Ok, then just what exactly is the theory of Intelligent Design, and how does one test it? The father of ID, Phillip Johnson, lamented that they don’t yet have a robust theory, and now he’s gone. And I don’t think you can understand it apart from its history. “Darwin on Trial,” “Of Pandas and People,” “The Wedge Strategy” and the rest.
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The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.
What Is Intelligent Design? | Intelligent Design
But if there is a designer, does it stop there, or can we find an undetected process explaining the designer too?
Is this really irreducible complexity? If so, how would a mechanism like science determine something is irreducibly complex?
John Patrick is a biologist with world renown who at least at one time stated few would be able to argue over irreducible complexity with him. I respect him and his credentials. I enjoy his lectures, and think he is highly qualified for his work. I would not second guess his job. I don’t think that I can quite agree with the application to irreducible complexity.
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Pseudoscience is that which is not science pretending to be science. If it does not pretend to be science then it is not pseudoscience. And yes I have encountered the accusation quite often, calling all kind of things which are not science, pseudoscience. But accusation is false if there is no pretense that it is science.
By YOUR definition, not mine. Most of the time YEC is simply a theological position and does not pretend to be science.
ID is not a valid scientific hypothesis, because it is not falsifiable. It is the scientific method to test an hypothesis, to determine if it is true or not. Thus where no test is possible this is not an issue for scientific inquiry. Science has limitations and is restricted to what can be measured, tested, and demonstrated. I don’t buy into naturalism precisely because I don’t believe all of reality can be measured, tested, and demonstrated – all requiring some degree of control.
“Design” (in the sense of requiring a designer) is not a measurable objective quality in things. What we can demonstrate is that a simple set of rules like in an evolutionary algorithm can produce things we would never think of which are far more effective than what is made by human designers. Thus we have conclusively demonstrated that “design” in that sense not only does not require a designer but is better without one.
How do you define science?
I only found Guillermo’s story on Wikipedia. Crocker and Axe you’ll need to read their books for their stories.
Caroline Crocker: https://www.amazon.com/Free-Think-Caroline-I-Crocker/dp/0981873448
Douglas Axe: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0166J7LZA/
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Science is built upon two methodological ideals.
- The honesty which tests an hypothesis rather than simply trying to prove it as is done in the methodology of rhetoric used in most human activities including politics, courtroom, sermons, and use car lots.
- The objectivity of written procedures which give the same result no matter what you want or believe.
Well, if you’ve read any ID work, you’d see they follow those ideals. I’ve been a bit involved myself, here is one of my publications which is quite reproducible.
https://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2019.2
I have and they do not.
A little thought shows it to be impossible that any such ideals can apply.
- The intelligent designer proposed is not by nature measurable, testable, or demonstrable. Nor has any intelligent designer of any sort ever been demonstrated. Just saying that something looks designed or doesn’t currently have another explanation doesn’t satisfy this requirement in the slightest. Every objective test ever proposed fails to produce positive results.
- An intelligent designer behaves as he pleases and not according to fixed rules.
- The intelligent designer proposed cares about what we want and believe therefore it renders the objectivity of science impossible when it is part of any such hypothesis.
Again I believe because I do not agree with the naturalist that reality is limited to what these ideals can establish. BUT this does not mean that science is of no value or that the attack upon science represented by ID is warranted. Science does have value and every scientist will fight the effort of religious fanatics to subjugate science to their theology, and thus return to the dark ages.
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Can you name the ID books you’ve read?
A very robust theory! Guess Phillip Johnson wasn’t aware of this. How can non-ID scientists test it?
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I have read no books catering to those who want to subjugate science to their theology.
This is a classic case of the tactic of rhetoric called moving the line.
You said ID work and now you say ID books. I have read ID work on the internet. I have never had any interest in the sort of books you speak of and I never will.
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What ID work on the internet have you read?
I would encourage you to crack a book if you really want to understand. A one page internet article is unlikely to do justice to the theory, although it’ll give you a decent taste, depending on what you read.
I am no biologist, but it’s easy to test with genetic algorithms. We can compare what an evolutionary process can generate vs what human programmers can generate and measure the difference.
Translating the computational result to biology is a bit more tricky, but not insurmountable, in my opinion.
Yes, that’s precisely the point I was making.
WUT?!!?
What then are these?
- The 10 Best Evidences from Science that Confirm a Young Earth
- What is Science?
- Creation Science
- Creation Science is Real Science
If that’s not pretending to be science, then I don’t know what is.
That is a fair point. You are stating where ID as a hypothesis falls short of scientific standards, which is what I was asking for.
Just to be clear here: I’m not trying to argue that ID is science. I am just saying that if you are going to insist that it is not, you need to make the point in the right way.
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Point made.
Well… maybe it never struck me as pseudoscience because I simply never thought of it quite that way. It always looked like a theological position to me. It certainly conflicts with science and is inconsistent with the objective evidence but most of the time that just looked to me like a rejection of science rather than a pretense that this was science. Rejecting science and being inconsistent with science is not all it takes to be pseudoscience.
Taking evidence from science does not make something science. Jeesh… I even take evidence from science for such things as the existence of God. That that doesn’t make it a scientific question.
