User talk:Dbergan/Karn
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Last Archived: August 22, 2005
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[edit] From User:Dbergan's talk page
[edit] ID-vs-creationism
Regarding the comment you put on my User talk page, I understand your explanation. The problem with it is that long before I heard the term "Intelligent Design" (and before it was coined, I'm sure) I heard exactly the same arguments about "irreducible complexity" from avowed creationists trying to shoot down evolution. In fact, such arguments combined with dogmatic statements about the truth of the Bible comprised the entirety of their rhetoric. (They might not have actually used the term "irreducible complexity" because most creationists didn't have vocabularies that large, but they certainly used equivalent words.)
Of course, the mere fact that a natural explanation for the "complex" mechanism in question hasn't been discovered yet doesn't mean that one doesn't exist; natural explanations for previously unexplained mechanisms are being discovered all the time. This reduces Intelligent Design, just like creationism, to an "Intelligent Designer of the Gaps" model in which the domain of the God/Intelligent Designer continually shrinks as science advances, just as the regions marked "here be dragons" on maps shrank as exploration progressed. Since the basic claim of "Intelligent Design" is that certain biological mechanisms are too complex to ever be explained naturally, as opposed to the scientific position that certain natural mechanisms simply have yet to be understood, it is hardly a credible scientific theory; in fact it is falsified with each new scientific discovery that explains something previously alleged to be "irreproducibly complex". And to the extent that IDers claim that science will never explain everything, well, that's not falsifiable so neither is it science.
Now this doesn't prove that Intelligent Design is identical with creationism. And indeed they are different in the sense that Intelligent Design is merely the latest, uh, evolutionary form of traditional creationism, which exists in many other forms and varieties: young-earth, old-earth, flat-earth, etc. That's always been the big problem with creationism; it seems to define itself by what it isn't (i.e., "evolution") rather than by what it is, so debating a creationist or ID proponent is like trying to nail down Jello. The overt Bible-thumping is gone, to be sure, but that's merely a ploy to cloak its creationist agenda in a transparent attempt to fool the courts. So far the courts haven't been fooled. So I guess I would like to see the parent Wikipedia article be called simply "Creationism", with Intelligent Design listed under that heading as merely its most recent instantiation. User:Karn 21 July 2005
I couldn't disagree more when you claim that ID is different from creationism in that ID is supposedly an empirical scientific theory. ID is nothing of the sort; it is simply creationism with a new name and some new terminology for old ideas, but no new ideas. I thought I explained why in my previous message; ID does consist solely of evolution-bashing. As I said, its most basic holding, that some biological processes are allegedly "irreproducibly complex", is exactly evolution-bashing at its core. It states, quite simply, that "evolution is wrong", and the only alternative theory provided is that some "Intelligent Designer" must have made it. Made it how? Where's the empirical theory for that?
That's why your analogies to bicycles and other artificial objects are all fatally flawed. When you see a bicycle, you already know, a priori, that you live on a planet inhabited by Homo Sapiens entirely capable of making such devices. So hypothesizing that it was designed and built in a bicycle factory run by humans is quite reasonable. There is, however, no empirical evidence that Earth in the first few billion years of its existence was inhabited or visited by an intelligent species capable of creating life. In fact, the evidence is entirely that there was no life at all. We do know, through laboratory experiment, that the materials known to be present in the primordial earth were capable of assembling themselves, under the conditions present, into the "building blocks" of life, the amino acids. We also know through empirical evidence that such conditions persisted on Earth for billions of years, a period of time most people have difficulty comprehending, and that it took that long for even the first single-celled organisms to appear.
Furthermore, we know of no basic physical laws, such as the laws of thermodynamics, that would prohibit life from appearing spontaneously and evolving under those conditions. As we all know from debunking one of the sillier creationist arguments, the second law is no obstacle because the earth is not a closed system, and the increase in entropy in the sun is far more than the decrease in entropy on earth due to life.
So the bottom line is very simple: though we do not yet understand all of the intermediate steps, we have absolutely no reason to throw up our hands and conclude that life could not have appeared and evolved on the earth through the action of physical laws, i.e., that some sort of Intelligent Designer (be honest: God) is therefore required. There is simply no empirical evidence whatsoever for Intelligent Design. In fact, those who advocate it do not follow the scientific method. They start with a desired conclusion and then try to force the facts to fit. That's not how science works. The theory of evolution as it stands today is the result of a careful process of proposing, testing and discarding or modifying hypotheses to be consistent with all the empirical evidence. That's science.
