The notion that there is some level of irreducible complexity that would do it doesn't work out either. We can see why by looking at a reductio argument: assume that you were able, somehow, to show conclusively that every step from Big Bang to the height of evolution (ie, me) could be explained by pure mechanistic physical explanation. (A helluvan assumption, but go with me.)

Then, from the standpoint of the argument from design (which is what this is normally called in philosophy), all you'd say is "what a wonder that the Creator could design a universe that leads to all this stuff automatically."

The point is, there is no experiment that could not be interpreted as evidence of intelligent design. If there is no experiment that can be performed that wouldn't distinguish between ID and no ID, then ID is not a scientific model.

That's pretty much my point, which is why I think it's far better classified as a philosophy, and not necessarily all that bad of one.

In my simplistic point of view, ID does not negate evolution, it augments it. Evolution explains how life adapts and changes, while ID explains how the changes are possibly not as random as previously believed, that changes occur for a purpose. As an example, asteroids almost destroy all life on more than one occasion and as a result we evolve to protect life on Earth. Is this why we have always looked to the stars, because we are looking for destruction from above.
If we discover a planet killing asteroid heading in our direction in the near future, will it really be just a coincidence that we developed the ability to avoid destruction just in the nick of time?
So, is ID true? I do not know, but, it is an avenue of investigation that should be explored. To not do so would just be, I don't know, unscientific maybe.

Intelligent design seems as much only to our limited brains. Even the Minimoids of Spica 7 would consider it unsophisticated.

Where, if at all, is the cut-off point?

It seems that the cut-off point is supposed to be this:

Universal Probability Bound (UPB) = 1/2 × 10^-150

Where an event less probable than this is suggested to be too improbable to occur by chance. Events are defined (by Dembski) as consisting of at least 500 bits of information, with information defined as:

I(E) = -log2 p(E) .... (1)

I is the Information Theory symbol for information (aka self-information, aka "surprisal") associated with event (E), and p is the probability of the event.

I haven't read Dembski's book (and if it's all full of this Information Theory hoot-and-holler I guess I won't) so I don't know how serious these formulae are supposed to be. If they're serious at all, though, it seems pretty weird to me. Moses had to climb Mount Sinai to find God, but Dembski just plugs in some numbers and crunches away.

It doesn't look like philosophy to me, either. It looks like numerology.

If you're interested in really, really big numbers Glen, remind me to send you a copy of Frank Tipler's The Physics of Immortality sometime, which purports to successfully reduce all of theology to a branch of physics.

Universal Probability Bound (UPB) = 1/2 × 10^-150

I've long thought that the Intelligent Design movement was about as productive as giving verbal direction to a cat; these folks need to just get a life. But anyone who can, with a straight face, modify an infinitesimal probability like 10^-150 with the increased precision of 1/2 has given us something new under the sun--mathematical comedy writing. Only the Infinite Humorist could have devised such a universe!

I agree, there is no evidence yet that makes us think that ID is science, therefore cannot be taught as science.

Moreover, recent studies (Juan Mercader, from NASA Astrobiology Center) have revealed that life might be not so uncommon in the universe, but multicellular life, that is, complex organisms.

Life on Earth appareaded in 500 million years, but multicellular life had to wait 2000-3000 more million years. (Some kind of) Intelligent life arrived 1000 million years later, those are the unfrequent, the mysterious, steps: multicellular and intelligence development, not life itself.

Take into account that many planets, solar systems and stars suffer cataclysmic events periodically. Even in Earth life was almost blown out of the entire planet several times. It is not probable that it last enough years to evolve into complex organisms in many other places.

Biological evolution is probably just chance and a quiet neighbourhood.

On the other hand, God surely has much to do with the historical evolution of men in Earth. The entire Old Testament talks about the development of an advanced religion. Monotheism is the first step, and Akhenaton, the Egyptian faraon, his first prophet. Later God told Abraham not to sacrifice his son. The killing of people was a religious ritual then, forbidden ever after. Christianism is another step forward, adapted to other peoples than the chosen ones. Then came the Reform, that fostered Capitalism and classic Liberalism, both of them the foundations of Democracies. Even from an absolutely scientific point of view, God has done a lot for mankind.

I don't have a problem with ID being taught in philosophy. What I have a problem with is that evolution is often taught as exclusionary to ID and uses a patina of science to reinforce this. I think this damages the teaching of science as well as advancing a moral agenda by those who want to cut religion out of life as much as possible.

StargazerA5

"What I have a problem with is that evolution is often taught as exclusionary to ID and uses a patina of science to reinforce this."

There is a very good reason for this: science has nothing to say on the subject. It is outside the bounds of what science can test. You would try to test evolutionary theory in shop class right? Does that mean shop is exlusionary to evolution?

"I think this damages the teaching of science as well as advancing a moral agenda by those who want to cut religion out of life as much as possible."

I think its quite the opposite. Scientists by and large simply arent interested in being involved in the culture war if they can be left alone to do their jobs (with noteable exceptions). Evolutionary biologists arent banging on church-house doors demanding equal time during the homily. ID on the other hand is a clear and obvious disguise for creationism. Its goal is not to test a hypothesis, its goal is to introduce dogmatic ideals that can never be falsified. Thats fine in a philosophy setting, but it is anathma to science.

"You would try to test evolutionary theory in shop class right?"

would=wouldnt

To me, it seems exactly right to identify ID as a philosophical point of view rather than as a scientific theory opposed to evolution. I've seen enough to provisionally conclude that ID is not falsifiable and that it lacks predictive power. That said, it may well be true--I don't know.

A point that is not probative but that readers may find interesting relates to expert judgement within a field of specialization.

• Does field X concern itself with the physical, material world?
• Is there very strong evidence that practitioners within field X can reliably make specific, falsifiable claims, and that their predictive powers are pretty good?
• What do these practitioners have to say about the theories and paradigms of their field?

Fields such as literary criticism and modern art wouldn't meet the first criterion. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and engineering would. These six fields, among others, would also meet the second criterion.

Some very high fraction of practicing biologists accept evolution and reject creationism and ID (I can't find a link to a poll, though). I've never personally met a biologist who advocates ID, and I don't know of another biologist who has, either.

There's a rich history of theories within the physical sciences being wrong--but wrong in this context usually means incomplete, in ways that weren't understood at the time. Famous examples are Newtonian mechanics being superseded by equations based on special and then general relativity (physics), and plate tectonics pushing isostasy aside (bad geology pun). I am certain that this process of challenge and revision will continue, full-bore, in all the physical sciences.

But if thinking within biology evolves (heh) in the way that ID proponents advocate, this would be something unprecedented within the sciences: a paradigm based on physical processes in the material world being supplanted by a paradigm based on supernatural explanations.

I imagine that this is one reason that ID enjoys only a miniscule level of support among biologists.

I would like to say that a lot of the noise and heat in this argument is spurred by a fundamental misunderstanding of each other by both sides.
I know many devout religious people, and how their lives are filled with their relationship with Christ (in this case). I also know quite a few scientists and teachers, and how their quest for knowledge fills their lives. I dont doubt that the religious find it unimaginable that the scientists simply dont give much (if any) thought to religion. In reality, they arent actively against it, they simply dont think much about it, but this can be simply shocking to someone who's entire life is in some way touched by their faith. And the scientists cant come to grips very well with the religious who simply arent driven by a love of science and dont always appreciate the purity of finding things out. For someone who devotes their life to discovery, it can be hard to understand that others may not value the physical world in the same way.

Its natural when you dont understand someone who is doing something seemingly opposed to you to project malice into their actions. Ie, the devout suspect secularists of being out to destroy religion, and the scientists suspect the religious of being out to destroy the scientific method and send us back to dogmatic learning. I think by and large neither of these things are true (again, with noteable exceptions), and that the motives on both sides are honorable. What we need is a meeting of the minds.

I like to break the issue down into three questions:

1) What is the explanation for the origin and diversity of species?

2) What is the explanation for the development of life on Earth?

3) What is the explanation for the development of life in the Universe?

The problem I have with the ID movement is that they're fighting on question # 1, for which there is a good scientific explanation that doesn't need a supernatural force: Evolution.

