See The Metaphysical Muddle of Lawrence Krauss, Neil Ormerod. — Wayfarer

I which we can read:

There is a certain desperation apparent in the attempts of various authors to eliminate God from an account of the origins of the universe. For, at bottom, what motivates such attempts is the desire to overcome the very incompleteness of the scientific project itself - I call it anxiety over contingency.

This anxiety is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the recent work of Lawrence Krauss, who is attempting to do for cosmology what Darwin did for biology: remove the need for God as an explanatory cause. The muddle that Krauss' most recent work illustrates will help bring us to a fuller account of the need to recover the significance of intelligence and reason in relation to reality.

How frustrating for the atheist scientist. They just can't figure out how the hell it's done...

I don't think it's in the cards that intelligent design can (ever) derive, say, the 10 commandments, that one should pray to the Sun for inspiration and atonement, that Muhammad was the (final) messenger of Allah, or whatever

I agree. In fact, my guess is the ID movement specifically avoids explicitly referring to a God (capital “G,” as in the Abrahamic sense) so it could be allowed to be taught in schools as not advocating for a particular religion.
Maybe in some ways it comes from more from Natural Theology perspective than presupposing any claims of divine revelation, or having an explicit religious affiliation
Of course, once you make the argument for there being an intelligent designer or God, then it becomes much easier IMO to advocate for the possibility of miracles, divine intervention, etc.
If ID tried to go any further and justify any religious or supernatural claims, I think it would be explicitly religious (depending on how one defines religious, it may already be). But I don’t know or think it would want to, given that this would fracture the relatively small base it already has and how much commonality different religious groups could use the core of ID to ground their beliefs.

The term "theory" in science is different from everday use. The title of this thread uses the everyday meaning of the word theory; as in "it's just a theory." That's not what science means by theory.

A better title for this thread might have been 'Intelligent design - a reasonable hypothesis?'

Science can entertain any hypothesis; because an hypothesis is different from a theory.

An hypothesis is a supposition; for example, suppose life on earth began because an alien dropped a cheese sandwich. There's no evidence for this hypothesis; it's not a theory.

In science, a theory is a logically coherent framework that explains a variety of evidence. Evolution is a theory; an underlying mode of explanation - which becomes valid, the more it explains.

Intelligent Design is an hypothesis; a supposition for which there's no evidence. That doesn't mean Intelligent Design is an invalid hypothesis; just that there's no evidence that supports or refutes it. It may be that the universe within which we exist was created, and designed in just such a way as to allow life to exist. But equally, it maybe that life on earth sprang from an alien's misplaced lunchbox!

suppose life on earth began because an alien dropped a cheese sandwich. — karl stone

Suppose life on earth began because of primitive amino acids and other proto-genetic material arrived on a comet. That hypothesis is called 'panspermia'. It's damned hard to prove but it has its proponents.

Intelligent Design is an hypothesis; a supposition for which there's no evidence. That doesn't mean Intelligent Design is an invalid hypothesis; just that there's no evidence that supports or refutes it. — karl stone

I don't personally accept intelligent design, but it's completely mistaken to say it has 'no evidence'. There are people who support the hypothesis with pretty elaborately-argued books. There's a line of argument called the argument from biological information. You may say that it's incorrect, the evidence doesn't support the theory, but you can't say there's no evidence.

To think outside the box, we must add another box?

1. You think normally inside a box. You ponder abstractly outside a box, and then make theories in the box.

2. To think outside the box, we need an ordinance.

Tesseracts, C3, C4, are not box environment but are technically more complex box-type environments.

Ordinances are like a VIP jet with three ordinance fighter jets nearby in formation, or a satellite.

1. We have an ordinance, classically another box shape.

2. Here is a model for thinking outside the box, and because this model is consistent it supports intelligent design, but super-partially, as mirror of out of a box thinking.

I could knuckle possibility to the mirrored process of out of box thinking.

Though this support is super partial, and doesn't prove anything, intelligent design is a credible hypothesis and shouldn't be ruled out, we all may concave under it's zeal.

To reiterate, to ponder and have abstract theories about what happened before the universe requires thinking in a box alone, however thinking about what happened before the universe, and not just pondering, requires, hypothetically, a external environment for thought, a new box perpendicular to the original. That's where God is, that's where intelligent design is. I measured it as a consistent model, and said it supports intelligent design super partially.

The difficulty I see with any creation story i.e. one involving the origins of our universe having been effected by a deity is this: The problem just shifts one step backwards, who created the deity who created us? An infinite regress immediately threatens, how shall I put it?, our intellectual integrity ($\infty$ is not something our brains were "designed" to handle/process; Georg Cantor went, forgive the disrespectful tone, cuckoo!).

