Why do people say intelligent design is not scientific?

reply to post by Outlawstar


Einstein did not have a belief in an intelligent designer to the universe. And usually when i talk about intelligent design im talking about the christian use of it, although i dislike all versions of intelligent design on the ground none have anything to backup their claims other than wanting it to be so. The christian version of ID is the most vocal, the most pervasive and destructive though. They try to push this into the science class and warp childrens minds with nonsense of their own creation. It should be in a religious classroom and nowhere near science.

Originally posted by templar knight
Here is Scientific evidence - how do these fit with intelligent design:
- Look at the fossil records, what we see by comparing the fossils from the age of the rock is that many million years ago there were plants, then we see in later fossil records, there were small land animals then larger land animals, suggesting that if ID did take palce it did not happen at a set time.
- Look at our bodies, we have imperfections - tonsils and appendix can be removed without any down side. We have imperfect sight, in most humans, our vision degrades after 20/30 going more to long sight sight. Childbirth is incredibly painful, so there are all sorts of imperfections on humans.

check out how software evolved... we still have the "fossil record" of DOS programs. some of them are incredibly painful to use. others have bugs and imperfections! that doesn't mean they evolved spontaneously

Originally posted by templar knight
- Look at the DNA sequences, we can see that the eye has "been created" only 4 times and all animals share that DNA from all the animals shareone of these 4 patterens at its centre.

These 3 are scientific facts that -although happy to run with ID as a hypothesis get blown out of the water when confronted with fact.

not sure if you've ever heard of object oriented programming. the main purpose is to build objects that do things and then reuse or even improve those objects in all future programs to avoid re-doing the same operations and testing every time you need to write a program.

could it be that the aliens who planted life on earth just experimented with biological "object oriented programming"? we call it evolution or ID but it's the same thing besides we already have PCR machines cheap enough for individuals to buy and the future is going to bring more innovation, perhaps even our own biological object oriented programming machines. maybe in 100 years students who intend to work in bio research will have to build their own life form as a graduation project...

i can't back ID because most who back it are way too religious for my liking. on the other hand i think evolution from one species to another is unlikely in such a short time (millions of years). what evolution gets right is that within a species you can have certain adaptations (like a longer beak to better reach the insects between rocks). ID gets it right by bringing in an outside force - some alien probe or even alien scientists experimenting on earth. those alien scientists aren't gods just like our scientists are not the gods of the genetically altered worms they're experimenting with!

disclaimer: i believe in science and for me the bible is just a history book. but i also believe that science like humans get things wrong sometimes.

In my opinion I feel that people sometimes misunderstand the concept of evolution. Micro and macro evolution is not the same thing. Macro evolution states that new information is being produced, while micro evolution is a variation of information that already exists(for the purpose of adapting to new situations and environments)

Many people mix these two, and use micro evolution to show that macro evolution is possible. As we all know, it has never been proven empirically that new information can be created, only micro evolution has ever been observed.

Would it be idiotic of me to expect a heap of building materials to turn into a building automatically? I'm sure if I told somebody today that those bricks laying there in the sand will start building a house by themself, that person would send me straight to the nearest doctor. Then why do people believe that the same non living substance transformed by itself into a living being, a billion times more complicated compared to any human invention ever made?

There is no scientific answer to this, people believe in MACRO evolution(don't mix the two!) for other personal reasons, it has nothing to do with science. You cannot expect MSDos to write Windows 7 by itself. You cannot expect a being of certain intelligent capability to create another being with HIGHER complexity than itself. And adding the statement "it took billions of years" also won't help.

If the common logic of everyday man tells him a rock cannot turn into the most complicated system in the universe by itself, then there must have been an intelligent designer. There is no other option to consider.

All of this is of course my opinion, so all you ID haters please don't send me hate mail

- Look at our bodies, we have imperfections - tonsils and appendix can be removed without any down side. We have imperfect sight, in most humans, our vision degrades after 20/30 going more to long sight sight. Childbirth is incredibly painful, so there are all sorts of imperfections on humans.

Haha, this is just hilarious. Scientists 200 years ago drained the blood of sick people, for they believed it would heal them. What makes you think todays pathetic "scientists" have their facts straight?

The reason why people are imperfect today is Biblically explained, if you are interested I'll explain to you, I'm not going to waste my time if you won't even read it.

reply to post by resonance


i agree 10x over. isn't there a gap between homo erectus and homo sapien? because modern humanity, it seems, just randomly stepped into the picture.

reply to post by Saidar


I smell BS here. There is no such thing as micro or macro evolution, nor does the theory of evolution state anything about *new information* being made. Prove me wrong if your so damn sure on your skewed view of evolution.

reply to post by Saidar


Along with, Oh hm, about every other mythological text. There is no more evidence for the biblical God than there is for every other God ever worshiped or that will ever be worshiped on this planet.

