But the concept is incompatibly different if you take the machine to be designed instead of the widgets to be designed.
By an extraordinary coincidence, all those are also claims made by creationism.
So ID is a subset of creationism.
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You hit that nail on the head. The “Wedge Document” defines DI’s raison d’etre and it could not be more clear or disturbing…
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There are ID proponents representing each of those two notions.
In any case, the atheists here not only don’t believe the widgets were designed, but don’t believe the machine was designed, either, so they have no more respect for ID proponents who affirm only the latter than they do for those who affirm the former. If suddenly Nelson, Meyer, and Dembski all said: “We’ve changed our mind; we no longer insist that new information had to be inserted miraculously at several points; we think the design was all implanted before the Big Bang, and after that, the universe evolved wholly naturalistically,” it wouldn’t make any difference, because no atheist here believes there was any design at all. ID would still be uniformly execrated here, at least by the atheist commenters.
No, they just agree on a number of points. If I found four points where the Republican Party agreed with the Democratic Party, would it prove the Republicans were a subset of the Democrats? Or vice versa?
If anything, the logical order would be the other way around, with “intelligent design” being the more generic position, and “creationism” being a specific form of intelligent design, i.e., a form that insisted on the literal truth of Genesis (and of the Bible as a whole). That this is a better way of conceiving the logical relation between the two is shown by the fact that if Christianity were disproved tomorrow, e.g., if the body of Jesus were found decayed in a grave under Jerusalem, with a note confessing that the early church had stolen the body and faked the Resurrection, it would be still be possible to hold to every tenet of intelligent design, whereas if the design of the universe were disproved tomorrow, it would be impossible to maintain Christian faith, which without a designer of the world makes zero sense.
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It’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of evidence and theory. First, ID proponents can’t explain the mountains of data we already have, such as the patterns of sequence similarities and differences I talked about earlier. They can’t even explain why we see a nested hierarchy. Second, they have no method for detecting design other than their own subjective beliefs. “It looks designed to me” is the ID method.
One of those agreements seems to be the supernatural creation of separate species. That’s creationism.
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That’s just wrong. It would change the claims from those for which there is good disconfirming evidence to one for which evidence, pro or con, is likely to be forever unavailable. That’s a distinct improvement. And it would take ID entirely out of the realm of biology, thus removing most of the conflict.
Better to say that creationism is a subset of ID, as you allude to below, but it would be useful to add that it’s by far the largest subset, especially among its less prominent supporters, like the old Dover school board, but also among some of the major ones, like James Tour.
It would be possible, but would it be likely? Without religion, would ID exist at all?
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I don’t think that is quite accurate. While most atheists would disagree with that position, they would probably find it more respectable and honest than those individuals’ current endorsement of ID, as it would essentially be an endorsement of theistic evolution. Many atheists, myself included, simply find theistic evolution to be an inadequately argued position which, nonetheless, does not fundamentally distort or misrepresent the extant scientific evidence.
ID, OTOH, is nothing more than a pack of lies told by a pack of liars.
The difference matters.
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Yes, it is. Neither you nor Faizal nor any of the other atheists believe there is a designer, and you aren’t personally open (as opposed to purely formally open) to the possibility that there is one. That’s quite evident from five years of conversation with all of you. You have tipped your hands by the number of remarks you have made about non-scientific topics – about the Bible, about religion, about God, about ethics, about politics, and so on – and it’s clear that on the basis of a whole set of considerations even outside of scientific ones you reject the existence of a God or Designer. You choose to present your rejection of the idea of a designer purely in terms of scientific language, but it’s quite evident that you have extra-scientific motivations for that rejection.
No. I’ve already explained this to you several times. ID does not require supernatural creation of separate species, and in fact, if you are using “species” in a traditional Linnaean sense, some IDers, like Behe, have said straight out that evolution, even Darwinian evolution, can produce new species without miracles. Denton thinks that not only species but phyla, kingdoms, etc. are produced without miracles. ID takes no stand one way or the other on “supernatural intervention”, even though many ID proponents, as individuals, think such intervention has taken place.
ID isn’t about demonstrating miracles. It’s about demonstrating design. You can argue plausibly that ID has not yet succeeded in demonstrating design, and I’d probably agree with you. But it’s not creationism, which affirms design as an article of faith and then looks for evidence to buttress a conclusion which is already settled in advance of the investigation.
Thank you.
Which I’ve agreed to about 50 to 100 times here.
I can only speak for myself, and for some others I’ve met through the ID movement who have shared their positions with me. If you showed me that Jesus had never lived, I’d still be an ID proponent. That may not be true of the majority of ID proponents, but it’s true of me. Of course, if you proved that no God existed, and hence that there was no designer of the world, then I would abandon ID, but I can’t imagine how anyone could do that.
