The lead story on last night’s edition of the 7:30 Report was on Intelligent Design. There is no need to rehash old posts but some comments by Colin Bunnett from Focus on The Family Australia are worth noting:
One of the largest battering rams that’s been used against the family in this century has been the argument solely of evolution.
Now I’ve been told that Intelligent Design is a matter of science not faith yet Colin Bunnett has given the game away here. You might as well say that general relativity was one of the largest battering rams on reason that lead to postmodernist relativity. It is equally specious reasoning. Intelligent Design is once more revealed to be a battering ram in the culture wars not an objective scientific investigation.
The last comment from Colin Bunnett is quite revealing:
GEOFF HUTCHISON: The fundamental question is whether intelligent design is about science or religion. Is it to be measured or philosophically argued and in which classroom does such a debate belong? Do you have to prove the existence of God?
COLIN BUNNETT: You see, that’s the impossible, because how can the created understand the creator?
This is a nicely disingenuous dodge. Intelligent Design advocates fail to realize that they are placing expectations on and making assumptions on understanding their creator. It is indeed about proving the existence of god by default and strengthening one’s belief. This is the faith that dare not speaks its name as wonderfully put by Jerry Coyne recently.
For a debate that is allegedly about science I wonder why Australian ID proponents rely on theological sleights of hand and political lobbying rather than scientific research to support their cause.
I saw that too. Bunnet came across as someone lacking the full quid.
Apart from the ID issue itself, I feel that there should be a lot of focus on Brendan Nelson’s “If parents want that to be taught, it should be taught”. This takes the government’s populist ‘choice’ mantra to ridiculous places. There are all sorts of things I’d love my child to be taught at school, but I doubt Nelson will be indulging *my* parental choice.
what I’ve decided from all this ID stuff is that if I ever have the misfortune to have Brendan Nelson shake my hand again I will endeavour to break it. Hopefully when I meet him on the way down.
Breandan Nelson shook my hand as head of the AMA at an event in support of Bob Cummings who was in Court (Hobart) on vandalism charges (spray painting cigarette ads on bus shelters).
I can still see, when he is on the telly, the dimple in Brendan Nelson’s ear from the stud that was in his left ear that day.
It would not surprise me, after his ID mealy mouth rubbish, if he now came out and said that cigarette companies should be allowed to advertise as there is no real proof of smoking causing cancer.
He makes Malcolm Turnbull look good.
Nelson’s comments as Education Minister frankly reveal he should not even be in the job. Why the hell would you accept an invitation from a religious organisation in regards to science education. The mind still boggles.
Yes suzoz, I’m sure the parents Nelson refers are a select group and not parents in general. Luckily we do not have the State school board system in Australia as in the US.
Of course, Colin Bunnet could adopt the tactics of creationists in California and sue.
I missed this. I’m kinda glad I did ’cause I may have thrown something at the telly.
Uhhhh … because ID is theology and not actually science?
(I know you know that, I.Rant, but still it needed to be said. Again and again it appears).
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/opinion/28dennett.html?ex=1282881600&en=5e66afa05b9ed96b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Sorry about the messy link folks, but this might interest T.Rex and the BFKAIR. (That’s you Shaun.)
I’m a bit bemused by the animus that ID seems to attract here. I mean, quite a few LP’ers have no difficulty in believing in Immaculate Conception and Transubstantiation, not to mention Resurrection, things that I personally baulk at, to be perfectly honest.
At the same time, science can’t explain everything, e.g. emotions. It can identify the chemical compounds in the brain that enable affection, but it can’t possibly explain why one particular person falls in love with a specific other person and not another.
ID, on my limited understanding of it, seems to posit the existence of an intelligent First Cause. So if the world began with a big bang, it was because it was willed and caused to happen. I think that’s an interesting proposition (assuming I’ve understood ID correctly). More research needed on my part.