Darwin's theory of Evolution is an incredibly strong answer to question # 1. At the same time, all the evidence for Evolution that's been amassed over the last 100+ years is aimed almost exclusively at question # 1 and NOT at questions # 2 or # 3. The problem I have with many scientists (I have a PhD in Computer Science, btw), is that they stretch Darwin's theory, i.e.: "Darwin shows that there's no need for God to explain why we are here." That's Richard Dawkin's big error.

The fact is, there are very serious scientists, usually physicists, who take the notion of a supernatural explanation for the universe very seriously. Stephen Barr, Anthony Rizzi, and Gerald Schroeder are three of them who have recently published books on the subject. As Gerald Schroeder put's it, the Big Bang was the beginning of physics. Thus, everyone already agrees that the cause of the Big Bang must be 'outside' of physics, the only question is what does that mean.
Their arguments are getting lost in the ID brouhahah, unfortunately.

"As Gerald Schroeder put's it, the Big Bang was the beginning of physics. Thus, everyone already agrees that the cause of the Big Bang must be 'outside' of physics, the only question is what does that mean."

Not to split hairs here, but I dont believe even the majority of physicists believe the Big Band was 'outside' of physics. Hawkings theory of a bounded universe and negative time accounts for the big bang in our space-time, and many theories such as evolutionary universes encapsulate a grander multiverse (sometimes with different physical laws), but not necessarilly outside of physics in general. The point is at the moment we dont know whether we can probe the big bang and before, and it is premature to insert a divine hand into the process. Until we understand quantum gravity, we wont know what we will be able to know, as it were.

Thoughtful posts, Mark Buehner (#13, 15) and A Berman (#14). On 12 August 2005, Science magazine published a Perspective piece titled "Anthropic Reasoning," by Mario Livio (Space Telescope Institute) and Martin Rees (Cambridge) (vol. 309, pg. 1022; subscription req'd). The summary:

It is an obvious fact that we live at a time in the universe when conditions are right for life to exist. Less obvious and much more controversial is the notion that this fact may provide useful bounds on cosmological theories. In their Perspective, Livio and Rees argue that this kind of "anthropic reasoning" not only has a role in valid speculative scientific discourse, but may in fact have predictive power for sorting out allowable cosmological scenarios. Acknowledging that such arguments raise the blood pressure of many scientists, Livio and Rees conjecture that anthropic reasoning can indeed be one of many tools in the cosmological toolkit.

The whole point of ID, so far as I see it, is an experiment in double standards.

For YEARS we've had pop-sci books tell us "Quantum physics, etc, therefore NO GOD!" or "Natural selection, development of humans, therefore NO GOD!!"

Books like these have never elicited howls of disapproval from the scientific community. No scientist seems to protest the obvious injection of metaphysical speculation into the books.

But as soon as someone does the opposite, saying that science proves God does exist, then it's a gigantic big deal from hell.

I just think it's ironic. Science doesn't prove anything metaphysical one way or the other, but atheists are given a pass in their soapboxing, whereas deists are labeled kooks.

Ben, I dont recall anyone introducing those kinds of books into highschool biology curriculum. Important distinction, is it not?

I think that the advent of quantum mechanics has actually made it a lot easier to argue for a lot of stuff that was previously termed supernatural or impossible before, but I expect that's a discussion that's best saved for another time.

#19

But Dan, that's the whole point---
Before the 20th Century, the belief was in a Newtownian Universe that existed infinitely in all dimensions, including time. A completely mechanical deterministic model that was always around and would always be. No room whatsoever for anything like a creator or free will.

Now we believe that the universe and our physical laws and constants began at a certain point (is that tempered enough for you, Buehner?) , and that, at least to a certain extent, the universe is not mechanical and determined. This is why we can have such a debate in the first place.

And the prejudices are in all directions-- many scientists throughout the 20th century even until the 90's HATED the big bang theory and dismissed it as the creation of a Priest-- which, by the way, it was.

It might be worthwhile dragging in the financial/statistical concept of survivorship bias when talking about 'Universal Probability Bounds' or 'anthropic' points of view. The former is meaningless as given, since it's focusing on the prior odds of our existence in a universe that appears more or less as ours does. In fact, the odds that matter are posterior - we are evidently here and killing time yapping about this: P(human-universe) = 1. For all we can tell, there may have been 10^150 previous/parallel/superimposed (pick your theory) universes which were/are not graced with the presence of consciousness of our sort. I think that's all the 'anthropic' guys are trying to say: If your cosmological theory cannot yield a universe with a human observer, you might as well chuck it, since that's the evident outcome.

see book by Dembski for a rigourous computation of such a cut off point. For example if first on the ballot is random then having all 50 Democrats first has been ruled by a court as evidence of human interference.

Life is so complex that the only explanation is the supernatural.

is not too far from

Everything that will be invented has been invented. (So we can shut the Patent Office down).

Try applying "Inteligent" Design to other aspects of science. You see pretty quickly how foolish it is.
The scientific method is powerful. It disolves away supernatural "truths". This makes people kick and scream. ID is people kicking and screaming. We may never calm them down. But eventually...

#22 bobbie

I've never heard that court rulings are science, tho.

I think that Ben has exposed one important part of the problem: the existence (or lack thereof) of a creator God cannot be demonstrated deductively. We are left only with induction, and that is no perfect proof. In the end, it takes an act of faith either to accept or reject God.

And for me the two choices are morally and intellectually equivalent.

I'm getting to really just loath these conversations, but I've got a morbid attraction to them anyway. To a certain extent, I don't have a bone in this fight. I consider myself both a believer in intelligent design and evolution, and of both specific creation and macro-evolution. Generally speaking, the actual arguments and evidence produced by either side don't offend me in the least, and by the time my daughters are old enough to be in high school they'll probably no more about the subject than the teachers will and I've got no fears about them being brainwashed.

But the conclusions the various sides often offer up annoy me to no end.

"The point is, there is no experiment that could not be interpreted as evidence of intelligent design."

So what. There is no experiment that could not be interpreted as evidence against intelligent design either. Reasonable people can look at the same evolutionary evidence and say alternately, "Well, random chance could account for everything we see." and "I don't know, that seems like an awfully lot of coincidences to me."

Likewise, there is no experiment which can be conducted which proves that evolution occurred, if only for the simple reason that evolution is 'lossy'. Energy and mass may be conserved, but the ugly truth is that information most certainly isn't.

Most of all, if there is no experiment that can distinguish between ID and no ID, then is there any experiment that can be performed that would distinguish between dumb luck and not dumb luck? If so, by the same standards, dumb luck is not a theory either, and the only difference is that you have a priori determined that dumb luck is more believable than intelligent design.

It is reasonable to ask what the cut off point between accepting dumb luck and accepting intelligent design is. Is there any scientific test which can set a fix number which everyone would agree to? When do you decide whether the probability is damn enough near 0, that it isn't 'probability 1'?

Lost in all of this discussion is that for the most part the actual evolutionists have won the debate. Serious educated religious people no longer deny that evolution has occurred. Once the debate turned to the subject of intelligent design, it was a full concession. We are no longer arguing about whether monkeys evolved from fish. We are now arguing about whether anyone was tinkering with that process. Ultimately, either answer - for or against 'tinkering' - is a philosophical answer and not a scientific one. The best thing scientists could do would be shrug at the philosophizing and say, "Well, as long as we agree on the facts (old earth, etc.), I don't care if you believe that you see a designer in the works."

It's worth noting that until very recently (meaning modern times), no one made a distinction between philosophy and science. If you teach 'dumb luck' then you are teaching philosophy. It's quite possible to say, "This is what happened.", and if a student asks, "Did it all happen by chance, or was a designer involved?", answer, "We don't know." and it be a completely scientific discussion. Actually the better answer is probably, "We don't know, and we can't see at this time how we could use science to find out. However, it certainly do know that it could have happened by random chance, but we also know that the chance of it doing so at random is very small. Reasonable people disagree on what this means, and as teacher I'm not going to discriminate against people for believing either one."

"Life on Earth appareaded in 500 million years, but multicellular life had to wait 2000-3000 more million years. (Some kind of) Intelligent life arrived 1000 million years later, those are the unfrequent, the mysterious, steps: multicellular and intelligence development, not life itself."

