What is good about ID?

[T_aquaticus]

@Mung

You posted a quote from the Discovery Institute Here’s another quote from them that’s far more relevant to your claim than the one you posted.

“As a matter of public policy, Discovery Institute opposes any effort to require the teaching of intelligent design by school districts or state boards of education.”

If you have a point to make that somehow actually addresses my original post I’d love to hear it.

As a matter of private policy, they are still pursuing an agenda that would put ID into public school classes. The only reason they have this public policy is that they were soundly defeated in court when it was revealed that ID was merely creationism renamed.

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@cwhenderson

I’d say several atheists are making positive contributions here. I’m not-so-secretly hoping to convert @T_aquaticus, @Lynn_Munter, and @John_Dalton at some point, but appreciate their time and effort, in any case

P. S. I still can’t tell for sure whether or not @NonlinOrg is an athiest, but if so, hoping there, too!

You are such the optimist!!!

@cwhenderson

1. I’d bet you a steak dinner that @NonlinOrg is no Atheist.

You will never change @T_aquaticus, nor @Lynn_Munter. They are both quite happy where they are. But I am sure Lynn would be relatively content in a U.U. congregation that wasn’t too distracted by therapeutic use of crystals!

I do not know @John_Dalton well enough to wager.

[Mazza_P (Mary)]

@gbrooks9

You will never change @T_aquaticus, nor @Lynn_Munter. They are both quite happy where they are.

Go on, prove him wrong!

@T_aquaticus. Seriously, if he is right, I really appreciate your input into my questions! Thank you!

[T_aquaticus]

@Mazza_P

@T_aquaticus. Seriously, if he is right, I really appreciate your input into my questions! Thank you!

I am an atheist, and I have no problem finding ways to present evolution to Christians in language Christians are familiar and comfortable with.

I do have an ulterior motive, but not a bad one. I think Christians are underrepresented in the sciences (at least here in the US) and the sciences are the worse for it. Some of that blame has to do with creationism. How many great scientists have we lost because they were scared away from the sciences because of their religious (i.e. creationist) upbringing? On top of that, bioethics is becoming a big part of biology (e.g. gene editing, gmo foods, “designer” babies) and bioethics will only work if all groups of people participate in the process. We atheist scientists depend on people like yourself and the beagle loving glipsnort to be our ambassadors to the Christian faith, so whatever we can do to help is helping all of science.

[Mazza_P (Mary)]

Very interesting! I hear what you are saying.

In the UK, there are probably fewer YECs. Christians tend to be ambivalent about creation. But recently, I have noticed more speakers and DVDs coming from the US, particularly with an ID viewpoint - and this is sometimes accepted with no filter by Christians who are not scientists. So the BioLogos discussion is needed more here than it used to be. I don’t know if UK scientists can help in the situation you describe in the US. Maybe we have to make sure the UK doesn’t go in the same direction!

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

I don’t want to sound blasé, @Mazza_P.

But England does have an Established Church (God loves the Anglicans!) and it doesn’t seem to be overly adventurous in its efforts to remind the inhabitants of that Scepter’d Realm that their religion features:

a] a man with magic hair,
b] another riding a talking donkey, and
c] yet another who spends 3 days inside a fish and lives to write about it.

America is the foremost place where such material becomes a matter of some consequence and the litmus test of a well-rounded American!

[benkirk (Benjamin Kirk)]

@deliberateresult

There are several false statements contained in these two short sentences. While the folks at the DI may indeed talk about ID theory, I think they would also be the first to tell you that ID theory is a work in progress (and by the way, they are doing the lion’s share of the work and making terrific progress).[/quote]

Joe, there is no ID theory. There isn’t even an ID hypothesis being articulated. It’s all just evolution-bashing.

This is why DI policy is against teaching ID in schools at this time.

The private policy is radically different from the public policy.

The fact is that a good deal of work put forth by DI fellows and contributors is written primarily from the standpoint of explaining why ID provides a better explanation of the relevant data.

But if there was a real ID hypothesis, it would look forward to predict new empirical observations. There isn’t. This pretense that science only (or even primarily) looks backwards is utterly false.

See Stephen Meyer’s “The Signature in the Cell,”

I see that Meyer denies the actual evidence. In 2000, it was shown that peptidyl transferase (the major enzymatic activity of the ribosome) is a ribozyme. In 2009, that work won the Nobel Prize. In 2009, Meyer wrote that peptidyl transferase is a protein. What’s his excuse? How does ID explain the true data?

SF goes on to charge that ID scientific research does not conform to “the scientific method,” and infers that they do not conduct experiments.

The fact is that they have no hypothesis and they don’t conduct experiments to test an ID hypothesis.

