1. Standard memberAThousandYoung
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    10 May '08 16:471 edit
    The ID argument, as I understand it, includes the idea that one can just look at an object and be able to determine whether or not an intelligence of some sort designed it.

    It seems to me that this necessarily means that one can describe objects that are clearly NOT intelligently designed. Would someone point such an object out to me?

    Incidentally it seems that this makes ID incompatible with the existence of any sort of deity who created everything.
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    10 May '08 18:311 edit

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  3. Standard memberAThousandYoung
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    10 May '08 19:49
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    I don't know. I'm not an ID proponent. However I've been told they can made this differentiation, and therefore know that there must have been a Designer. I want to know the same thing you do, or similar.

    What would you use as an example of something NOT intelligently designed? The argument is that people can tell the difference, and that these people can see intelligent design in certain things like life. Well, point out the things without intelligent design please, so we know what part of the universe was NOT designed by some intelligence.
  4. Subscribersonhouse
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    10 May '08 21:09
    Originally posted by AThousandYoung
    I don't know. I'm not an ID proponent. However I've been told they can made this differentiation, and therefore know that there must have been a Designer. I want to know the same thing you do, or similar.

    What would you use as an example of something NOT intelligently designed? The argument is that people can tell the difference, and that these ...[text shortened]... nt design please, so we know what part of the universe was NOT designed by some intelligence.
    A volcano?
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    10 May '08 22:54
    Originally posted by sonhouse
    A volcano?
    OK. That means ID is not compatible with Christianity, Judaism and Islam, right? Because Genesis says God made everything.
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    11 May '08 03:21
    Originally posted by AThousandYoung
    The ID argument, as I understand it, includes the idea that one can just look at an object and be able to determine whether or not an intelligence of some sort designed it.

    It seems to me that this necessarily means that one can describe objects that are clearly NOT intelligently designed. Would someone point such an object out to me?

    Incidenta ...[text shortened]... that this makes ID incompatible with the existence of any sort of deity who created everything.
    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 have answered, apply what you've learned to your question about what ID is.

    Have you ever heard of a project called SETI? If not, do a Google search. What are the purposes and objectives of the project? How does it do it's work?

    If you'll do what I just said, I think you'll have a much better idea of what ID is. If you actually follow through, let us know in a post, and share what you've found out. I'm sure everyone here could benefit from it.
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    11 May '08 04:10
    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 ...[text shortened]... in a post, and share what you've found out. I'm sure everyone here could benefit from it.
    ID isn't a theory. It's only an idea, and a badly conceived one at that.
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    11 May '08 04:251 edit
    Originally posted by scottishinnz
    ID isn't a theory. It's only an idea, and a badly conceived one at that.
    It's not even a theory. It's an emotion.
    Dizzy, why do keep equating anything done by what we call intelligent humans with ID? Just because we can design a new virus doesn't mean thats how the universe was made. You are not after science or proof or peer reviewed papers, you are only after this: "Trust me on this". So what about SETI? There may, probably are, civilizations out there that maybe could respond to us but we have already let the cat out of the bag, our radio NOISE will tell anyone in range 'here be intelligence, this noise is not natural'. This may or may not be a good thing. But it sure as hell doesn't have a bloody thing to do with ID.
  9. Standard memberAThousandYoung
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    11 May '08 16:176 edits
    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?
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    11 May '08 16:231 edit
    Now, I've accepted for the purposes of this thread that ID people can tell between a designed object and one not designed. I've been given an example of a non-designed object (a volcano) and managed to prove that ID is therefore incompatible with creationism. That's a useful argument that could lend credibility to ID, assuming you can divorce it from religion. If you can't do so it's not science.

