ID is Dead (Again)

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”

If that’s not enough to convince the reader that Elizabeth is no prophet, there’s aways other things we can point to.

UD is still chugging along, as is the Discovery Institute. Michael Denton has a new book coming out soon, as does Douglas Axe. BIO-Complexity continues to publish. More of the incredible design of the living world is being revealed daily.

ID Is Dead. But perhaps like the proverbial cat it has more than one life.

451 thoughts on “ID is Dead (Again)

  1. Try again-

    What religion? ID doesn’t require a belief in God. It doesn’t say anything about worship or service. There aren’t any prayers.

    So please tell us what ID has to do with religion by actually addressing the points made

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  3. Mung:
    One person manages to come up with one statement in defense of the claim that“Intelligent Design” is a broken-down vehicle for promoting religious ideas as scientific.

    And it wasn’t even Alan Fox, who made the initial claim.

    That’s it?

    Maybe it’s anti-ID that is dead.

  4. Richardthughes: Mung:
    One person manages to come up with one statement in defense of the claim that“Intelligent Design” is a broken-down vehicle for promoting religious ideas as scientific.

    Actually that one person seems to work at the Discovery Institute.

  5. Neither ID or YEC are religion. But both are only able to survive because of the strong religious bias of their adherents.

  6. REW:
    Neither ID or YEC are religion.But both are only able to survive because of the strong religious bias of their adherents.

    Evolutionism is not a religion but it survives only due to the strong faith of its adherents.

  7. Frankie: Evolutionism is not a religion but it survives only due to the strong faith of its adherents.

    The alternative is unthinkable.

  8. Virgil Cain at UD: “IOW Elizabeth and the TSZ are about as dishonest and deceptive as it gets.”

    KairosFocus at UD: “You just proved what you are, a trollish agitator unable or unwilling to acknowledge a major and longstanding deep-seated problem of abusive behaviour by objectors to design theory; backed by enabling behaviour of the more genteel [aka Elizabeth] . . . some of whom com across as unwilling to confront the abusers because their feral fury will predictably turn on them if they do so.”

    No, ID is not dead, but it certainly has strange bedfellows.

  9. Alan Fox: This is arrant nonsense, Frankie. There is no testable ID hypothesis. You haven’t provided one and neither has anyone else, neither here nor in any other location, in any book or paper or on a website.

    There is NO testable scientific hypothesis for “Intelligent Design”.

    1) High information content (or specified complexity) and irreducible complexity constitute strong indicators or hallmarks of (past) intelligent design.

    This is no more than a vague assertion. If you want it to be a premise of your argument you need to define exactly what you mean by “information” and show how to measure it. You also need an operational definition of irreducible complexity. You need to provide examples of both in past intelligent design. And you need to clarify that you specifically mean intelligent design by humans, not something abstract.

    2) Biological systems have a high information content (or specified complexity) and utilize subsystems that manifest irreducible complexity.

    Unsupported unless and until you provide the operational definitions and example measurements noted above.

    3) Naturalistic mechanisms or undirected causes do not suffice to explain the origin of information (specified complexity) or irreducible complexity.

    Baseless assertion. Provide the necessary operational definitions and proof of the claim.

    4) Therefore, intelligent design constitutes the best explanations for the origin of information and irreducible complexity in biological systems.

    This is unsupported and does not follow from your first three items.

    That is the ID hypothesis

    It’s not an hypothesis, it’s at best an unsupported speculation with no testable entailments.

  10. Frankie:
    Robin,

    You are conflating what some people want to use ID for with ID itself.

    Whaaaa…? Quoting the two most prominent ID promoters – including the guy that started the the entire concept as defined – is conflating “what some people want”? Seriously Joe…you need to work on your argument there!

    In his book “Signature in the Cell” Stephen C. Meyer addresses the issue of Intelligent Design and religion:

    “You are conflating what some people want to use ID for with ID itself.”

    Right back atcha there Joe!

    “The Design Revolution”, page 25, Dembski writes:

    Gosh…Dembski contradicting himself. Like we can’t find more examples of that…

  11. Frankie:
    Try again-

    What religion? ID doesn’t require a belief in God. It doesn’t say anything about worship or service. There aren’t any prayers.

