Yes the ‘period’ really lends weight to your argument.
Here’s the flaw in your reasoning. Intelligent design says that there is some supernatural entity that we don’t understand that just ‘is’. So why can’t the universe just ‘be’? Why does there have to be that extra layer?
Tomndebb, Stranger on a Train, Darwin’s Finch, thank you. Whatever. As I stated earlier, I’m not arguing that point and the reference to PE could have–and I guess should have–been left out of scenaro #5, which could be restated as “God is in the gaps”. My main point is that there are still a lot of people in the US who believe in Noahs Ark, and if the ID includes a lot of people like this, that needs to be exposed. There’s a big difference between God of the gaps thinking and trying to pass mythological tall tales off as natural history.
Well of course, Last Thursdayism is silly and no one believes in it. But there is in fact a split among Biblical creationists between those who claim the evidence for an Old Earth was manufactured by God, and those who claim that the physical prcoesses were greatly sped up to fit within the 10,000-year time frame. Not that it’s actualy being debated among them.
Indeed, what I’m getting at is is the suspicion that ID is intended as a simple escape clause to permit students to disregard everything they’ve just been taught about evolution and hand them a blank slate onto which they can project their favored interpretation of religious belief. I want to hear ID proponents take a stand on a more specific scenario of events and defend it on all sides, rather than rely on vaguery.
Which one is the red herring?
Smith’s Who designs the Intelligent Designer?
or your If the designer is not natural
Why is Last Thursdayism silly? It answers all possible objections. Only method of ID that does so, really.
The silliness is self-evident, but the main point is that no one believes it in the first place. Scientifically it’s a non-starter, but politically it’s a moot point.
The former, because the latter bears upon the metaphysical modality of the agency in question. It is an epistemic limitation of empiricism that it cannot examine anything other than what is observable with the senses. It cannot, for example, examine the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem. (It can examine whether a given triangle, which can be seen, indeed measures correctly, but it can examine whether the theorem applies generally to all triangles.) Therefore, it is a logical fallacy to presume that an agent of design is empirically discernable.
As I suspected, your red herring to lead the debate astray on another bla bla trip.
ID proponents remark about how marvelously the human body is designed. I would like to see one of them generate a paper on how marvelously the tapeworm is designed.
The supposed designer designed a predatory creature that must kill other creatures to survive and endowed that creature with an instinct to survive. So some prey creature had to be designed for the predator to kill. However, the prey can’t be too easy to kill or the predator will wipe out its good supply. I wonder how many mods the Mark I predator-prey combination went through before the Designer got it right?
Insorfar as evolution vs. ID is concerned, ID doesn’t explain anything that evolution doesn’t also explain. It does give an explanation for the beginning of life - God did it by design - but that explanation is a mere assertion. And ID requires the insertion of a Designer who is claimed to be undesigned. As others have remarked, if we are going to have one undesigned creature then we might as well have all undesigned creatures. That assertion is just as good as the alternative assertion of the ID backers.
Well…conveniently your theory requires nothing but your imagination so it’s impossible to disprove. It also does not address the question of why there even needs to be an intelligent designer in the first place. Is it possible that life could have originated without one?
You want to belive in metaphysical BS, that’s your right. But don’t expect rational people to ignore empirical evidence. If you measure enough triangles, pretty soon Pythagorean starts to look like he knew what he was talking about.
Sorry. I thought for a moment there that I had encountered someone with a sincere question and an interest in debate. My mistake.
Any theory is easily provable or disprovable so long as you use the right tool to do it. For example…
…empiricism is the wrong tool to use for proving mathematical equations. The right tool is deduction.
Where did this idea that the Pythagorean Theorem is not provable come from? It certainly can beproved in in general for the case of all right triangles. I don’t know that it has ever been shown to be not true for triangles in general but it doesn’t have to be. It is true for the general right triangle and that is all that is claimed for it.
Pythagorean Theorem is known by deduction to be true for right triangles. Emperical data have nothing to do with it.