    What I'd like to do now is ask HOW you determine that a volcano is not designed. How do you know it's not designed, but bacteria are for example? Don't give me the fallacy of personal incredulity please.
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    11 May '08 19:231 edit
    Originally posted by AThousandYoung
    Now, I've accepted for the purposes of this thread that ID people can tell between a designed object and one not designed. I've been given an example of a non-designed object (a volcano) and managed to prove that ID is therefore incompatible with creationism. That's a useful argument that could lend credibility to ID, assuming you can divorce it fro but bacteria are for example? Don't give me the fallacy of personal incredulity please.
    So, should I, for the purposes of this thread, accept that non-ID people CAN'T tell the difference between a designed and non-designed object? A lot of good that degree has done you. Obviously.
    I think some missed the point of why I asked about SETI. The whole premise behind it is not so much that we want to be detected, but that we ourselves can detect signs of intelligence. So, if you don't accept that premise to begin with, there's really no point in continuing our conversation.
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    11 May '08 19:415 edits
    Originally posted by dizzyfingers
    So, should I, for the purposes of this thread, accept that non-ID people CAN'T tell the difference between a designed and non-designed object? A lot of good that degree has done you. Obviously.
    I think some missed the point of why I asked about SETI. The whole premise behind it is not so much that we want to be detected, but that we ourselves can dete ...[text shortened]... 't accept that premise to begin with, there's really no point in continuing our conversation.
    So, should I, for the purposes of this thread, accept that non-ID people CAN'T tell the difference between a designed and non-designed object?

    Well I certainly can't. Therefore any experiments would not be reproducible. There should be some sort of objective facts you can point to as evidence of design.

    Your 'premise' is not a premise. That's a claim that should lead to a hypothesis.

    As I pointed out before, SETI has data which can then be analyzed in any number of mathematical ways. Patterns can be looked for. Communication theory has quite a lot of mathematical analysis of how communication relates to patterns, randomness etc. They, I would assume, use mathematical models which they hypothesize would locate intelligence.

    SETI does NOT, I would most certainly hope, simply rely on people going "oh look at that, it must be from intelligent aliens". People have been doing that sort of thing for ages. It's not science though and despite zillions of claims of alien sightings we still can't seem to find them. That's because peoples' subjective feelings about what something is are not science and are not reliable.

    I don't think that "people can just TELL" is ever science, now that I think about it. Science goes from objective facts to models to hypotheses which are then tested by looking for more objective facts. The objective facts in ID just don't exist. They're hinted at with terms like "complexity" but that reasoning should naturally lead to statistics, entropy, information science, etc which requires lots and lots of data to check.

    I've seen an attempt to statistically study the situation but it was horribly flawed and the authors of the study did not update their model to take scientific facts into account that they failed to account for the first time.
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    11 May '08 21:511 edit
    Originally posted by dizzyfingers
    So, should I, for the purposes of this thread, accept that non-ID people CAN'T tell the difference between a designed and non-designed object? A lot of good that degree has done you. Obviously.
    I think some missed the point of why I asked about SETI. The whole premise behind it is not so much that we want to be detected, but that we ourselves can dete ...[text shortened]... 't accept that premise to begin with, there's really no point in continuing our conversation.
    Man, you ARE obtuse. Detecting alien life is just that, it is not detecting a god, we are just looking for signals that may indicate something like the technical level of our civilization. We can see signs of intelligence in fossil bones of Neanderthals for instance, so what. That is not even close to the same league as looking for evidence of a god. Why do you even TRY to keep equating the two? There is a universe of differance in detecting some kind of alien civilization who uses intelligence to come up to our level of technology or beyond and saying, see, we found intelligence, they designed something using intelligence, therefore ID is valid. You are talking apples and universes here, not in the same league of logic, or in your case, illogic.
  14. Standard memberNemesio
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    11 May '08 23:32
    Originally posted by AThousandYoung
    What would you use as an example of something NOT intelligently designed? The argument is that people can tell the difference, and that these people can see intelligent design in certain things like life. Well, point out the things without intelligent design please, so we know what part of the universe was NOT designed by some intelligence.
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    12 May '08 01:29
    Originally posted by sonhouse
    Man, you ARE obtuse. Detecting alien life is just that, it is not detecting a god, we are just looking for signals that may indicate something like the technical level of our civilization. We can see signs of intelligence in fossil bones of Neanderthals for instance, so what. That is not even close to the same league as looking for evidence of a god. Why do ...[text shortened]... re talking apples and universes here, not in the same league of logic, or in your case, illogic.
    I was only using SETI as an example of how we are already scientifically attempting to detect design in the universe, not equating ID and SETI's goals. What seems to make ID so controversial, though, is that it is taking that same type of scientific reasoning used in SETI and applying it to biology, attempting to demonstrate that there is an un-evolved intelligence detectable in the design of living things. ID's antagonists say they object to it on scientific grounds, but generally, I think they are just having a hard time with it's implications.
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