motion problem, there is only one certain right answer to where the particle is going to land. There is a bit of error due to the fact that we can't calculate every inperfection in the projectile and every wind current traveling in the area...if we could we could make the calculations with zero error. The point is once something becomes a Law, it is certain.

 

Speaking of high school, the implication that I can't handle college physics is kind of a bit of bigotry. (FYI, I've taken 400 level physics courses for my physics minor, though nothing in thermodynamics as of yet. My marks weren't great, but I know what I'm talking about.) I also don't go to any of those websites, and to my knowledge the Vatican has no opinion on Intelligent Design other than that it is a scientific theorey and none of their concern.

 

I know I wrote something really callast in that religious topic how many months back, and I know it came off as insensitive. There are many people online who act a certain way just to give a certain appearance, such as those who intentionally set themselves up on freq 666. They don't really beieve that stuff, they just want to scare people away. It was a case of mistaken iden!@#$%^&*y.

 

I mean, take Delic for example, who claims to be in a secret society devoted to attacking members of the supposed Illuminati. I for one would assume that claim to be merely a sarcastic one...I could think of much better things to do with my time than chase after why there is a pyramid on the back of the $1 bill. (oh wait...that's Freemasons, my bad) Would it be possible for you to make the wrong guess here? Since tone of voice doesn't carry over into text conversation, it is impossible to tell if someone is being sarcastic over the internet, so we are left with best guess. I for one thought that anyone claiming to be more Satanist than Ducky would be sarcastic, for he has made many more offensive comments over the years than you ever will.

 

The topic was a religious topic, and all religious topics end in altercations. I myself proposed a rule banning pure religious topics here for that reason when I was elected mod. I hate those topics, and Ducky's criticism of my religion had set me off just like my subsequent criticism of yours set you off. We disagree, and it is to a point that we cannot even agree to disagree.

 

However, there is no point in letting that disagreement spill over into other topics. Please just let the !@#$%^&* thing go.

[»Ducky]

For example, a sculptur requires carfully cut strokes in a sequence. If instead of a careful series of actions, the stone was cut with a series of random strokes, it would most likely end up as a pile of gravel.

 

fact that this machine was constructed successfully implies that the events were not random but were carefully planned strokes.

 

Wouldn't it be "Implies that most likely."

Tossing sticks into the air and having them form a loosely constructed form that was able to sustain 50 pounds of weight would be possible given the amount of sticks and numerous throws.

 

With your wording, I note that you don't disclude the possibility of the primordial ooze theory; which sounds to me to be about as possible as ID.

 

If you simply just misworded it, I understand.

-----------

 

Unfortunately; the topic was introduced about what should be taught in school. IMO; no one has seemed to mount well enough evidence that ID would be a science instead of simply philosophy.

Although Aileron has touched almost every other part of ID than that.

[»i88gerbils]

Okay. We have one more conclusion to this topic that Aileron himself admits. That is Aileron refuses to accept logical statements. But next time don't be upset when I flame him for being an ignorant !@#$%^&*!@#$%^&* (unless he changes).

 

Let's review.

 

Aileron needs to learn not to rely on Science as religion. The scientific method allows us to criticize "the way things work" and accept changes to previous agreements. Aileron specifically tries to use Science as "golden rules", but this is not true. No intelligent & critical thinker is going to believe that. Furthermore it's not acceptable because it goes against what Science actually is. Until Aileron learns to accept the definition of Science and the scientific method I am pretty sure he will continue to mislead others with fallatic arguments based off these wierd definitions.

 

Science does not rely upon a generic conclusion because it cannot come to a conclusion! Intelligent Design does just that. We don't ask why, why, and why again only to say that we give up and make a conclusion that we can't explain. If I ask why, why, and why again about "intelligent designers" I will receive no answer as to its certainty. Sigh. That was very simple.

 

Once again Intelligent Design does not belong in a Science class. If you want to believe in intelligent designers, then discuss this under Philosophy along with Neitzsche & Chuang Tzu who have already come up with the same ideas as Intelligent Design centuries before some ignorant American moron came up with it. It's not a new concept. We have already recognized this and do not teach it in Science classes.

 

 

 

N.B.: And the Law of Entropy does not apply. Especially when Aileron changes the definitions around to fit his argument. He needs to explain his scultpor analogy so that we know what is "work" and what is the "environment". I'd say that even if he does explain it will just prove my point even more that Intelligent Design is a philosophy and not a science.

