<p>I am getting very different answers from those that support ID…and a science teacher should NOT say, well, GOD. As ID implies, and please, please do not say it does not. It does. Otherwise, what is ID? It implies something planned, not natural, beyond man…</p>
<p>Again, CGM, lots of capital letters and gainsaying and repetition of the same question do not add anything. You claim that your respondents say something that they claim they don’t. And then you admonish them not to disagree with your mischaracterization of their positions. It’s impossible to get anywhere with you. Did you ever see Monty Python’s argument clinic? Sometimes I think you’re just pulling our collective leg.</p>
<p>What is there to teach about intelligent design anyway? From what I have read and heard on the news, it is just a body of <em>evidence</em> that attempts to discredit the idea of evolution and descent through modification, suggesting that the diversity of life cannot be fully explicated through natural selection. I cannot imagine a science teacher saying to his or her students that there was/is an intelligent designer that created the earth, as if it were a fact. The public school science classroom is not the place for anything unscientific. ID is just another form of creationism repackaged as pseudoscience because they both emphasize the idea that there was a creator. </p>
<p>Another thing irks me is that people are mislabeling ID as a theory, which it is not. According to the dictionary.com a theory is “a set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.” So far I have not seen any repeatable experiments to suggest that there even is an intelligent designer. I wouldnt even call it a hypothesis.</p>
<p>BTW, it is not like students do not talk about the possibility of an intelligent designer in the science class. In my biology courses in high school and college, we discussed about what some thought to be the shortcomings of evolution. The professor even stated that religion and science could thrive harmoniously. There can be a creator and evolution; I dont even think that any public school systems are refuting the idea that there wasnt a creator.</p>
<p>
I hate to be the one to tell you this, Poke, but you have been exposed to ID. That’s all it is. As the president said, you’ve been exposed to alternative points of view (gasp).</p>
<p>I have a feeling that the supporters of ID wnat more than to simply expose students to ID for a minute or two of a lecture.</p>
<p>
Now we get to the heart of things. Your “feeling.” I’ve used the word bigotry before in similar contexts, and I’ll do so again. I don’t understand the suspicion and angst. Except that it’s been incited time and again by our major newspapers and those derivative news outlets that swallow their biased garbage and regurgitate it to the masses.</p>
<p>Pokemaster - I think you’ve hit on the nose. I’ve never heard the “falsifiable hypothesis for ID”. It isn’t a theory at all - it might actually be true, but it isn’t a theory in the scientific sense of the term. If you harken back to the history of Darwinian evolutionary studies for the past 140 years, scientific attempts to discredit it have, for the most part, led to expansions and revisions of the theory to account for new and expanded data. That’s the way science works, and the case for Darwinian evolution is far stronger today than it was 140 years ago as a result. </p>
<p>My major complaint is how poorly high schools teach evolution now, with or without ID, with teachers often stuck in a 50-year time warp.</p>
<p>It’s already discussed in the public schools, in the history textbooks concerning the origins of life. What I wonder is how come these ID supporters mask creationism as a science when it is not. And I don’t care how many stats you give about the probability that life would just emerge out of chaos being you cannot simply infer that there is a creator.</p>
<p>And driver, why does not the public schools teach tarot-card reading, fortune telling, phrenology, and other pseudosciences?</p>
<p>mini,</p>
<p>What is the “falsifiable hypothesis” in regard to signals received from space in SETI. If scientists were to (using carefully set up and tested equipment) receive a relatively short duration radio signal from space that very clearly (after some type of decoding) contained information about the number of atoms, electrons, protons, etc. of all of the known elements in the universe, but then the scientists could not locate the signal again, would they conclude that this was a purely random event? Not if they were any scientists I have ever met. Yet, according to your criterion, since this radio transmission could not be repeated, tested, or otherwise replicated, their interpretations could not be FALSIFIED, so it would not be science. </p>
<p>There is nothing unscientific about looking for intelligence in patterns, whether they are from radio signals or molecules, organisms, etc. Your requirement of a “falsifiable hypothesis” is not the perfect definition of science that obviously must be used by all intelligent scientists in all situations. One must use common sense along with any definition. Your definition may be OK for some applications, but is definitely too narrow for others.</p>
<p>“What is the “falsifiable hypothesis” in regard to signals received from space in SETI. If scientists were to (using carefully set up and tested equipment) receive a relatively short duration radio signal from space that very clearly (after some type of decoding) contained information about the number of atoms, electrons, protons, etc. of all of the known elements in the universe, but then the scientists could not locate the signal again, would they conclude that this was a purely random event? Not if they were any scientists I have ever met. Yet, according to your criterion, since this radio transmission could not be repeated, tested, or otherwise replicated, their interpretations could not be FALSIFIED, so it would not be science.”</p>
<p>Why, of course, it could be falsified (falsified and replicated are not the same thing), not only by other transmissions, but by descriptions or hypothesis concerning the available data that fit the data better. That’s the thing about science - NOTHING is certain, NOTHING is stable, and all is subject to further inquiry. (Quite the opposite of my own belief in God, by the way - though that is irrelevant.) That is what is so aesthestic and scientifically beautiful about the evolution of Darwining thinking. </p>