However, like one very astute member once said (paraphrasing) "I'm not at all inconvenienced by the infinite regress; all I want you to do is make you admit that this universe had a creator!" Makes sense in a way, but that the question "who created the creator?" can be asked is not something we can sweep under the carpet; sooner or later it's gonna pop up in a rational analysis of the origins of the universe, if attributed to a deity of some sort.

The alternative - it just happened! (by fluke, for no apparent reason and without purpose) - is what we'll have to go for. This won't go down well with some of a particular bent in mind; the other option (infinite regress) is even more difficult to digest in my humble opinion. An infinite chain of gods creating gods creating gods creating gods....ad infinitum/ad nauseum :vomit: isn't, let's just say, a very good way of solving the problem (reminds me of procastination and/or kicking the can down the road).

Panspermia doesn't answer the question; rather it punts the question into the cosmos, saying life evolved elsewhere and somehow got here. That doesn't explain how life evolved. It's a supposition; an hypothesis - it's not a theory.

The irreducable complexity of DNA argument is not a theory either; because an inability to explain how DNA formed is not evidence of ID, anymore than it's evidence for the alien lunchbox supposition; which is rather the point!

One of the more interesting ideas is 'fine tuning' of physical constants, but that runs into the anthropic principle - namely, if the universe weren't just so, we wouldn't be here to notice that it's just so. So again, that's not evidence.

This has relevance to an interesting distinction made recently by Ricky Gervais of all people, between knowledge and belief. He said, 'We're all agnostic because we don't know; but that's knowledge, not belief.'

I don't know, and I know I don't know. So I'm agnostic on epistemic grounds. I believe in agnosticism because I'm an epistemic philosopher, and beliefs should be formed, as justified true beliefs.

But proponents of ID; they believe God exists, and seek to justify that belief - and call those post rationalisations evidence. Similarly, atheists believe God doesn't exist; someone mentioned Krauss above, and suggested he seeks to post-rationalise his belief. I believe 'I don't know' is the only legitimate position.

A better title for this thread might have been 'Intelligent design - a reasonable hypothesis?'

I think about that too, but in my experience hypothesis is used to refer to things that are falsifiable (this could be regional usage). It really comes down to definitions here, but I agree that the wording wasn't the best. What I meant to ask was whether people thought ID was a philosophically viable position.

As you mentioned, I think saying "I don't know" is pretty much the only reasonable position to have, as neither strict naturalism (and any historical accounts for abiogenesis from this starting point) nor intelligent design can be falsified. Of course, one can lean one way or another given arguments in either direction, and try to assign fuzzy probabilities either way, but at the end of the day, we can't really be sure.

One of the more interesting ideas is 'fine tuning' of physical constants, but that runs into the anthropic principle - namely, if the universe weren't just so, we wouldn't be here to notice that it's just so. So again, that's not evidence.

I do think John Leslie's firing squad brings up an interesting point about, despite this being the only universe we can observe, we would (and maybe should) still be surprised that we are alive. Then again, what does it mean to try and assign probabilities to things like universal constants, or spacetime itself? We want to have certainty about all these things, but I don't think there's anything wrong with saying "I don't know" or "I believe this but I could and may be wrong"


I think the assumption is that the "creator" of the universe must exist outside of time (as from what I understand time as we know it started from the big bang). And this creator, according to some of what I've read, exists necessarily and eternally (at least in the abrahamic religions, where God is often held as the sole agenētos (unoriginated being)). As you said, it doesn't seem like we can regress infinitely (although maybe with universes or god(s) we can).

What I meant to ask was whether people thought ID was a philosophically viable position. — Paulm12

No, it is not. It is just theology.

The irreducable complexity of DNA argument is not a theory either; because an inability to explain how DNA formed is not evidence of ID, anymore than it's evidence for the alien lunchbox supposition; which is rather the point! — karl stone

I think it's a valid argument about the limitations of naturalism even if not the existence of God. There seems to be an almost universal assumption that as the Enlightenment freed us from belief in God, then it's reasonable to presume that life sprang into existence through something very much like a spontaneous chemical reaction. But that hardly seems a reasoned belief, either, even though it also seems to carry portentious philosophical ramifications.

One of the more interesting ideas is 'fine tuning' of physical constants, but that runs into the anthropic principle - namely, if the universe weren't just so, we wouldn't be here to notice that it's just so. So again, that's not evidence. — karl stone

It's a very glib way of dispatching a highly complex and technical line of argument. In fact, so-called 'fine tuning' doesn't 'run into' the anthropic principle - it is a paraphrase of that principle, first articulated in 1973 and subsequently the subject of a lot of literature. That dismissal trivialises the issue, which is this: as noted above, it is widely accepted that, in the absence of an act of intentional creation, life arose as a consequence of chance - the so-called 'million monkeys' effect. But the anthropic principle shows rather that the causal chain that makes the emergence of life possible didn't simply begin on a warm pond on the early planet earth, but that it stretches back to the formation and dissolution of earlier stars, back to the mysteriously happy apparent coincidence of carbon resonance, and ultimately back to the small number of fundamental constants which allowed stars and matter to form from the inchoate chaos of the early cosmos.