As for your last question, hard to say. We know that design arguments don’t require Bible-based religion, since Greeks who hadn’t read the Bible came up with them. But did those arguments spring ultimately from motives of pagan religion? Maybe, but that’s not certain. Certainly the particular form ID has taken in the US, the DI and so on, would not have existed without the Christian social matrix of America, but ID as a concept does not depend on that matrix. Arguments to design seem to be as old as science and philosophy themselves.
My own interest in design arguments sprang not from Bible commitments but from reading Greek and Roman authors and Hume and Paine and so on. So for me anyway, ID as a way of exploring and interpreting nature can certainly exist without much reference to religion, though of course its conclusions (as opposed to its methods and premises) are religion-friendly in a general way.
One would wonder how you determined that.
Yes. But that would not, by itself, indicate that we are not open to the idea. Just that we have not found any compelling reason, whether thru science or any other discipline, to believe that such a designer exists.
Whereas you explicitly admit that your belief in a “designer” is contingent on your belief in theism:
I believe that is known as “Saying the quiet part out loud.” Those hundreds “ID insiders” with whom you claim to be intimate won’t be too happy with you. And they’ll be absolutely apoplectic over this:
Did someone secretly spike your drink with a truth serum or something? That’s quite a change from your usual doggedly ideological defense of every ID utterance.
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No, they wouldn’t. Denton has been savaged here almost as badly as the others, particularly by you. Most people here don’t respect Denton’s position at all. And no, I’m not inviting you to rehearse your past excuses for dismissing Denton without having done anywhere near enough reading of his work, so if you start down that path I’ll simply cease to reply.
Also, while Denton’s position could be called theistic evolution in an older sense, it’s not theistic evolution in the more recent sense that BioLogos and some ASA people have made popular. Theistic evolution in the BioLogos sense either entirely rejects design arguments, even when they don’t rely on on miracles, or accepts them only for arbitrarily sectioned-off parts of nature, e.g., Francis Collins rules them out in biology but thinks they may be OK for the origin of the universe and of natural laws, and maybe for the origin of life. The view I’m speaking of regards the entire universe as shot through with design, and therefore thinks that design arguments apply across all scientific fields. And the arguments for that view cannot be looked at piecemeal, but only as a connected whole.
Why?
Yes, that’s why I said “religion”, period.
Though, oddly, it seems not to exist that way for you, considering your constant references to religion and to your opponents’ supposed lack thereof. It seems much more a holy war for you than any sort of scientific argument.
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First, their beliefs don’t have a lot to do with the amount of respect they get, and I don’t see why it should. Maybe you respect people because you agree with them and disrespect those you disagree with, but it’s a poor reason. ID has some rather more important house-cleaning to do if they want my respect - and a lot of it.
Second, the personal beliefs aren’t really the issue at all, it’s what they promote under the ID banner,
If ID really were a method of design detection, then the failure to detect any such interventions should rule out any claim of their necessity.
Third, it would ar least be a move towards a coherent alternative to naturalistic science, even if it would be philosophical rather than fully scientific. The fact that the ID movement doesn’t see that as important is rather telling.
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Cute of you to think that you can read my mind.
If I was presented with evidence for the supernatural or for design I would absolutely change my mind. This is a matter of evidence, not belief.
I reject their existence because of a lack of evidence.
What the ID insiders really think is that it is supernatural creation of species or created kinds. That much is obvious from all of their writings.
Yes, there is a lack of evidence.
" To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God." --The Discovery Institute, “The Wedge Document”
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It’s has never been about demonstrating Design. It’s about how a hypothesis about Design could ever be falsified.
Don’t forget CDesign Proponentists.
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Yes. Because his arguments are ludicrously bad. He is a proponent of ID, not of theistic evolution (as you go on to admit). The pertinent difference being that he gets the science wrong and thereby misrepresents evolution as “A Theory in Crisis.”
What is your point?
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Completely irrelevant to what I’m discussing here (ID as a theory about nature, not ID as a social movement), for reasons I’ve discussed a dozen times here.
Give some examples of what would count as evidence. Write in plain language, not the language of population genetics etc., so that an educated layperson who is not a biologist can understand the sort of evidence you are talking about.
Epistemological error there. Lack of evidence should leave you agnostic, yet you “reject”. You must be pretty eager to “reject” if you don’t have evidence against, but only lack of evidence for. This is an example of the bias I was talking about.
But you don’t know the insiders. You have no friendly or personal relations with any ID proponent, as far as I know. Have you ever had a beer with any of them? Have you ever even met any of them?
Denton is a Fellow of Discovery. He does not believe what you just said ID people believe. There are others, less famous, like him – I’ve conversed with them many times.
First of all, that ancient statement is not a statement of what ID is as a theory, but a statement about an overall broad agenda for the Discovery Institute, that includes social goals as well as scientific ones. Second, even as it stands, it is not, as you imply, about “creationism”. You are making the fundamental error of equating “creationism” with “belief that the world was created”. The former is a narrow doctrine which insists that Genesis is literal history; the latter is a broad general doctrine which is held by all Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and does not require a literalist reading of Genesis. So even if we took it that this ancient statement (from a tentative internal working paper) was still Discovery policy, it would not prove that Discovery was championing “creationism”; it would prove only that Discovery was championing a generic theism. You should learn the meaning of theological terms before you attempt to score argumentative points from them.