Originally posted by ohsnaptruth
reply to post by resonance

 

i agree 10x over. isn't there a gap between homo erectus and homo sapien? because modern humanity, it seems, just randomly stepped into the picture.

There is no gap that I am aware of. You can do a really quick simple google search and look at the evolutionary tree for our species. Seems pretty damn complete to me.

i have a question to those who say we cant build the pyramids with the same amount of accuracy and theres the "you cant fit a razor blade between the stones" of other monuments and whatnot

who says we cant?

thats totally absurd to me. we can make machines out of molecules (nanotechnology), but we cant make two rocks fit together perfectly?
why dont we do it then? because we dont need to. the stone structures we build usually have mortar. mortar pretty much negates the need for perfect fitting stones.
we dont need THAT degree of accuracy. we want our buildings made cheap and fast.
making bricks fit together perfectly slows down progress of construction.


[edit on 7-11-2009 by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest]

and another point on this.
all that time, effort, and expense to make perfect building materials is wasted. buildings get torn down, replaced, and remodeled, bricks get broken or destroyed, so many things can go wrong that having quick and pretty much disposable building material such as bricks makes construction less of a nightmare.

[edit on 7-11-2009 by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest]

How about proponents of intelligent design just say the God did it. Maybe, that's true. I'm not here to debate about that but, that's not science. Sorry. Perhaps, you want to ask, "why do people say ID is incorrect?" or "why do people not believe in ID?"
Show me the science behind intelligent design. To be honest, when I see people who believe that we rode dinosaurs or that fossils were created as some form of conspiracy, I can't even take the subject seriously.
The only thing I've heard from a believer in ID that I agree with is that the theory of evolution has not been proven. Absolutely true. That's why it's a theory.

reply to post by really


for the 1000th time in this thread, theory doesnt mean guess.

Theory: A theory is more like a scientific law than a hypothesis. A theory is an explanation of a set of related observations or events based upon proven hypotheses and verified multiple times by detached groups of researchers. One scientist cannot create a theory; he can only create a hypothesis.

In general, both a scientific theory and a scientific law are accepted to be true by the scientific community as a whole. Both are used to make predictions of events. Both are used to advance technology.

In fact, some laws, such as the law of gravity, can also be theories when taken more generally...

evidence-based-science.blogspot.com...

i wish people would learn the difference.

[edit on 7-11-2009 by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest]

ID is just Creationism in disguise. It's camouflage to make it seem as though, religion doesn't have a hand in it.

Why not name the designer?
God right?
God's the designer?
If not God, then who/what?

Eventually they have to prove that a "designer" exists, or they have nothing. Currently, they do anything to avoid talking about who the "designer" is, and instead only talk about how everything must have been designed.

That is ridiculous, if they want to treat ID as something truly scientific, then finding out the who/what/where of the "designer" would be paramount.

That is why ID is unscientific. They claim that everything was designed, but refuse to talk about who/what/where that designer is.

I am truly honestly sorry to hear that.

Really lame beginning. I am truly honestly sorry that you find it impossible that something beyond your intelligence created you.

Really? Then what is it's true purpose considering the nature of the question seems to be slightly contradictory to that statement.

Because it's not? Seems simple enough to understand, to me at least.

So... The Universe appearing out of NOWHERE, including life, gravity, and the laws of physics seems more plausible to you? Give me a break.

Well, there is your problem. IDist's demand a designer by asking "Well where did this come from? HAHA PWNED YOU!"; And when we finally figure out the evolution of some so called irreducibly complex system, they turn around and pick a new one for scientist to work on.

Evolution is a crock. The Creator set those processes in motion so that the species would be able to adapt to a changing world. You wouldn't be here if He didn't.

A blind seeker, I like that. Can I ask you a question? What tangible explicit evidence do you have for your God? What evidence do you have against someone else' God?

The simple fact that everything in this universe has laws it is bound to. The fact that this planet has the perfect conditions for life, nothing more, nothing less. The fact that there are systems in effect on this planet to keep it from drying out and becoming a cold barren chunk of rock floating in space. IT IS JUST SIMPLY TOO COMPLEX TO HAPPEN BY MERE CHANCE. IMPOSSIBLE.

Without knowledge of the initial conditions of our planet prior to the beginnings of self-replicating molecules is a big hindrance in discovering how life began. Attempting to discover those initial conditions and replicate them does not detract from the observations seen in nature. I refer to my gravity example above for explanation.

