In the debate between intelligent design (ID) and evolution there is often an important element that is left out: The scientific method. And while there can be an endless debate on definitions of the word “science,” it’s important to remember how science is used to arrive at certain conclusions before we use it to conclude that some vague concept of intelligence created the universe.
It’s logical to conclude that for something to be “scientific,” someone used the scientific method to come to that conclusion. And what is the scientific method? If we remember from elementary school, roughly it is observation, hypothesis, prediction, experimentation, and conclusion. Now, when one says that ID is scientific, he or she is forgetting an important detail, and that’s the experimental step of the scientific method. If someone observes that the physical world is extraordinarily complex, makes the hypothesis that there must have been an intelligence that designed everything, predicts that this is the case, and concludes that an intelligence or god or whatever designed it all, an important step was missed, experimentation! So far, there have been no experiments set up that give conclusive evidence that an intelligent being or force designed things.
Of course, no good scientist would ever say that an intelligent designer is impossible, because science is a skeptical endeavor. Science is not about believing something to be true, it’s about coming to a temporary conclusion through the process of rigorous experimental evidence and peer review which points to that conclusion-until that conclusion or theory can be disproved. If an experiment could be conceived of (although I’m not sure how) that could test and prove the presence of a specific intelligence, then scientists would modify their body of knowledge and further assumptions to include that intelligence. But this hasn’t happened, and until it does, ID should not be considered science and should not be taught in science classrooms.
ID is a philosophy. It is a thought experiment that exists in the mind while theories of evolution use empirical evidence, the stuff people can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell to construct a model that fits with the evidence. Any scientist worth his salt doesn’t believe in evolution, but accepts it based on the empirical evidence that supports the model. It should be clear to anyone who studies the history of ethics that morals do not come from religion or a belief in God. And anyone (including atheists) can live a purposeful life without belief in ID.
It’s ironic that the author of the letter “ID Theory is Science” would resort to insulting Mr. Bates even after 90% of his own letter was cut and pasted from the article “Intelligent Design: The Scientific Alternative to Evolution,” an article published in The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (Autumn 2003).
Luke W. Johnson
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2008.
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Intelligent Design, as posited in The Source by its many proponents is definitely not science–it is a religious belief based on observations, suppositions and faith.
I agree, it should never be taught in a science classroom–it has its place in the study of mythology, comparative religion, or literature.
It will never be science.
Well put, Luke. I question the premise that the physical world is extraordinarily complex… that which we don’t understand always seems to be extraordinarily complex until we understand it… then it is all quite simple, sensible and logical. To the uneducated or primitive intellect, a 747 seems very complex… yet in reality… it is a vast shit load of very simple systems and parts…all working together in harmony….in 1920, the thought of building an Atomic Bomb boggled the mind. Now, a bright 14 year old could build one, given the resources to acquire and assemble the simple pieces… I suspect as we unravel Form and Void… it will all be quite simple… There is really no reason to bring Constantine’s Sun God into the mix… Or some ancient dream obsessed pedophile named Mohammed. Such over-reaching ignorance explains nothing.
And…to add to your point, the Dali Llama has an excellent book out about ethics…
If intellegent design exist, how the hell did it’s proponents squeak through?
“If evolution were a crime would there be enough evidence for a conviction?”
…James E Gambrell
“So far, there have been no experiments set up that give conclusive evidence that an intelligent being or force designed things.”
And by definition there never can be empirical proof, because the Intelligent Designer / God exists outside of the natural world. (It has to, because otherwise you run into the “infinite regress” problem.) All the “proofs” of ID that I’ve seen are really only inferences, i.e., “This universe / earth / animal / eyeball / DNA seems so complicated that there MUST have been a designer. Q.E.D.”
The Scientific Applied to Design:
Observations of Designers in Action
รข ” They take many parts and arrange them in highly specified and complex patterns which perform a specific function
รข ” They reuse parts and design concepts over and over again
รข ” All components have a purpose
รข ” Results are often beautiful or have aesthetic appeal
Hypothesis: Organisms are designed
Predictions: If organisms are designed we should expect to find:
1) High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures.
2) Forms in the fossil record that appear suddenly and without any precursors.
3) Genes and functional parts re-used in different unrelated organisms.
4) That the genetic code will NOT contain much discarded genetic baggage code or functionless รข junk DNAรข ย.
5) All organs have a purpose.
6) Beautiful organisms.