Ok, brainic, please explain to me how single celled life first spontaneously arose. Note, that evolution is not a process which works on dead things. Evolution by definition is a process which works on things which are alive (and have encoding DNA or equivalent). It cannot say anything about how we got from dead to non-dead. The idea that the genesis event is somehow well understood by science is laughable.

"Hawkings theory of a bounded universe and negative time accounts for the big bang in our space-time, and many theories such as evolutionary universes encapsulate a grander multiverse (sometimes with different physical laws), but not necessarilly outside of physics in general."

Maybe not outside of physics, but any speculation into things which lie outside the universe is inherently speculation into things which lie outside the natural world. Thus speculation about multiverses is indistinguishable from speculation about the supernatural. It's worth noting at this time that arguably biology isn't the only branch of science out there which has practicioners appealing to something outside the universe with an apparantly unfalsible. Many of the same charges are being leveled at string theorists, the difference being that presumably the string theorists are being motivated by something like a traditional religion.

"In fact, the odds that matter are posterior - we are evidently here and killing time yapping about this: P(human-universe) = 1. For all we can tell, there may have been 10^150 previous/parallel/superimposed (pick your theory) universes which were/are not graced with the presence of consciousness of our sort. I think that's all the 'anthropic' guys are trying to say: If your cosmological theory cannot yield a universe with a human observer, you might as well chuck it, since that's the evident outcome."

Well, I think that's kind of the point. If you are going to speculate about 10^150 unseen parallel universes being out there in the undetectable regions beyond the universe, then how is that any different from speculating that the universe is nested within a higher dimensional frame and that there is some higher dimensional being toying with events for his own amusement? Can we demonstrate whether either theory is true or false using current science? And for that matter, is either theory any less philosophical than speculating that the universe is unbounded in all dimensions? Was the Newtonian Universe science or philosophy, or was it not something somewhere between the two? To the extent that I think the ID people have a point, its that too many otherwise good scientists have been assuming that they know far more than they actually do. I didn't agree with Behe's conclusions, but I did agree with him that biology has become religiously dogmatic of late.

For YEARS we've had pop-sci books tell us "Quantum physics, etc, therefore NO GOD!" or "Natural selection, development of humans, therefore NO GOD!!"

But as soon as someone does the opposite, saying that science proves God does exist, then it's a gigantic big deal from hell.

You've made a straw man agrument. Please point me to the place where scientists are saying biology classes (or religion classes, or any class) should teach that God doesn't exist.

As someone very much on the inside of this debate (I finished my PhD six months ago in a lab that studies the mathematics and mechanisms of evolution), I can tell you that as far as the scientists are concerned, the existence of nonexistence of God has absolutely nothing to do with this debate, or with scientists' feelings on the matter. There are thousands of biologists who believe in God and who study evolution, and certainly nobody complains about them.

The debate about ID is about people trying to propose that evolution doesn't exist or function as a mechanism, which at this point is simply ludicrous from a scientific perspective. It's not just some assemblage of a few facts supporting evolution - the "evidence" is essentially every piece of biological data ever collected. Every genome ever studied shows the marks of stepwise alteration from millions of other related genomes. Every protein ever sequenced shows conserved sequences. Every physiology shows components that previously existed for other purposes but were adapted for a new job by a few mutations. Every bodyplan shows conservation in layout from a lineage ancestors. Whether an intelligent hand guided that process -- well, while few biologists feel that is necessary as an explanation, few are also particularly offended by the idea. It's the nuts who take one argument that they personally can't see how something complex evolved, and want to throw out the whole of evolution as a result -- that' the source of contention lies. God's existence is a total nonissue.

Evolution is so fundamental in both the understanding of and the data foundation of biology at this point that rejecting it is frankly no more rational than rejecting atomic theory as the basis of chemistry ... and I'm really not exaggerating. It's as if someone said "I don't understand how ST microscopes could take pictures of atoms, and I think those pictures are fake. Therefore atomic theory is false and we should throw out the periodic table."

Imagine if people of some other faith - say Judaism or Wicca, whatever - felt very strongly on a religious basis that matter was infinitely divisible and therefore atomic theory was wrong, and moreover, since they can't see atoms, atoms must not exists. They want the theory of non-atomic matter taught alongside the periodic table in chemistry classes. You'd laugh them out of the room, but it wouldn't have anything to do with their belief in God.

Throw out the biological equivalent of the periodic table (or the theory of gravitation, or electromagnetic radiation, or...) because you personally "don't get how evolution can create very complex objects" (which is among the least scientific of statements ever made) and scientists will stop taking you seriously.

Like the article author, I'm okay with ID being taught in school in the context of a philosophy or religion class, and in fact I think compartive religion should be both taught and required in all public schools at the high-school level.

But honest scientific debate over evolution as a mechanism ended nearly a hundred years ago. Really.

"You've made a straw man agrument. Please point me to the place where scientists are saying biology classes (or religion classes, or any class) should teach that God doesn't exist."

I take it you didn't read Gould's sermon in the journal Science?

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/284/5423/2087

I would imagine you consider Science a pretty mainstream scientific journal with a pretty high impact value.

"Every body plan shows conservation in layout from a lineage ancestors. Whether an intelligent hand guided that process -- well, while few biologists feel that is necessary as an explanation, few are also particularly offended by the idea."

I think here is the main source of the problem. While it may be true that few scientists are particularly offended by the idea of a designer, it is also true that the vast majority of religious people aren't offended by the idea that the creation could have taken millions of years and involved processes like evolution. However, the debate on both sides is driven by the loudest voices, and in both cases the loudests voices are evangelical, fundamentalist types who are offended by thier opposite counterparts. That such should exist in some numbers is only to be expected when you are dealing with a religious group, but the fact of the matter is that for thier part the evangelical aethists (like Gould above) having been publically framing the terms of the scientific debate for years.

"Imagine if people of some other faith - say Judaism or Wicca, whatever - felt very strongly on a religious basis that matter was infinitely divisible and therefore atomic theory was wrong..."

I just want to point out at this point that we have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, and furthermore we certainly know at this point that the atom is not in fact atomic. While I have no reason to believe that quarks are divisible (into strings or anything else), I have no reason to believe that they are not divisible or that whatever they divide into is not itself subdividable. I do have reason to believe that dividing a quark, even were it possible, would require such an astounding ammount of energy that we might never be able to test whether it is dividable, but that is a different thing.

"...They want the theory of non-atomic matter taught alongside the periodic table in chemistry classes. You'd laugh them out of the room, but it wouldn't have anything to do with their belief in God."

The problem with your analogy is that we've had a non-atomic theory of matter for some time now. Atoms are not atomic. When you laughed the Wiccans out of the room for suggesting that atoms were not subdividable, the last laugh was and is on you. Furthermore, what really is critical is not getting the wiccans to believe that matter isn't infinitely subdividable - since that is not a question science can answer - but simply that atoms exist, quarks exist, etc.

"But honest scientific debate over evolution as a mechanism ended nearly a hundred years ago. Really."

I agree, but ID isn't a debate about evolution as a mechanism. I'm of the firm conviction that the only reason the evolution debate reignited is that sometime in the past few decades, some scientists with a religious (or rather irreligious) agenda took up the banner of using evolution as an attack on theism. In doing so, they reprovoked a debate which had largely been closed. It's being reclosed, since even the serious cutting age creationists don't deny evolution exists or that the earth is old anymore. The debate is now solely about theism or atheism, and 'intelligent design' and 'evolution' are simply covert terms for the agenda.

celebrim,

In chemistry atomic nuclei (or better, shells with associated inner electrons) are indivisible. Full stop. And I know whereof I speak.

"Note, that evolution is not a process which works on dead things. Evolution by definition is a process which works on things which are alive (and have encoding DNA or equivalent). "

You're wrong. First of all, you are making a semantic argument, biological evolution by defintion involves living things. That doesnt mean that the same process cant occur on non-living things, or Nonbiological Evolution, which certainly exists in many different realms.
Protien strands 'evolve' and you can see it happen under a microscope. So do crystals.

"Maybe not outside of physics, but any speculation into things which lie outside the universe is inherently speculation into things which lie outside the natural world. Thus speculation about multiverses is indistinguishable from speculation about the supernatural."