    Which has nothing to do with what I wrote or the comment I was replying to. Care to try again Joe?

    So please tell us what ID has to do with religion by actually addressing the points made

    See what the the most prominent ID promoters actually promote as I posted. ‘Nuff said…

  12. Patrick,

    Blah, blah, blah- You still cannot produce anything better for evolutionism.

    We have defined information and said how to measure it. You cannot say how to measure natural selection wrt producing new proteins and multi-protein configurations such as ATP synthase.

    The operational definitions have been provided. Your continued denial is not an argument.

  13. Robin: Which has nothing to do with what I wrote or the comment I was replying to. Care to try again Joe?

    See what the the most prominent ID promoters actually promote as I posted. ‘Nuff said…

    And just ignore what I posted about what they say. Great. Behe even testified that ID doesn’t require God. All of the top IDists and Creationists have shown that ID doesn’t have anything to do with religion.

  14. Robin: Whaaaa…? Quoting the two most prominent ID promoters – including the guy that started the the entire concept as defined – is conflating “what some people want”? Seriously Joe…you need to work on your argument there!

    “You are conflating what some people want to use ID for with ID itself.”

    Right back atcha there Joe!

    Gosh…Dembski contradicting himself. Like we can’t find more examples of that…

    And yet I posted two prominent IDists that support my claim. Behe’s testimony supports my claim. I can post more prominent IDists who support what I say:

    “Intelligent Design is based on scientific evidence, not religious belief.”- Jonathan Wells “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design”

    John Morris, the president of the Institute for Creation Research:

    “The differences between Biblical creationism and the IDM should become clear. As an unashamedly Christian/creationist organization, ICR is concerned with the reputation of our God and desires to point all men back to Him. We are not in this work merely to do good science, although this is of great importance to us. We care that students and society are brainwashed away from a relationship with their Creator/Savior. While all creationists necessarily believe in intelligent design, not all ID proponents believe in God. ID is strictly a non-Christian movement, and while ICR values and supports their work, we cannot join them.”

    And you are still not addressing the points I made.

  15. Patrick,


    3) Naturalistic mechanisms or undirected causes do not suffice to explain the origin of information (specified complexity) or irreducible complexity.

    Baseless assertion.

    It is based on the fact that no one even knows how to test such a thing. You don’t have any idea how to test the claim that any bacterial flagellum evolved via natural selection, drift and/ or neutral changes.

    That is the whole problem, Patrick. If you could only support the claims of your position ID would really be dead. The way you are trying to go about just exposes the fact that you can’t.

  16. Alister McGrath and theistic evolution


    Barry ArringtonJanuary 6, 2016 at 1:26 pm
    SB @ 6,

    I do not agree. It tells the world that you value your membership card in the “cool kids” academic club more than you value truth.

    If they actually believed TE, they would be idiots. I doubt many of them do.”

    TE off the table. What does that leave us with?

  17. Frankie,

    Blah, blah, blah-

    Thank you for reminding me why I stopped replying to you.

    We have defined information and said how to measure it.

    If that were true you could just copy and paste it in your response.

    The operational definitions have been provided.

    If that were true you could just copy and paste them in your response.

  18. Frankie: And yet I posted two prominent IDists that support my claim. Behe’s testimony supports my claim. I can post more prominent IDists who support what I say:

    “Intelligent Design is based on scientific evidence, not religious belief.”- Jonathan Wells “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design”

    John Morris, the president of the Institute for Creation Research:

    “The differences between Biblical creationism and the IDM should become clear. As an unashamedly Christian/creationist organization, ICR is concerned with the reputation of our God and desires to point all men back to Him. We are not in this work merely to do good science, although this is of great importance to us. We care that students and society are brainwashed away from a relationship with their Creator/Savior. While all creationists necessarily believe in intelligent design, not all ID proponents believe in God. ID is strictly a non-Christian movement, and while ICR values and supports their work, we cannot join them.”

    And you are still not addressing the points I made.

    ‘Cuz you’re not addressing my points. So…you first.

    Frankie: And just ignore what I posted about what they say. Great. Behe even testified that ID doesn’t require God.

    And again…*requiring* God is not the issue. Try again.

