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The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design
Mime Narrator writes "An article over at Kuro5hin discusses the controvery over the Intelligent Design movement. The Dover, Pennsylvania school board recently adopted a policy requiring that high school science teachers teaching evolution tell their students that evolutionary theory, a theory that has been shown to explain the origins of life time and time again, is flawed, and that intelligent design is a valid alternative. The ACLU, along with the AUSCS (Americans United for the Separation of Church and State), and 11 parents, are suing the school board, accusing the board of violating the separation of church and state. "
By this, I mean that the process of evolution is a thinking intelligent process. Or to state it another way: Evolution is intelligent.
This means that all signs of evolution also will be signs of intelligent design, simply because evolution is a form of intelligence.
So, instead of the intelligence reciding in the metaphysical head of a super
natural being called God, it resides in DNA and their interactions with the
world through life and death.
All this according to the Kolmogorov Complexity definition of intelligence.
Intelligence is the process of rationally building and testing theories about
the world, and then using those theories for useful stuff. DNA is mutated,
recombined, merged through sex, and otherwise changed. These changes are
hypotheses about the world, in the form of new life forms trying to survive
there. Thus life forms which do not reproduce are falsified hypotheses. The
useful stuff is survival.
As for those people preaching intelligent design:
They are all religious, and do not know what theories or evolution are. They
just pretend and believe they know. Remembering this, they are easily exposed,
as long as you yourself really know what theories and evoution are.
Kim0
I spend my high school time (12-18) at a catholic school in Europe.
In biology we spent a lot of time learning about evolution. When those classes where over, the teacher said he was obligated (well, don't know by who actually. School or govn.) to mention intelligent design. It took him no more than two minutes, and the entire class had a good laugh.
At the time I was surprised that he had to mention it, though.
"I have absolutely no idea why the universe is complicated, therefore God did it."
Exactly. It's an argument through ignorance. It's just like many other things in the past which weren't explained by science, and have since been been explained by science. Well, not really, becasue we already do understand how complexity can arise from evolution, so it's even worse than that.
As an atheist, I am alarmed when people try to mark religious belief as science.
As a Christian, I am too.
-Rob
"looks" is considered a gift which if not used is considered sinful?
Is this correct in the gist of it?
Seems almost opposite to various other faiths, where women cover themselves almost completely.
where exactly did they come from if the planet is in fact only 6000-odd years old?
If you look at the original Hebrew, the word translated "day" in Genesis has the same meaning as if I said "In my fathers day, automobile fuel was 35 cents a gallon". It refers to a time period. The references to "morning" and "evening" are the same. If this was not the case, there would be no way to count the days until the 3rd "day", since thats when the sun and moon became visable on the surface of the earth.
The earth is several billion years old. The universe is much older. Those who think that the bible claims the earth was created in 6 literal days simply have not done enough research on the matter.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
Nope, no Christian-bashing is implied. If you move outside the USA, you'll find that the majority of Christians are quite happy to accept that modern science is not antithetical to religion. There are many Christian biologists -- and working in biology without accepting that evolution is an inescapable *fact* is like working as an architect without believing in gravity.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Nah. ID parallels creationism's key flaws - it moves the action from that which can be examined to that which can not. Philosophically, and scientifically, we don't know what intelligence is. The definition of it shifts from person to person. There is no way we can test for it, no way we can measure it, no way we can explain it. In fact, there is no way we can even prove that intelligence by any definition actually exists. (especially not in other people) What ID does is to assume that certain aspects of life are tied up in the big black box of 'intelligent designer', and so can never be questioned. That's when the whole nontheory loses all scientific credibility.
Free will with an omnicient and omnipotent creator can't work. He made Adam and Eve and if he is omnicient then he knew everything that would happen, correct? He knew when he made Eve that she WOULD eat the forbidden apple, and he WOULD kick them out of Eden. It would be like me making a bomb, putting it somewhere, setting it to go off knowing that it WILL go off, but when it does go off saying 'Oh, the bomb had free will. It is to blame, not me'.
Or maybe God is not omnicient?
A cogent argument sir (or madam). Now where are those mod points i threw away yesterday.
And if you're not a religious nutcase but you are in the U.S., don't fucking apologise. DO SOMETHING. You are to blame for letting these rabid fundamentalists take over. YOU have to stop them.
