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It was to make sure science classrooms stay science classrooms and not a pulpit. All it would have taken is some evidence. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but there hasnt been one single peice of evidence for ID to make it worth consideration at this point. The proper process here, is to take the ideas to scientific community for debate... not to take them straight to the classroom.

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So then ID is religious? There are quite a wide range of atheists and probably just as many unique reasons for them being so as there are atheists. Some are pure rationalists, sure, others simply find theological explanations lacking for one reason or another. Atheism at its simplest is a lack of belief in god.. nothing more. I still dont follow how ID is an alternative to atheism, if it's not supposed to imply god. If ID doesn't imply god, it is not an alternative to atheism.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud

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It was to make sure science classrooms stay science classrooms and not a pulpit. All it would have taken is some evidence. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but there hasnt been one single peice of evidence for ID to make it worth consideration at this point. The proper process here, is to take the ideas to scientific community for debate... not to take them straight to the classroom.

That it is all fine and good, but it does nothing to support your original contention that that IDists attempted to take ID to classrooms by “force of the courts”; that was wrong.

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I already told you; atheism, whatever it’s form, is dependent on unguided forces being able to produce life and develop it. If that isn’t the case, atheism really can’t be accurate.

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ORIGINAL: drj11
ID is dependent on that as well, if it implies the designer might not be God. It follows that the designer would either have to be designed supernaturally himself, or a product of unguided natural forces. You either have to have the infinite regress of designers problem, or it has to end in some form of theism.

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If the evolution of life as we know it was guided by some intelligence other than god, I do not see that as incompatible with atheism.

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2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.

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Well, ok...

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ID is dependent on that as well, if it implies the designer might not be God. It follows that the designer would either have to be designed supernaturally himself, or a product of unguided natural forces. You either have to have the infinite regress of designers problem, or it has to end in some form of theism.

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Atheism is only inaccurate if we can prove that there is in fact a god. Atheism doesn't hinge on the idea that life was designed, especially if that designer isn't a deity.

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But yea, the main thrust of this thread is accurate.. ID is mutually exclusive with atheism, since it is religious in nature. I don't see how you can say in one breath that it doesn't imply god, and in the next say its the antithesis of atheism. There's a logical leap there that doesn't quite jive with my own... If the evolution of life as we know it was guided by some intelligence other than god, I do not see that as incompatible with atheism.

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
As it turns out though, ID, like all scientific ideas, is concerned with causation – and of the three possible causes, ID suggests that intelligence is necessary for the origin and development of life – regardless of the implications of a such a fact.

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Regardless of the implications, or because of them?

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They probably exist, but I don't think that I've ever seen an ID proponent who didn't start from a religious point of view. They start with the notion that a designer designed, because of their faith, and attempt to find the evidence for it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because all people are tainted by subjectivity, but they then try to place their notions in public school textbooks without the due process of going through the scientific community

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I don't know about the cosmological side of things, but I've seen quite a number of theists take an evolutionary standpoint. Evolution doesn't preclude a god existing, but ID automatically implies one.

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Even this I wouldn't have a problem with, if the ID community would put out enough scientifically supportable material to back their viewpoint by explaining in detail the mechanisms of how the world got to be how it is.

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Jhud, if you’re going to continue posting in this thread, why aren’t you attempting to address what I said in my last post on its first page?

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Who are you that I would be obligated to?

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Glad we agree here.

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An ‘infinite regress’ really doesn’t present a problem for two reasons. The first is that the investigation of scientific causes is always proximate. That is, if I say that a certain chemical reaction was the product of the properties of certain elements interacting in certain conditions, I don’t have to then show how those elements came to be, or how the conditions came to be.

In the same way, if I were to find a piece of alien technology on a distant planet I wouldn’t have to show how the alien intelligence in question came to exist to be reasonably certain that an alien intelligence did build the piece of technology.

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All scientific cause have the potential for consideration of infinite regress; that fact does not negate the reality of the proximate cause, in this case, intelligence. Understand?

If biological organisms could not exist as a result of unguided forces (chance and necessity) then atheism is certainly wrong, and atheists know this.

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I find it ironic that you say this, as atheism, whatever its relationship to ID, is certainly metaphysical; that is it is concerned with the nature of existence. So even if one agreed ID was also metaphysical construct, that fact wouldn’t cause it to be different than atheism.