    But to further the point, since when do what Behe, Morris, Wells, or Meyer write outrank what Johnson and Dembski write? Why should should I even consider anything Meyer or Wells put out when they and Luskin’s job is to generate propaganda?

    All of the top IDists and Creationists have shown that ID doesn’t have anything to do with religion.

    As the quotes I provided show, this is completely false.

  19. To the point, here’s why Wells has no credibility:

    “Father’s words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism. When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.”

    – Jonathan Wells, Why I Went for a Ph.D, Unification Church presentation

    Geez…no agenda there…*rolls eyes*

  20. We know that ID has nothing to do with religion, because the IDists who post here never, never, never, uses atheist as a pejorative.

  21. Just picking up on the prolific output of papers published at Bio-Complexity. I see Zachriel draws our attention to an impressive paper in a comment at Uncommon Descent.

    As Zachriel puts it:

    Voordeckers et al. find what apparently so eluded Reeves, Gauger, and Axe.

    It’s worth a read.

  22. Alan Fox:
    Just picking up on the prolific output of papers published at Bio-Complexity. I see Zachriel draws our attention to an impressive paper in a comment at Uncommon Descent.

    As Zachriel puts it:

    It’s worth a read.

    I really don’t feel like reading another piece of crap from Axe an Co. Is it the same old molecular crocoduck type of argument?

  23. The impressive paper is not by Axe. Should have been obvious.

    Axe is to experimental evolution what Mung is to GAs.

  24. dazz: I really don’t feel like reading another piece of crap from Axe an Co. Is it the same old molecular crocoduck type of argument?

    Personally I can’t do better than this critique by commenter REC at AtBC:

    Wow….2nd 2015 publication from BioComplexity, and it is a doozy:

    Axe and Gauger “tested these proposals by observing how the endpoint of simple evolutionary optimization depends on the starting point. Beginning with optimization of protein-like constructs in the Stylus computational model, we compared promiscuous and junk starting points, where design elements specific to the test function were completely absent, to a starting point that retained most elements of a good design (mutation having disrupted some). In all three cases, evolutionary optimization improved activities by a large factor.”

    Another round of Axe and Gauger running experiments designed to fail, therefore design (except again, some worked, but you know, still design. Not evolution. Nope. Not ever).

    Oopsy.

    Much handwaving BS follows. Mostly that good ‘designs’ (defined by them as starting points closer to their target) perform better in a few rounds of directed evolution than more distant starting points, which they call promiscuous or junk (which are totes not-designed, cuz please they be evolutionary random ‘junk’). Duh.

    My favorite junky ‘non-design’ is a totally deranged protein* with a huge deletion which apparently fails to achieve full activity in a couple rounds of kit mutagenesis. This kit in my hands only changes a few bases per clone. No insertions more than a base. They don’t try shuffling to mimic recombination. Shockingly, it didn’t work!! But nearer starting points (again, called designs) do, therefore design and Jesus and all that.

    *Their words: “In addition to the 36 residues that are missing in the deletion mutant, another 29 residues are unequivocally prevented from adopting the wild-type conformation because of the missing segment, meaning that the structural disruption extends to 65 residues. Because this is the minimum extent of impact to the whole structure, the images on the right show the maximum amount of wild-type structure that could remain in TEMΔ. What actually remains may be much less. In addition to the deletion, TEMΔ carries 32 amino acid substitutions (see Supplement S1 [28])”

    When you read that, remember that TEM is ~280 amino acids.

  25. petrushka:

    Axe is to experimental evolution what Mung is to GAs.

    And both of them should feel insulted. 🙂

  26. Probably the most science that ever happened in a Mung post. Perhaps he front loaded it?

  27. petrushka:
    The impressive paper is not by Axe. Should have been obvious.

    Axe is to experimental evolution what Mung is to GAs.

    I know, I know. The paper of Voordeckers is already bookmarked.

  28. dazz: I really don’t feel like reading another piece of crap from Axe an Co. Is it the same old molecular crocoduck type of argument?

    Ah, Petrushka points out that you misunderstood that I was talking about a paper by Karin Voordeckers et al.

    Sorry for not being clear.

  29. Alan Fox,

    Meh, the same shit, only that this time they simply run a few simulations. Why rent lab time when you can debunk evolution from your laptop with a green screen and superimpose the lab later?

