Here’s the question, partly inspired by the “Controversial Science” thread, because I was impressed with how knowledgeable a group this is. Do you think there is scientific evidence for intelligent design? Ok, some rules. When I say scientific evidence , that excludes scriptures from any religion. By intelligent design, I do not mean any particular concept of God. On the other side of the coin, it is not evidence to say the concept of intelligent design is unacceptable because of some presupposition you hold. The question is whether you think there is any evidence for it. Thanks. I’m looking forward to this.
I think there is a philosophical basis but not a scientific basis. There doesn’t seem to be any hypothesis to test or predictions to make.
Euler proved to Diderot that God exists:
“a + bn over n = x therefore God exists” (true story…not convinced with the proof though :-))
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Here’s the question, partly inspired by the “Controversial Science” thread, because I was impressed with how knowledgeable a group this is. Do you think there is scientific evidence for intelligent design? Ok, some rules. When I say scientific evidence , that excludes scriptures from any religion. By intelligent design, I do not mean any particular concept of God. On the other side of the coin, it is not evidence to say the concept of intelligent design is unacceptable because of some presupposition you hold. The question is whether you think there is any evidence for it. Thanks. I’m looking forward to this.
By definition, there cannot be evidence to support intelligent design. The whole idea is that there are systems in organisms that are “so complex” as to be wholly unfunctional (and therefore useless to the organism) unless they arose intact. This is based on the argument from incredulity: “I can’t imagine X, therefore X cannot be”. Just because we (or any given person) can’t currently understand some process, doesn’t mean that such a process doesn’t or didn’t exist. A few of the classic examples used by the proponents of intelligent design (such as the flagellum having no utility except as a whole system) have been shown to be incorrect (many of the proteins and structures involved in the flagellum have been demonstrated to be effective in other uses).
Go to http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/ and follow some of the links on intelligent design for some convincing arguments. Kenneth Miller is a professor of biology at Brown.
Your response. which is a good one, is addressed more specifically to evolution than I had intended. Let me throw out another question. Is there any scientific evidence for the old canard that no two snowflakes are identical?
Your response. which is a good one, is addressed more specifically to evolution than I had intended. Let me throw out another question. Is there any scientific evidence for the old canard that no two snowflakes are identical?
You asked if there is any scientific evidence behind intelligent design: “Do you think there is scientific evidence for intelligent design?”. I answered that question.
My guess, and klehner or other please correct me if I’m wrong, is that there is no evidence actually FOR intelligent design, but that there is only ambiguity about how evolution would result in highly complex lifeforms, which people take as a sign there must be intelligent design.
I’m not even sure that makes sense, I’ve been reading stuff that klehner has written and my brain is mush trying to comprehend it.
Almost an anecdotal/unimportant question I have is: If there was intelligent design, why do humans have vestigial structures? That doesn’t make sense to me. I guess the pushback is I’m human so I can’t comprehend why God would do something.
The hammer met the nail up there. Intelligent Design is purely an argument of incredulity. It is the organized process of saying, “NO WAY!” in various different, educated-sounding ways.
If you’re going to believe that God created you, just stop there and let it be. Don’t try to argue about it, because there is no logical reasoning or evidence. Just believe it and let the rest of us go about our lives.
As far as the snowflake question:
Given the unfathomable number of snowflakes that have fallen, I find it hard to believe that there have not been at least two that were morphologically identical.
Anything deeper than that is difficult-nigh-impossible to say, since you’re not even the same as you on a molecular level from one instant to the next; billions of electrons have already shifted billions of times in the time it took for you to read this.
It may be 1 chance in googol, but there is a chance that two snowflakes have been absolutely identical. That’s the beauty of science, you never know the full story. It is likely that you cannot possibly comprehend the full story.
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Basically intelligent design is not even a theory. It is basically trying to take advantage of any ambiguity or incompleteness of evolution to suggest that it deserves the benefit of the doubt. But of course, it takes that benefit of the doubt and tries to drive a truck through it.
I don’t even know why people who actually believe in intelligent design would send their kids to school. It seems to me to be such an abrogation of one’s responsibility to sound reasoning that anything is possible.
I think you are right - they should be open to new ideas. But they should also be given the tools to be able to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas - ideas which have both intellectual appeal and empirical justification, from those whose primary support is faith and the denial of science. When you have schools being forced to tone down or eliminate evolution teaching because of faith-based complaints, I think you have a real problem. Where would we be if the Bible denied the presence of atoms and subatomic particles, or elements of basic physics?