Thats is patently absurd. Again this is an argument of linguistics, 'the universe' if taken to mean everything within the power of physics to explore could easilly encompass a 'multiverse' if some means could be determined to interact with it (for instance there is a suggestion that the famous '2 slit' experiment is evidence of multiuniverse interaction, if this is the case we can interact with a parallel 'universe' and hence it is certainly not supernatural). If we take 'the universe' to mean that which the Big Bang produced, that is a different and much more confined definition.

"If you are going to speculate about 10^150 unseen parallel universes being out there in the undetectable regions beyond the universe, then how is that any different from speculating that the universe is nested within a higher dimensional frame and that there is some higher dimensional being toying with events for his own amusement? Can we demonstrate whether either theory is true or false using current science?"

Current science? Whats current science have to do with it? It is entirely possible that tests or mathmatical constructs will be produced able to falsify the existance of parallel universes some time in the future. It is impossible to design a test able to falsify the existance of god.
Creationists need to be very careful about this point. Hitching your wagons to whatever bits and peices of research fit into their agenda on a given day is a bad idea. Science evolves as well :)

"When you laughed the Wiccans out of the room for suggesting that atoms were not subdividable..."

Pardon me, for suggesting that atoms were subdividable.

"In chemistry atomic nuclei (or better, shells with associated inner electrons) are indivisible. Full stop. And I know whereof I speak."

Irrelevant. You are only pointing out that by some methods atoms are not divisible. This wouldn't offend the hypothetical Wiccans of the example, who only want to believe that by some method matter is divisible. Whether or not matter is infinitely divisible is not something that science can at this point definitively address, and the atomic theory itself (atom by definition meaning 'indivisible') is a legacy of science discovering that its philosophical underpinnings were wrong.

Perhaps you all have heard of this. In case you haven't:

A fellow named Bobby Henderson wrote this to the Kansas School Board with respect to their voting Intelligent Design as a part of state curriculum. It has sense taken on a life of its own, far exceeding the author's expectations.

Here's the 'Flying Spaghetti Monster Manifesto' -- his letter to the KSB:

http://www.flyingspaghettimonster.com/

Read more about the resulting phenomenon here, which has spawned something larger:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/08/19/pastafarianism_flyin.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/09/11/wfsm11.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/09/11/ixportal.html

Interesting times.

"You're wrong. First of all, you are making a semantic argument, biological evolution by defintion involves living things. That doesnt mean that the same process cant occur on non-living things, or Nonbiological Evolution, which certainly exists in many different realms. Protien strands 'evolve' and you can see it happen under a microscope. So do crystals." (empasis mine)

Are you suggesting that inheritable mutations occur in non-life? In other words, are you suggesting that the process of evolution can be divorced from the notion of inheritance? It's one thing to speak about non-living things evolving in a loose sense. It's quite another to suggest that the Theory of Evolution applies to non-living things. If you consider that a semantic argument, well, then I suggest you consider everything a semantic argument.

"Thats is patently absurd. Again this is an argument of linguistics, 'the universe' if taken to mean everything within the power of physics to explore could easilly encompass a 'multiverse' if some means could be determined to interact with it (for instance there is a suggestion that the famous '2 slit' experiment is evidence of multiuniverse interaction, if this is the case we can interact with a parallel 'universe' and hence it is certainly not supernatural)."

You are pretty quick with your declaring things ubsurd and mere arguments of linguistics. By universe, I mean that n dimensional space (we can argue about how big n is) in which we inhabit and can interact with as opposed to anything which we can imagine but cannot interact with. If we can interact with something, then naturally it becomes a part of what is natural. If we could interact with ghosts (for example), then they would see to be 'supernatural' and become just another part of the environment that would be available for scientific inquiry. If we could interact with 10^150 universes, then they would be a part of the natural world. But if we can't interact with them, they are not a part of the natural world and speculation regarding them is indistinguishable from speculation about the supernatural. Both are making appeals unscientific appeals.

"Current science? Whats current science have to do with it?"

It has everything to do with my point. The Newtonian universe was assumed to be infinite. The atom was assumed to be indivisible. Those assumptions weren't scientific assumptions, but under the science of the day it was not possible to prove these assumptions correct and the leading scientists of the day took the absense of evidence to the contrary as proof of the assumption. We now know that they were wrong, and we can with hindsight look back at thier assumptions and recognize them - not as the scientific fact that they were assumed to be - but rather as the philosophical positions that they were.

"It is entirely possible that tests or mathmatical constructs will be produced able to falsify the existance of parallel universes some time in the future. It is impossible to design a test able to falsify the existance of god."

It's equally possible to design a test able to falsify the existance of parallel universes. No matter what test you designed, I simply could suggest that these parallel universes still existed but were removed from us in such a fashion that made it impossible to detect or interact with them. This is of course exactly the same argument that prevents one from testing the general case of the existance of god. As such, parallel universes and god are - until we find some way to interact with and detect either of them - equally unfalsifible. We may be able at some point to prove the existance of either one, but we will never be able to prove the non-existance of either one.

Marcus: Actually, I want to think you for bringing up Pastafarianism.

The fact that Bobby Henderson considers Pastafarianism a suitable attack on the premise of intelligent design, only reinforces my point that part of the problem is that at least in sciences public face, the argument is about theism vs. atheism. The public face of the scientific argument has become 'theism is ridiculous'. Satirizing thesism may be amusing, but once you do that you've taken a religious stand of the same fashion that Gould is making when he makes a poetic and empassioned sermon encouraging his fellow scientists to help him irradicate the notion of theism in favor of something more 'stately'.

At that point, the debate has ceased to be over scientifically verifiable concepts like the antiquity of the earth, macro-evolution, and so forth and has devolved into a philosophical debate not over meaning of the evidence, but the meta-physical meaning of the evidence.

"Current science? Whats current science have to do with it? It is entirely possible that tests or mathmatical constructs will be produced able to falsify the existance of parallel universes some time in the future. It is impossible to design a test able to falsify the existance of god.
Creationists need to be very careful about this point. Hitching your wagons to whatever bits and peices of research fit into their agenda on a given day is a bad idea. Science evolves as well :)"

The theory of parallel universes mandates that they not be viewable-- if they are, then they are not parallel since an observation is an interaction and two things that interact are, by definition, in the same universe. So, indeed, the current theories which are deemed scientific by their proponents are, by definition, not falsifiable. That makes them not scientific.

Dear Sirs,

Much of the misunderstanding is caused by the old "monkeys typing the works of Shakespeare" red herring. Google "monkeys typing shakespeare" and see that it would take 5000 monkeys typing for 5 billion years to have a 50% chance of typing "WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE". No, Neo-Darwinism does not offer a reasonable explanation of speciation.

As to how to determine when an event is highly improbable, I would suggest that if there is less than one chance in a billion that it could happen in the 15 billion years this universe has existed then we might start to say impossible. For the Darwinian explanation to work we have to have many billions of these improbable events to occur.

Regards,
Roy

Hate these discussions but am drawn to them like a car wreck. Call me a rubber necker.

This argument for random improbability is mistaken. The Theory of Evolution has two parts, Random Mutation AND Natural Selection. When you get millions of variations to chose from the chances of one being suitable are fairly high.

A contemporary example is the numerous cases of people who have empirically been demonstrated to be immune to AIDS (we don't understand some of this yet). When there are 6 Billion variations of humans to choose from, atleast a few will be immune to every disease.

I agree that this a philosophy debate -- it has little to do with God or science. I think the fact that the 'G' in God is capitalized and the 's' in science is not underlines the nature of the debate.

What is great about God is that He reminds us that we shouldn't be too sure of ourselves. It's odd to say that, because very often the righteousness that humans take from their faiths in God can create just the opposite effect.

Am I a believer? I don't know. I'm working on that.

I doubt that ID is going to change the course of history like science has. I doubt that it is going to plunge us into the Dark Ages, renewed. I doubt that ID Churches will supplant labs anytime soon. I resonate with ID's inherent yearning to identify the complexity uncovered by science with a purpose, and a deliberate cause.

There may be a cause and a purpose for life and the Universe, or the Multiverse; and we needn't presume to be the ones who get to the top room of Babel's tower to know that cause and purpose. Or there may be no cause, no purpose, and a God nonetheless.

