Kitzmiller, the Universe, and Everything

Or just find it here.

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$200? I guess it’s rare, now that most of the copies have been nailed to outhouse walls.

maybe i didnt got your point. are you saying that ID is religion?

ok. but who said otherwise? ID is still science since it has scientific evidence for design.

do you agree that basically any scientist who believe in creationism also think that evolution isnt scientific or that its false? if so we do have many scientists that think that evolution isnt scientific.

if you refer to design by humans i agree. and this fact alone also strengthen the claim that a cat need super design.

we do have cases of artificial genomes. so its something very similar.

are you asking for evidence for design?

What hypothesis? We just had a 1000+ post thread asking for an ID hypothesis, and none was seen.

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Interesting snippets:

These scientists, known as design theorists, advocate an alternative theory of biological origins known as design theory or the theory of intelligent design (sometimes abbreviated simply design or intelligent design). They have developed design theory in scientific and scholarly journals as well as in such books as Darwin’s Black Box, The Mystery of Life’s Origin, Mere Creation, The Design Inference , and the supplemental high school textbook Of Pandas and People .

… the intelligent design textbook Of Pandas and People…

So Pandas was not a creationist textbook, but an “intelligent design theory” textbook endorsed by the DI leadership.

@Eddie has some ‘splainin’ to do.

I love how one of the books they recommend is called Mere Creation. Here’s part of the description of this book on the DI site.

Proponents of design believe they have reasons independent from “naturalistic ignorance” to invoke design. For Christian theists, this justification can come from Romans 1, which says that men are “without excuse” if they deny the evidence for a Creator.

I half agree. I do believe that ID could be considered science, in the same sense that flat earth theory could be considered science. Both make claims about the physical world that, at least in principle, could be tested.

What they also have in common, however, is that both ideas are without any evidential support whatever, but their adherents continue to deny this and insist they are right.

You are manifestly among the most scientifically ignorant members of this group. I do not mean that as an insult, it is just a fact of which you should be aware. There are other subjects for discussion on this group on which I am equally ignorant, and if someone were to point it out I would be in no position to deny it. I just think you need to appreciate that so you can understand why the fact that ID appears convincing to you is of no significance whatsoever.

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You suggest that ID makes claims about the physical world that could be tested, at least in principle.

Can you give us some examples of such claims? I am asking, because my first reaction is that this is not true. For it to be true, ID must generate testable hypotheses that are entailments of the claim. So what are the entailments of saying that 'certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by intelligent design"? I have a hard time of thinking of any, apart from stating that some things will never, ever be explained without ID. Good luck proving that negative.

They don’t even present an objective metric by which to judge what is ‘best’.

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@scd

If there was scientific evidence that Design is Super-Natural, instead of natural, we wouldnt have to argue about it.

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I don’t have a specific answer. I just see no reason that, if there had existed some intelligent being that had created or designed the life forms on earth, this could not be demonstrated thru empirical evidence available to us. I don’t think it’s a hypothesis much worth taking seriously, so I don’t spend much time thinking about situations in which it could be true.

ID Creationists do make other potentially falsifiable claims, e.g. that there exist structures or systems that could not arise thru evolutionary processes. This could be tested in theory by simulating every possible mutational path by which a particular system could have evolved and demonstrating that all of these have at least one step that would be immediately lethal. But that would probably be impossible to test in practice and, in any event, is not an entailment of ID. Even so, ID Creationists do try to make a similar argument. Behe’s whole “irreducible complexity” schtick was one such attempt.

I don’t think practical testability should be a demarcation criteria for a scientific idea. If it was not possible to build the Large Hadron Collider, IMHO the Higgs Boson would still qualify as a scientific hypothesis.