Rob,
As an atheist I had a hard time believing in Immaculate Concpetion, Transubstatiation and a whole host of beliefs all over the world. But that is religion, not science. It is a whole other issue.
The issue is about science. In this post I have a go at explaining what is wrong with ID. I suggest giving it another read. Apart from the science (lack of) there are also theological considerations.
What you propose in the last paragraph is a quite common belief that really does not contradict science (though the theolodical questions are another matter). The problem I have is yourself (and Homer) try and skirt the issue by claiming a broad definition for ID at odds with that is being discussed.
The ID that I direct my animus towards is the idea that a supernatural being has been intervening over the past few billions years (thousand is a creationist) and tinkering with life on this planet. And that this being is indeed a specific variant of the Christian god.
Right. I see it piqued my curiosity last time as well. Is there any recommended reading on this to get the ID side of the argument?
Be glad to help Rob.
Some ID Forums and blogs:
William Dembski
ARN
ARN Forums
Intelligent Design The Future
The Discovery Institute
That should keep you busy. All are pro-ID sites. I shall reserve my comments on the quality of material present.
Thanks, Shaun. I’ll go over and have a read.
People are beating around the bush here a bit. Anyone who believes in creationism or intelligent design is an absolute fuckwit incapable of understanding the whole rationale of scientific progress.
There is no debate. You believe in ID, you are a dumb shit. And no dumb shit bastard is going to teach that utter crap in a science class that one of my kids ever attends.
So shove the ID creationist bullshit up your evolved, but not designed, arseholes.
What flute said.
Thanks, flute. I’ll keep that perspective in mind when I read the material.
What flute and lifesylte tit said.
The whole idea of an argument between evolution and ID is a category mistake.
It’s like comparing a compass with a fortune cookie message.
That’s right Rob, you get a balance between rock solid scientific evolution, and the barmy old cack that is ID. It beggars belief that in 2005 complete shit like that manages to crawl out from between the dusty leaves of a bible to see light of day without instantly turning to ash like Christopher Lee did when Peter Cushing pulled the curtains down and made a crucifix out of two candlesticks.
Mmmm, vampires.. no one had proved they don’t exist you know.
Creationists, ID freaks, UFO spotters and spoon benders. Piss off the lot of you.
WHat flute, me, and Kava Nob said.
Ill add: its such pissweak, surrender-monkey theology too.
Viz “We can explain the ever-diminshing pool of stuff science hasnt yet. Stayed tuned for new retractions. Why not sign up for our ‘chalk that one up for evolution’ email service”
Flute’s called it. ID’s all over, red rover.
God is changing from omnipotent supreme being to cute little woodmouse about to get run over by a Jeep Cherokee as we speak.
I want moon-baying taught in schools. Its about choice.
Daniel C. Dennet ‘Show me the science’ from Kim’s post
‘All it takes is a rare accident that gives one lucky animal a mutation that improves its vision over that of its siblings; if this helps it have more offspring than its rivals, this gives evolution an opportunity to raise the bar and ratchet up the design of the eye by one mindless step. And since these lucky improvements accumulate - this was Darwin’s insight - eyes can automatically get better and better and better, without any intelligent designer.’
ALL it takes? That’s a massive (accidental) leap forward regardless of your thinking. This is science? It’s all luck after all. I know I’ll get a stoushing for saying it, and I hesitate to say anything after my last drubbing, but it must be more convincing than this. Please!
Shaun Cronin
‘The ID that I direct my animus towards is the idea that a supernatural being has been intervening over the past few billions years (thousand is a creationist) and tinkering with life on this planet. And that this being is indeed a specific variant of the Christian god’
Agreed! ID is not consistent with the idea of a Creator. But is luck all anyone has to look forward to for future generations. Isn’t there good and bad luck?
Brendan Nelson. There’s your proof intelligent design is bollocks.
FaceLift, you are an ignoramus.
Go and read a few books, you are talking shit.