I agree absolutely with this. Hey intelligent Americans - TAKE BACK YOUR FUCKING COUNTRY! We are sick of this shit and many of us are tiring of NOT lumping you all in the same bunch. You are burning serious karma.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
If YES, then there is an endless recursion of intelligent designers.
If you are LDS, then the answer is yes, and yes there is an endless recursion, or at least that is the implication. Of course if you are LDS, then evolution probably doesn't bother you much.
Lasers Controlled Games!
The "Young Earth" (more accurately, "young universe") viewpoint supposes that the universe was created about 6000 years ago. Okay, okay, quit laughing. That viewpoint HAS managed to turn up some interesting cases of rapid rock formation and "instant fossilization" which should really be examined with a more open mind. ANYway, they say that nothing is more than 6000 years old.
Then these same people go on and on about how huge the universe is, with all those stars so far away... star clusters, nebulae, galaxies, galactic clusters, etc. The problem is, most astronomically observed objects are more than 6000 light-years away. So if the universe is only 6000 years old, how did the light from those objects get here?
I've seen a couple ways to talk around this problem. The least idiotic one is, "God created everything in its finished form". They say that animals and people were created as adult creatures, and so the universe was created all-grown-up. Quit giggling and wait for the real obvious problem that they skip.
Okay, so even if you buy into all that about creation, you still have a really, really big problem with measuring distances to the stars. The whole idea is based on the assumption that the light which we see actually came all the way from the star in a more-or-less straight line at the speed of light. We measure angles and we measure parallax to get even more accuracy but it's still based on the assumption that the light actually came from the distant object in the normal way. The problem is, according to the creation doctrine, no light could have been going anywhere for more than 6000 years because that would have been before the pronouncement of "Let ther be light."
What that means is that according to creationist doctrine anything which appears to be more than 6000 light-years away is actually "faked" by God to look that way.
So make a dot on a chalkboard. That's us. Now draw a circle around it. That's the 6k light-year limit of what we can really see and measure by what we know about light. Everything outside of that may or may not really exist because it had to be "faked" by God at creation for us to see it at all. Now for the real fun... Stellar events. Every supernova that we see, since it's more than 6k light-years away, never really happened! It's just a light show that God puts on just to make the universe look old. All those most-distant quasars and pulsars, high-energy signals from the beginning of the universe... none of it is real. It's a gazillion-year-long history falsified, for what purpose?
The heavens declare that the god of these "Creationists" is a liar.
To comment on your Italian example, they go further than that. In rural Italy, it's not uncommon to have the local Communist/Socialist/Unionist posters on the church wall. They do go to church, it's true, but on the understanding that the men can smoke. The religious calendar is adhered to, not least because there are fireworks.
In other words, the Italians are sensible people who prefer to enjoy their life rather than muck about with all that argument you Americans seem to prefer.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
The general belief is that Adam and Eve chose to disobey God and eat of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. God smote them, and banished them from Eden and made Eve feel pain during childbirth as punishment, etc.
I believe that this common belief is all wrong.
In this parable, God gave Adam and Eve a choice. They could remain in Eden for all of Eternity, so long as they denied themselves knowledge. Eve chose Knowledge, and shared it with Adam. As _REWARD_, God set them free from Eden, and allowed them the to explore the world around them.
If God really wanted to punish Adam and Eve, he would have struck them dead and started over. He didn't, and instead all of humanity has the opportunity to explore the Universe He created.
Doesn't sound like punishment to me...
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
As a fundimentalist I think perhaps my views could be valuable. First, intellegent design does not contradict evolution. Intellegent design does not support evolution. It simply states that there probably was some intellegence involved in this phenominon we call "life." It does not go so far as to state where the intellegence resides, whether it is in God or mice.
Secondly, regarding God needing a creator. Most fundimentalists consider God to be even outside time. Unchanging, simply existing. In fact the name given by God, which Israel was to refer to him by means something similar to "He who exists." This name is often times refered to as the tetragrammon, which is often times translated as Yahweh or Yehovah(YHWH), but no one really knows how it should be translated. Anyway, the point is that a God which simply exists, which is timeless and unchanging could not be created. Since the term "created" implies both change and some dependence on time. God therefore could not "spring" into existance, because "springing" implies some sort of change and dependence on time. He simply exists, timeless and unchanging.
