Instead, many called it pseudoscience and agreed with Duane Jeffery, a Brigham Young University biology professor, who put it in the same category as astrology and pyramid power.
“By definition, science does not attempt to explain the world by invoking the supernatural,” University of Utah bioengineering professor Gregory Clark told the board.
"Intelligent design fails as science because it does exactly that - it posits that life is too complex to have arisen from natural causes, and instead requires the intervention of an intelligent designer who is beyond natural explanation. Invoking the supernatural can explain anything, and hence explains nothing."
This a slightly different version, but I believe he’s been quoted using the same basic line more than once. It’s quite possible he said the exact version given by Giant_Spongess, but even if not, the essence is still quite correct.
I just read a cute bit in The Economist. Proponents of Intellegent Design put out a list of 370 people with advanced science degrees who thought Intellegent Design sounded right, so somebody else (National Academy of Sciences? I forget) put out a list of 600 people with advanced science degrees who thought Intellegent Design was wrong, and were also named Steve or Stephanie.
This set me to wondering: are there instances in which science does indeed legitimately have to decide whether something is the result of intelligent design?
For example, archaelogists dig up an artifact of unknown origin, and it’s not obvious whether it was crafted by an intelligent creature or whether it was the result of natural processes.
Or a virus (either the biological or computer kind): could scientists determine whether it was specifically created by some malicious person (as destructive computer virsues are, or as conspiracy theorists posit the AIDS virus was), or whether it evolved naturally (as a result of random mutation or whatever)?
Yes but “intelligent design” doesn’t really mean naturalistic “intelligence.” They’re saying X can’t happen naturally, therefore it happened by magic. human design would not fall into the realm of the supernatural. ID is really kind of a disingenuous phrase since it really does not consider any kind of “designer” but a supernatural one.
The New Republic just ran an excellent (though very long) refutation of intelligent design, in the form of a stinging review of the book Of Pandas and People. It’s online here, but I don’t know if one must be a subscriber to access it.
The site I linked to exists in order to keep people from having to register. Who wants to provide their personal info to one more site? Last time I linked to this site, my link to it was deleted by the mods, then brought back when they realized there was do big deal after all. Linky
tsk,tsk – don’t let yiour prejudices and preconceptions get in the way of things. Mormons have always been a pretty technological bunch, and good science comes out of BYU. The LDS Church hasn’t been, as far as I know, big proponents of Creationism or ID. The Catholic Church, recall, has long been OK with evolution. The groups supporting ID have been different.