So that's why it's very clear that Intelligent Design is nothing more than the latest manifestation of creationism, and why it should be classified as such. --User:Karn 22 July 2005
[edit] From User:Karn's talk page
[edit] ID and creationism
The Supreme Court (through citing a District Court ruling) identified "scientific creationism" as not just similar to the Genesis account of creation, but in fact identical to it and parallel to no other creation story. (Edwards v. Aguillard citing McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education).
ID reasoning is instead like this... examine the physical properties of your computer and you will find that it is irreducibly complex. Because it is irreducibly complex, you know through empiricism that it was intelligently designed. In other words, it is something you can know empirically based on the object's physical properties.
But is there anything else about the designer that you can know from this object's physical properties besides the fact that he/she/it is intelligent? I mean, do you know if the designer of your computer was Asian or not? Married or not? Homecoming King or class clown?
Push the reasoning further, and you can't even conclusively say that the designer is human or not based on the fact that your computer is irreducibly complex. Nor do you have any prayer or knowing how or why or even if the designer was designed itself. The only thing you know is that something intelligent made your computer. That is the only fact you can assert.
This is precisely why ID is not creationism. Creationism seeks to justify science with a particular creation story. ID says nothing about a story. When ID is successful, all it says is "we know that X was designed by something intelligent" because we don't have a clue how to ascertain any data about the designer or the designing process apart from the fact that the designer is intelligent. David Bergan 15:03, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
So I guess I would like to see the parent Wikipedia article be called simply "Creationism", with Intelligent Design listed under that heading as merely its most recent instantiation. Thanks for your reply. To be sure, there are definitely similarities, and you are right that ID came from creationism. The leading design theorists credit YEC literature as guiding them to their work.
However, that doesn't mean the articles should be merged. The main thing that makes ID different is that it is a positive scientific theory rather than a merely negative anti-evolution one. Creationist literature is, as you said, only finding holes in evolutionary thinking. ID, on the other hand, is building its own empirical case that relates to all physical objects... organic and inorganic.
Here's what I mean. If you saw a bicycle on the street and wondered how it came about, how likely are you to think that it was the result of geo/meteorological events? How long would you study that bike and think to yourself, "Yeah, this probably just came out of the ground that way."? Not very long. And the reason is because every bicycle you have seen being made, was made by a designer. And all the bicycles that you heard about being made (even though you probably haven't seen them yourself) were made by humans, too. And most importantly, you have never ever heard of anyone claiming that they found a bike that didn't have a designer. Therefore, applying induction, you can say with confidence that all bikes have a designer.
Granted, when you get to biology we start talking about things that for the most part no one saw when they were made. So we can't say anything like, "Every phylum we have observed had a designer" because we haven't literally seen the origin process for any new phylum. But what ID says does still apply. Starting with bicycles, you can then apply the same logic to many of the manmade things around you. Every time you see a computer, you know that this computer had a designer. Every time you see a car. A mousetrap. A vaccuum cleaner. A VCR. A microwave. A steam engine. A watch. Etc. So then design theorists generalize the case: "Every time you see an irreducibly complex system, you know that that system had a designer." This abstraction, as far as we know, is true. In the inorganic world, it isn't even contested. Every irreducibly complex system where we have seen the origin process, did have a designer. Therefore, empirically, if we are presented with an IC system where we didn't watch the origin process, we know that it had a designer.
You probably don't agree with this last statement, but that isn't the point. You just need to notice that I explained the main issues of ID without any reference to God or Genesis, and that (in theory) it is supposed to be a positive addition to science rather than a merely negative critique of evolution. To say that ID should be merged with creationism is like saying that jet aircraft should be merged with monoplane because they are basically the same principle, and we all know that jets came from monoplanes. David Bergan 14:38, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
Ok, since I tried explaining the concepts last time... could you provide me with what you see as accurate definitions of (1) "creationism", (2) "Intelligent Design", and (3) "empricism"... linking a decent reference to each. David Bergan 02:19, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
