Originally posted by dizzyfingers
From your posts, I highly doubt that you are honestly trying to understand what the theory of Intelligent Design is. There is so much information available on the subject, you could have easily educated yourself much better than you have before starting this thread. Nonetheless, I'll get to the heart of the matter by asking you something, and when you h in a post, and share what you've found out. I'm sure everyone here could benefit from it.
I've spent a lot of time looking into ID. I gave it the benefit of the doubt at first. Then I found out there was zero science behind it.
Why don't you educate me instead of assuming I'm simply ignorant and haven't even tried to look into it? I can just as easily tell you that you are not honestly trying to understand what the criticisms of ID are, and that you could have easily educated yourself with all the info out there. What does that accomplish? Nothing, except to show that I am biased and unwilling to even discuss the possibility that I am wrong. That's what I'm hearing from you.
is so much information available on the subject, you could have educated yourself much better than you have before starting this thread. Nonetheless, I'll get to the heart of the matter by asking you something, and when you have answered, apply what you've learned to your question about what ID is.
Wow. You're arrogant. Where do you get off with this kind of condescending attitude? I went to the best chemistry school in the world, got my BS in biochemistry and have taken a job as a science teacher. Why do you think I don't know what I'm talking about?
SETI is based on lots of assumptions and has so far failed to find anything. It assumes extraterrestrial intelligence will be similar to human intelligence and then looks for human-like signals. Even it's been criticized as pseudoscience. However, at least it assumes a human-like designer, and understands that it might be wrong. It provides data that can be analyzed. ID doesn't even do that. It assumes...a designer. How do you know what such a designer is like? Is it human like? Not necessarily. Then what do you look for?
writer Michael Crichton, in a 2003 lecture at Caltech, stated that "The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion.
http://www.michaelcrichton.com/index.html
In Skeptical Inquirer, Mark Moldwin explicitly made the distinction between the two projects, arguing that an important discriminator was the acceptance of SETI by the mainstream scientific community and that "[t]he methodology of SETI leads to useful scientific results even in the absence of discovery of alien life."
http://www.arn.org/docs/williams/pw_setivsufology.htm
If I wanted to investigate SETI, they have lots of graphs of what kind of information they've found that I could look at. Conversely, ID simply insists, over and over, that life or the universe "could not happen" without an ID. There's no data. There's no math, no hypothesis, no nothing. Just insisting over and over. It comes down to this logical fallacy:
The argument from personal incredulity, also known as argument from personal belief or argument from personal conviction, refers to an assertion that because one personally finds a premise unlikely or unbelievable, the premise can be assumed not to be true, or alternately that another preferred but unproven premise is true instead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
That's ID. That's all they've got. It doesn't use the science anthropologists and SETI people use. All the ID people ever do in my experience is paraphrase that above fallacy. You're no different. You're just asking me to do a bunch of reading to educate myself.
ID can be science. If I wanted to explore ID as science, I'd want to see math involving complexity and entropy. I'd want to see equations proving the "impossibilities" ID asserts. Where's the math?