Examining the Evidence (Experiment & Conclusion):
(1) Biochemical complexity / Laws of the Universe: High information content machine-like irreducibly complex structures are commonly found. The bacterial flagellum is a prime example. Specified complexity found in the laws of the universe may be another.
(2) Fossil Record: Biological complexity (i.e. new species) tend to appear in the fossil record suddenly and without any similar precursors. The Cambrian explosion is a prime example.
(3) Distribution of Molecular and Morphological Characteristics Similar parts found in different organisms: Many genes and functional parts not distributed in a manner predicted by ancestry, and are often found in clearly unrelated organisms. The “root” of the tree of life is a prime example.
(4) DNA and Biochemical Functionality: Increased knowledge of genetics has created a strong trend towards functionality for “junk-DNA.” Examples include recently discovered functionality in some pseudogenes, microRNAs, introns, LINE and ALU elements.
(5) Biological Functionality: Increased knowledge of organisms shows a strong trend toward functionality of all organs in all organisms. A prime example is the fact that a once very long list of human รข vestigal organsรข ย has disappeared over time as researchers have found at least one purpose for each organ.
(6) Beauty in Organisms:
Many organisms appear beautiful by their symmetry, color and form.
Also, remember that both Intelligent Design and Common Descent are historical sciences and cannot be repeated in the lab. We must look at the evidence and decide which theory best fits it.
Author’s comment on Scientific method:
“If we remember from elementary school, roughly it is observation, hypothesis, prediction, experimentation”
I am not a defender of Intelligent Design, but let us be fair. The ID people have as much right to use the scientific method as the evolutionists do. They have the right to observe, predict,experiment and search for evidence. As for philosophy; the scientists are as guilty of espousing their personal philosophy as the IDists. I appreciate and respect our scientists and their accomplishments, however no scientist’s personal philosophy is any better than mine or yours. If the IDists would seek a better understanding of “Logic” and the evolutionists seek a better understanding of “Logos” they both may be enlightened.
…James E Gambrell
Two questions for Tony:
1. To say something is designed necessarily implies that it has a purpose. What is the purpose of the universe?
2. If all organisms were designed by an Intelligent Designer, why have so many gone extinct? What happened to the saber-toothed tiger and Neanderthal man? Were they mistaken designs? Or did the Intelligent Designer make them for practice?
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – “Flabbergasted” NASA scientists said on Thursday that Martian soil appeared to contain the requirements to support life, although more work would be needed to prove it.
Scientists working on the Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which has already found ice on the planet, said preliminary analysis by the lander’s instruments on a sample of soil scooped up by the spacecraft’s robotic arm had shown it to be much more alkaline than expected.
“We basically have found what appears to be the requirements, the nutrients, to support life whether past present or future,” Sam Kounaves, the lead investigator for the wet chemistry laboratory on Phoenix, told journalists.
“It is the type of soil you would probably have in your back yard, you know, alkaline. You might be able to grow asparagus in it really well. … It is very exciting for us.”
Kinda blows a hole in the creationist claim that the earth is “uniquely fine-tuned” to support life, doesn’t it? There probably are thousands of planets in the universe that could support life, and hundreds that do.
Tony: Beauty is in the eye, or perception, of the beholder…not inherent in the object or entity… and thusly entirely subjective, if at all. One mans beauty is another mans sweat hog. HBM makes a valid point (that really hurt to admit that) almost the entire fossil record are of ‘designs’ that didn’t work out. Only a damn fool fool thinks the entire prcess only took 6000 years. Perhaps your designer is not all that intelligent after all. Further, to postulate that humans are an intelligent design is laughable… almost nothing in the human body is properly designed, from cancers to an immune system that attacks itself to spines inadequate for upright stance. If we have an intelligent designer, than the ignorant son of a bitch needs to go back to school…A god who is clearly at the beginning of a long learning curve… is not particularly desirable. “Oh my! Look at that mess! Is that what I did? How could I have known they’d do THAT? I guess I better drown them all and start over…better luck next time! Yawn.” (scratches his psoriasis and looks for ticks in his beard)
Folks that have a certain personality defect, the innate inability to face a reality that clearly has no purpose, find it necessary, out of self need, not logic, to invent an all powerful Big Daddy in the sky, lest they fall to the ground weeping in abject despair over the pointlessness of it all. Some of us call these people cowards.
Those ignoramus that assume the entire universe was created for humans, and that we are at the center of that, need to take a long look at the vastness of the universe…we amount to less than nothing and hang out over in a minor and obscure corner. Enjoy the accident of your birth. Shut the hell up, and let the rest of us make the best of it.