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As it turns out though, ID, like all scientific ideas, is concerned with causation – and of the three possible causes, ID suggests that intelligence is necessary for the origin and development of life – regardless of the implications of a such a fact.

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Nobody, but it was a direct response to what you were saying about Intelligent Design, so I’m a little surprised that you’re choosing to ignore it. Since you reply to all other posts at this forum that expect replies from you, both from me and from the other posters, it’s fairly clear that you’d be replying to mine also if you had anything to say in response.

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You’ve done this once before, in our debate about bird origins. It’s a very interesting tactic: to reply to each of the other person’s posts until they make an argument that you’re unable to refute, at which point you abandon the debate and continue holding the same position as though it hadn’t been refuted. If you were aware of anything wrong with my argument, I know you would have pointed it out, since that’s what you do in every other case. But now that it’s happened twice that you responded to this type of refutation by ignoring it and not changing your position, it seems safe to assume this is what you’ll do if the same situation ever arises again.

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Is that correct? If so, it means no amount of evidence of logic will be capable of changing your position, because whenever anyone refutes it you’ll just react in the same way that you’ve done to me. Or is there something special I need to do in order to get you to not ignore my points whenever you can’t find anything wrong with them?

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If you agree that they dishonestly tried to sidestep scientific due process and take their ideas straight to the curriculum, sure. Even if ID were sound and correct, with supporting evidence, it still shouldnt happen this way and people would be right to take them to court.

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We would probably only be able to determine this if the technology followed some sort of pattern or design similarities to human inventions... thats is, if the designers were similar to us in any sort of degree. Ironically, this is partly where I see the whole specified complexity argument breaking down. Of all designed objects of human invention, we see a reduction of complexity, not an increase.

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Using ID's own distinctions between God and 'intelligent designer' it really isnt. But we all know the framing of the designer that way was intellectually dishonest.

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Well, I'm not saying atheism is science or a scientific theory.

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Of course we are completely ignoring the fact that all criteria developed to detect intelligence will never be fulfilled. In order to infer IC/SC, you will need to have perfect or near perfect understanding of all the natural processes that can form life to determine if something is outside that range of possibilities. Even an evolutionist will tell you we arent even close to that.. thats exactly what evolution attempts to explain. In short, ID will never be supportable until we basically know everything there is to know.

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This thread kind of illustrates perfectly why scientific community at large feels negatively about ID. On one hand, they try and pitch the it to the scientific community as a "No theism required! The designer could be anything!" scientific theory. Then it gets pitched to the religious community, expertly touching the sensitive points of their misgivings towards science, as a way to battle the vast atheist conspiracy that they claim science is apart of. Cant have it both ways...

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ORIGINAL: Jhud
There is no such thing as ‘scientific due process’; indeed, you are confusing scientific and legal terms, which many evolutionists do, which is why they seek to have a scientific theory proved in court (much as the opponents of Galileo did I might add).

But this is simply more fluff to avoid saying, “Oh yeah, I was wrong”, which seems inevitably to make one more wrong.

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Really? So in your opinion, a calculator is less complex than an abacus? And a computer even less so than either of those? Odd.

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Why would ID need to make a distinction in this respect? And how is this responsive in the least to my comment?

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So if it’s not religious, and it’s not science, then what do you think it is?

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Actually, we don’t need that at all, because we would only need to falsify ID, not prove it absolutely.

For example, Pasteur demonstrated that organisms do not arise by way of spontaneous generation by demonstrating that known organisms did not spontaneously generate. Were there other organisms in existence that could exist by way of spontaneous generation? Possibly. Could there be other circumstances under which organisms could spontaneously generate? Conceivably.

But absent any proof to the contrary, there was no reason to believe this was the case; however, the notion could be readily falsified.

In all cases where the origin (not a copy) of a complex information system driven machinery is known, it is the product of the work of intelligence, employing various mechanisms for production; there is no evidence to the contrary, but this notion can be easily falsified. Until it is, there is veracity to the notion of ID.

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So, when Dawkins ‘pitches’ to the atheist community that evolution supports atheism, “expertly touching the sensitive points of their misgivings towards” religion, does his work negate the veracity of evolution, and should it cause us to be skeptical of evolutionists?

