Is Intelligent Design Scientific Theory? (1 Viewer)
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I wouldn't have asked elseKraj said:
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Have you ever thought that if mankind had more faith in mankind he might actually try and make the world a better placeKenHigg said:Here the crux of the faith thing from my persective (In case anyone cares):
When considering some things, like how things are in the really big and really small, at some point theories and faith are all we have. When the theories become weak enough, faith is all we have. You either have a weak theory or a strong faith...
Oh, yes you would. You know darn well that you regulary post rhetorical questions as a way of commenting rather than making an actual statment.Rich said:
Nevertheless, here is your answer:
The question is invalid. As I said before, if God exists then - by definition - he would not be bound by the laws of the universe. When you take away the context of the universe (therefore taking away things like time and space), words like "where" and "from" lose their meaning.
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That would depend on how you define the laws of the Universe in the first place, surely ?Kraj said:
reclusivemonkey
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Friday said:
LOL. Missed this earlier on today in the flurry of pleasant debate
My economics teacher used to use a similar example; the rise of both yoghurt comsumption and sexually transmitted diseases... for a while we just thought he had a yoghurt fetish!
reclusivemonkey
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Kraj said:
No it does make sense Kraj, but then if you don't believe in God, then there is no interaction/influence and thus nothing to think of for me personally. I take your point though that as someone with faith, then of course you are coming from a totally different stance. I don't mean to belittle anyone's faith; its just that as a "non-believer", my brain just has nothing to grip on to! The Christian "God" to me always comes across in my mind as a human being. Obviously that's not the case, he's not, but I get this idea he "thinks" much as we do and that's what I just can't get down with. The idea that a deity of such awesome power/divinity/wisdom (all terms which don't really get it across but I can't think of any better) is in any way remotely thinking like we are is something I just can't comprehend. Now does that make sense???
That exact phrasing? Yes. The concept? No, I've had that idea for years.KenHigg said:
Actually it depends more on how you define God. The laws of the universe are static (assuming we don't discover a phenomenon that violates them at some point), so what humans do with them is pretty irrelevant. Our concept of God, on the other hand, is completely subjective.Rich said:
To give you an example that will hopefully explain my idea better, take the universal law of conservation of energy. The law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed and the total energy in the universe is always exactly the same. Now, a widely agreed-upon characteristic we define for God is that he created the universe (I am not arguing the existence of God here, I'm just presenting a hypothetical). If God created the universe then, by definition, he must have not been bound by the law of conservation of energy since he brought forth energy and matter from nothing. Therefore, we cannot use the law of conservation of energy to describe God (ie. prove or disprove the existence of) because it simply does not apply. The same is true for any scientific principle.
Absolutely, and I agree completely. One of my biggest probelms with the Western model of God is that he behaives like a human (an immature, irrational, megalomaniac to boot).reclusivemonkey said:
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reclusivemonkey
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KenHigg said:Here the crux of the faith thing from my persective (In case anyone cares
When considering some things, like how things are in the really big and really small, at some point theories and faith are all we have. When the theories become weak enough, faith is all we have. You either have a weak theory or a strong faith...
Well put Ken. When you get down to the Scientific theories on the begining of the Universe, and partical theories about things we cannot see and never will and can only guess to be there to fit in with other theories, you are simply dealing with another kind of faith...
reclusivemonkey
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Kraj said:
He really needs some better PR people I think ;-)
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Intelligent Design is an attempt at pseudo-intellectualism by those who cannot intellectually accept non-existence. The problem, of course, is they use non-existence as part of their own arguments. "This missing link doesn't exist" they say - as if we have exhaustively explored places where the critter might exist. "This is too complex" they say - because they are afraid of the possibility that they might actually understand what they believe to be God's creation. And they KNOW they cannot understand God's creation. It absolutely scares the living sh** out of them that if we learn enough, God becomes irrelevant - and so do their ideas.
My own favorite attack, though, isn't defending science. It is attacking I.D. Basically, Jesus told us "You come to the Father only through faith." In the desert, he said, "You must not tempt or test God." Before Rome, he said, "My kingdom is not of this world." Now, put those things together. If I.D. ever DID find "god" - it would not have found the God they worship. Because to do so would mean Jesus LIED. Let's see, if you are Christian, whom do you know that might wish you to believe in a false god? I.D. is the spawn of SATAN. REPENT, ye sinners who believe in I.D.!!!!