It might be that quantum discoveries reveal a Universe that is composed of code rather than matter. If true, I don't think it needs to butt heads with there being a God.

I have long accepted there might be a God behind this stage we play ourselves upon, but He needn't be obsessed with the details and travails of our lives. I think that God wills, he doesn't design. He sets the rules, turns the switches on, and lets everything else run its course, hands off. Too often we mortals confuse our inability to imagine nothingness with a God who intervenes personally on our behalf.

I think ID people could accept that the random and ordered complexity of physical existence -- of which science has uncovered barely a trace -- doesn't invalidate God. We needn't humble God and personify Him by calling him a 'designer'.

We need to get off this planet we call Earth someday, somehow. The statistical probability of a stupid, dumb rock in space hitting Earth and killing off God's beloved human race is proof that it is a humorous if not ironic universe. How ridiculous. A rock, of all things.

No intelligent design required.

"The theory of parallel universes mandates that they not be viewable-- if they are, then they are not parallel since an observation is an interaction and two things that interact are, by definition, in the same universe. "

Im going to cut across several threads and simply note that the above is simply incomplete. While it is true that parallel universes cannot be directly observed, it is intrinsic to the Many Worlds theory that they interfere with each other.
If indeed the Many Worlds theory is correct, a wave function is a real event and particles are entangled with their mates in other universes. An interference pattern would then be the fingerprint of other universes.

I would further suggest that if the many-worlds theory was ultimately untestable conjecture as some here are suggesting, the top physicists of the past 50 years wouldnt take it extremely seriously. In fact there are tests already designed that could prove or disprove the theory, the technology simply doesnt yet exist to impliment them.

Finally I would note that this is exactly what science has at stake in this argument. That evolution disagrees with Creationism is clear. That almost all of modern physics and chemistry, and hence engineering disagrees as well will become clear if this battle is lost. There are as many hole in the current quantum theories as in Evolution if not more. I dont wish to see equal time split between Relativity and 'Intelligent Falling' as the Onion so brilliantly suggested just because we can no more quantize a blackhole than we can prove how a goo of amino acids came alive. Pluggin 'God' into every temporary hurdle in science is not a good thing.

I propose that if the court rulings prevail, science teachers (such as myself) open a can of worms which ID proponents have not fully anticipated in their rush to force this issue. To wit: we should subject the ID creation stories of the world's great faiths to stringient scientific inquiry to see which ones are best supported by evidence, in particular, the stupendous evidence that the universe and earth are billions of years old. The Hinduism model would almost certainly fit the hard evidence best. Therefore (following the scientific method), the ID curricula in schools should focus on promoting the Hinduism model over the scientifically inferior Judeo-Christian-Islam creation hypothesis, and all the others as well.

That would completely rip the cover off the true agenda of the ID movement, which is to forcibly promote the literal interpretation of the Genesis story. If they want so badly to subject the tenets of their faith to the ruthless scrutiny of science, I say bring it on.

"Hate these discussions but am drawn to them like a car wreck. Call me a rubber necker."

Heh. Me too.

"This argument for random improbability is mistaken."

That depends on what you take that argument to be.

"The Theory of Evolution has two parts, Random Mutation AND Natural Selection."

Before I attack your misunderstanding of the argument, let me first point out that I think Natural Selection makes a pretty good 'blind designer'. I'm well convinced that Natural Selection as proposed by evolution could (but not necessarily did) account for all the diversity of life that we see.

Nonetheless, before natural selection can be invoked, we first have to have something which has inheritance, and if we have inheritance then we have something which is close to life. If you don't have something which can replicate itself and pass on its traits to its offspring, you don't have natural selection.

And therein lies the first big problem. Even if the theory of evolution can account for all the observed properties of current living organisms, it doesn't do a heck of alot for us in explaining how we got the first one. I would argue that its fundamentally over the question of were we got the first life form, that the theists and atheists are divided. The educated ones are divided over what happened after that, only why what happened after that happened. The atheists believe we got the first life form by dumb luck, even if the odds of it occuring were damn near 0, the fact that we are here is proof that it occurred. The theists believe that there was an intelligent designer who made the first life form by some process which may or may not have resembled a natural process, but which in fact wasn't, because the odds of the event occuring naturally are so damn near zero as to make it irrational to attribute it to chance.

That the latter stages of evolution are also sufficiently amazing and (seemingly) improbable is only an additional reason (according to the proponents of ID) for disbelieving the dumb luck thesis.

"When you get millions of variations to chose from the chances of one being suitable are fairly high."

This is the large numbers thesis. Both sides have one. I personally think that in this, the evidence is on the side of the ID'ers. Your average vertebrate mitochondrion contains ~16,000 base pairs. Do you have any idea how many possible mitochondrions that is? 416,000 is an enormous number. I don't want to do the math, but I'm sure its greater than 101000. So when you start talking about millions - a mere 106 - you aren't even in the remotely the same ballpark. And mitochondrions aren't by any stretch of the imagination self-sufficient life forms. You have to get up in the 1010000 range before we are talking about sequences that could possibly encode for any sort of hypothetical minimal life form. Do you have any idea what the odds are against any random sequence folding into a protein are - much less a functional protein? Just imagine that applied to a related set of interacting proteins.

And for that matter, we are just talking about DNA. However, DNA doesn't represent all the information in the cell. So which came first, the machinery of the cell, or the information necessary to build that machinery? You can't have one without the other.

"When there are 6 Billion variations of humans to choose from, at least a few will be immune to every disease."

Again, a failure to understand the size of the numbers involved here. The fact that there are any observable number humans at all who have some level of immunity to AIDS implies that at some point in the past natural selection has occurred. Otherwise, 6×10^9 is just not large enough of a number to expect immunity in the population. Moreover, there is certainly no reason to suspect that there will be at least a few who will be immune to every disease. Again, if there were, that would be evidence for an extended period of coevolution in which diseases and people were evolving together. Of course, that is what we'd expect, but we wouldn't expect it by random chance.

dang thing must have stripped my 'hat's. Oh well. That was supposed to be "4 raised to the 16000th power" not 416000 and "10 raised to the 1000th power" not 101000 in the above posts.

Oh, dear.

Any event less probable than 0.5e-150 is too improbable to have happened by pure chance? Well, let me point out that if you flip a coin 500 times, the probability of any particular sequence of heads and tails is roughly 3.05e-150, which is too improbable to have happened by pure chance. (Which, ironically, is probably why he chose the cutoff he did. The nice round numbers just sort of jump out at you, don't they...?)

And yet, if you do that experiment, you'll get one of those too-improbable-for-random-chance results.

Now, one may argue that because I'm sitting there flipping the coin, that's not happening by pure chance-- as the coin flipper, I am the intelligent designer. Well, okay. Fine. Thing is, you don't need me to flip a coin to do an experiment like that. All you need to do is cast this in terms of a naturally occuring statistical process, like radioactive decay times.

Those too-improbable-for-random-chance results are going on all around us, all the time, and no credible experiment has ever shown these events to be anything other than truly random in nature.

Dembski is not the guy to listen to, here. (Dembski is also noted for repeatedly misunderstanding the purpose of the No Free Lunch theorem of optimization theory, as well.)

There is an aspect of the meaning of "wrong" that's been obscured here. By today's standards, the evolutionary theory of Dobzhansky's day is wrong in that it has been superseded by theories that encompass new insights and new data in the field. The current theory makes more powerful (falsifiable) predictions than did the 1950 theory.

This is different from asserting that evolution (or macroevolution, or speciation) is wrong, and invoking a supernatural mechanism in its stead.

ID may be true, or it may be false. Either way, theories of evolution fall within the practice of science, and ID does not. Teach it in schools--but in religion or philosophy class, not as part of the science curriculum.

In an earlier incarnation of this discussion, Benjamin Kuipers contributed a link to his essay Why do we believe in electrons, but not in fairies? One of his observations goes to Dan Darling's original point:

The scientific method is an enormous intellectual asset to the human race. All citizens should understand what it can and cannot do, and all children should be taught to appreciate and apply it... In the debate between evolution and intelligent design, I believe that we scientists are missing an important opportunity to educate people about the difference between "truth" and "scientific truth". There is a perfectly reasonable role in society for faith in truths that are not scientifically testable. But we and our children need to understand and respect the difference.