Affirmative, as stated in my prior post:

Of course not. What a bizarre thing to say. Look at Behe, who affirms that evolution actually happens and can be responsible for significant differences between creatures. At the other end of the spectrum, look at the “baraminologists,” whose “theory” REQUIRES evolution to be powerful enough to generate immense amounts of novelty over just the last few thousand years. And thinking that “evolution is false” is not the same thing as thinking that “evolution is not science.” Look at Kurt Wise, for example.

No, it doesn’t, because there is no reason to think that a cat needed design at all. There simply is no “designer” the existence of which can be empirically demonstrated which is capable of doing the job, so where is your mechanism? And where is the design implementation mechanism? A worker in the Ford plant would surely point out that while cars DO come about through “design,” design is not sufficient to make a car. You have NO explanation: no explanation of how design happens, no explanation of how it’s implemented.

All you have is the notion that a cat is so conceptually similar to a manufactured mousetrap that if the one was designed, the other must be. That is a hideously poor analogy, not a scientific theory.

If you are prepared to say that Craig Venter designed cats, you will need evidence that Venter was around to do the work. Why don’t you ask him if he was?

Yes. But let me ask you for something else, too.

As you know, there is a long, documented faunal succession in the chordates. If we want to go from Pikaia to Panther, we start with things like Pikaia and its ilk, we move along to the cyclostomes, then the gnathostomes, then bony fish, lobe-finned fish, basal tetrapods, amniotes, pelycosaurs, therapsids, mammals, Carnivora, cats, and then – the pinnacle of all creation – panthers. Where in that faunal succession are you under the impression that the morphological change is too great? Tell me what the fossils are which you think are on each side of your gap, and explain why, with reference to known principles of biology, that gap cannot be crossed.

The best bet is that this question – which nobody should ever become a creationist without asking first – has never occurred to you at all. If you have an answer which is coherent, it’ll be the first one I’ve ever received after asking many people this (well, okay, I usually ask “Pikaia to Protestant,” but you asked about cats). If you have an answer that isn’t badly mistaken, I will be shocked.

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There is a difference between untestable in principle, and testable in principle but not (yet) in practice. The Higgs boson fell in the latter category. The very generic and vague claim of ID (in its current form I quoted above) falls in the former category, in my opinion.

Even if we found evidence of an ancient intelligence entity that somehow might have manipulated biological processes at the molecular level, we still wouldn’t be able to say if that entity is actually a ‘better explanation’ than natural processes, let alone the ‘best explanation’. Both processes may have been at work, in different degrees, or the intelligent agent might have been able, but in practice unwilling to do it. Who could say?

Moreover, finding such evidence only pushes the question back one level.

The ID claim as it stands is way too underspecified to be considered scientifical, imo. Fine as a philosophical concept, but without concrete entailments, how does one get to grips with it using our scientific methods and tools?

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Word.

ID Creationist apologists never seem to acknowledge, or even understand: The criteria by which we differentiate objects that are designed (mouse traps) from those that are not (cats) has nothing to do with their complexity in comparison to other things in the universe.

It has to do with whether our experience is that they come into being by natural processes. Cats do, mousetraps don’t.

Paley’s watchmaker argument failed before he completed his first sentence: “In crossing a heath…” He already acknowledges that we instantly distinguish the watch as being in a different category from the heath surrounding it. But it is the origin of the heath that Paley is trying to describe.

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You may be confusing the testing of the mechanism with the mechanism itself. The observation of the designers existence as necessary to disqualify design as a scientific claim is a flawed argument as this precedent does not exist in science.

We don’t directly observe electro magnetism or gravity we observe the effect of these mechanisms.

There are plenty of reasons to think a cat needed a designer as there are reasons to believe a watch needs a designer.

It’s not, though. The problem is that you are characterizing the manner in which the complex thing, be it a cat or whatever, comes about. A design process about which nothing can be said, mirroring the theological claims of inscrutability, ineffability and mystery, is nothing. There is no way to distinguish such a design process from other unknown causes. When you have a known designer and mechanism, THEN you have a force known to operate in the world, and THEN you may attribute things to that cause. You cannot characterize a process of which you can say nothing as “design.” To do so strips the very word “design” of all operative meaning.