In the only example you ever gave of his getting the science wrong, from a Bio-Complexity article, you did not understand what you were reading. This is not surprising, as you admitted that you only took one biology course in your entire university career. And you refused to read more of this thought, to get a bigger tapestry which would have helped you to see how rushed and inadequate your judgment was.
His use of that phrase, and its misunderstanding, I have covered here many times before, but you have conveniently managed to forget. Read his third book for his correction of the misunderstanding. I’ve even pinpointed the chapter and page for you, on some post or other in this maze. In any case, in none of the six books of his that I have recommended to you does the “theory in crisis” notion appear. So you’re attacking something peripheral, doubtless because you fear to engage with the central.
By the way, he is both an ID theorist and an evolutionist, as every English-speaker would have used the word “evolutionist” in everyday conversation, up until the latest round of culture wars started and certain people (including yourself) decided to arbitrarily insist on all kinds of extra requirements before someone could count as an “evolutionist”.
A supernatural deity appearing before me and creating a new species would certainly do it.
It’s a bit like asking someone what evidence it would take to convince them the Earth is flat. The evidence is in. It is overwhelmingly in favor of common ancestry and evolution. We can even find the fingerprint of the same natural processes we see today operating in the past, such as the fingerprint of different types of mutations in the genomes of species.
However, I am open to whatever ID/creationists have. Perhaps they can show me an angle I haven’t considered. Hasn’t happened yet, but let’s see.
Yes, I reject conclusions that lack evidence. Once evidence is given, then I will consider accepting them. It’s a basic burden of proof.
C’mon Eddie. It’s pretty obvious. For example, Ann Gauger has made her views pretty obvious. She rejects common ancestry between chimps and humans, and has clearly stated a belief in separately created humans.
The type of ID that Denton favors is found nowhere in the literature released by the DI nor on their website.
Given their long standing rejection of common ancestry, where do you think they have new species or species groups coming from? Meyer continually argues that there are no ancestors for the groups of species seen in the Cambrian. Where do you think Meyer has those species coming from?
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Hee hee. Right, “Eddie”. Remind me, again, how you answered my question regarding whether Denton provided the correct non-Darwinian explanation for the existence of the pentadactyl forelimb across multiple species.
Uh huh. Are you now doing a postdoc in hypocrisy? Let us remember that you, “Eddie”, claim to be able to tell, not what OOL researchers have written in their articles, but what they were thinking when they wrote it without even reading a single one of their articles, but just from brief quotations James Tour provided in his own video.
Shameless.
And since my point was that he is not a theistic evolutionist, as that term is usually used, you have again wasted your time writing something that is irrelevant to my point.
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Such a concession would be theological suicide for evangelical Christians because it would put deism on par with theism. Meyer tries to argue that front loading is not possible because the chemical makeup of the Big Bang could never lead to the complex chemistry necessary for life. A kind of cosmic “irreducible complexity,” so to speak. So, God has to pop in once in a while with more instructions and material to keep the system moving along.
I don’t disagree with your point, but look at the context of what I wrote. I wasn’t suggesting Meyer etc. should do that; I was saying that even if they did do that, they still would not be respected by the atheists here. You’re quite right, it would get them into hot water at home, and, since there would be no compensating gain in respect from the atheists, it would be a lose-lose change of position.
!?!?
They’ve published six of his books, plus videos with him.
No. “They” have not rejected common ancestry. Some of them reject common ancestry. Even most of them. But not “they” as a collective. Even John Harshman here will tell you that some of them accept it, albeit a minority.
He tells us: A massive infusion of new biological information. And he’s pretty clear that this comes from an intelligence beyond nature. But that’s Meyer; that’s not ID. Why do I need to keep making the same precise distinctions to you, over and over again? Are you uncommonly stubborn, or are you having trouble understanding plain English words?
Yes, and that’s Ann, not ID per se. Tell me where you see separately created humans in the writings of Denton. Dave Springer, who used to run Uncommon Descent, also had a Denton-like view.
How many times do I have to say it?: Yes, most IDers are some sort of creationist. But ID itself does not require creationism, as the counterexamples prove. All you have to do is agree with John Harshman, and say that most IDers are creationists, but there are some outliers, and our disagreement vanishes. You seem to want a showdown when a showdown is unnecessary.
Note that when I have used such a line of argument here, John Harshman has jumped on me for restoring to “whataboutism”. I complained that you had not read sufficient Denton to understand his thought, and instead of dealing with that, you turn around and tell me that I supposedly did the same thing elsewhere. But even if I did, that would not excuse your doing it.