Oh, but I thought Science knew everything about how the conditions for life began. I thought it was proven fact. Evolution has just as many holes as any other theory.

Gday,

Originally posted by Saidar
In my opinion I feel that people sometimes misunderstand the concept of evolution. Micro and macro evolution is not the same thing. Macro evolution states that new information is being produced, while micro evolution is a variation of information that already exists(for the purpose of adapting to new situations and environments)

This is nonsense that only cretinists believe.

Originally posted by Saidar
Many people mix these two, and use micro evolution to show that macro evolution is possible. As we all know, it has never been proven empirically that new information can be created, only micro evolution has ever been observed.

Rubbish.
There is vast evidence for macro-evolution, you can see some here:
www.talkorigins.org...
Of course, cretinists just ignore the facts.


K.

Originally posted by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest
for the 1000th time in this thread, theory doesnt mean guess.

Yeah, I know what it means. However, there is a difference between a scientific Law and a scientific Theory. One being that a Law is repeatable, offering the same result each time, and observable.
The Theory of Evolution, if I remember correctly, has been proven on a micro level (white moth turning into black moth) but not a Macro level (fish turning into lizard, lizard into mammal).

But even scientist disagree sometimes on the definition of "Theory". While a theory often means a synthesis of of a large body of information, scientists also use it this way:

1. The abstract principles of a science as distinguished from basic or applied science. 2. A reasonable explanation or assumption advanced to explain a natural phenomenon but lacking confirming proof (Steen, 1971). [NB: I don't like this one but I include it to show you that even in "Science dictionaries" there is variation in definitions which leads to confusion].

science.kennesaw.edu...

While scientific Laws are facts scientific Theories are not:

A theory is valid as long as there is no evidence to dispute it. Therefore, theories can be disproven....
Is this theory a fact? No. The event is a recorded fact. Is this this theory generally accepted to be true, based on evidence to-date? Yes. Can this theory be shown to be false and be discarded? Yes.

chemistry.about.com...

Thus, Evolutionary Theory is NOT a FACT. This is what I attempted to say in my previous post. Sorry if I didn't.

What I was trying to express in my last post is that scientists empirically prove or disprove their hypotheses while ID does not. This is why ID is NOT scientific. This is why I wrote this in my last post:

Perhaps, you want to ask, "why do people say ID is incorrect?" or "why do people not believe in ID?"
Show me the science behind intelligent design.

No reason to jump down my throat.

[edit on 8-11-2009 by really]

reply to post by av8r007


nothing but buttloads of unfounded claims. show some support for what you're saying. "God did it" doesnt count as science or any type of reasonable support for ANYTHING.

and the link Kapyong posted has evidence for Macro evolution. (but in reality, macro evolution is not separate from micro evolution. the two terms are part of the cretinist movement putting their fingers in their ears going "LALALALALALA")




[edit on 8-11-2009 by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest]

Nothing violates known laws of physics? I guess you've never heard of something called quantum physics. In the quantum world, the rules of cause-and-effect are suspended, that is particles can appear out of nothing(which follows that God can appear out of nothing.) Concepts like quantum entanglement and the double-slit experiment violate all what we deem "common-sense." The beginning of the Big Bang also violates Newton's first law.

The problem is that people are following the Newtonian line of thinking, or the "traditional common sense." And really, Newton's theory of gravity is anything but a proven theory, much less a law. Einstein "disproved" it with his theory of relativity by showing that gravity is not a force, but merely a curvature of space, caused by matter. At the moment, all experiments and predictions have agreed with his theory of relativity, therefore, we'd do better to side with Einstein.

What we call forces, may be merely nothing more than the interactions between Energy and Space. From an intuitive standpoint, without space, there would be no individual identities, as everything would still be connected. Instead of thinking of matter and gravity, it would serve us well to think of them in terms of energy, curved space, and even consciousness.

Also, I believe that micro-evolution cannot be random, because let's use Darwin's finches as an example. To say that something is random means that it would happen, regardless of the environment, in which case, changes to the finches' wings should be as likely to happen as changes to their beaks. Yet what happened? The trait that changed was the one that was a "direct response" to the environment. In other words, the mutations were NOT random.

Why is that? If all mutations were truly random, then we should at least see some changes in the wings, or the legs, or the neck. Heck, how about a 3rd eye on the back? Instead, the one thing that changed was the trait that helped them adapt to the environment.

You say, so what's so surprising about that? It has a brain, so it should "know" to make those changes. Well, let's go back to the period where an organism hasn't developed the brain. Now the development of the brain, I believe, consists of successively small steps, leading first to the sensory system, then the billion of neural pathways. Let's assume that the first step evolved "randomly." However, at this point, the brain has not developed, and in conjunction with the random mutation theory, it could not have "known" that this step is good. And if it doesn't know that this step is good, then there is no reason for it to retain this information in its cells("random mutations theory says mutations happen all the time, if that's the case, then why keep certain information over the others?)

