"We don't know yet" vs "God did it!"

[Ruin]

Intelligent design is the face of the "God did it!" argument, and is also a branch of theTeleological argument, the argument that elements of creation betray the signs of design by a higher being.

ID has been overwhelmingly rejected by the scientific community. Those books written to support the theory have been routed when placed under peer scrutiny and only survive deep in the US, where you don't seem to need qualifications to call yourself a doctor and teach.

The reason for it's rejection? It's that is slams head first into scientific principles and doesn't actually use any. ID looks at things such as eyes and the flagellum of bacteria and declares "Irreducible complexity", the crux of their argument. Why do they claim it? Because they don't know how it could have evolved. ID is a theory based on ignorance, a "God of gaps" theory. The proponents of ID don't know how things occur, so slap ID on it and say "we don't know, so this must be ID".

Unsurprisingly, both eyes and flaggeli have been explained.

Science works on the basis of "We don't know yet". Researchers make a job out of it, seeking to know what we don't know. Proponents of ID do the opposite, rejecting the possibilities of scientific advances and slapping intelligent design onto what they do not understand.

[gsoxx]

I think ID is simply the attempt to give the creation myth a scientific touch and nothing more.

[removeduser_426582376423734]

Intelligent Design gets less sympathy than Creationism in my books.

[Ruin]

For an attempt it fails quite miserably. My post above could just as easily be applied by replacing "ID" with creationalism. The two are very similar in many ways, ID is simply more vague.

[Theseus1234]

i think ID is just modified creationism in order to counter scientific evidence

[Empiricus]

Creationism is, essentially, a belief. It's a religious belief, based upon the stories of whatever holy book you happen to be following. Intelligent design, on the other hand, is a weak attempt to justify said belief, and is tragically flawed, both scientifically and logically.

You hit the nail right on the head, Ruin. It approaches the problem from a position that is in no way empiric, but rather uses the theory of God as a catch-all for anything we don't understand. In this, they assume that because we can't fully explain what happened yet, the only other explanation must be god.

This belief could be forgiven a thousand years ago, but at the present time we definitely know enough to understand what we don't know. That is, by far, the most important thing.

In this, I agree with Shyam:

Intelligent Design gets less sympathy than Creationism in my books.

[Zuwxiv]

I wish everyone could make as good 1st posts as Empiricus.
(Welcome to TWC! )

In fact, I would think religious conservatives wouldn't like ID. There's the obviousness of it being based on ignorance and having no scientific backing, but in the end it harms creationism.

Think of it this way: ID was supposed to be scientific creationism, the metaphorical pudding of proof. The best arguments for creationism (which can't even challenge evolution) were nested as the foundations of ID, and the jewel of it all was the evolution of the eye.

People literally believed that they could stand up and say "God exists and the best proof is the eye."

And then science explains the eye through evolution. Kind of makes creationists look foolish, now doesn't it? When you admit science is successful at describing things and make your foray into "scientific" backing of your theory, and you get thoroughly destroyed by the advancement of real science, you look silly, defeated, and above all, wrong.

If I was a strict-interpretation creationist, I wouldn't not support ID: It's like betting on a crippled horse. It's like betting on a crippled horse with your own life: Not only is it doomed to fail, but you've staked your very moral, ethical, and religious system upon the success of the horse.

Bottom line: Intelligent design is quickly running out of even vaguely effective arguments. And even then, the basis is "If we don't know, God did it." It assumes we know everything; the proper standing for ID should be "If we don't know and everything we have tried supports no other alternative, it might be reasonable to believe God did it."

Even then, the better answer is "Well, let's find out."

[Chaigidel]

Why are we still on this subject ?

[Zuwxiv]

BECAUSE I STILL NEED LIKE 800 MORE REPUTATION POINTS




Oh come on, one of my 3,000 posts can be spammy.

[Chaigidel]

your talking to the lord high commander of spam here; may you gain reputation speedily --- but in short

ID is silly; evolution makes perfect sense---and I would far more respect a god that would lay out things in a way that baffled us for at least another 5000 years , rather than the ID guys just knowing that eyes and bannanas were crafted in the god forge.

[Axeman]

Does this mean we can get torches and pikes and hunt down the ID promoters?

[Theseus1234]

is this something you had in mind?

[Axeman]

Why are they so heavily armed.....

[Theseus1234]

Why are they so heavily armed.....

DANG IT. shouldve done the teutonic clerics. rats

And as for the beauty of nature, science perhaps doesnt have an answer for how everything just...fits together. but then again, most atheist/agnostics/non-religious people would claim that there is nothing to show that nature's mechanics werent designed.

[McGness]

ID has been overwhelmingly rejected by the scientific community. Those books written to support the theory have been routed when placed under peer scrutiny and only survive deep in the US, where you don't seem to need qualifications to call yourself a doctor and teach.

Creationism was started in Britain last century. ID has proponents from all over the world. The US is at the forefront, but the US is at the forefront, or close to it, of just about everything so that shouldn't be a big surprise.

Attempts to introduce Intelligent Design in Europe spark backlash, from 2007
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-backlash.html

[Tiwaz]

Creationism was started in Britain last century. ID has proponents from all over the world. The US is at the forefront, but the US is at the forefront, or close to it, of just about everything so that shouldn't be a big surprise.

Attempts to introduce Intelligent Design in Europe spark backlash, from 2007
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...-backlash.html

Yes, but only in USA there is actual notable support. You have few loonies willing to support this stupidity everywhere... But only in USA they are so numerous and influential.

Elsewhere they are considered village idiots.

[Zuwxiv]

Huh, I guess it kind of figures that the ID guys would be Teutons.

The more I look at it, the more my views tend to shift farther on the agnostic / atheist / non-religious side of things. Creationists look silly when scientists answer their best questions, and every day there are fewer things to prescribe to God and more things to prescribe to science.

Then again, there is something beautiful in the constants and processes that are physics and life itself. There are things which control the universe - no scientist would disagree - the fundamental laws of nature and equations which describe exactly how things happen.

It's beautiful in it's own sense. If there is a God, that's what He looks like.

[André Masséna]

Oh, My Science!

[McGness]

Yes, but only in USA there is actual notable support. You have few loonies willing to support this stupidity everywhere... But only in USA they are so numerous and influential.

Elsewhere they are considered village idiots.

Population ratio wise I doubt the US has more support than for example Poland. They are considered village idiots in the US too. The Foreign media has really blown ID in the US out of proportion based on three cases, two of which were in Kansas, one of which was in a district where the population was small, and even then, the great majority of the district's population was vehemently opposed to ID, and voted the crazies out at the first opportunity.

It is in many secular nation's interests to make the US out to be some Christian bible ground, when in reality, the numbers of secular people in the US is many times higher than the number of people period in European countries.

[Ruin]

Population ratio wise I doubt the US has more support than for example Poland. They are considered village idiots in the US too. The Foreign media has really blown ID in the US out of proportion based on three cases, two of which were in Kansas, one of which was in a district where the population was small, and even then, the great majority of the district's population was vehemently opposed to ID, and voted the crazies out at the first opportunity.

It is in many secular nation's interests to make the US out to be some Christian bible ground, when in reality, the numbers of secular people in the US is many times higher than the number of people period in European countries.

Absolute bull, the lot of it.

There, see the US at the bottom?

As for population:
US: 304,537,292
Europe: 728,000,000

Say 40% reject evolution (according to chart)... that's about 140,000,000 believers in ID/creationalism.
1 percent to 46 percent of the US population is secular. That's somewhere between 150 and 1 million. So average that out at 1/10th of the European population. Get your facts straight.