<p>“Intelligent” and “design” don’t have to go hand in hand either. (That’s the problem with appealing to Aristotle and the primum mobile). I can “intelligently” pick up a china cup and, either in a fit of anger or for my own amusement or just because it is there, shatter it against the wall, with no design regarding what the shards will look like, nor where they will lend, nor able to reproduce that same pattern every again. I can take a box of colored marbles off the shelf, shake them, and throw them all over the floor, with no indication whatsoever from the final pattern that there was a primum mobile, without any design intention that placed them there. I can even create things anew that way. I can write a computer program to generate integers in an increasingly random sequence, with no knowledge whatsoever of any potential future pattern, and without anyone perceiving the lack of pattern able to trace it back to the “intelligence” which set it in motion. There can be evidence of an intelligence without a creator, or evidence of a creator without intelligence, either of which can be perceived in the final design.</p>
<p>Mini,</p>
<p>I recognize that no scientific model fits data exactly. I also agree that some models fit data better than others, and may be considered “better” than previous models (unless they add substantially greater complexity without significant increase in goodness of fit). </p>
<p>I still contend that many excellent scientists could definitely conclude from a single, non-recurring, transient recorded radio signal (depending on the content of the signal) that the signal itself MOST LIKELY did not originate from any random process and hence was LIKELY the result of some form of intelligence. Until (if ever) the scientists discovered some other rational explanation for the observed phenomena, then the best explanation would be some unknown intelligence of the source, propagated through space.</p>
<p>There is nothing unscientific about applying these same principles to the physical world, considering the universe to have progressed and propagated through time over possibly billions of years, limited by the known physical laws of the universe. Just as in the SETI example, there may be some measured signals that would be suspect, but there could could be other signals that are so clearly beyond any reasonable probabiliity of being random that a great number of excellent, rigorous scientists would conclude that they VERY LIKELY originated from some intelligent source.</p>
<p>What is so unscientifric about applying this same approach to the structure, components, life forms, etc. of the universe?</p>
<p>mini,
What is the “falsifiable hypothesis” for Evolution? I can’t recall ever seeing one stated, but of course, I may have missed it in my reading.</p>
<p>Back in Darwin’s day there were “falsifiable hypothesis for the entire theory” - alternative explanations of how various lizards and turtles got to the islands etc., etc., explanations for the various digging or burrowing habits of birds, etc. Data gathered from direct observation left them on the scientific dung heap - which isn’t to say they weren’t useful; they were necessary to push the development of the scientific hypothesis further. But the theory has gotten so far past there that questions have more to do with “punctuated equilibrium” vs. steadier incremental rates of change, impacts of variations given various changes in environmental and meteorological conditions, etc., etc. Parts of neo-Darwinian evolution are being falsified constantly, especially in the world of gene sequencing and theories regarding protein production.</p>
<p>“a great number of excellent, rigorous scientists would conclude that they VERY LIKELY originated from some intelligent source.”</p>
<p>As noted, there could be an intelligent source without a design, an intelligent source where the design is intended to be random and/or chaotic, or a pattern which evolves ecologically - in another words, a design – without an intelligent source outside of itself (the “Gaia hypothesis”).</p>
<p>(a nice little paper on PE -</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html[/url]”>http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/punc-eq.html</a>)</p>
<p><a href=“http://skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html[/url]”>http://skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html</a></p>
<p>I guess I will never get an answer…who or what is the Intelligent Designer…</p>
<p>driver, no capitals, just a straight forward question…</p>
<p>I think the more important question is who gets to decide to what to teach in public schools. Also, if ID were actually incorporated into the curriculum, would it be taught in a science class, and would it be obligatory that all students take it?</p>
<p>The fundamental difficulty with ID, other than the fact that most of it is made up of refutable attacks upon another theory, is that it is based on arguments from analogy. The idea being that if there is design to be perceived, it follows that this design must have been created by some intelligent designer. A Rube Goldberg machine implies a Rube Goldberg, etc.
The problem with arguing from analogy, for complex systems, is that it is notoriously unreliable. A compelling case has to be made for shared properties, and an equally compelling case made that divergent properties are insignificant. Otherwise you end up with something like: “Rube Goldberg created the Rube Goldberg machine; the Rube Goldberg machine is very complex; the universe is very complex, and like a machine; therefore, Rube Goldberg created the universe.”</p>
<p>But, again, it doesn’t hold. I (an intelligent being, I hope ;)) can design a random or chaotic number sequence that could indicate nothing about the designer nor demonstrate anything in the way of design. Using this analogy, I could argue that since biological organisms, unlike man-made machines, have reproduced themselves over millions of generations with random variation and natural selection, the randomness is proof of an intelligent designer. It just isn’t very satisfying (even if it happens to be true), and can’t be falsified.</p>
<p>I’m sorry, mini, what is or was the falsifiable hypothesis then? If there must be one to be scientific, then I would like to know what it was/is for Evolution? What evidence would have to surface to show it false?</p>
<p>Mini: I (an intelligent being, I hope ) can design a random or chaotic number sequence that could indicate nothing about the designer or demonstrate anything in the way of design. Using this analogy I could argue [. . .] </p>
<p>Is this the exception that proves the rule when it comes to arguing from analogy? </p>
<p>Mini: The problem with arguing from analogy [. . .], is that it is notoriously unreliable.</p>