“God is changing from omnipotent supreme being to cute little woodmouse about to get run over by a Jeep Cherokee as we speak.”
Funny. I always imagined him living in a penthouse with taped up windows at the Fountainbleu in Maimi, spending a lot of time online in Usenet groups.
There ya go folks. A lazyweb parody opportunity waiting to happen. “Glod:The Blog”.
First post:”Not many people realise how I was created.”
Post n
Oh, yer back FaceLift. You’re game, I’ll give you that. Now let the games begin.
“…but it must be more convincing than this”
Why?
I mean surely an internal combustion engine is powered by the magic farts of purple pixies in the pistons isn’t it?
Well, I’m not much enlightened, having now visited Shaun’s nominated sites, though I thought I discerned some traces of an interesting metaphysics. But really, since so many here are happy to defend Islam and Catholicism, what is it about little ol’ ID that rattles the collective cage?
Rob, being a Catholic is not incompatible with science, as I’ve argued before. Transubstantiation isn’t a matter of a physical transformation, but of faith. There is no difficulty in reconciling having religious faith and believing in science - different domains.
This was argued and explained at length on an earlier thread of Shaun’s - I’m sure someone can provide you with a link if you don’t recall which one.
ID is simply horseshit Rob. It is not a question of belief, it is a question of polluting the education system and minds of kids with 24 carat bollocks. Every nanosecond spent on this creationism-lite in school is too bloody long. It should be banned worldwide.
Well, I think Islam and Catholicism are as intrinsically ludicrious as ID.
My cage remains neither rattled, shaken or stirred. Which is more than I can say for this bottle of Buller & Son 2002 cab sav which was obviously delivered to my local bottlo through rough mountain passes by the same donkeys that contributed to its fluid content.
flute
I’m saying ID is unlikely. I also say luck and accident are unlikely.
Dennett claims, “The designs found in nature are nothing short of brilliant, but the process of design that generates them is utterly lacking in intelligence of its own.”
But it’s not such a simple matter to say that the process has no intelligence since it produces brilliance, and that brilliance, in the form of human beings, is is attempting to discover, source and recreate the origins of life.
So what is the source of intelligence?
Not your cranium mate.
Not very polite, Flutey.
FaceLift, I think what you need to understand is that science doesn’t provide meaning - it’s descriptive not a search of cosmological answers.
“I also say luck and accident are unlikely.”
So how you did stumble across this blog?
Let’s shift the goalposts a bit. Why do you think how we came to be what we are should not be an accident?
Nabakov, that’s exactly what I was gettting at. If ID is faith-based, what makes it different to other faith-based systems and why is it so awfully awful?
Its the old anthropromorphic principle coming isn’t it. How come the conditions are just right for us to exist? Because if they weren’t you wouldn’t. Similarly:Those who don’t understand evolution, those who have never been bothered to get off their fat arses to read a bit, scratch their flaky heads and question that which they know fuck all about. If they understood it they wouldn’t believe in a fairytale.
What Nabsy said: all fairy tales are bullshit. Sorry, Mark, Catholicism’s in that bucket, too.
Or likely. That’s the point of stochasticity, isn’t it?
The reason why it’s a worry, FaceLift, is that in the context of science or scientific education - it’s irrational and we’d be teaching kids assertions rather than evidence and method. With dire consequences for education and indeed in the longer term our ability to compete economically in a globalised world.
that, and the fact that it stinks like poo.
‘I think what you need to understand is that science doesn‚Äôt provide meaning - it‚Äôs descriptive not a search of cosmological answers.’
That’s fair. I agree with the science because it cannot be disproved, but I find the idea of luck and accident does not comply with the intelligence that is revealed in nature.
There’s a difference between ’stumbling across a blog’ which already existed, and mutating accidentally into a higher being with superior advantages to all the other hitherto related beings in my species.