[MonteZuma]

To Monte:

Life is slowing entropy down though.

I gotta say, I agree with sever and think that you don't understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics. As I said earlier, your views on entropy seem to me to be a philosophical generalisation. From a scientific point of view, entropy is a measure of the dispersal or degradation of energy in a closed system (such as the solar system). Earth and especially human settlements on Earth are open systems, with a constant input of low entropy energy from the sun (which includes fossil fuels which are essentially storages of solar energy) - and geothermal energy. In the solar system though, there is only a limited amount of low entropy energy. Eventually it will run out. Humans and other life forms are not making any significant difference. The amount of energy transformation that we are involved with is insignificant compared to the amount of energy transformation by the sun.

 

but the first DNA strand could not have been evolved.

The only evidence that you have to support this idea is that you do not know how it could have evolved. Not good enough in science class, but a wonderful topic for philosophy class.

 

Science may not always impose certainty. Infact the Uncertainty Principle in modern physics is one case where it does not. On the other hand, if I did give a high school level projectile motion problem, there is only one certain right answer to where the particle is going to land.

There is certainty in mathematics. The uncertainty is whether or not the equation holds true in every situation in time throughout the universe (or other universes for that matter). But I take your point.

 

to my knowledge the Vatican has no opinion on Intelligent Design other than that it is a scientific theorey and none of their concern.

Then the Vatican is wrong (ie it isnt a scientific theory). As far as I know, ID is primarily an American political and religious issue that is of little interest anywhere else in the world.

[Aileron]

Trust me, I understand thermodynamics. What I have problems with in the communication of ideas. My statements are too long and too general, leading to miscommunication.

 

You may be right that I am bordering on the religious and philosophical, but just because a theorey may be those things does NOT in and of itself make it unscientific. Just because in the Book of Genesis it says that there was a huge flood that covered the Earth doesn't mean that there wasn't a flood. There are indeed cases of scientific evidence supporting biblical events...they show about a dozen cases each holiday on the History channel.

 

How do I know the first DNA strand could not have evolved? Because I am making the !@#$%^&*umption that it was the first. If it evolved, it had to by the definition of evolve have been generated from a previous DNA strand, contradicting the !@#$%^&*umption that it was the first. We know that there had to be a first life-form, because to state otherwise would contradict all the evidence of our universe before life showed up.

 

The question here is "How does a life-form come to exist from an environment that has no life in it?" I'll call this first life-form "Bob" for shorthand. Now Bob cannot be born or be replicated off a previous cell, because there is no life. Bob had to be put together out of non-living materials.

 

This brings us to Ducky's statement. Now, first off we have no sticks, sticks are pieces of life-forms, and life doesn't exist yet. We only have rocks and fluids. Secondly, Bob can't be just a loosely constructed pile. Remember, Bob has to be able to reproduce so that the rest of us can evolve from it. This means that Bob has to be a functioning machine, with a stable genetic code that all life on Earth would evolve from.

 

But the RELEVENT point is that if the tossing of sticks was truly random over a given area over a long period of time, we won't get a loose pile in the center. Instead, the sticks would cover the area in an even fashion. They would form a carpet, not a pile. This is why and how I am referencing the Law of Entropy, because it implies that gravity would cause the sticks to settle into a carpet. Entropy states that once we have the carpet, we can't get a pile without adding energy.

 

But wait! Energy is added to the Earth's surface all the time. Can't that energy be what is causing Bob to form when we should be getting vegitable soup? Not necessarily. Just adding energy won't automatically give us a pile. If we add energy in a random fashion, by shaking the entire floor up and down evenly, the carpets remains to be a carpet. As a matter of fact, if we somehow already had the pile and applied random energy in this way, it would give us the carpet.

 

If we want a pile, we need to add energy that is NOT random. We would need to push it towards a location. Now, such a action may have a random component. For instance, if we put the sticks in a funnel 10 meters above the ground, we don't know the exact location each stick will land, but we will get a pile. However, the point is that there is no way to get a pile without removing some of the randomness in how we are applying the energy.

 

Now, as I pointed out, Bob can't be just a pile. Bob is a fully fuctional machine that has a big role to fill being the lifeform that all other life will evolve from and all. Bob thus needs to be in a precise order, if but one of the molecules in its genetic code is out of place, Bob won't be able to fill the role that we know it did. If we need to remove randomness to get a pile of sticks, how much randomness do we need to remove in order to get a perfectly in-line genetic code?

