Following up on my last post I’d like to suggest another video from Leah Libresco that perhaps should be required viewing here.
Not only is it relevant to every conversation we have here but it is related to Turing Tests something that I find fascinating and important for “my Game” if I ever get around to it.
Here is a link for the corresponding Ideological Turing Test
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/ideological-turing-test-contest
What do you think? Should we come up with some questions surrounding Intelligent Design?
peace
walto,
Our 10 minute conversation re common descent is on youtube. If you are interested I will share the link. To summarize his position:
-He believes there is evidence supporting common descent because of similar DNA sequences among species.
-He believes to fully explain common descent you must account for the differences and this is tricky
-Common descent is a battle he chooses not to engage in because he does not see it as a major issue and it requires making predictions based on historic data.
-He prefers the design hypothesis because it can be made by direct observation and does not require sorting out historic data.
Behe thinks the evidence is strong, therefore, Behe thinks it can be tested, and it has been tested.
This is utter bullshit. If we can observe intelligent design in action (remember ID is supposed to explain how living forms came about) when has anybody seen anything being “designed”?
ID can’t answer the “what” questions, or the “how” or “when” questions, because it’s completely devoid of explanatory power.
Please do!
I watched that vid.. in it’s entirety! it’s a loooong podcast in Jonathan McLatchie’s YouTube channel. That’s where Bill dropped that gem about sequence space size being “an almost infinite, imaginary number”
It was 100% worth it just for that good laugh
fmm
If ID includes or does not include a designer seems fairly fundamental to me.
fmm
So it seems that ID does not discuss the designer while attempting to determine if that designer is the mind behind the universe.
Whatever.
Design is a process, not an object. Objects we call “designs” are side-effect outputs of that process. As Dembski discovered, you can’t determine if an object was the side-effect of an intelligent, intentional process all by itself. You need more context, more background. In a nutshell, you MUST know the nature and methods and purpose of the designer. Without this knowledge, you can’t really guess whether some unknown unidentifiable object was “designed” in this sense.
Essentially, ID starts with the presumptions that (1) there IS a designer of life, so life is therefore an intelligent design; and (2) we can support this presumption with various sorts of statistical legerdemain. For the ID proponent, their personal god is fundamental, not open to any doubt. But without this god (“we don’t deal with the designer”) their claims remain vacuous assertions of vague theology.
Once ID invokes “design”, questions about the designer are legitimate and expected. That ID does not discuss this designer is a weakness of the idea. If there is no possible designer, or if the designer is wholly outside empiricism, then it is not a scientific explanation or model (i.e.: theory).
sean s.
walto,
The common descent discussion is at about 1hr 23 min in. Takes about 10 minutes.
sean samis,
This is exactly right. A pro talking about ID will shut down the discussion beyond the design discussion. If you look at my discussion with Mike Behe you will see he agrees with this point.
We are in agreement. I’m not sure what he is trying to get at with 3 that is why I asked for clarification
I’m not sure if atheists would do worse on those three questions. If we did not see any statistical difference the solution would be to add questions or respondents until we did see a difference. a tie would be a non-result.
peace
I often wonder whether comments like these are meant to be taken seriously. ID is a PURELY theological apologetic approach. It starts with a god, without which there would be no ID of any kind. As others have pointed out, if it ain’t the god of ID, then ID itself is nothing more than “somehow, at some time, something unspecified did something, resulting in us.”
Occasionally, the ID folks have been honest (!) and admitted that yes, they start with the belief in their god. And even admit that ID is the political end of Christian zeal and activity — the effort to CLAIM that it’s science in order to get legal dispensation to preach in public schools to children young enough to fall for it.
It doesn’t bother creationists to be corrected about their misuse of the concept of science, anymore than it bothers Trump that the fact-checkers find he’s lying 90% of the time. We truly live in the post-truth era, where emotions and feelings and desires inform our realities, and facts need not be involved.