I find it unreasonable to think that so many incredible accidents have taken place. This planet, and the universe may have it’s problems, but all in all it’s pretty amazing. Sorry to be ‘cosmological’, but as someone has pointed out, we have an emotional as well as a physical presence.
and Karl Popper would turn in his grave.
I’m off to watch Lateline - can’t say I saw much evidence of intelligent design in the madness on sbs Dateline tonight in Zimbabwe and Tonga… just saying…
Please play nice, folks.
Facelift, do a bit of reading on evolution.
Downer on Lateline - draw your own conclusions!
An incredible accident if ever there was
Geez, I settle in with The Beloved with a bottle of Pinot for the ABC Wednesday Night and look what happens.
Personally, as a science geek who prefers SJ Gould over Dawkins (now did those two have a great stoush, eloquent as was fiery), ID irritates me for the obvious reasons. There are certain issues that I blog about because that is what turns me on intellectually. Other issue, while I agree they are important, don’t seem to have the same hotness for me. Each to their own. LP would be pretty boring if Mark, Kim, Kate, Naomi et al blogged on the same issues.
I think the reason why ID pisses a lot of people off Rob is that is a political movement of gross intellectual dishonesty passing itself of as science to smuggle in religion through the backdoor. I think that has been well explained Rob and your last questions to Nabs ignores quite of lot has been said in the various ID threads in the past few weeks.
Didn’t Paul (’The Mind of God’) Davies argue some years ago that science actually cannot explain the existence of life? That science, in a real sense, followed to its logical conclusions, hits its own endstops, and winds up groping in the dark. I may have that wrong.
There is an argument that philosophy, too, ultimately reverts to solipsism - the ultimate process of treading on your own tail.
I would certainly be interested in a metaphysics that sought to resolve that dilemma, rather than keeping faith and science, as Mark seems to suggest, as separate psychic compartments. Whether ID is such a metaphysics or not is something I don’t know, but I’m interested in finding out.
“If ID is faith-based, what makes it different to other faith-based systems and why is it so awfully awful?”
No difference, they’re all awful. Yer just arguing for the hell of it aren’t you? Because someone you think you can label “lefty” advanced an opinion.
And there’s nothing wrong with that per se. I like to do the same. The difference is I try to chose a defensible viewpoint.
Y’know what I think is the key difference between the self-identified “left” and “right” online is? The “left” wishes the “right” would see the light, or at least go away, and the “right” would be lost for energy if the “left” did see the light and/or go away.
The “left” react to our rulers (and wannbe rulers) absurdities and the “right” reacts to the “left”’s reactions.
And moi? Well I’m a parasite, not a symbiote. The strong live off the weak, and the smart live off the strong.
I share your interest, Rob, but I don’t think you’ll find much in the way of intelligent answers from people who think that sweearing can refute a point of view.
No, Nabakov, the basis for my interest in ID is sketched in the post immediately preceding yours.
However, there seems little point pursuing it.
Rob, let’s assume that our ability to understand phenomena has limits. Why does that mean there must be some higher intelligence?
Rob, I just don’t know what a “metaphysics” of the sort that you postulate would look like. Either you accept that science describes the processes of the universe but doesn’t impart meaning to them (and I see no merit in the argument that meaning can come through science - that’s just an inverted theism) or you accept that you can postulate a deity but that that has no necessary implications for the processes of the universe.
These debates get stuck somewhere in the 18th century with (philosophically refuted) arguments from design and a certain deism.
As I’ve done before, I recommend Pascal, but you wouldn’t like him because he refuses to ground faith in anything other than itself. Which is as it should be.
Nobody before the Reformation ever believed that the book of Genesis described physical processes - both in the Tanakh (Jewish Scriptures) and the Christian Bible it was seen as metaphorical, and in any case really just a prologue to Abraham’s decision for God. That’s why Islam, Christianity and Judaism are described as Abrahamic faiths. Nor should anyone be disturbed by the fact that all sorts of cosmologies involving floods and so on were cooked up around about the same time in the Middle East some millennia ago by various peoples.