This chain of logic is abbreviated, but you get the idea. Usually it is enough to make a hard-core ID'er's eyes glaze over.
My own favorite attack, though, isn't defending science. It is attacking I.D. Basically, Jesus told us "You come to the Father only through faith." In the desert, he said, "You must not tempt or test God." Before Rome, he said, "My kingdom is not of this world." Now, put those things together. If I.D. ever DID find "god" - it would not have found the God they worship. Because to do so would mean Jesus LIED. Let's see, if you are Christian, whom do you know that might wish you to believe in a false god? I.D. is the spawn of SATAN. REPENT, ye sinners who believe in I.D.!!!!
This chain of logic is abbreviated, but you get the idea. Usually it is enough to make a hard-core ID'er's eyes glaze over.
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From reclusivemonkey
Holy guacamole! He should know better than use a medium that supports bacterial growth as a lubricant! If you thought the smell was ... interesting ... before, give it a couple of days.
Another factor that has been brought out is important. People talk about ID is supported because there are gaps in the evolutionary chain of evidence. But they neglect to recognize their own context.
God, by the IDer's definition, is perfect and infallible. God gave us this earth as our domain and dominion. Which means that if he DID create the earth from the void, he did so in a way that short-circuited time, so that we have radioactive decay profiles that are far older than the beginning of the fundamentalist Bible. In other words, God made the earth with its own history. It is the ULTIMATE in arrogance of the IDer to believe that they could find a flaw in the chain of evidence that their perfect creator made. More likely, if there is a flaw, it is because Man is flawed and imperfect (again, perfectly consistent with what their Bible tells us).
So what does it all prove? Why, just that the religious nuts who go overboard on ID are arrogant, non-thinking bastards who don't want to follow their own rules!
Holy guacamole! He should know better than use a medium that supports bacterial growth as a lubricant! If you thought the smell was ... interesting ... before, give it a couple of days.
Another factor that has been brought out is important. People talk about ID is supported because there are gaps in the evolutionary chain of evidence. But they neglect to recognize their own context.
God, by the IDer's definition, is perfect and infallible. God gave us this earth as our domain and dominion. Which means that if he DID create the earth from the void, he did so in a way that short-circuited time, so that we have radioactive decay profiles that are far older than the beginning of the fundamentalist Bible. In other words, God made the earth with its own history. It is the ULTIMATE in arrogance of the IDer to believe that they could find a flaw in the chain of evidence that their perfect creator made. More likely, if there is a flaw, it is because Man is flawed and imperfect (again, perfectly consistent with what their Bible tells us).
So what does it all prove? Why, just that the religious nuts who go overboard on ID are arrogant, non-thinking bastards who don't want to follow their own rules!
CraigDolphin
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Erk, well. I'm not sure you know too many ID'ers Doc_MAn. I certainly don't agree with many of the attitudes and positions that you represent as being typical of an ID'er.
Although, I guess to be more precise I fall into the 'fine-tuned universe' school of thought.
God may be perfect and infallible, but our understanding of God is far from perfect in my opinion. If there's conflict between our understanding of the bible and what we can scientifically measure then my suspicion is it's our interpretation of the bible that is flawed, or that the people who wrote down the words did not understand or could not properly articulate what God revealed to them.
As an example, the bible says God created the Universe in 6 days. My own belief is that the '6 days' of creation exist in a temporal space that is outside of our own time-space continuum. That is, God, being in (presumably) heaven took 6 days in heaven-time (lame term but trying to be clear) to layout his plan for/create the universe. The outworking of that plan created a new time-space continuum in which we live and the laws of physics etc are fixed and immutable for anyone inside of it. The outworking of God's process of creation in this universe need not have happened in the same order, or perceived duration, as the design process in God's timeline. Hence, the age of the universe and biological evolution of species is not particularly bothersome to me.
The closest analogy I can make is this. A movie has an internal timeline (within the plot of the movie) but the creation process of the movie exists in the timeline of the real world. A movie writer may write the screenplay in a couple of days and the movie might take months to film in the real world. However, the plot of a movie might only last 24 hours or it might cover hundreds of years. The ordering of scenes in the movie may be completely different than the order in which those scenes were conceived and filmed.
From a character in the movie's point of view, the movie-makers would have God-like powers since the director can quite easily rewind, change a scene, add a flying toroise, whatever.