"That would completely rip the cover off the true agenda of the ID movement, which is to forcibly promote the literal interpretation of the Genesis story. If they want so badly to subject the tenets of their faith to the ruthless scrutiny of science, I say bring it on."

You do recognize of course that the IDer's already have long splintered away from the Fundamentalists on the grounds that the IDer's already accept such things as the great antiquity of the universe, evolution, and so forth? When we talk about ID, we aren't talking about 'Young Earth' people. The 'Young Earth' people might technically be IDer's but they consider the mainstream IDer's to be every bit as evil as 'evilution'. In fact, they consider the IDer's to be a Satanic plot to keep people from seeing the truth of the literal Bible.

I would suggest that the true agenda of the ID movement is to get science teachers to start questioning a) thier open hostility to religion and b) some of the mythicism that they've embrassed with regards to evolution (see the link I posted above), or failing that to at least get it out into the open that a religious agenda by a segment of the scientific population is being covertly pushed on the public in the name of science. I suspect that they already feel that the tenets of thier faith have been as 'ruthlessly scrutinized' as its possible for them to be, and they don't have much fear of that at all.

Celebrim,

How the first proto-organism got on Earth is an interesting question, and one that some evolutionists tackle, because it's so thought-provoking. But it doesn't seem to be germane to the debate about ID, which is about speciation and the generation of "irreducibly" complex life forms.

As far as natural human resistance to HIV infection: some few people have a form of a white-blood-cell surface receptors (CXCR4 or CCR5) that the HIV virus cannot bind to. The story is too involved to go into here, but the probabilities are not shocking. It's the kind of intra-population genetic variation that one would expect to find.

So let's get this straight. The chance of life arising from some chemical stew is so small that you postulate... a supernatual being?
This whole arguement is absurd. What we're hearing is the agony of the true believers as dissolves the centrality, the import, and the explanatory power of their faith.

#39
"Im going to cut across several threads and simply note that the above is simply incomplete. While it is true that parallel universes cannot be directly observed, it is intrinsic to the Many Worlds theory that they interfere with each other.
If indeed the Many Worlds theory is correct, a wave function is a real event and particles are entangled with their mates in other universes. An interference pattern would then be the fingerprint of other universes."

Uhh... let's define our terms, I think you confused two different notions of multiple universes:

There's the parallel universes theory where everything that can happen happens in different universes which are continually splitting off. You flip a quantum-coin, two universes are created, one where it's heads and one where it's tails. That is the parallel universes which physicists talk about when they talk about 'entanglement.'

The multiple universes that we were talking about before is different-- that is the multiple universe in the 'multi-verse foam', where universes are continually popping into existence through such mechanisms as inflation and physical constants are randomly chosen-- some of them wink out instantaneously, some of them explode into nothingness, and some of them (such as ours) has life. These are the universes of the 'anthropic principles' and are what we were discussion.

It's easy to get them mixed up, but they're quite different concepts.

>>"If you don't have something which can replicate itself and pass on its traits to its offspring, you don't have natural selection."

Just to pick a nit, there are organisms that do not have an internal reproductive process. Viruses come to mind. But to answer your point Science does not have an 'Origin of Life' Theory, there is much speculation/ Heated argument over warm organic soups and such, but is always labled as that and nothing more.

If ID is proposed as a speculation I don't think there would be quite as much opposition to it.

>>"And therein lies the first big problem. Even if the theory of evolution can account for all the observed properties of current living organisms, it doesn't do a heck of alot for us in explaining how we got the first one."

This is not a problem at all. Science is incomplete, arguably permenently. See above, but also there are many other things where we do not understand the first moments but this does not hamper our understanding of the present. When/Why did gravity decouple at the Big Bang, we don't know, yet its influence at that instant caused large scale changes. This does not prevent us from accepting the existence of gravity now.

I believe I'm a spiritual person, definitely not Atheist, but doesn't mean I have to follow a book to be a Theist.

Do you not want to know how life originated? If you believe in a micromanaging 'Creator' then there is no further need for curiousity. I believe only science can discover this reality, not ID. Maybe not in my life time but someday.

>>"That the latter stages of evolution are also sufficiently amazing and (seemingly) improbable is only an additional reason (according to the proponents of ID) for disbelieving the dumb luck thesis."

Please give me some examples and we can discuss them. I would say Evolution is extrodinarily wasteful and inefficient. The results may seem amazing but the time and waste involved is horrendous. Truth is if I were the designer there are many many things I would improve upon with the Human design. Knees for instance. Unfortunately the fact that what we got in our inheritance had to be modified makes many of our and most species designs very inefficient. Every so often a species comes along, has a break thru design and wipes all the rest out.

>>"Do you have any idea what the odds are against any random sequence folding into a protein are - much less a functional protein?"

Yes I do. But I also know that the vast number of proteins we use, we share with hundreds of species. Humans do not produce a single protein that other animals do not. The insulin molecule from a horse can be extracted and works just fine in a human, slightly less efficient. Changes are accumulative not dramatic. You do not have to get to 16000 base pairs from 1 base pair, you get there form 15,999 base pairs.

>>"Moreover, there is certainly no reason to suspect that there will be at least a few who will be immune to every disease. Again, if there were, that would be evidence for an extended period of coevolution in which diseases and people were evolving together."

True enough. I should have qualified that. There are diseases that wipe out species. But it does not imply that people had to be exposed to diseases. Does that not argue for natural selection. That people who had a disease resistance survived and hence the resistance persists.

A fundamental error that probabilistic arguments make is to calculate the odds of a particular molecular combination resulting in life is to calculate the odds of a particular combination resulting randomly.

They then claim that that is the likelihood of life resulting randomly. But that is a quick leap that is falsely made. For the calculation fails to account for all other possible combinations that result in some form of life.

A similar error is made when arguing about the probability of a particular mutation or combination of mutations resulting in a biological construct.

Dembski knows that this is a falsehood but happily allows people to make that leap.

Celebraim (#45)

Actually, the only teacher I've heard that is hostile to religion was an english teacher, and as a scientist who likes to think about (B)ig ideas, I told him that he was an idiot.
What scares me about ID is that they are pushing unprovable theories over those which are already tested. Evolution is science, it has been studied exhaustibly in labs across the country for over a hundred years, and the more we find, the more convincing evolutionary 'theory' becomes. On this point, most scientists are past debate.

Most biologists will agree that biology has problems, it's only a theory, not a law. However, I think ID is being pushed by those who want to establish that science has 'holes', so they can disregard any evidence they don't want. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but that's how I feel.

Hopefully biologists are taking a good chunk of time to explain the problems with evolutionary theory, most importantly 1)the complexity of interpreting DNA 2) we will never be able to determine the 'birth' of all life.

Unfortunately, scientists should only take a short minute to explain the ideas behind ID. This is because the problems with ID almost completely outweigh the benefits of ID. To recap others: 1)ID makes no useful predictions about current life 2)cannot be tested (either for or against) 3) there is no evidence that indicates directly that a creator is 'neccessary' 4)does not change our fundamental understanding of sciece.

Dan is right, ID is philosphy

....if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the NON-existence of God.
The argument goes like this:

'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

'But,' says Man, 'The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.

'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing
-Hitchiker's Guide

Sorry, couldn't help myself

I think a lot of you guys are off-base here.

Good religion begins where science leaves off. That is, if you can proove it, it's not faith. Bad religion assumes that it IS science.
Likewise, good science is all about reproducability. If other people can do it, it means something. Bad science is all about anecdotes: uncle Jim built a flying saucer but he never showed it to anybody.
What I believe is not reproducable by another person -- it is unique to me. Therefore, science and religion will ALWAYS be mutually orthogonal, ie, non-overlapping.
Some people believe in science like a relgion: if you can't proove it, it doesn't exist. For these people I feel truly sorry. Some people fiew religion like a science: if the Great Pumpkin said he created the world from a stale doughnut then it must be so. For these people I feel pity, but we all have limits in how much knowledge we can grasp.
Science has limits. Over and over again things we thought were true turn out to be nonsense. Religion reminds us of this, and makes many uncomfortable -- it questions their faith in science.
Likewise with religion. Obviously the sun did not stop in the sky in the Old Testament. Religious people, however, have gotten smart. Most of them stopped being so literal.
People who worship science do not have that luxury: everything must be literal. Therefore when you start talking about holes in evolution theory, dark energy, gravity waves, or a GUT as showing they don't know everything, they tend to get a little defensive.
I don't have a problem with science being so vastly incomplete. I just wonder why so many people are so scared of teaching this simple fact to our kids? It's a fact of life that everything you learn in elementary school is a vast oversimplification that we boil down just so we can get it in those little heads. Why not at least be honest and tell the little tykes?Sounds a lot to me like the Catholic church not wanting to hear about planets orbiting the sun. My opinion only.