The whole presupposition of the ID argument has already gone a long way towards accepting a rationalistic world view. You may as well go the whole hog because science works - but is ethically neutral - and liberate faith from sterile and irreligious arguments about designers and intervention, randomness etc.
Kate, forgot to thank you for the Dennett link. Much appreciated.
Facelift, regarding eye evolution. The eye has independently about 40 times. While Dennett is correct (I would have taken a different tack) we know that ’simple’ organisms such as euglenids have a pigment filled shield that they use to move in response to light. Further out on the evolutionary bush there is an excellent two part series of articles by Carl Zimmer regarding the evolution of the eye. There is quite a lot of interesting developments in regarding evolution of the eye. And it is all science. Dennett’s comment is a simplification but essentially true. The science is all there (and more) if you care to read.
Now regarding chance, I do take the Gouldian line as mentioned by Zarquon that the history of Earth and human evolution is contingency. Your comments Facelift have a metaphysical sheen that is not warranted even in light of such facts.
Well, interesting is one thing. Curriculum is another.
Yes, precisely, Lefty E. It’s not even interesting.
I just don’t see how you can preclude it, flute.
We live in a universe that is literally infinite - an awesome, breath-taking concept, when you think about it. Someone once tried to explain to me that this was not so, that the universe curves back on itself. Maybe it does but somehow I can’t buy it. To me, the physical void goes on and on and on. It never stops, because it can’t.
It seems reasonable to me to think that somwhere out there in the void is - ’something’. I don’t know what it is, what shape it might take, what its concept of time might be. No-one will ever know. And that’s the thing. Against that unknowability, all the human disciplines struggle and ultimately fail - the sciences, the religions, the arts - all save one: metaphysics, whose subject is the unknowable.
That’s why I’m interested in ID. It seems to me to be not unreasonable to think that there is or may be a design, a blueprint, a schematic for quickening inert atoms into sentient life, somewhere, somehow, impregnated in the endlessness of the void.
(Sorry about the poetry. but that’s metaphysics, too. And this is a long, long way from the political readings of ID which this thread is about, so sorry also for going way OT.)
flute
‘let‚Äôs assume that our ability to understand phenomena has limits. Why does that mean there must be some higher intelligence?’
Fyodor’s principle of stochasticity indicates it could prove, conversly, that there is a higher intelligence.
Higher than what? Presumably you’re not discussing dolphins here, but the human race. So what makes people conceited enough to believe there is no possibilty of a higher intelligence?
ID supporters are still searching for answers. Mark is right to say that such things shouldn’t be taught as science. But shouldn’t students be given the opportunity, nevertheless, to explore phenomena and come up with ideas?
Yes Mark, it reminds me of that fractals fad circa 2000.
“everyhtings so pretty, and complex n shit”
‘That science, in a real sense, followed to its logical conclusions, hits its own endstops, and winds up groping in the dark. I may have that wrong.”
You do have that wrong. Science is all about taking a torch into the dark and so turning a grope into a firm grasp.
No.
And as far as conceit goes, why do IDers think that we are so shit hot (even with our back to front retinas) that we must have been plopped out of the big guy’s (who funnily enough made us in his image - a tad of arrogance for you) jelly mould.
If IDers want answers they should understand a bit more about biology before running off into lala land.
“Mark is right to say that such things shouldn‚Äôt be taught as science. But shouldn‚Äôt students be given the opportunity, nevertheless, to explore phenomena and come up with ideas?”
But then you’d lose the debate. Come on FaceLift, we want it taught in school. Start with a campaign to get bookshops to stock ID in their science racks and work up.
Debate what? The IDers haven’t even got a theory. Short textbook, still you could fit more on the school library shelves.
I’ll re-read Davies, Nabakov, but I think I’ll find I’m right.
Perhaps as part of studies in philosophy or religion, FaceLift, but not as science - for the reasons I’ve given.