This is certainly rhetoric for the justification of pseudo-science. But discussion on what is science is not science. That is not a question which the methods of science can answer. Science does not hold itself up by its own bootstraps. But the response to this is to say that what science was in the middle ages is not what science is now and this sort of natural philosophy is certainly not what scientists mean by “science” in modern times. There is a difference and using this kind of rhetoric is comparable to redefining Christianity in a way that sounds fundamentally dishonest.
Yes creationism as a whole is generally pseudo science. Take the pseudoscience out of it and it is just theism, so it is hard to avoid the seeing this as other than pseudoscience.
Why hasn’t anybody done this yet? Who is the intelligent designer? Is there just one?
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they have, dembski marks and ewert have a whole host of these papers on evolutionary algorithms published in peer reviewed journals
they’ve also published a book combining and elucidating all their primary results in a really clear and readable manner that makes it easy to reproduce as well
book is called introduction to evolutionary informatics
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So the intelligent designer is a human?
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yes, humans are intelligent designers
Hi Eric,
We’ve been over this before elsewhere. In case it may be helpful for those who haven’t seen it here, the same things will be said again. You didn’t reply there to the key points. Perhaps here you’ll give it another try in this thread you started.
Not according to the DI’s “official” theory of “Intelligent Design” (which should be written with capital letters - see here: Reviewing “Darwin’s Doubt”: Introduction - BioLogos). According to them, “ID theory” is about a “transcendent designer” or a “supernatural designer” (they use this latter term nowadays less than Phillip Johnson used to), which cannot be reduced to “naturalism”. This is what compromises their claim that “ID theory” is a “strictly scientific” approach, since “theistic science” would expose the personal bias of the particular theorist claiming a “transcendent” or “supernatural” source. That most IDists won’t identify the “Intelligence” under question as part of their “scientific” claims, reveals a massive gap in their “strictly scientific theory”.
Dembski has been quite equivocal about it, e.g. in his “Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology” (1999). On pg. 276, he wrote: “Whether these mundane objects trace their causal histories through mundane [here he means “human”] designers or transcendent designers is irrelevant.”
Yet that’s not irrelevant to most people, and certainly not to natural scientists, who are being told they are biased in how they “do science”. Thus, we see in Dembski a kind of “design universalism”, that can in no way be considered either 1) balanced and carefully discerning, or 2) non-ideological.
I was a student in the Discovery Institute’s “summer program for students”, just as you were, Eric. But I was in the section “Intelligent Design in Social Sciences and Humanities”, before they closed it, to instead open their C.S. Lewis Fellows apologetics section. I can assure you that John G. West (more below) disagrees with you; “human designers” are simply not now (if they ever were) part of “ID theory” from the DI. West knows better than anyone that human beings must be left out of “ID theory”, otherwise “ID theory” must immediately collapse as too biased and “subjective” to be given any longer of a hearing.
“Intelligent Design” theory in social sciences and humanities (SSH) is a non-starter for several reasons. First, the term “intelligent” is redundant in front of human “designers”, since all humans are “intelligent” to some degree. Second, and more importantly, there’s already “design theory,” “design thinking” and “design history” in SSH. So, if someone wanted to study “design”, they should actively study those fields where “design” is already widely used, rather than trying to invent a new “theory” from scratch, as the DI has tried to do. Third, if one were to try to adopt “ID theory” into SSH, they would immediately open themselves up to “evil designs” and “design disasters” that are still made by “intelligent people”. This would destroy the raison d’etre of the DI’s “ID theory” in the first place, and open a moral dimension that isn’t present in biological “ID theory”.
To return to the OP’s question, speaking as a sociologist who has studied the IDM for over 15 years, IDists are “persecuted”, meaning not treated with welcome in the Academy, mainly because they have acted stubbornly regarding their “design fetish” and “design universalism”. They flat-out refuse to adapt or to change their language, even when Christian leaders reject it and have asked them nicely, gently, patiently and fairly, to either make a change or simply shut down their over-heated rhetoric. We saw this at Baylor University where Dembski had his “Waterloo” boasting moment and lost the Polanyi Centre. IDists have repeatedly over the past 15+ years demonstrated that their desire is to try to force a category error into biology specifically. That IDists have shown they simply won’t take “No” for an answer cannot be blamed on other people, despite what this OP suggests.
ID theory is a sophisticated way of saying “God did it” that seeks to turn biology into the Discovery Institute’s own late 20th c. version of “theistic science”. The DI’s leaders have ignored or avoided direct requests from Christian theologians and philosophers to distinguish “Divine Design” from “human design”. Until they can do that, in my view they do not deserve any platform to promote their ideology at public universities anywhere in the world. That’s not “persecution”, but rather wisdom displayed by both religious and public leaders. One of those is Jo Ann Gora, President of Ball State University (2004-2014), who offered that “[d]iscussions of intelligent design and creation science can have their place at Ball State in humanities or social science courses.” This was met with with accusations of being an “Orwellian attack on academic freedom” by John G. West, current vice president and senior fellow of the DI, along with being “Associate Director of the Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, which he co-founded with philosopher of science Stephen Meyer in 1996.”
Such rhetorical tactics as West regularly displays in the videos he produces for the DI is part of the reason why “ID theory” is only promoted at private evangelical universities. This is how they got their foot in the door in Brazil, at private Protestant MacKenzie University, amidst a sea of Catholics.Such a situation speaks of the politics behind the IDM, which makes rejection of ID theory, and with it, the IDists (proponents of ID theory) who would try to promote it, a very easy decision for most public universities to make.
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