Or do you want it both ways?

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It’s not that “no amount of evidence of logic will be capable of changing your position”, it’s that I don’t sit around obsessing on whether I have responded to every jot and tittle someone who I don’t know and who seems more interested in posting off topic instead of addressing topics has to say.

It’s not like you are posting anything original that I haven’t responded to a zillion times before around here.

Indeed, as the topic here (and Unk can correct me if I’m wrong) is basically “Is the purpose of ID to provide empirical evidence that intelligence is required for life to exist, or is it primarily an "alternative" to evolution”, and as your response was essentially to try to shore up support for evolution rather than answer this rather straightforward question, there is little to respond to.

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Would it make you feel better if I used 'peer-review' instead of due process? I'm sure all kinds of tarot card readers, palm readers and psychics would love to have their ideas bypass peer review or "due process" to have their ideas touted as scientific in a science class before they had a chance to be reviewed by the scientific community. Every other scientific idea has to go through it before it becomes part of science curriculum, why should ID be an exception?

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They are certainly less complex than biological systems found in nature.

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They make the distinction to make their religious philosophy palatable to atheists.

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Its simply a lack of belief. Call it a philosophy if you want. It's immaterial to the discussion really..

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How are you defining information in this context? There is certainly a lot of of 'information' transmitted through just about every natural process, and it absolutely doesn't infer design by default. There are plenty of 'complex information systems' apparent in all things natural, and as far as we know, they arent designed. All objects or systems that for which we have the capability to infer design are all products of designers that we are already familiar with.

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If we saw a spider web without ever having observed a spider at all, would have no reason to assume design.

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ID is unfalsible, as far as I can tell. I hate to beat a dead horse, but it truly is the god of the gaps fallacy. All evidence that has been trotted out for ID that I have seen can simply be explained away by our lack of understanding for how these process can occur naturally.

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This may surprise you, but I am not all that familiar with what Dawkins says. I listened to a few excerpts from The God Delusion on audio book, but thats about it. None of the material actually pertained directly to evolution as evidence for atheism. Quite frankly, he annoys me. Discussions where I've heard him talk about evolution and atheism he has simply used evolutionary fact to dispute creationist/id claims that some particular aspect is proof or evidence of design. I haven't actually heard him using evolution as proof for atheism. Dawkins also doesn't speak for the entirety of scientists who believe evolution the be the best approximation for explaining the diversities and similarities between life. The handful of IDists that our out there, do speak for their movement, however, because their movement isnt more than a handful of people.

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I asked an honest question earlier... provide evidence for ID. Show me some sites/book etc that make serious arguments for it that haven't been thoroughly debunked. I will look at the stuff honestly and with an open mind. But so far, everything I have found on my own has been thoroughly debunked.

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I forgot to mention one other tactic you seem to like using, which you resorted to at the end of our feather debate: you accused me of bringing up a “red herring” when it was the same point I’d been making since in that thread since before you began posting in it. I see the same thing here: your point was that the goal of ID organizations such as the Discovery Institute and the methodology of ID are two different things, and I explained why they aren’t really. This pertains directly to the question of whether ID is science, and thus whether it can be considered an alternative to evolution, and you had no problem with making your own points about this for several posts before mine. But as soon as I posted a thorough explanation of why the methodology of ID is based on political ideals, it suddenly became off topic by your standards.

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It’s a very strange coincidence that the posts which you won’t answer for one reason or another are always those that would be most difficult to refute. After I made my post at the end of page one, I was actually predicting that you were going to come up with some sort of excuse for not answering it—although ignoring it entirely, and then returning to the thread after a few days without acknowledging it at all, was still a little beyond what I had been expecting.

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Not that it really matters, since what you’re doing is what I’ve been used to from “cdesign proponentsists” (Google it) for the past eight years. I know you won’t be able to show me an example of where you’ve allegedly addressed these points before, since threads that have been inactive for more than a month seem to be removed from this board. But the longer you keep making your claim “I can refute this but I just don’t feel like it”, the more difficult it will be for you to keep up the illusion that you’re able to. My end of this gets fairly easy now: whenever the next time is that you claim ID is science without attempting to address what I said in my post, all I have to do is refer back to what I’ve said already and/or restate it, and see what your next excuse is for not answering my point.