In this modern world, religious rationalizations, misinformation, doublespeak, quote mining, and flat-out lying are “correct” to the degree that these techniques garner converts (and often, get votes). What better yardstick could you ask for?
I prefer this variant:
At the risk of derailing my own thread. I would argue that with out God there would be nothing at all. I think pretty much all theists would agree with that point.
Saying that ID requires God is not a problem for the enterprise. Everything requires God. That is part of what the term “God” means.
On the other hand ID is not a exercise about God it’s an exercise about design and how to recognize it. I would say that mainstream ID specifically deals with recognizing design in nature.
While I’m am interested in that sort of thing I think that recognizing design in general is probably more cool and useful right now.
That is why I am so fascinated with AI and Turing tests. I tentatively think the only valid way to ascertain if a computer is truly conscious is to catch it designing something. I mean real and not pseudo design. Being able to tell the difference between those two things might be the only way to know if a computer is also a mind or not.
So as much as the “skeptics” here want to discount ID as nothing more than apologetics I think that it just might be the only way to save us from a life of slavery to the robot overlords 🙂
peace
That’s simply not true. Intelligent design creationism is a clear and blatant attempt to circumvent the constitutional separation of church and state in the U.S. Look up “cdesign proponentsists” for the evidence.
Then we are doomed.
Is the the pattern of elements of Yosemite Valley a real design?
And people say that ID-backers don’t have any good reasons for their views! 😉
There is no such thing as “intelligent design creationism” and the “constitutional separation of church and state” isn’t what you think it is. Where do you get these bizarre ideas? They certainly don’t come from libertarianism.
Ever since I heard of the concept “Intelligent Design” I found it dubious and likely bogus. Simply put, the notion of “detecting design” is just plain silly and belies and ignorance of what “design” actually means.
A “design” is a planned approach to either a) solve a specific problem or b) meet a specific requirement goal. There is really no way of looking at some product or component and determine anything about the requirements or how such solved a particular problem. At best, one might be able to determine that a product or component was manufactured, but even then, such does not say anything about the product or component having been designed. There are number of human manufactured items for which there are and were no designs. Mozart, for example, readily stated that he did not design his music; he claims he heard most, if not all of them, in his mind as early as he could recollect. I have created an entire wildlife refuge without spending a second on any design.
So really,,,”intelligent design” is just plainly nonsense.
I’m sure pretty much all theists might agree with your point, but there’s no reason for that beyond their subjective conclusions; and certainly no reason for skeptics to agree. The necessity of a deity has resisted proof.
This is also true, and why ID is not any kind of science. It is religion through-and-through. That does not make ID bad, but the pretense of being rational or scientific is bad.
The term “God” may mean what you say, but the term could well refer to something entirely imaginary.
ID assumes design where ever it needs to. The logical problem of recognizing design does not need any reference to any deity.
I don’t see how you’d ever distinguish between “real” and “pseudo-“ design. It’s good to keep this kind of thinking tentative…
… by helping enslave us to the belief in an imaginary deity? I’ll take my chances with the robot overlords. As someone said once, artificial intelligence is probably a good idea given the shortage of the natural kind.
sean s.
There’s no movement using the term “intelligent design creationism” but it is a good way to refer to creationists and ID-advocates; different sides of the same base coinage.
Even con-law scholars dispute about the Establishment Clause. But to the best of my knowledge, every time a court blocks the teaching of intelligent design/creationism, it’s on Establishment Clause principles.
Gosh, I hope not. I generally agree with Patrick and I LOATH libertarianism.
sean s.
Robin,
So if I put 6 products in front of you 3 that were designed and 3 that were not, you think you would fail identifying the designed products? I think we could find some google images and test this.
sean samis,
This is a term used by political organizations like the NCSE in order to block a competing hypothesis to UCD. The establishment clause is being violated all the time as Evolutionism is indoctrinated in our schools and universities.
It has been very effective spin but all good marketing campaigns have a half life.:-)
What’s your example of a non-designed product?