I think the assumption is that the "creator" of the universe must exist outside of time (as from what I understand time as we know it started from the big bang). And this creator, according to some of what I've read, exists necessarily and eternally (at least in the abrahamic religions, where God is often held as the sole agenētos (unoriginated being)). As you said, it doesn't seem like we can regress infinitely (although maybe with universes or god(s) we can). — Paulm12

Well, the Kalam cosmological argument is self-refuting: It first assumes that the everything must have a cause and then it goes on to claim that that would imply an infinite regress. It rejects the infinite regress in favor of an uncaused cause (primum movens). See what happened there?

Why not "unintelligent design"? Are not all biological entities examples of unintelligent design. Could not one argue, for example, that cancer research is a concerted effort to address and correct the deadly effects of the unintelligent design of the human body?

...
What do you think? — Paulm12

From ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) I got the following description of ID:
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific set of beliefs based on the notion that life on earth is so complex that it cannot be explained by the scientific theory of evolution and therefore must have been designed by a supernatural entity.

And from Wiki:
Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins".

It seems that ID says that whatever (traditional, conventional) science cannot explain, must be taken as a proof for the existence of and the act of (some) God. I don't find this plausible at all. There are hundreds of things --both in the physical and the non-physical world-- that science cannot explain or provide a proof of or evidence for. At least not yet. It would be very easy then to prove the existence of (some) God just base on our inability to undestand or explain things! Moreover, this reminds me that Man had always the tendency to refer to gods things he could not undestand or explain: fire, thunders, sun & moon, desasters, plagues, and so on. Which with time were explained by science. Myths that collapsed.

So the story continues ...

So, what I think is that ID is not even a "pseudoscientific" belief. It's just an absurd and useless concept.

The most common objection to ID seems to be that it does not produce any testable hypothesis, and thus is “outside” of science (thus perhaps it would better be argued in a philosophy class). However, what bothers me about this is if science must be testable, then much of cosmology would also be considered inappropriate for a science classroom (no multiverses, no accounts for natural laws-all those would similarly be outside of science and therefore not belong in a science classroom either).

What do you think? — Paulm12

Agree, you can't argue on lack of ability to test for one thing but get over for another thing.
If lack of the ability to perform tests is what determines what is science and what is not then a lot of the mainstream science is not science at all.

A more appropriate argument against intelligent design is that ID is not perfect, or that we (humans) see how to make it more perfect.
or that ID is somewhere in between 2 extremes: order and chaos.

Then we could argue where in between ID is, and why is it where it is, why not more toward chaos or why not more toward order?

Question:

Would we have three (and counting) pages of discussion of this if we would be discussing Flat Earth Theory?

Surely we could, it is a fascinating even if lunatic objection to modern science and a spectacular conspiracy theory, but I don't think a theory that can be disproven by anyone simply by going to the seashore to note how large ships start to "dip under" at sea when sailing farther away would then have an opening paragraph like this:

Obviously this a very contentious issue, and my extent of biology knowledge is limited to honors biology from high school. However, it seems the whole ID issue brings up an interesting point of what should be considered “science” and also what should be taught to students in classrooms. — Paulm12

Very good point. As a matter of fact, what about any conspiracy theories or fringe theories, like the Christ myth theory?

If we take the criterion of falsifiability, then flat earth theory is a very easy one to debunk for most people-satellite images, boat routes, etc. I don’t know if any prominent, highly cited scientists in any field who accept that the earth is flat, perhaps as a result of this and the amount of evidence for a spherical earth that a flat-earther would need to explain (no offense to any flat earthers here).

I tend to stick to Popper’s falsifiability criterion to demarcate science, but I am aware there are other interpretations and definitions. Otherwise, without it, “pseudoscience” isn’t even a useful word.

I think the greatest flaw in Intelligent Design is simply that it goes against religion if the conclusion made (by ID proponents) is that by scientific methods you could argue creationism. It's the basic flaw in all ontological arguments for god: it goes against the actual teachings of religion. Religion is about faith, and religions understand that themselves.

I think it's extremely well and clearly stated in the Christianity, in the Bible, and in other religions too. Way to God is through faith, not reasoning. The metaphor is of opening your heart to Jesus, it is not about opening your brain to Jesus. Yet the interviews that I've seen of ID proponents is that they are really anticipating some kind of scientific proof of the existence of God with ID. That proof, if even hypothetically possible, basically would be in every way an Idol, the thing that all Abrahamic religions are really against.