Great comments from all of you!

Here's my penny's worth:

1. Although I do believe in some form of ID, I think the Argument for ID because our evolution is just too improbable is false for the following reason:
Probability is really only useful as a concept when predicting the future or evaluating the unknown - not explaining the past. For example - suppose you were to put an accumulator bet on every winner in a horse racing season. The odds would all be multiplied together and you would end up with such astronomical odds that the change of winning would be practically zero (if you could get the bookie to take the bet). say there were 600 races and the average odds or probability of the backed horse was evens - i.e. a one in two chance of winning. Then the probability of 2 horses winning would be 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4. Do that 600 times and you get a total probalility of 1/2600 or 1 to 4.1495 * 10180 which is a number so large that it's more than the total number of atoms in the universe in fact it's so stupidly large that the probability is effectively zero.
But what happens when we look at the winners for last season? well if we took the odds of all last seasons winners and multiplied them together then we would get similarly large odds - in other words the probability that the all the actual horses that won actually did win is also as close to zero as makes no difference. So does this mean the horses that won didn't win? or that all the races were fixed? - Of course it doesn't - it simply shows that you can't use probability retrospectively. Any combination of 600 specific horses will produce odds that are approximately zero.
Similarly, the probability of any specific sequence of random evolution is also practically zero - but this does not mean that the one that actually occured is not random.

2. Secondly the debate about science education in schools is important and religious groups do have a point about science education descriminating against religion. This is because the concept of science in schools is taught as if it was totally logical and totally certain - scientists and by extention materialists are given an aura of infallibility. When I studied the history and philosophy of science at university I quickly learnt that this wasn't the case at all and that many scientists were just as guilty of dogmatism as religious groups. I believe that it is this scientific dogmatism that activly descriminates against any evidence that does not fit into the current (or indeed neutonian) view of the world.

I wonder what you all think about these points?

In the world of science, there are some things that we don't know or don't know well, and there are things that are pretty thoroughly understood.

How life came to be in the first place, how multicellular life emerged form single-cell life, and how one species turns into another species are not all the well understood. That the Universe is about 13 billion years old and the Earth is pretty close to 4.5 billion year old is very well understood. Also well understood is that life took different forms over the course of the history of the Earth, many of those forms are no longer here (extinct) while many of the current forms have traits that indicate that they were derived in some manner from the earlier forms.

If the proponents of ID are saying that there is a boundary between science, the things that are known, and religion, the things that are unknown or perhaps unknowable that we describe in the language of mythology, and not so fast Darwinists, the sphere of the known is not quite as large as you make it out to be, I would throw my hat in with the ID people.

But . . .

The history of the evolution vs religion debate has been one of the various religions and denominations coming to terms with the narrative of a 13 billion year old Universe and a 4.5 billion year old Earth. One of the famous holdouts are Christian Fundamentalists, Fundamentalism describing a particular movement regarding understanding and interpretation of the Bible, and being a movement that not even all that describe themselves as Evangelical Christians subscribe.

A key point for the Fundamentalist interpretation of Scripture is an understanding of Genesis that puts the age of the Universe and the Earth at around 6000 years, a number arrived at by some accounting of years in the Biblical geneologies.

In support of Fundamentalist doctrine have emerged some efforts to challenge not only the science behind Darwinian evolution and the fossil record but also the earth scientists and physicists and the whole narrative of an ancient Earth. Some of this is under the rubric of Creation Science which attempts to uncover anachronisms among the fossils, explained by conventional paleontologists as mixing of rock strata owing to various mechanisms that move rocks around, to various efforts to undercut radioactive dating.

If ID is yet another back-door way to get Fundamentalist Bible chronology of a 6000-year-old Earth into the public schools, and the earlier Creation Science movement is in that category, I definitely don't support it. What are the ID people saying about the radioactive dating chronology?

Celebrim (#45)

I appreciate your measured, thoughtful response to my post (#40) - civil, intelligent conversation by people with divergent views on this topic is rare. Let's keep it up.

I just want to add I am not at all hostile to the creation hypothesis, or to a creator (or creators), I am totally open to it, and will always be, and I tell my students to be open minded about it as well. And the vanishingly few teachers and scientists I have met in my career who are hostile to the idea are wrong.

But I'm also waiting for something challengeable and testable about ID to be brought up before I call it science, rather than philosophy or theology.

The hardest thing about science is balancing: #1) an open mind to ALL ideas, no matter how outrageous; and #2) ruthless skepticism and the highest standards of evidence (with more sensational claims requiring more spectacular, airtight evidence - and those claims we desperately WANT to be true held to an even higher standard). Virtually all of the creationists I have encountered want one to adhere to #1, but if you invoke #2 with just a fraction of the same skepticism you use when buying a used car, you are labeled a close-minded bigot on the subject and the argument ends. You gotta have them both in true science, and it is takes a mature intellect to keep them in balance.

Science rewards those that shatter the status quo, unlike religion and politics. Just think of Newton, Galileo, Einstein, and yes, Darwin. If as a scientist, I could find or be presented with a smidgen of hard evidence for ID, (or for that matter, a fatal flaw undermining any currently accepted theories), I would pursue it relentlessly, for a chance of destroying the status quo and be held in the company of those giants. And if anyone has any evidence, the invitation is always there - just beware, I will challenge it just like an '87 Buick on a used car lot.

When ID theory helps produce an AIDS vaccine i'll take notice.

" These are the universes of the 'anthropic principles' and are what we were discussion."

Ah, in that case the universes are not strictly 'parallel', but 'bubble universes'. Regardless, the point stands. It is silly to claim that we can never design experiments to test the tenants of the evolutionary universe theory, perhaps we can, perhaps we cant, but we certainly wont know until we crack the gravity problem. Physists have ideas in mind for creating bubble universes in the lab, for instance.

Our universe is not built on total random chance. There are prefered pathways.

The study of such prefered pathways is called chemistry.

The study of the results of such prefered pathways is called biology.

The study of the interaction of biology with the environment is called evolution.

At this point the study of the first cause is called philosophy. At some point science may be appled to philosophy. Such has happened in the past, such as when logic became more of a mathematical discipline as opposed to its origins in philosophy.

The central problem of applying ID to science is this:

If the Intelligent Designer did it then one need look no farther for causes.

Thus ID stunts science. Which was the case for quite some time until humans decided to try to find cause and effect for things that could not be understood as such given the current state of knowledge.

Science has led to the destruction of religion as the primary explanation of why the universe is as it is. i.e. a loss of power. And who likes that?

Religion still has ethics, for a while. Economics and evolution are encroaching though. What is a religion to do? Many want to fight a rear guard action. ID is such an action. Will there be a place for religion in the future? Maybe.

My research on the nature of addiction is taking "drunkeness/addiction" out of the realm of ethical discussion. There are many folks who resist for "moral" reasons. Change is never easy. Which is why death is a good thing. Rigidities get dissolved.

#56,

The problem you state is not unusual. It is why software testing is rarely entrusted to the designer of said software.

Very few can be critical of their own creations.

Perhaps ID could be dealt with in science the same way phlogiston is studied.

Worth a passing mention. Show what is wrong with it. Move on.

ID depends on our ignorance. Explicitly. i.e science cannot (yet) explain xxx, thus ID.

Show that the IDers leave out the "yet".

End of story.

Fabio C.,

Atomic Chemistry - specifically beta and alpha emissions.

Simon I like your idea. An even better example comes to mind. Ether, the infinitely elastic and dense substance.

#63,

Thanks. One quibble. Ether has not been disproved. What has been disproved is that the ether is fixed.

Feynman in his Physics Lectures covers this.