What people don’t realise is the US is cutting its own throat with this - foreign grad students, already dissuaded from studying there by Patriot Act assumptions that they all want to make bombs, are avoiding American universities, and teaching kids that reason and evidence are subservient to metaphysics in science will produce a generation of scientific ignorance.
It’s not as though US schools are in good shape - they’re far worse than ours on the whole - looking at the comparative stats and also from personal experience having taught hordes of American exchange students signing up for a course I taught called “Youth and Deviance” a few years back.
This has serious consequences - and not only for economic competitiveness - think of how many things in your daily life are impacted on by scientific research - and often saving your life. Do you want medical researchers who treat some issues as off limits because Cardinal Pell told them not to?
Unless you place your faith in the discredited studies about prayers and healing, well…
We’re already turning out too few science and maths graduates - and having great difficulty getting skilled high school teachers in these disciplines - and primary school teachers who haven’t the slightest acquaintance with science or maths except curriculum units at Uni.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
“Right. I see it piqued my curiosity last time as well. Is there any recommended reading on this to get the ID side of the argument?”
Rob, try the discussion here and particularly the link there to another discussion at techcentralstation http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007324.php
You’ll find it gets quite esoteric, a bit like the boofheads trying to explain the gaps in Evolution. Essentially an emotional argument about whether you like to call a bloody impressive rock Ayers Rock or Uluru. If you’re a farmer, you can believe the rain is caused by prayers to God, an Indian rain dance or ice crystals forming in the upper atmosphere, as long as you understand it’s the rain that grows the crop and it’s time to get planting.
wbb
Good advice, but then flute wouldn’t send his kids to school and they might never learn anything.
But flute didn’t really answer the question, what makes people conceited enough to believe there is no possibilty of a higher intelligence?
Surely ID’ers are fairly intelligent thinkers who have seen anomolies to their belief in evolution, rather than creationists attempting to take a sneaky direction around evolution. I wouldn’t have thought that creationists have to backslide into ID.
Thanks, observa, I don’t mind the esoteric, nor the emotional.
Thanks for that link, Observa. Now we’re getting somewhere.
Issues like this can’t be adequately addressed in the sterile realm of politics.
this is like watching a strange end-times sect form before my very eyes - reverse evolution in action
race you to the bottom fellas!
Gee it’s like watching a tag team in action when EP, Rob and observa get together on a thread. Just saying…
At least observa’s calmer over here than at Tim D’s. Must be because there’s little scope for mentioning the I or M words (though I note Rob tried…).
‘I‚Äôll find I‚Äôm right.”
About what?
About Davies’ conclusions about science, Nabakov.
Everything, Nabs. Unless Rob’s in one of his postmodern moods.
Rob, how do you square your desire for a new metaphysics for your previously stated views about different narratives and a postmodern epistemology?
When you were talking about history, as I recall. Is it perhaps an aesthetic preference?
Possibility of a higher intelligence? Maybe in a galaxy far far away, but like it or not we are accidentally and temporarily numero uno at the moment.
No, flutey, cats are a higher intelligence.
But yet again we are back to the bloody anthropromorphic principle. Some species has the be the smartest, and between us and cats we get to say there is no higher intelligence.
Yes, I’ve tried post-modernism in the context of historical study, Kim, where I’ve found it a useful heuristic tool. Even there, though, it collides with ultimate unknowability, as do all the disciplines. I have no idea how metaphysics and po/mo might interact, but it would be interesting to find out.
They wouldn’t, Rob, since po/mo is an anti-metaphysical project in its origins and essence. I suggest you read Derrida’s “White Metaphysics”.
About Davies‚Äô conclusions about science, Nabakov.”
I’m sure you think you’re right about about someone else’s views about what science should mean to lay persons (tho’ try to run the methodology behind ID past Davies and see what happens).
But how does that any of that justify or explain treating ID as a legitimate branch of scientific inquiry?