The point is that to a believer in God, the notion is that God could not only create the universe, but he could create it so precisely that the eventual evolution of humanity was guaranteed if that is what God was aiming to do. (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle need not apply to God since he exists outside our plane of existence.)
I also do not hold with the notion that, since God put us here and gave us 'dominion' over the earth, we have the right to ra** and exploit the planet or the animals that live here. What I read in genesis is that the first task God set us was to be stewards of the planet. I'm a biologist. In my experience, material greed and the love of money play a far larger role in the extirpation of species than any religious view.
In any case, to answer the original question. No. ID is not /scientific/. I subscribe to Karl Popper's definition of things scientific as being an idea that can be tested, and that the results of these tests are reproducable. Since the required assumption of ID, that there is a God, cannot be tested the whole theory is not scientific.
Which is not to say it isn't true: just that it's not science. It's entriely a matter of faith IMO.
Although, I guess to be more precise I fall into the 'fine-tuned universe' school of thought.
God may be perfect and infallible, but our understanding of God is far from perfect in my opinion. If there's conflict between our understanding of the bible and what we can scientifically measure then my suspicion is it's our interpretation of the bible that is flawed, or that the people who wrote down the words did not understand or could not properly articulate what God revealed to them.
As an example, the bible says God created the Universe in 6 days. My own belief is that the '6 days' of creation exist in a temporal space that is outside of our own time-space continuum. That is, God, being in (presumably) heaven took 6 days in heaven-time (lame term but trying to be clear) to layout his plan for/create the universe. The outworking of that plan created a new time-space continuum in which we live and the laws of physics etc are fixed and immutable for anyone inside of it. The outworking of God's process of creation in this universe need not have happened in the same order, or perceived duration, as the design process in God's timeline. Hence, the age of the universe and biological evolution of species is not particularly bothersome to me.
The closest analogy I can make is this. A movie has an internal timeline (within the plot of the movie) but the creation process of the movie exists in the timeline of the real world. A movie writer may write the screenplay in a couple of days and the movie might take months to film in the real world. However, the plot of a movie might only last 24 hours or it might cover hundreds of years. The ordering of scenes in the movie may be completely different than the order in which those scenes were conceived and filmed.
From a character in the movie's point of view, the movie-makers would have God-like powers since the director can quite easily rewind, change a scene, add a flying toroise, whatever.
The point is that to a believer in God, the notion is that God could not only create the universe, but he could create it so precisely that the eventual evolution of humanity was guaranteed if that is what God was aiming to do. (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle need not apply to God since he exists outside our plane of existence.)
I also do not hold with the notion that, since God put us here and gave us 'dominion' over the earth, we have the right to ra** and exploit the planet or the animals that live here. What I read in genesis is that the first task God set us was to be stewards of the planet. I'm a biologist. In my experience, material greed and the love of money play a far larger role in the extirpation of species than any religious view.
In any case, to answer the original question. No. ID is not /scientific/. I subscribe to Karl Popper's definition of things scientific as being an idea that can be tested, and that the results of these tests are reproducable. Since the required assumption of ID, that there is a God, cannot be tested the whole theory is not scientific.
Which is not to say it isn't true: just that it's not science. It's entriely a matter of faith IMO.
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Craig, the problem I have with ID is that by definition it deals with things that cannot be tested, yet entirely too many ID proponents use it to attack science. This is an apples and oranges issue. Believe as you will, because you would do that anyway. As long as you don't use ID as the basis for an attack on science, we can get along.
This is my view on ID:
If God is truly omnipotent, then the earth He built for us contains no flaws of His making. (How we screw it up isn't His fault.) With me so far?
God's creation contains fossil and geological evidence for things that predate the time of Adam. So the age of the earth as 6400+ years claimed by many Biblical "scholars" can only be true if God MADE it appear that old. Of course, being omnipotent, God could quite well have done that. Your "an astronomic epoch is but an eyeblink to God" only begs the question, but that doesn't invalidate anything. Still with me?
If God made the world look that old, or if it really IS that old using the "epoch is an eye-blink" theory, it is because He didn't want to leave us any evidence. After all, isn't there a statement that, translated loosely, says "You shall not come to me except through faith." ??
If that is true, then WHY IS ANYONE LOOKING FOR EVIDENCE? Do you not believe God's word? Do you not understand the concept that God, by definition, is INFALLIBLE? THERE WILL BE NO EVIDENCE. He has told you there will be no evidence by that exclusionary statement requiring faith.