This threw me for a loop, too, until I carefully read the rather convoluted language of the original (for this tangent) [post=6261281]post[/post]. I believe the author’s intent was to point out that one could not “prove” the Pythagorean Theorem via empirical methods, which is true but not especially insightful as there is no analog to the deductive proof in an empirical or a posteriori approach. This was in response to Latro’s challenge of “Smith’s Who designs the Intelligent Designer?” Since an Intelligent Designer (or Great All Almighty, Cosmic Clown, or whatever you like) is an inherently, definitionally non-falsifable proposition, any challenge to it is built upon the incorrect assumption of knowledge outside of empiricism. (Latro’s argument, for instance, is a homonuculus fallacy in asserting that every entity must have an origin, rather than just exist.)
This statement by the same poster, however:
is incorrect. Gödel established that any sufficiently complex system of algebra will contain propositions which are neither provable or falsifiable. One can easily establish any number of conjectures which are incapable of either deductive or inductive proof, or of experimental falsification.
In any case, the Designer postulated by proponents of ID always manages to stay behind the veil. No matter how througoughly any individual claim is disputed, their Entity keeps retreating behind one curtain after another, always leaving some tiny gap which our understanding of the natural world does not (at that time) explain. Disproving any particular claim–say, that they eye is to complex to have evolved without design–succeeds only in demolishing the claim while the Progenetor in question flits off into some higher dimension like an arch-villian in a bad science fiction show.
Stranger
On rereading the post in question I think maybe you are correct in your interpretation but it’s hard to tell.
However I don’t think the assumption of a Designer is any more mysterious in origin than is the origin of life and so if one can postulate a Designer without being challanged then one can postulate that life had a beginning and go on from there with the investigation of evolutionary changes.
And as a rather trivial point, not everything has an identifiable beginning. For instance the sequence of numbers greater than zero has no member that one can point to and say, “That is the beginning of the sequence.”
The OP question was: “… why is “atheistic” evolution more scientifically valid than evolution by intelligent design?”
For me the answer is that the ID idea is not scientifically fruitful. Why does the wolf have that social organization? Because it was designed that way by the Designer. There is no need or incentive to go beyond that, no need to study the wolf and begin to understand how an animal with such a social system evolved. The theory of evolution does raise such questions and encourages study to try to find and answer.
The dictionary defines intelligence as: A capacity for reasoning,a manifestation of such capacity,etc. For a designer to exist it would need a place to exist. Did that come about by intelligent design?
I dropped a bit of paint once and it formed a perfect star, was that chance or intelligent design? Intelligence itself has evolved, as well as the definition of God. Who or what created the place?
Monavis
In fact, I should have said (and meant to say) right triangles. Thanks for setting that straight, David.
Actually, Godel established that fact only for the system of Peano arithmetic, as put forward by Russell and Whitehead. He did say that he believed he could prove it generally for all similar systems, but he never got around to it. In any case, my statement that “any theory is easily provable or disprovable so long as you use the right tool to do it,” was intended to mean theories in the context of this discussion — propositions about physical observation and metaphysical analysis, not systemic theorems. The kinds of propositions that are undecidable by Godel’s proof are a very specific kind, ones that are recursively statable.
I forget eight grade geometry proofs and all, but the empirical data is the measurement of the right triangle that result in A^2 + B^2 = C^2. The deduction is that ALL right triangles follow Pythagorean’s Theorem.
Well I think the answer you will get is that a metaphysical designer does not need a “place” in any sense we can comprehend.
The problem with the use of ‘proved’ or ‘provable’ in conection with physical theories is that they lead to the idea that they have been deduced from a set of postulates which isn’t the case. A physical theory, say gravitation, is a postulate. All physical objects, i.e. those with mass, attract each other directly as the product of their masses and inversely as the square of the distance between their centers of mass. Then conclusions are drawn by deduction from that postulate as to the behavior of masses and empirical observations either confirm the conclusions or they do not. Physical theories are not proved for all time and are always subject to modification or discarding as new data come in.
Could be. I either forgot or never knew which came first, the Pythagorean Theorem proof or the empirical knowledge.