I was going to post a final comment on ID, but ran up against the bandwidth wall, so I posted it at my blog instead: Intelligent Design as Philosophy.

I take it you didn't read Gould's sermon in the journal Science?

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/284/5423/2087

Of course I've read Gould, and I won't deny that there are some people who make a big point out of atheism. It's just as easy to point out extremists on the other side, but it's not informative to the debate.

The mass of the present public debate has to do with the teaching of ID in science classes. Nowhere in that debate is the issue about the existence of nonexistence of god.

The problem with your analogy is that we've had a non-atomic theory of matter for some time now. Atoms are not atomic. When you laughed the Wiccans out of the room for suggesting that atoms were not subdividable, the last laugh was and is on you.

You read my argument entirely backwards: my hypothetical religious group was certainly not positing the existence of quarks ... they were, sans evidence, denying the existence of atoms and demanding to be heard.

This is directly analogous to IDers denying, sans evidence, the existence of evolution, and demanding to be heard. Just as the modern ID set insists on a pre-1800's understanding of biology, my hypothetical group insisted on a pre-1800's understanding of chemistry.

That matter was continuous/non-atomic/infinitely divisible/not composed of particles was, in fact, what people believed until sometime in the 1800's century, when Dalton's atomic theory of matter overwhelmed the preexisting theory of continuous matter.

The evidence for evolution is every bit as strong as the evidence that atoms exist.

54. Then the probability of 2 horses winning would be 1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4. Do that 600 times and you get a total probalility of 1/2600 or 1 to 4.1495 * 10180 which is a number so large that it's more than the total number of atoms in the universe in fact it's so stupidly large that the probability is effectively zero.

I think you're basic understanding of the molecular world is a little off. There are molecular 'horseraces' everywhere. In your body, there are thousands-hundreds of thousands of these reactions occuring everyday. Computers can calculate the math on guessing the right answer correctly, afterall you did it in a blog.
However, in the physical chemsitry world there is a lot of math on the functioning of different protein strings, single molecules in solution, and the effect of polarity on individual molecules based on basic assumptions. These computer programs massively simplify molecules into small spheres, and with several super-powered computers together it can still take months to compute trends, which can then be compared to the real world. The kicker, these simulations can only calculate 100-500 molecular 'spheres' at a time.
Yes, evolution seems statistically impossible. But, you also have to see that the universe doesn't play this game once or twice, but billions*10^billions of times. It only takes one 'winner' for life to start.

67 Thanks Alchemist for replying :)

I think your argument makes a much stronger claim than mine - that because of the high numbers of oportunities the individually improbable events of evolution are in actuality highly probable. - Rumsfeld, eat your heart out :)
I'm arguing for the much weaker claim that it doesn't matter how improbable something is if it has already happened. It doesn't mean anything because probability is about prediction of the unknown not explanation of the known. And I hope I've backed this up with the horse racing example. The question is - does DNA mutate and are the mutations passed on? Can we demonstrate that a random mechanism exists? I think there is a yes to both these questions. Also can we find evidence of animals at each stage of the (random) evolutionary path? I find probility to be really strange when not used for prediction. Consider throwing a fair dice under a box - if you can't see it the probability of it being a 6 is 1/6 - now if your friend takes a peek then he knows. So the probability of it being a 6 for him is either 1 (yes it's a 6) or 0 (no it's not) - The point is that, as you can't see the dice, the probability for you is still 1/6. This is strange because it shows that probability isn't a fact independent of knowledge. This is just one more example of how probability behaves in very counter-intuitive ways, and this is why I don't like the argument for ID from probability. Probability is just too unreliable to be used for specific instances.

P.S. I'm sorry that my power sign (^) didn't come out - does make a mess of the maths :)It should of been 1/(2 to the power of 600).

A bit off topic, perhaps: I just finished reading an important recent paper on how the hepatitis C virus evades the body's antiviral defenses (abstract here). It's part of a large body of work that may lead to much-improved therapies a few years from now...

...and many of the authors' important arguments are best made sense of in the context of evolution. In a world where biologists thought in terms of ID instead of Darwinian processes, I doubt this piece of work would have occurred to these investigators.

IdahoEv's arguments (#26, #66) got to the heart of the question.

If it's not empirically or logically falsifiable that a mechanistic or entirely non-intelligent process, such as random selection, explains every aspect of the cosmological phenonemon of "life" then Evolution is also a "philosophy," when it comes to that sort of issue. So the question is, is such a proposition scientifically falsifiable?

It is, in the narrow sense that a Creator might leave some fingerprint which, if appropriately interpreted, would lead to the conclusion that something other than a dumb process was involved. However, this leaves science at the mercy of God, which hardly would seem very satisfying for an unbeliever like Dawkins. So, is it possible to so narrowly or specifically define the resultants from natural selection that we could ultimately reject the hypothesis of the exclusivity of a "non-intelligent (dumb) process," even if a Creator were determined to obscure or hide His presence?

Unfortunately one simply can't imagine such a thing, for if the Creator is (as Anselm proposed) "That than which no greater can be considered," then it seams clear that the ability to always conceive something higher than whatever non-intelligent process one has in mind leads to the conclusion that Evolution is, in that very important absolute sense, non-falsifiable and non-scientific.

Demosophist #70:

Fair enough, coming to the conclusion that Evolution is, in that very important absolute sense, non-falsifiable and non-scientific.

Would you be willing to apply the same standard to the other historical sciences? Geology is most analogous.

• "I reject the idea that erosion at a rate of 1 mm/year acting over 1 million years could have removed 1 km of overburden as a mountain range rose. I invoke an Intelligent Designer, instead.
• "I reject the idea that plate motion at 2 cm per year has led the Atlantic to widen by 200 km over the past 10 million years--ocean width changes can only have been the handiwork of an Intelligent Designer.

And so on. In each case, absent a time machine, we cannot know what the past was like. Present-day mechanisms might not explain what went before--and cannot rule out the action of a Designer.

A scientific paradigm ought not to need proof that acts of supernatural intervention did not occur in the past. If ID advocates insist that evolution does, then I expect to see the same demands made of geologists.

Would you be willing to apply the same standard to the other historical sciences? Geology is most analogous.

Well of course, at least to the extent that geology is used as a refutation of the idea that God exists hand has some sort of role to play in the natural world. As a theory, however, it just needs to be reliable and open to falsification. I guess the problem I have with the way these issues are presented is that the scientific claims often go way beyond what is actually science, and they do in a non-obvious kind of way... not by adherence to method but by presumption.

Demosophila, thanks for your thoughts.

Actually, mea culpa, my comment #71 is awry. ID is the idea that certain of the complex structures formed by living things that are in evidence today are irreducibly complex, defined as meaning that their origin cannot be explained by the workings of natural processes (i.e. evolution).

In #70 and #71, we were talking as if ID concerned the possibility rather than the necessity of intervention by the Designer (nobody's claimed that a couple million years of erosion can't wear down a mountain).

If one thinks that known biological processes are likely able to account for all seemingly-irreducibly complex structures, one is unlikely to be an advocate of ID.

To me, and I care about science as much as anyone I know, this question is so academic. I just can't get excited about it at all.

So what if they force public schools to teach ID?
So what if they then turn around and ban the teaching of evolution in school?

How many people went through religious schools and found their way to evolution anyway?
(Me, me....)

All the indoctrination in the world simply didn't take. As long as Darwin is part of the intellectual environment, those who need to find it will find it.

All they are guaranteeing is that the ordinary folks - the great masses - will be confused.

The elite. The men and women who matter. The true seekers after knowledge, will find their way to Darwin - even if they banned all books on evolution.

If the religious right has its way and one day Darwin is supressed, all that means is that many American biologists will have to go overseas to work. So? Science is a fraternity that transcends mere nationality or politics.

I am utterly sanguine about this. I have seen so much betrayal of science in my life that I have no faith - no trust in any kind of political order. What else is new? Politicians are the lowest kind of scum. They will betray science in an instant if it suits them. They would sell their own mothers. A scientist is truly a higher being with a higher calling. You must stay loose. Travel lightly. Be prepared to move - to run if necessary. Nothing is certain - nothing is guaranteed.

[Incredibly long cut & paste rant with bare URLs deleted as sp*m --NM]