Corrolary: If you DO find evidence of divine creation, the supernatural being who provided that evidence either isn't God or wants you to believe that God is fallible after all. Or, you - being quite fallible - have MISINTERPRETED the evidence to suit your weakness of faith. All of these, according to the teachings of Christianity as I understand it, would be works of Satan, who is always trying to weaken one's faith in God.
I agree with you that interpretation of the 'evidence' proposed by ID proponents is based on flawed humanity. My problem with them is that they have the insufferable arrogance to believe that they could FIND any evidence when God already said there would'nt be. Jesus told us his kingdom was not of this world. Don't go looking for Him anywhere here. You won't find Him. You can only find Him within yourself. (Which is where faith resides anyway.)
The part that blows me away is the bunch of yahoos (no relation to the web site) that INSIST on sneaking ID into a curriculum about science. Kansas has been named prominently in this thread. However, there is a school board in Louisiana somewhere near Crowley that invariably gets caught trying to sneak in ID as part of the science class "to stimulate critical thinking" on the theory of evolution. They don't get it. They just don't get it. As you so correctly point out, ID is not scientific.
This is my view on ID:
If God is truly omnipotent, then the earth He built for us contains no flaws of His making. (How we screw it up isn't His fault.) With me so far?
God's creation contains fossil and geological evidence for things that predate the time of Adam. So the age of the earth as 6400+ years claimed by many Biblical "scholars" can only be true if God MADE it appear that old. Of course, being omnipotent, God could quite well have done that. Your "an astronomic epoch is but an eyeblink to God" only begs the question, but that doesn't invalidate anything. Still with me?
If God made the world look that old, or if it really IS that old using the "epoch is an eye-blink" theory, it is because He didn't want to leave us any evidence. After all, isn't there a statement that, translated loosely, says "You shall not come to me except through faith." ??
If that is true, then WHY IS ANYONE LOOKING FOR EVIDENCE? Do you not believe God's word? Do you not understand the concept that God, by definition, is INFALLIBLE? THERE WILL BE NO EVIDENCE. He has told you there will be no evidence by that exclusionary statement requiring faith.
Corrolary: If you DO find evidence of divine creation, the supernatural being who provided that evidence either isn't God or wants you to believe that God is fallible after all. Or, you - being quite fallible - have MISINTERPRETED the evidence to suit your weakness of faith. All of these, according to the teachings of Christianity as I understand it, would be works of Satan, who is always trying to weaken one's faith in God.
I agree with you that interpretation of the 'evidence' proposed by ID proponents is based on flawed humanity. My problem with them is that they have the insufferable arrogance to believe that they could FIND any evidence when God already said there would'nt be. Jesus told us his kingdom was not of this world. Don't go looking for Him anywhere here. You won't find Him. You can only find Him within yourself. (Which is where faith resides anyway.)
The part that blows me away is the bunch of yahoos (no relation to the web site) that INSIST on sneaking ID into a curriculum about science. Kansas has been named prominently in this thread. However, there is a school board in Louisiana somewhere near Crowley that invariably gets caught trying to sneak in ID as part of the science class "to stimulate critical thinking" on the theory of evolution. They don't get it. They just don't get it. As you so correctly point out, ID is not scientific.
KalelGmoon
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some days I am ashamed to be from Kansas. I was reading I think it was in Time or one of those other big magazines a couple of monthes ago. they had an article on the worst jobs in the country and I think #5 or so was a Kansas science teacher. it was considered a worse job than someone who cleaned up after zoo animals.
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Yeah, the Kansas state school board IS made up of creatures lower than zoo animals on the Evolutionary scale.
Evolutionary scale.In defense of IDologists (tee-hee) who've pretty much been the butt of this thread, I would like to point out the movement is basically born out of a backlash to the sect of scientific thought that likes to decide when science disproves God. When you've got a truckload of scientists barking their own absurd claims like, since evolution is fact then God must not exist, it's hard to blame people of faith for deciding to attempt to fight fire with fire. In a way, the scientific community brought this upon themselves.
Not that it in any way validates ID, but before we rant and rave too much about the absurdity of ID let's take a moment to recognize the errors this side of the coin has made.
Not that it in any way validates ID, but before we rant and rave too much about the absurdity of ID let's take a moment to recognize the errors this side of the coin has made.
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