posted
It appears that there's a great deal of disagreement here over what Intelligent Design actually is. There's been at least three significantly different definitions given:
Fugu: "Intelligent design is an assertion that the scientific evidence shows evolution could not have occurred without intervention from some 'super intelligence'."
swbarnes2: "To paraphrase, it's that modern organisms appeared out of nothing, with all their features completely mature. No transitions through evolution."
Mercury: "Intelligent design, simply the idea that life was designed by an intellect, be it aliens, God, multiple gods, or Jedi doesn't inherently demand a belief in creationism."
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Those three definitions are not mutually exclusive. The folks who coined the term "intelligent design" certainly embrace both fugu's and swbarnes2's definitions in full. They also use elements of Mercury's definition (specifically, the removal of explicit reference to a "god") to appeal to those who want their creationist cake with a healthy dollop of pseudoscience to legitimize it.
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Tarrsk: Those three definitions are not mutually exclusive.
But the last, the one where the designer might be Jedi or something, is exclusive with the evidence of what ID advocates say the designer is. When ID advocates hook up with Creationist textbook writers, and say that ID is the logos of John couched in scientific language, when ID is described as the means of oveturning scientific materialism to replace it with Judeo-Christain beliefs, that proves that they aren't talking about aliens.
Posts: 575 | Registered: Feb 2007
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: This desire to establish a false equivalence is central to the ID movement- because ID has nothing to offer anyone in terms of actual human progress in the understanding of science. Nothing.
You seem to be under the false impression I have stated ID is a valid theory, when I actually said the exact opposite multiple times. My purpose was to correct what I believe to be a misperception regarding ID, and nothing more.
quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: The non-definitive nature of ID is one of its sneakiest and underhanded gimmicks.
To what end exactly? To argue that ID is a unified, consistent theory would seem to me to be a much easier way of making the argument it is valid science. (Again, an argument I explicitly stated I did not support.)
Tarrsk
Thank you for correcting my mistake. All of what you wrote was my point exactly, written much more eloquently and with far more clarity. Thank you.
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quote:So if a kid comes in and says "My political and philosophical views tell me that my religious beliefs that I can drink poison and not die trump the scientific argument that doing such will kill me. The followers of Christ are protected from poison, by a mechanism that I say is beyond the boundaries of science. Hand me the Draino, teacher, please", your view is that professional educators should not contradict this?
Well, I don't know Tres's opinion on this, in fact from his later posts I don't think Tres knows his own opinion on this. But for myself, yes, the teacher should absolutely be handing out the Drano. How often do you get people volunteering to directly test big, important questions like the power of prayer and the existence of natural selection in a science classroom? And in an immediately verifiable manner, at that! No messing around with probabilities and statistics and one-fourth-sigma effects on obscure patient welfare indices; just boom, either the kid dies or he doesn't. That's real science, real religion, and real classroom participation. I give the hypothetical kid a posthumous A for effort, and D for dead. (Well - providing the experiment comes out as I expect, of course. If the grades turn out not to be posthumous, then A for providing us with extremely important experimental evidence, and co-authorship of the resulting scientific paper.)
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