Right bugger this I’m trying to turn this thread into a pub cark park stoush and you lot are getting too bloody wordy. I’m off to get my fix of Delroy.
Cats blog, Flutey, just saying…
“I‚Äôm off to get my fix of Delroy.”
sadder and sadder
Sorry, flute.
Mark, Derrida does not define the post-modern project.
“What people don‚Äôt realise is the US is cutting its own throat with this”
Damn right. Notice how many Indian students are now working in Aus big city 7/11s. Overseas student enrollments here are booming. The US has unwittingly created a new Columbo plan.
Well, try Lyotard on metaphysics, then, Rob.
Insofar as po/mo is anti-Platonist, it can’t be metaphysical. And don’t forget that the history of French philosophy aside, the greatest target of po/mo was the most totalising metaphysician of modernity, Hegel. Perhaps the Kantian element in some po/mo thought might qualify, but you’d be drawing a long bow in my view.
The post-modern project is what its practitioners make of it, not what its authorities determine it to be. All disciplines should be multi-temporal and multi-dimensional - that’s what makes for the dizzying ride. I for one would be interested to see what could be made of po/mo’s projection into metaphysics.
This is rather reminiscent of Baudrillard’s America.
Over at the creationist ranch, roadside dinosaurs find religion.
Postmodernism may not hold water, but anyone who doesn’t believe we are living in postmodernity isn’t looking around!
Colour me foolish if you like, but if this article at Tech Central Station is typical of Intelligent Design it seems to be both intellectually respectable and defensible, whether one agrees with it or not. Thanks for the link, observa.
Consider yourself coloured, Rob. It’s not “intellectually respectable” if it substitutes faith for reason. Likewise, if it’s only defensible via resort to this nebulous concept of “faith”, it’s not defensible in any rational argument.
Did you actually read the artikcle, Fyodor?
Personally, I think ID should be taught in science classes… but really as science. This means that you get to put the theory forward along with all its supporting and detracting evidence and discuss. Since the supporting evidence they’ve got comes to a grand total of heresay in one 2000-year-old book of dubious provenance, I think it might be very educational for some of those kids of religious families to have this pointed out to them. You could sit down and actually prove to the kiddies that creationism and ID have no more basis than spaghetti-monsterism and there’s nothing the frothing whack-jobs could do to stop you.
In religion class you can say what you like and use your bible to prove it; in science its cough up the evidence or get out. Science allows the best possible theory to remain til displaced by a better explanation, so all the ID arguments about how Darwinism is “unproven” go out the window (and you will find that almost all ID arguments are in fact anti-Darwinism arguments.) It is not sufficient to show that Darminism can or cannot explain all things, you must also show that your explanation can explain more, and that the recorded facts support it over the existing theory. Even if you could inarguably prove Darwin false it would still not in any way support the case for ID.
The ID confusion comes from approaching science with a religious attitude. In religion you’re talking about the word of god, so it must all be true; if I show any of it to be false then I have shown it all to be false and my religion to be superior. So they approach ID that way: Darwinism is the enemy, so I find any small gap in Darwinism and therefore ID is true. Science, of course, doesn’t work that way. We find an explanation for the evidence that we can show to be 90% true, and then we argue about the other 10%. If you find an exception that doesn’t necessarily mean the theory was wrong, it means you need to expand it to explain the exception, or come up with a new theory that explains both. Bringing ID into science classrooms, were it really done that way, would force them to approach religion with a scientific attitude, not the other way around. And that, in my book, would be a good thing.
What Fyodor said. The article’s point is that science hasn’t explained everything. Of course. Science will never explain everything. Science is a system of inquiry, not a set of truths.
ID is just sticking God into the gaps, like theological polyfiller.
Rob, I’ve had the misfortune to read that article at least once, and the headline several times. You’re possibly the 17th person that I’ve seen link to it as a “defence” of ID. May I refer you to this interpretation of ID, which I find equally convincing. [via For Bottle].