We can see that the only way for it to keep having successive beneficial steps is to "know" that each step is good and "keep" it. However, how could it have known this? After all, it's still in the process of developing the brain. The only conclusion is that it must have some sort of inherent or proto-intelligence in its cell nucleus, that can tell each step is good or bad, for it.

reply to post by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest


What evidence? Showing that the chimpanzee's skull is similar to a human's doesn't prove that a reptile can evolve into a mammal, even IF humans did evolve from chimpanzees. Where are the intermediate fossils for the reptiles and mammals?

Originally posted by np6888
reply to post by ELECTRICkoolaidZOMBIEtest

 

What evidence? Showing that the chimpanzee's skull is similar to a human's doesn't prove that a reptile can evolve into a mammal, even IF humans did evolve from chimpanzees. Where are the intermediate fossils for the reptiles and mammals?

thank you for letting me know i can ignore you from now on.

NOWHERE IN EVOLUTION DOES IT SAY HUMANS CAME FROM CHIMPS

www.talkorigins.org...
reptiles to mammals. there you go. actually looking at the link kapyon provided wouldve been nice. it mentions this too.

All this comes down to this simple statement!
1. God Isn't provable by Scientific Scrutiny. 2. God Isn't disproven by Scientific Scrutiny. 3. Therefore they resist Scrutiny and are not Considered Science.

We will consider Arguments for the Universe and how/where it came from.
There are good arguments on both sides and lets consider a few of them.

1.The Universe is composed of Matter/Energy/Space-Time/
2.Since Energy/Matter/Information is a conserved quantity it must have... 1. Always existed. 2. This could arise from a prior Universe(Cyclic) but then it isn't known if those physical attributes (Constants) could survive a singularity. The other possibility is that we arose from a fluctuation in the Quantum Vacuum. It has been shown that empty space is a sea of virtual particles and filled with a foam of energy. But this relies on the fact that this vacuum(Foam) exists even without the Universe but since it is unprovable it resists SCRUTINY! The Multiverse theory is quiet a funny idea It also resists SCRUTINY and becomes unprovable and not science but speculation. Then there was that idea by Lawrence Krauss which stated that the Universe is considered by many to be flat and a flat universe can have Zero Energy which can give rise to a Universe from nothing!!!
www.youtube.com...

I find this Beautiful but it needs MUCH more evidence and I don't think it can be Scrutinized by science any time soon so it remains irrelevant for now. We also have the BRANE Proposal which was proposed by Randall and Sundrum which states the Universe arose from two parallel BRANES colliding. Great speculation here also. I love some of these MATHEMATICAL theories for the UNIVERSE but non can be Scrutinized by Science and remain in the realm of PURE MATHEMATICS.

We are also left with where did the process of Evolution Arise. The Universe can be said to be an Evolving Organism. Like biological Evolution the universe has a coherent evolution of it's own. We are still left with this problem of where did the notion of evolution arise. It can be traced all the way back to the big bang when Information first arose. From this point the universe became a giant Quantum Computer which began performing computations on its self. Yes the Universe is a Universal Computer! Now where did this program Originate? Evolution in its whole can be traced to this point! The program doesn't necessarily mean god created it but it could have arose by pure chance. But we shouldn't rule out either possibility! Either way it isn't up for Scrutiny. So it isn't considered scientific but neither is String Theory(For Now) or these crazy theories which rely on 90% Mathematics and 10% Physical Scrutiny.
Oh someone mentioned earlier about us creating a Quantum Computer and implementing our own little program like the Matrix. We could create it with its own little universe filled with a program of evolution much like our own, which if done correctly would someday give rise to civilizations much like our own. Oh by the way with a Quantum Computer this is 100% possible since it relies on the Laws of Quantum mechanics and is just a smaller universe like our own with the same laws of physics. So let us say if we were to do such a thing and make a small universe within this Computer, We must wonder what these programs(Beings) might think of their Universe. Will they question where they originated or how? Would they believe they arose by chance or would they look to a creator(Programmer)?
So what makes you think we are any different? This isn't Science but it is probable like anything else. Just because it resists Scientific Scrutiny doesn't mean it's any less true. So this brings us back to the point of Science and God. 1.God isn't Provable by Scientific Scrutiny. 2.God isn't Unprovable By Scientific Scrutiny. 3. Since neither resist Scrutiny they are not considered Science. So Intelligent Design is not Scientific but that doesn't mean it can't be true...