What is scientific about ID?

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This isn't about "winning," facts are facts and rejecting facts for blind faith does nothing to make those facts any less real. Science does not need religion, Science is Truth and Openness, Religion is Ignorance and Dogmatism.

well first, thanks for putting words into my mouth (and effectively many other people here).


second: my problem with faith is that it cannot be questioned or challenged so my reaction is that of an even harder swing against such resistance. faith can help many people just due to the power of the mind and give many people much more willpower. conversely, however, it can also render people slaves to morally bankrupt people who take advantage of them (see: organized religion) and encourages people to be intellectually bankrupt (see: most people, actually). this leads us back to the thought that faith cannot be challenged or questioned. people put so much emotional attachment that they feel personally attacked when something they attribute to their god is questioned and it's stupid.

lol
Are people still here? Creationism? It's 2008.

One more thing, Ragtime: you put the quote from my private message to you into the wrong context. The complete quote was:

My comment on bearing false witness referred to your accusations against me, not your opinion on ID.

I just wished to point out that your statement underestimates the ability of humans to create descriptives for observational or imagined concepts.

Our ability to craft new words far outstrips our ability to rationalize. For example, there are a good million words in the english language. Assuming that it takes 1 second to say any one word(some are short, some are very long), then it would take 1 million seconds to say every word in english, or about 12 days. however.. once you string together two word sentences you now take 144 days to explore every possibility and combination. Thats just a 2 word sentence! Once we go to three words its suddenly 1728 days, or about 4.7 years. here is the progression from that.



See that last number? 14 million years! Even Castro doesnt do speeches that long!

This is assuming THREE things. That the speaker is conversant with every word in english, that the speaker does not speak any other language, and that no new words are being created.

We are human. We dont use singular words to describe things, we use sentences. Our ability to articulate concepts already outstretches the length of time we will be on earth. It far outstretches the time that any extant languages have been around, and its growing faster than we have time to fully explore the possibilities!

Consider this: descriptive language predates science and religion. Even the art of refusing to describe phenomena(religion) uses it. consider...

person one: The event cannot be explained.
person two: what do you mean?
person one: its a miracle!
person two: whats a miracle?
person one: an act of god
person two: what is an act of god?
person one: its an event that defies rationalization
person two: why cant we rationalize it?
person one: we just dont have the words!
person two: is it too hard to explain?
person one: yes thats it. somethings just cannot be put into words

But you see, you can. The two people are gnawing away at the concept, refining it, shaping a common understanding of it so that all people can grasp the idea. They are not answering why but rather what. The former is the purveyance of science, and the later is the domain of religion. Its at the core of humanity to explain or articulate. Both are descriptive methodolgies.

Language will NEVER be exhausted. I havent even broached visual art, music, scents, tactile experience..

Well, let's see here.

Creationism: The theory that it takes place just like the Bible says. This is trouble. There's two creation stories. The first one has God creating Adam and Eve at the same time. The second one has him creating Adam and then creating Eve out of his rib. This is grossly inconsistent and hopelessly confusing, unless you consider the whole story a parable, in which case Jesus died because a fictional character committed the first sin, thus dooming all real humanity to a fall. Amazing that a fictional character can doom so many real people.

Intelligent Design: The theory that a supernatural designer created the universe. This is more general than The Bible married Creationism is, but still has that whole supernatural thing going on. What if it's really advanced aliens or some other form of super-advanced being. Not supernatural, just a more evolved form of a natural thing than ourselves. Think how complex we are next to single-celled organisms. We can design a house, something they could never do or even comprehend. So if we want to teach that it's equally likely that superadvanced aliens created the universe as that God did it, then fine, I'm all for discussing theories in science class. What? The aliens thing sounds kooky? So did the Earth being round, the Earth revolving around the Sun, and the Earth not being the center of the universe. Science has proven them all, and religion was wrong on them all. Who's kooky again?

-Frank

Aliens. That's what kooky again.

ID advocates usually avoid this issue by claiming ID can't say anything about the designer. A leaked strategy document from the Discovery Institute was used in the Dover trial to demonstrate that this neutrality is only for show.

Another issue they don't mention, and which an ID advocate evaded when asked in a televised debate, is the complexity of the designer. ID advocates often claim that complexity can only come about by design. So how complex is the designer, and what is the origin of the designer's complexity? Is it designers all the way up, in an infinite series? That gaping hole alone would make ID unsatisfactory as a scientific theory, because it doesn't solve the problem of complexity is posits and claims to solve, it only moves it out of sight.

ID would have us believe that there is but one Designer behind all things seen & unseen. A first, last, and only Designer. A Designer whose intelligence is revealed throug higher and higher scientific revelation about nature.

I would not put ID in the realm of biology or astrophysics. ID cannot fairly be called a science, since it isn't fact-based. Which is to say, no hard data. Rather I think ID is more about inferring and making connections between things. It's about the revelations occurring to those who already believe in a Creator.

Nothing, really, is scientific about ID.

IDer have simply taken the cosmological fallacy and rewritten it in scientific-sounding jargon.

That's because ID is not intended to be scientific or logically coherent. It's scientific-sounding sophistry designed to mislead people. ID is nothing but a way to manipulate public opinion and thus get politicians to legislate religious nonsense into science textbooks. This is why they keep using the same talking points and memes over and over again even though they have been shown to be completely wrong, because non-scientists will fall for the BS memes. The Climate Change denialists work the same way, they don't care about being right, they only care about manipulating public opinion.

It is creationism, invoking non-empirical causality, with a different face.

What a perfect, precise definition of evolutionism.

And the same can be said for blood transfusions - it is an evil, deadly practice. 99% of the doctors have been deceived and think it may save lives under certain circumstances. Fortunately, a few religious groups are trying to reverse everyone's opinion.

</sarcasm>

What about those evil heretics who promote heliocentrism? All true believers know that the earth is the center of the universe!

http://www.fixedearth.com/

http://geocentricity.com/

No.