The Top Six Lines of Evidence for Intelligent Design

So this is the best the ID community has got, lots of quotes and zero evidence for intelligent design.

In addition, they reject the entire package from universal ancestry down to the common descent of man. Intelligent design creationism indeed.

8 Likes

Amazing. None of those are evidence!

8 Likes

ROFL. If that is the “top evidence” then ID is in a poor state indeed.

4 Likes

Does anyone still want to claim that ID isn’t creationism?

2 Likes

I wonder why someone like Behe never criticizes or corrects articles like these which contradict many of his own beliefs and claims. If his motivations were scientific, rather than religious, that is what I would expect him to do. (Hmm. Guess I just answered my own question there.)

8 Likes

So…

  1. Evidence for the big bang. No evidence for design
  2. Assertions about fine tuning. No evidence for design.
  3. Waffle about DNA and “specified complexity”. No evidence for design (or anything else).
  4. Irreducibly complex things can’t evolve. No evidence for design.
  5. Intelligent agents can build things. Life is complex. Therefore animals were built by intelligent agents. No evidence for design.
  6. We haven’t found enough hominid fossils. No evidence for design (or anything else).

Spot the common theme.

I never understood how anyone could accept their fine-tuning claims.

“I’ve only got a tape measure, so I can’t tell exactly how wide this desk is, but it’s about 1.453m across. Give or take a millimetre. Maybe 1.452m, maybe 1.454m, maybe somewhere in between. But if it was 0.0000000000000000001m wider, it wouldn’t fit through the door.”

2 Likes

How do you define evidence and why do Casey’s claims not fit that definition?

For data to constitute evidence favoring a hypothesis, that data must be expected if the hypothesis is true(the hypothesis being true should increase the probability of observing the data), and not expected if the hypothesis is false.

It’s all just perceived problems with naturalism, or evolution. Something being unknown or unsolved in science or philosophy is not evidence for intelligent design, obviously.

And of course, we know humans and animals evolved, we know the origin of information in DNA, and we know how irreducibly complex structures and systems evolve. We don’t know the origin of the universe, or if there even is such a thing as a why the laws of physics are the way they are, but that fact isn’t evidence for intelligent design.

6 Likes

Exactly. Behe can write an article articulating the evidence for the common descent of man and other great apes from ape ancestors and publish on the Discovery Institute website but in all the intervening years since he came out that hasn’t happened. Maybe Casey Luskin would have none of that.

2 Likes

He has plenty of opportunity to do that elsewhere. He is not limited to writing what the Di will allow him to write. He clearly has no interest in correcting the errors of his DI colleagues so long as they serve the causes of discrediting “Darwinism” and promoting religious dogma.

3 Likes

I never understand why anyone thinks that some conclusion about the Origin Of The Universe or about Its Fine Tuning is supposed to be evidence that Design Intervention is needed to explain evolution. And then we get to Complex Specified Information. Which is a circular argument. To show that something has CSI we first have to show that it is implausibly improbable that it arose by natural evolutionary processes. We have to do that before concluding that it has CSI. And then its having CSI allows us to conclude that (ta da!) it is implausibly improbable that it arose by natural evolutionary processes. Isn’t that an amazingly powerful argument?

8 Likes

It’s the opposite, in fact. If the universe is fine-tuned for life, it’s a poor sort of fine-tuning that would make it impossible for life to evolve. Yet more evidence that ID isn’t science and IDers are uninterested in science or even in simple self-consistency.

7 Likes

I see what you did there. :smiley:

2 Likes

Yup. A universe in which life cannot occur naturally is clearly not fine tuned for life.

4 Likes