Saying that intelligent design is bunk is not intellectual intolerance. It is simply saying that ideas without some basis in fact, which exist only to forward another agenda, don’t meet the minimum requirement for intellectual consideration.
Doth mine eyes deceive me or is it the religious Right that now clings to “keep an open mind, maaaaaan”?
I don’t think the Religious Right does irony, dude.
**I don’t even know why people who actually believe in intelligent design would send their kids to school. It seems to me to be such an abrogation of one’s responsibility to sound reasoning that anything is possible. **
I think the reason we send our kids to school is so that can remain open to new ideas, in the same way those that do not believe in intelligent design should.
An open mind is a great thing, as long as it is not so open that your brains fall out.
I gave intelligent design the benefit of the doubt, read some stuff by people far smarter than me, and determined that ID is demonstrably incorrect. Read the articles by Kenneth Miller (linked above); he shows that fundamental aspects of ID are just flat out wrong (he quotes Behe directly, then refutes him).
The religious right uses ID solely to advance their own anti-evolution agenda. There is yet another anti-evolution Kansas school board “debate” starting (today?); the whole of the scientific community is boycotting it, because it has nothing to do with education.
Explain the Cambrian Explosion … Darwin couldn’t.
Explain the Cambrian Explosion … Darwin couldn’t.
What the hell does this have to do with anything in this thread? Darwin probably couldn’t explain nuclear fusion, either.
In his writings, Darwin acknowledged that the Cambrian fossil record defied his evolutionary theories. It is now often referred to as the Cambrian Explosion because of the startling variety of animal life that appeared suddenly nearly 530 million years ago. The pre-Cambrian fossil record inexplicably contains far too few precursors to explain the Cambrian variety in evolutionary terms. One explanation is that the pre-Cambrian environment was not suitable for extensive fossil recordation. However this theory has been all but rejected by more recent pre-cambrian fossil discoveries but still nothing close to explaining the Cambrian Explosion. There is something to be said about an open and informed mind … give it a try.
Here the article that gave rise to my question: Note that the characterizations by the press go further than the actual conclusions of Prof. Flew.
NEW YORK Dec 9, 2004 — A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God more or less based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.
At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.
Flew said he’s best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people’s lives.
“I’m thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins,” he said. “It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose.” 
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Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article “Theology and Falsification,” based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.
Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.
There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.
Yet biologists’ investigation of DNA “has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved,” Flew says in the new video, “Has Science Discovered God?”
The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese’s Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews.
The first hint of Flew’s turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain’s Philosophy Now magazine. “It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism,” he wrote.
The letter commended arguments in Schroeder’s “The Hidden Face of God” and “The Wonder of the World” by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.
This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his “God and Philosophy,” scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Press.
Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well “that’s too bad,” Flew said. “My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.”
Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a “minimal God” and believes in no afterlife.
Flew’s “name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up,” Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew’s reversal, “apart from curiosity, I don’t think it’s like a big deal.”
Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American “intelligent design” theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.
A Methodist minister’s son, Flew became an atheist at 15.
Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.
Another landmark was his 1984 “The Presumption of Atheism,” playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists.
On the Net:
Varghese page:
Infidels on Flew:
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I agree with you on the snowflake question. I have heard the snowflake thing all my life, practically, but never really bought it. My first response was " How could anyone know that?" Stop a minute and think about all the snowflakes since the beginning of time. Ok, I know about the odds, but is expremely improbable the same as impossible? If so, where is the line that changes one into the other? That is the question I was really getting at. Is it impossible for all the air in the room I occupy to suddenly rush to the upper north corner of the room? ( I’m not seriously worried about this) 
"Saying that intelligent design is bunk is not intellectual intolerance. It is simply saying that ideas without some basis in fact, which exist only to forward another agenda, don’t meet the minimum requirement for intellectual consideration. "
I think this is a cop-out, and it sounds more arrogant than you probably intended. Obviously, a lot of very intellectually accomplished people have found that it meets the minimum requirement for intellectual consideration. Perhaps they are all just so far below you intellectually that they cannot realize how wrong they are, or perhaps you would prefer to just dismiss an issue that threatens your own views , rather than be engaged intellectually. Was Prof. Flew only seeking to forward another agenda? What was it? (In this response, I am not saying he is necessarily right, just that it is worthy of discussion.)