 

In order to get the code, the energy events upon the system had to occur in a specific sequence. The application of energy and matter could not have been random. The right energy had to be at the right place at the right time or it would not have worked. Scientists trying to prove the primordial soup theorey have tried to recreate the conditions, but we cannot because our methods are too random to give us the order needed to put that code in sequence. Thus, the application of energy required more order than our intelligence is capabile of providing.

 

Overall, life is clearly an example of perfect order. Either that order was created from another order or that order was created from chaos. The former implies intelligence created life. The latter cannot occur...because if the result is order, is the chaos truly chaos?

[Aileron]

Science does not rely upon a generic conclusion because it cannot come to a conclusion! Intelligent Design does just that. We don't ask why, why, and why again only to say that we give up and make a conclusion that we can't explain. If I ask why, why, and why again about "intelligent designers" I will receive no answer as to its certainty. Sigh. That was very simple.

 

Wait a minute. Back the truck up! I can't believe I missed your post the first time! Okay, so its unscientific to impose certainty when we are uncertain about something. Okay, lets look at what YOU are doing.

 

YOU have started with the generic conclusion that the Primordial Soup Theorey is correct. When I try to point out some uncertainty in that theorey, your defence is "My theorey is right. Change your opinion or I flame you."

 

While I am indeed making the claim that the Intelligent Design theorey is right absolutely, my overall goal only requires uncertainty in the Primordial Soup Theorey. I am pushing harder than I have to. If neither theorey is certain, both should be taught in classrooms.

 

Its not idiotic in and of itself that you are making the statement "I'm absolutely right, you are absolutely wrong. End of story". There are times and places where that is correct. The point where you contradict yourself is "I'm absolutely right, you are absolutely wrong, but there is no such thing as absolute and anyone who thinks himself absolutely right is an idiot."

 

I don't have to prove I'm right. I don't even have to prove you are wrong. All I have to do is prove uncertainty. While I am attempting to go farther, I don't have to. YOU have to prove you are RIGHT and that I am WRONG. If you can't do that, then BOTH theories are acceptible and BOTH should be taught.

 

It can go without arguement that ID is consistent with the evidence we have. It could very well be that the first cell on Earth was created, and that cell evolved to create all other life. Since we have no evidence confirming or massively implying that the first cell was NOT created by an intelligent being, ID is consistent.

[MonteZuma]

...How do I know the first DNA strand could not have evolved? Because I am making the !@#$%^&*umption that it was the first. If it evolved, it had to by the definition of evolve have been generated from a previous DNA strand, contradicting the !@#$%^&*umption that it was the first. We know that there had to be a first life-form, because to state otherwise would contradict all the evidence of our universe before life showed up.

The first life form might have been something completely unlike anything 'living' today. Just as we have life forms that straddle the boundary between plants and animals, at some time in the past we may have had life forms that straddled the boundary between a complex chemical reaction and 'life' (which is not much more than a series of very complex chemical reactions).

 

...If we want a pile, we need to add energy that is NOT random. We would need to push it towards a location. Now, such a action may have a random component. For instance, if we put the sticks in a funnel 10 meters above the ground, we don't know the exact location each stick will land, but we will get a pile. However, the point is that there is no way to get a pile without removing some of the randomness in how we are applying the energy.

The logic here is flawed. You seem to think that the only relevant force is gravity. But as we see in nature all the time, things do self-!@#$%^&*emble. Storm clouds, volcanos, snow flakes, raindrops and hailstones, ice or salt crystals, beaches and sand dunes. etc etc etc etc etc.

 

Now, as I pointed out, Bob can't be just a pile. Bob is a fully fuctional machine that has a big role to fill being the lifeform that all other life will evolve from and all. Bob thus needs to be in a precise order, if but one of the molecules in its genetic code is out of place, Bob won't be able to fill the role that we know it did. If we need to remove randomness to get a pile of sticks, how much randomness do we need to remove in order to get a perfectly in-line genetic code?

'Facilitated variation' is a new theory that seems to explain how complexity and diversity evolve from humble beginnings. The basic premise is that evolution is not entirely random. Whilst mutations are random, variation cannot be random because variation depends on the modification of something that already exists. We aren't throwing up a random pile of sticks. Essentially we are gradually building and rearranging a pile all the time.

 

Overall, life is clearly an example of perfect order.

No it isn't. What is your definition of 'perfect' and 'order'. To use the standard argument to this, why do men have nipples and why do we all have an appendix? Life isn't perfect. Life is just the most complex thing in the universe.