  30. keiths:
    petrushka:

    And both of them should feel insulted.

    Truth is not an insult.

    Both have dabbled in straw models of evolution that are guaranteed — by design — to fail.

    Anyone can write a program that doesn’t work, or do an experiment that produces negative results.

  31. Alan Fox: Ah, Petrushka points out that you misunderstood that I was talking about a paper by Karin Voordeckers et al.

    Sorry for not being clear.

    Actually your post was crystal clear, I just hit the UD link first where they were discussing Axe’s paper, so it’s my bad

  32. petrushka: Anyone can write a program that doesn’t work, or do an experiment that produces negative results

    But only ID creationists can continually do that and get paid to build models that don’t work

  33. Patrick:
    Frankie,

    Thank you for reminding me why I stopped replying to you.

    If that were true you could just copy and paste it in your response.

    If that were true you could just copy and paste them in your response.

    It is true and you would know that if you didn’t just deny, deny, deny.

    Shannon told us how to measure information, Patrick. And Crick told us what is meant by information wrt biology- Information means here the precise determination of sequence, either of bases in the nucleic acid or on amino acid residues in the protein.

    According to Meyer and Dembski, the following is the operational definition used (information):
    the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects

    Hey, it concurs with Crick’s!

    Now what, Patrick?

  34. Robin,

    Robin, you aren’t making any point. Your Dembski quote-mine doesn’t say that ID is religious and I quoted him saying it wasn’t- no interpretation required. And Johnson isn’t a scientist and he also says that evolutionism is a religion.

    ID doesn’t say anything about worship. It doesn’t say anything about service and it doesn’t have any prayers. Religion has all of those.

    ID doesn’t require God. ID doesn’t require the supernatural. You can be an atheist and still be an IDist

  35. Robin:
    To the point, here’s why Wells has no credibility:

    – Jonathan Wells, Why I Went for a Ph.D, Unification Church presentation

    Geez…no agenda there…*rolls eyes*

    Wow- that makes Well’s motivation religious but it has nothing to do with ID.

    And Dennett said that evolutionism is a universal acid for religions. By your logic evolutionism is an atheist concept and as such should be put under the Establishment Clause

  36. Frankie,

    Show the math. Provide detailed examples. Commit to a specific definition and demonstrably measurable metric.

    In short, make your case with more than hot air.

  37. Frankie:
    Robin,

    Robin, you aren’t making any point. Your Dembski quote-mine doesn’t say that ID is religious and I quoted him saying it wasn’t- no interpretation required.

    LOL! Quoting someone in full is a “Quotemine” in your book…what a joke!

    And yeah…I suppose that the “logos theory of John’s Gospel” could refer to anything in your book too. You’re a laugh riot Joe!

    And Johnson isn’t a scientist and he also says that evolutionism is a religion.

    What does Johnson not being a scientist have to do with the religious implications of ID? And further, who cares if “evolutionism” is religious or not since it’s just some schlocky pejorative you made up Joe?

    ID doesn’t say anything about worship. It doesn’t say anything about service and it doesn’t have any prayers. Religion has all of those.

    Again…sooooo missing the point Joe. Nice try though!

    ID doesn’t require God. ID doesn’t require the supernatural. You can be an atheist and still be an IDist

    Interesting statement there Joe. Got any evidence that an atheist could be an IDist? Got any members of the ID community who claim to be atheists? I got money on you not having squat.

  38. Robin,

    The quote-mine is due to the fact it doesn’t support your claim. Also Mayr says evolutionism is what you call the “theory” of evolution. I did not make it up, My, you are desperate

    Again…sooooo missing the point Joe.

    THAT is the point! LoL!

    Got any evidence that an atheist could be an IDist?

    Yes, I posted it- ID doesn’t require GOD and ID does not require the supernatural. Do try to keep up

  39. Frankie: ID doesn’t require GOD and ID does not require the supernatural.

    That can’t be right. That would mean so many people here are just wasting their time and the time of everyone else here. Better to claim ID is Creationism, even if it isn’t.

  40. Robin: Interesting statement there Joe. Got any evidence that an atheist could be an IDist? Got any members of the ID community who claim to be atheists? I got money on you not having squat.

    There is one.

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