Make a note of the year – we appear to agree! 
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Lol. Appear is the appropriate word.
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(Noting the date would be overly precise for the number of times I expect it to occur. )
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MmmmNa hah. Inspired by the sublime talks of Alan Guth, something physical does universes. Quantum perturbations occur in some infinite matrix and already ordered energy, with 11-17 dimensions and 25 fundamental physical constants exactly assigned with that geometry with no possibility of variation, expands.
Something grounds that something.
Could be God.
Hello, Christy.
Usually I don’t enter these conversations because by the time I see one there’s already 80 lengthy responses and I don’t want to read them. I was hoping for a little more reaction to your post because I’ve been trying to understand why there is so much hostility to ID around here.
A few thoughts, in no particular order:
Well, as a general maxim that’s obviously true. Otherwise SETI would be a total waste of time. (It probably is, anyway). The bone of contention seems to be whether it’s applicable to biology. That’s really a philosophical question. One could deny it applies outright. One could also accept the possibility yet remain unpersuaded by the existing arguments.
Criticisms of “irreducible complexity” only address a particular argument for ID, not the underlying thesis. I’m starting to find the arguments on both sides to be irreducibly complex and have no intention of stepping in.
The fine-tuning has been mostly observed in astronomy, physics, cosmology, chemistry, and geology. Francis Collins seemed to find it compelling. I’m not sure whether you were trying to file it under ID. I would see them more as separate, but partially overlapping.
As a young teen growing up on agnostic evolution I became persuaded of Theism mostly through the design argument. It spoke to me. Nothing I’ve learned in the last 50 years has made it any less compelling; quite the opposite. I recently read “The Language of God” to try and understand Dr. Collins, and BioLogos, better. It sounded like the moral argument and evidence of fine-tuning really spoke to him. I don’t see those as any more or less compelling than biology-oriented design arguments. Visit a different group, and they are just as contentious. It just seems that God reaches different people in different ways, and we’re all biased toward thinking our own reasons are the best.
It’s fair enough to say that scientifically and logically we can’t “prove” God. Nor can I prove scientifically that I’m not a Boltzman brain, living in a simulation, or just one of infinite “me’s” in a quantum multiverse. But I feel safe enough excluding those on philosophical grounds, as do most scientists. Science can’t answer life’s most fundamental questions. Still, science can limit the possibilities and point us in certain directions, as it did for Dr. Collins.
I’m not sure if this addresses your question, but I’m not sure what you mean by lower-case intelligent design either, or if that is a distinction without a difference, or a difference of style, or of philosophy.
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Hi @Christy! I appreciate that you have tried to define Intelligent Design, but I do fear there are as many definitions of that as there are defenders and detractors! And you have nicely summarized a number of the key arguments.
But … (doncha hate that word!!!) … from your post, I find it hard to differentiate between id
and ID
because how can you say the first without seeing something, some “feature” somewhere, that you really don’t think is a result of chance? You would say the first because you feel you have some evidence somewhere of intelligence, and evidence of intelligence, it seems to me, implies something that “could not have arisen by chance”.
Perhaps ID is associated with certain people, and maybe one could say ID is a branch or subset of id, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how one can assert id without buying some tenet(s) of ID. Or is ID just how the DI approaches id? Thoughts?
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As a fairly recent convert to lowercase from uppercase ID, one significant influencing factor on the ‘competing’ website, PeacefulScience.org, was that neutral drift can and does produce complexity. Another is that neo-Darwinism really went by the way in 1968, I think it was, and the neutral theory of evolution and population genetics have been established as the real deal.
I can only answer for myself, but while I see intelligent design as a given as a EC adherent, I stop short of pretending to know how that manifests itself. It seems like ID (capital letters) refers to the organizations who sadly seem to have taken an movement founded on deceptively getting religious creationism in the back door, and have continued being more interested in tearing down than building up with some of their publications.
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I was hoping some people from the ID sympathetic side would chime in and rescue this thread.
For me the defining thing of ID is the pursuit of identifying intelligence supposedly via the scientific method. It’s the idea of proof and what kind of proof that separate affirming intelligent design and Intelligent Design.
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Sure, lots of people point to fine tuning in some kind of apologetic way. Some people maybe more in the realm of philosophy or theology than science though. I wasn’t trying to imply that ID “owns” the idea, just that they use fine tuning arguments as part of their proof of intelligence.
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