Right. We demonstrate that these forces do actual work in the real world. In the case of design you have no such demonstration; we know of HUMAN designers who design things in the real world, so the claim that the Ford Focus is designed is a very strong one. The claim that mere complexity demonstrates design is just silly, without a demonstration that this “design” process actually operates in the real world.

Except, of course, that there aren’t. We know of entities capable of designing watches, and we know of industrial processes which are used to produce objects of like character. We know that it is quite easy, for example, for people with the right tools to shape brass into various mechanical parts that will help the watch to operate. We know of no process by which nature may do this – that doesn’t mean nature couldn’t, but it does mean that we would have no basis to think that the watch arose naturally.

Where do squirrels come from? They come from squirrels. No design there. And we have a marvelous faunal succession that demonstrates that once there were no squirrels, but there were more generalized rodents, and so on – back to Pikaia, back to undifferentiated worms with about three cell types. There is no place in that succession where design is needed; no known designer capable of doing the work; no design process capable of doing the work; no known process for implementing design capable of doing the work. In the case of the watch, we have all of these.

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Again claims like this have no basis in science. Gravity for example has had 2 theories for several hundred years that contain a model and demonstration of that model. Gravity has yet to have a detailed explanation of how matter really attracts another mass or curves space time.

Your objection needs grounding.

This claim is silly but this is not the design arguments by Meyer and Behe. Got to run but we can continue later.

It will always be the case that observations of forces which regularly work in the world lead to more observations of what causes the cause. But this is very different from ID, where you cannot demonstrate that your postulated force works in the world, and where you say, in response to the suggestion that you ought to do this, that the Designer, Hallowed Be His Name, is inscrutable and that his intentions, actions and methods are beyond the scope of possible inquiry.

So, for example, it turns out that while resistance as a phenomenon in electricity is a known, demonstrable phenomenon, if you start drilling down into the underlying reasons WHY some part of the flow of current through a resistive material is converted into heat, there are significant problems to which we do not know the answer. Likewise, with gravity: we can observe that gravity is real, but the mechanics by which it operates are less clear. With ID, you cannot demonstrate that it is real; this is not remotely comparable to the situation with gravity.

Well, but I am familiar with those arguments and they really have nothing else. In Behe’s case he tries to make something of irreducible complexity, but falls far short of being able to demonstrate the absence of any possible pathway to the construction of any “IC” system. What one is left with is the bare contention that if something is complicated enough, it must have been designed, despite substantial evidence that it had precursors which are an alternative to that design, e.g., the faunal succession.

Seriously: demonstrate that supernatural design actually operates in the real world. If you can’t, why should anyone infer that these non-demonstrable processes account for anything in the past? One may “believe” such a thing without such evidence, but it is very hard to see how reliance upon a force never seen to have acted even once is a compelling argument. Show that it works.

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@Puck_Mendelssohn is new here, so he does not know how many dozens of time you have been corrected on this claim, which you continue to repeat over and over, ad nauseum.

One more time: The existence of gravity is demonstrated by direct observation.

The existence of mutations, natural selection, drift, etc. is demonstrated by direct observation.

The process of something coming into physical existence purely because a “mind” thought up a “design” has not been observed, and there is not even the hint of a possible mechanism by which this can happen in all of science, and not even in ID literature.

“Poof! Magic!” is not a mechanism.

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This can go on forever. If a theory of quantum gravity is ever found, what is it really? What is space really? What is time really? What is mass really? What is the Higgs field really? What is an explanation really? I think therefore what am I really? What is what really? What is really what? Not that these are necessarily illegitimate questions, but there will always be a more fundamental unknown.

Yes, the prime directive. Rejection of your distinction of design and designer in the context of ID does not constitute confusion. One can understand the point being driven with perfect clarity, and still dismiss it as implausible and logically convoluted.

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