Evolution has no religious content or premises so teaching it does not violate the Establishment Clause.
If telling the truth is just “spin” then I’m OK with that.
The half-life of the truth is indefinite.
sean s.
It would obviously depend on the products, which is my whole point. But further, since the ONLY products you could possibly put in front of me would be either natural or man-made, such makes your question rather moot since identifying man-made objects is relatively easy precisely because I (and others) not only know how humans design things (being a human, it’s kind of innate), but we also recognize human production effects, something the concept of ID oddly overlooks.
The point of my previous comment though is that, in the absence of any knowledge about the designer, there’s no way one could actually infer design, intelligent or otherwise. At best, one might be able to infer production from the product entails (effects of the tools or process used to build said product), but even that’s a stretch given that it’s conceivable that some intelligence out there could manufacture things using tools and processes so beyond human understanding there’d be no way to detect any effects.
So, if and when all ID proponents relent and admit that ID is only useful for deducing human design, fine. Nothing unreasonable there. But insisting that there’s a way to infer non-human design, particularly non-human “intelligent design”? Utter absurdity, particularly when looking at biological organisms.
Personally, I say we continue to violate religious rights and indoctrinate our youth with satanic secular explanations until some damn fool gets off his or her ass and demonstrates that his or her deity and/or pet extraterrestrial alien was actual behind the “intelligent design” he or she insists exists. Seems like a fair cop to me.
I believe this is an oxymoron. But I can get behind it!
; P
sean s.
Yes, put three machines and three organisms in front of me, and I’d have no problem identifying the three designed products.
The trouble with IDists is that they want to pretend that it’s hard to do, but can be accomplished by a bunch of bogus numbers.
Glen Davidson
Robin,
Cool: let ideological indoctrination continue 🙂
GlenDavidson,
How about 3 man made machines and three biological molecular machines?
At least it’s fact-based indoctrination instead of the fantasy-based alternative. 🙂
sean s.
It’s about the same, although the scientist has to consider context and history more as IDists isolate bits and pieces especially to ignore both.
But no, it’s not hard to differentiate between intelligently designed and copied bits, and historically-bound and hereditarily-limited biology. There’s thinking reflected in the first, not in the second.
Glen Davidson
Robin,
I hear your declaration here but this is just an opinion that is desperately trying to create a straw man argument. The continued attempts to make straw man arguments shows extreme weakness in the counter arguments against design.
You can easily infer design from a purposefully arranged set of parts. No knowledge of the designer is required.
But lets still indoctrinate those kids. They are so much easier to manage when they are ignorant.
Or more to the point, evolution wouldn’t exist without the evidence. ID did and does exist without real evidence, only with rather inexact and incorrect analogies.
There’s a real problem with the premises behind this OP and thread, however, which is the assumption that we’re discussing ideologies on both sides and not with science vs. ideology (at best), or more correctly, theology. The second false premise is related, in that what supposedly matters is what IDists say, not what they’re really doing.
It’s perfectly idiotic to claim that ID is not “about the designer” because some of the theologues pushing it have said so. Who cares what they say? Were it science it would be about either general designers and what they do (that is, not what unintelligent evolution does), or it would be about a specific designer or set of designers and what they demonstrably do. ID tries to avoid both, because life doesn’t comport with actual design principles, and we don’t have specific designers known to design life to look like it evolved sans intelligent choices. That is, it fails at that crucial juncture, so it claims to just be detecting design, only it’s all too apparent that they’re just trying to define functional complexity as designed without any reasonable evidence for that claim.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
What do you mean by copied bits? Can you demonstrate that there is no thinking in the second?
Correct. Evolutionary theory also has no implications for religion, either.
There is no sense in which teaching evolutionary theory as the best currently available theory of adaptation and speciation violates the Establishment Clause. The idea that it does is just creationist propaganda.
This appears to be a request to demonstrate a negative.
Can you demonstrate that there is “thinking in the second”?
Not just opine, but actually demonstrate it?
sean s.
