On 07/01/2011 04:09 PM, clipka wrote:

> One problem with that Intelligent Design Vs. Evolution discussion is
> that it perfectly fails to realize that evolution can be used as a
> design method. Virtually everything man-made is a product of
> evolutionary design.

Well, yeah, for sufficiently lose definition of "evolutionary".

I think the central sticking point is that most people believe that only 
a concious /mind/ can assess how good a design is and how to improve it.

> No, an intelligent designer does not rule out evolution - I guess an
> intelligent designer /will/ employ evolution. Nor does evolution /per
> se/ rule out an intelligent designer - it just doesn't necessarily
> require one.

I've seen a lot of arguments for and against whether ID should be taught 
in schools alongside evolution. For me, these all miss the main point: 
ID is not a scientific theory. It may or may not be correct, but it's 
not testable. Because it doesn't /predict/ anything.

Hell, it's not even a complete theory. ID says "life was designed by an 
intelligent entity or entities". OK, that's nice, but you've failed to 
specify who or what this entity was, where it came from, when it did all 
this design, /how/ it was able to design what we cannot, /why/ it went 
to all the trouble in the first place, or... actually, anything. You 
haven't specified a damned thing. You've presented a vague skeleton of a 
theory, rather than an actual fleshed-out theory.

For example, when did the designing happen? Are you asserting that all 
life was designed in one hit, back in the pre-Cambrian? If so, how do 
you account for the subsequent 4 billion years? Or do you assert that an 
invisible intelligence continues to shape the course of life even to 
this day? If so, what /the hell/ is your proposed mechanism for this 
invisible influence?

Likewise, /why/ did somebody do all this? If we knew what the design 
goal was, we might be able to test whether life as it actually exists 
satisfies that design goal, and you'd be in danger of having a testable 
prediction. But noooo. No indication as to what the design goal was. So 
no testability there either.

If the designer was trying to see how clever they would be, you might 
expect life to be as over-complicated as possible. But, although life 
*is* complex, there are endless ways that it could be even *more* 
complex, in same cases with a great increase in efficiency.

If the designer wanted to produce the most "perfect" design possible, 
then why the **** did he design creatures that live in water and yet can 
drown in it? (Not to mention being able to die of thirst while submerged 
in drinkable water.) Why the hell do whales /grow teeth/ and then 
reabsorb them?! Why do humans have 6 broken copies of the globin gene?

Saying that whales and humans were designed on purpose fails to explain 
these anomalies. Saying that humans evolved their current structure by a 
series of fortuitous accidents /perfectly/ explains - even /predicts/ - 
these exact traits.

In short, the argument of ID is "I can't think of a theory that explains 
this, so let's just pretend that the fairies did it". If you want to 
believe that, go ahead. But don't you dare try to pretend that it's science!

By the way, you know what else isn't science? String theory.

So check it out. Thousands of scientists and mathematicians around the 
world have devoted their entire professional careers to studying string 
theory. It all looks very "sciency"; there are equations in string 
theory that make general relativity look like 2nd grade math class. This 
is serious, highly respected research.

And it's /still/ not science. You know why? No testable predictions. Not 
a single damned one. There is no possible experiment, even 
hypothetically, which would prove or disprove string theory. (But that's 
the least of their problems; they're still trying just to make the math 
stop contradicting itself!)

The difference is, string theory could *become* science some day. If 
they ever sort out all the theoretical difficulties, we might end up 
with testable predictions. Maybe in 20 years time, we'll all laugh at 
the absurdity of string theory. Or maybe it'll be an unequivocally 
accepted part of proven modern science. Only time will tell.

Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is a thinly veiled attempt to get 
the Christian Holy Bible into schools. Let me make this clear: even if 
God exists, it's /still/ not science. /Science/ is the study of what you 
can /prove/. It's that the study of /truth/, only /provable truth/. 
We're not saying that God doesn't exist, we're just saying that such 
questions have no place in /science/. Now go sit in the corner.

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