I would also like to address the issue of fossils. It's wrong to suppose that God created fossils to test men's faith. God is not cruel or deceptive. Many fundimentalists do not understand the nature of God as described in the scriptures, but rather the nature of God as described by poorly trained teachers. God is described as providing plenty of evidence for his existance, such that no man is without excuse to be without faith(Romans 1). Therefore, God's nature is quite the opposite. He is revealing the truth of himself, which men choose to ignore. We are the ones who are deceptive. God tests men's hearts by providing every reason to believe.
I hope this clears things up a bit. My purpose was not to argue or refute anyone, but simply to provide an accurate understanding of what Christian Fundimentalists believe.
Should school boards be required to look at potential liability issues when considering whether to incorporate intelligent design into science curricula?
My thinking is that if a school district begins to teach intelligent design as an alternative to the theory of evolution, it could be held culpable for the failure of its graduated students to achieve in the realms higher education and/or technological training. There might be massive class action suits by former students who can demonstrate statistically that they were unable to get the high paying jobs that students in similar schools with sound science curricula were able to get.
I envision an argument something like this: the conflation of the scholastic reasoning of intelligent design with the empiricism of the scientific method had damaged the student's minds (or "reasoning", or "cognitive ability") to the degree that they were unable to compete successfully with students from other school districts in acquiring technological skills. Directly measured damages could be the costs of remedial schooling and the loss of income potential for those years that they played catch-up.
I think there would also be very fertile ground for developing punitive damages, since the School Board could probably be shown to be egregiously negligent in causing this situation (purposefully blind to the risks they were putting the students in, despite being charged with minimizing those risks). And as I write this, I begin to wonder whether individual School Board members might be charged with criminal negligence for the recklessness they exhibited toward their obligations of office.
It seems to me that if this line of reasoning is widely distributed now, it would increase the likelihood of success of the class action suits that might be brought in five or ten years. And might also cause School Boards to pause and consider this concern now, and therefore decrease the number of such potential suits later on.
I would dearly love to hear from PJ or other paralegals or lawyers about this.
I seem to recall Stephen Hawking came to the conclusion that the universe had no singularity at zero time because of an imaginary time (?) component that became dominant at the beginning. I don't have a problem picturing the universe as having no beginning, and it short-circuits this sort of mystery.
"It doesn't belong in a science class."
Christian here and I couldn't agree more.
It has a place in academia, however, and that place is PHILOSOPHY class where things like this are discussed and deconstructed as rational ideas that need evaluation in a rational manner, as they are not testable in a laboratory.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
I don't understand why a large (or at least a loud) group of programmers like the ones here don't give Intelligent Design more credit. In particular, there have been a few arguments along the lines of "how would the designer evolve?"
Look at the designer as a programmer. Heck, I'll use myself as an example. Lets say that I sit down at my really fast computer and create a little artificial world, a la The Sims. The world is populated by intelligent agents (humans) as well as less intelligent agents (animals). Nothing too crazy yet, right?
The designer has complete control over the virtual world. The agents don't. They can only percieve other constructs within this world, and obviously have no idea that there's a fat guy with crumbs in his beard tapping away at a computer making all of this possible.
I tell the constructs that I created them, maybe mention the few parts of myself that are comparable to the game world just so they can put it in their own perspective, and they're cool with that for a while. Eventually they bitch, but I smite them a few dozen times and watch the world progress.
If these guys came up with their own little reasoning system that violently argued that I couldn't exist, I'd have a good laugh at them in their folly. They'd argue along the lines of "there are BILLIONS of 1's and 0's around me! Of course, over time, a few of them would randomly become the code that is me!" These little AIs would have no concept of what happened before the "Big Bang" (I turned powered on the computer), or how I could live outside of their rules of reality(which I laid down).
If I really wanted to teach them something, I might log in as Jesus_Of_Nazareth01 and hack that character a bit so it's not as constrained by the rules the other AIs have to follow. That'd be fun. Heck, it goes a ways towards explaining the God/Son paradigm.
If these people started noticing that monkeys shared similar structures to human agents, I'd roll my eyes and wonder why these AIs had against code re-use.