Wake up. Eat your rice…wash your bowl.
“Enjoy the accident of your birth.” That’s a good way to put it. As a prominent atheist whose name I can’t recall at the moment said, “I have won the evolutionary lottery and I rejoice every day of my life.” What does it matter if that life isn’t eternal? Just as we didn’t miss being alive before we were born, we won’t miss it after we die.
When an animal reaches the stage of intellectual awareness that it is able to deduce the true nature of it’s own predicament, i.e., to contemplate the eventuality of it’s own death, anxiety sets in. Presumably, antelope don’t wander the desert worrying about when they are going to die; they are too Zen for that, they live in the present moment. The anxiety that humans feel over their own impending ‘doom’ seeks relief. That relief is provided by the invention of a fantastic escape mechanism, The Ultimate Anxiety Alleviation. We don’t really die, after all, That Great Bearded Daddy In The Sky allows us to live FOREVER! All we have to do is live in an ethical manner that comes natural to us! Thus, enter the simplistic, but utterly fantastic pap, the huge distended overflowing great flopping tit of religion, and it’s prerequisite requirement of a belief in ID, inherent in a message derived from a time of fantastic ignorance by fools who thought they were explaining the unexplainable.
Take the Great Flood as a ‘for instance’…Genesis 6:7… And The Lord said, I will destroy man whom I created from the face of the earth; both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air, for it repenteth me (which directly contradicts Numbers 23:19, I Sam. 15:2 = God NEVER repents!) that I have made them.
Reality check conclusion: So, in a petty, reactive pissy fit, He decided to seek revenge for His hurt feelings and murder everyone and everything that upset Him, by drowning them. Indicative of an emotional/reactionary sadistic and infantile personality, sadly and unwisely blaming others for His own internal out-of-balance emotions. The fowls of the air? What did they do? This is gross over attachment to His inexperienced expectations. He obviously didn’t know how it was all going to turn out or He would have built more suitably compliant planetary animus detritus in the first place. How can you blame the object YOU CREATED, for the way they turned out? He was the one who created the whole unruly faulty mess in the first place, so isn’t the responsibility completely His? Piss poor design is the responsibility of the designer!!!
The Flood: Noah and three sons. Plus wives. Eight in all. One week to fill a stationary ark 500 ft. long 83 ft. wide and 50 ft., deck to keel, with seven of every critter that walketh, slithereth, boundeth, flapeth, soareth, leapeth and creepeth on earth.
Seven days…travel to the length and breadth of Australia, New Zealand, and return…travel to, and scour, the undiscovered continent of the two Americas…criss cross Russia, and the Arctic and Antarctic, gathering, herding, beasties along at a walk…Haul butt out into the South Pacific Islands…grab up some Komodo Dragons… Traipse over to Borneo, New Guinea… Mosey from one end of Africa to the other…tens of thousands of miles in all different directions…In a week…Eight people total.
They obviously didn’t come to the Americas, Africa, Australia or travel about, to and from all these different countries, continents and places in the Ark, which was setting on high ground waiting for the Big Wet. This gathering up venture would have required a bunch of other huge vessels built on the sea shore to sail to all the undiscovered continents and return. One week seems a tad on the short side to accomplish all this, to circumnavigate the globe with multiple huge row boats or sailboats, not mentioned anywhere, to get it all done on time….with eight people…think about gathering 490,000 spiders alone…Would 23 feet of rain water (15 cubits) spread out over 40 days cover the tip of Mt. Jefferson? Remember to get water over the top of mountains requires all the oceans to be about 30,000 ft. higher…Where did all this NEW water drain off too?
But…we only had a few ft. of water falling over almost a month and a half…23 ft. not 30,000 feet…
Could eight people shovel shit fast enough, working 24 hours a day, that every creature on earth, 2 or 7 of each, wouldn’t have quickly filled the puny Ark, less than half the size of the Titanic or Queen Mary to overflowing? How and where did they store and keep wholesome the diverse food and water this venture would require for a full year afloat? The neccessary water tank would have to be substantially larger than the boat and the water around them would have been mixed with salt water and not be otherwise potable with hundreds of millions of dead bodies of every sort contaminating it…so they couldn’t drink it.
Remember the knot heads that believe the utter bull shit of The Great Flood are the very same knot heads telling you to believe in ID….They use the same ‘infallible’ source…
BCW
Amen, brother–Amen!!