Hey…so long as the supposed Christian “God” isn’t being promoted above all other legends, myths, and religious deities in the public sector and isn’t allowed within 1000 feet of anything remotely science related, I really could care less what you call it.
Oh please, it shouldn’t be that hard to realize that I was discussing intelligently copied bits there, vs. the limitations of biology. I stuck in a comma in edit to make it a bit more clear, but it should have been obvious anyway.
The point being that any general designer could and should copy from one lineage to another one, which is not what we see in biology. Or a supreme intelligence might skip the copying and come up with optimum design in every case. Assuming for the sake of ID’s pretensions that we’re not talking about Supreme Intelligence, a cephalopod, say, could have vertebrate eyes, or a vertebrate could have cephalopod eyes–or even better, the best of both types of eyes could be combined like intelligent designers do.
We don’t see anything like that.
Glen Davidson
BZZZZZZT! FAIL!
Calling something a “biological molecular machine” is simply giving the lie to your agenda and is just question begging. How are you determining that something is a “biological molecular machine”? “Why…because it looks and behaves similar to man-made machine! And because man-made machines are designed, why this biological thing that behaves analogously to a man-made machine must be designed (psssst…by something intelligent too!)” *Facepalm*
Sorry…the analogy (as has been shown repeatedly) just isn’t valid. Nothing about biology can be honestly called a “machine” because…wait for it…you can’t actually infer the design about anything non-man-made.
What would be taught in ID classes? Let me guess:
Chapter 1: The Flagellum.
The Flagellum was designed, just look at it’s purposefully arranged set of parts.
Chapter 2: The Racoon.
The Racoon was designed, just look at it’s purposefully arranged set of parts.
Chapter 3: The Solar System.
The Solar System was designed, just look at it’s purposefully arranged set of parts.
Chapter 4: Humans.
Humans are all designed, just look at their purposefully arranged set of parts. Your parents are not really your parents, you were manufactured in some cosmic human factory
If you want to skip an honest attempt at discovery, and to instead define functional complexity as having been designed (manufactured, whatever).
Then you don’t have to bother with science.
Glen Davidson
I am not setting up any strawman of anything. If you think I am, identify specifically what I am caricaturing falsely.
No you can’t. It was a bad analogy when Bovier de Fontenelle attempted to make the argument in 1686 and when Paley laid it out explicitly in 1802 and it’s even worse today. As biology and chemistry show, there’s no such thing as a “purposeful arrangement of parts”. Organisms use their physiology in all sorts of creative ways to survive, in many cases in ways that utterly depart from the “convention”. Or are you suggesting that while a wing’s “purpose” is clearly flight, creatures that use their wings in other ways are not using them “correctly”? And how would you know?
Insisting there’s a “purpose” to anything biological is epitome of arrogance to me. Flightless cormorants perfectly illustrate to me why. Ditto vestigial hind legs in whales and vastly superior ocular structures in mollusks. The whole perspective of “purpose” in biology (to say nothing of chemistry and physics) is simply nothing more than question begging.
Anything to prevent our kids from growing up question begging gremlins arranging biological “purposeful” parts suits me just fine.
I don’t think that is true, because it trades on an ambiguity about “purposefully”.
A biological organ — a pancreas, for example — can have a purpose (i.e. be purposive). Even cellular metabolism is purposive. But purposiveness does not logically entail design. Design is a hypothesis that purports to explain purposiveness. Such a hypothesis can be — and must be — empirically tested in order to count as a reasonable explanation.
In short, not everything purposive is purposeful.
Hahahaha Excellent.
Exactly. ID is just one big argument from analogy. That argument is in no better shape now than it was when Hume eviscerated it in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
I missed this earlier; dazz’s objections (and later ones by others) are all on the mark; this claim is circular.
You cannot infer design from a purposefully arranged set of parts BECAUSE you don’t know that those parts are “purposefully arranged” until AFTER you determine if they were designed; at which point no inference of design is meaningful.
sean s. [edited]