A quick visit to the body of work produced at the Biologic Institute puts the lie to both claims.

A quick visit confirms those facts.

But perhaps even more importantly, ID is primarily (or at least importantly) an origin of life theory. This being the case, ID, like the other OOL theory - the one that seeks a purely materialistic explanation for the OOL - is an historical science which seeks to understand an event or sequence of events in the distant past which is/are most likely not repeatable. As a forensic science then, the stength of any OOL theory hinges on inference to the best explanation and not so much on bench or laboratory science.

That’s completely false. There is a vast amount of bench science done to test OOL hypotheses (none of them have a status of theory yet). [quote]People like Behe and Meyer are not only gracious people and fine scientitsts, they have also stood up very well to their critics.

Behe is a former scientist. Meyer has never been a scientist.

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@deliberateresult

The problem is that BioLogos sees no need to invoke the Creator in the process of the evolution of life. This is a fundamental gulf between the two which cannot be bridged until BioLogos positively affirms the clear evidence that life requires a Creator.

@deliberateresult

Frankly, the fact you can write such a ridiculous statement shows an immense hostility towards BioLogos… or an incredible inability to comprehend the written word.

This is not the first time by you and would be equivalent to my going to a YEC blog and saying YEC’s hate Jesus.

[Mung (The Illustrious One)]

@T_aquaticus

As a matter of private policy, they are still pursuing an agenda that would put ID into public school classes. The only reason they have this public policy is that they were soundly defeated in court when it was revealed that ID was merely creationism renamed.

Everyone loves a good Conspiracy Theory!

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@Mung

Everyone loves a good Conspiracy Theory!

Really? From DI’s own website I gleaned the following:

Seven states (Alabama, Minnesota, New Mexico, Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas) have statewide science curriculum policies that require or encourage learning about some of the scientific controversies relating to evolution. Texas’s science standards require that students “analyze, evaluate and critique scientific explanations…”. Texas also requires students to “analyze and evaluate” core evolutionary claims including “common ancestry,” “natural selection,” and “adaptation,” and also to “compare and contrast scientific explanations for cellular complexity.” Additionally, teachers must help students to “examine scientific explanations” for both “the origin of DNA” and “abrupt appearance and stasis in the fossil record.”

Four states (Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi) have adopted statutes or resolutions that seek to protect the rights of teachers and/or students to discuss the scientific evidence for and against Darwinian evolution or other scientific theories in the curriculum.

From the Discovery Institute’s Science Education Policy

The argument about science standards continues to rage in Texas, as you can see here.

[heddle (David Heddle)]

I have an different take on the question of probabilities and fine tuning. I think everyone gets it backwards (which of course means it is likely I who am confused). First of all, I think that the fine tuning problem is completely unrelated to the probability of the constants. The fine tuning problem is simply this:

Fine Tuning: The habitability of the universe appears to be very sensitive to the values of the physical constants.

Or, if you don’t want to introduce life into the definition:

Fine Tuning: The ability of the universe to produce rocks appears to be very sensitive to the values of the physical constants.

To produce rocks the universe must produce heavy elements. To produce heavy elements requires stars and galaxies, and some of the stars need to explode to seed space with the heavy elements so that rocks can form. As a happy byproduct, heavy elements (and complex chemistry) are minimal ingredients for any kind of life. But tweak the constants just a bit and their are no stars, no galaxies, no rocks, no heavy elements, no life.

This definition says nothing about probability. It is all about sensitivity, not probability.

And here is where the IDers make a mistake in my opinion. They try to connect the sensitivity to low probability. The fine-tuning/cosmological ID argument should not be based on improbability, even though it is often expressed that way. It is based on sensitivity. As many have correctly pointed out, there is no way to calculate the probability of various constants.

It’s tempting, but not correct, to relate sensitivity to improbability. However, at least in my opinion, the opposite is a better approach. The more unlikely the constants, the more they appear to come from a random draw, then the more indirect credibility (again, this is my opinion) for non-ID explanations, such as the superstring landscape or other multiverse models. After all, the multiverse explanation for fine tuning easily accommodates low probability–it does so with infinite or semi-infinite universes with different constants. Of course a select few will hit a Goldilocks combination.

The best thing that could ever happen for cosmological ID is a fundamental theory that predicts the values of the constants. In that case, the constants would not be improbable but, on the contrary, have a probability of unity. That would mean, given life’s sensitivity to their values, that habitability was built, in the form of those laws explaining the constants, into the very fabric of the universe. That would be an enormous bit of circumstantial evidence in favor of cosmological ID.

I’ve been tilting at this windmill for a long time. Truth in advertising: I am persona non grata in the ID movement.