Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

Can you answer this: If it was scientific for Darwin (and Dawkins) to argue against design, then why is it not scientific to disagree?

Quote:

"Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."
[ Scott C. Todd, "A View from Kansas on that Evolution Debate," Nature 401.6752 (September 30, 1999): 423]

Is this scientific?

In 2000, an entire department at Baylor University, conducting scientific research on design detection in complex natural systems, was shut down because it conflicted with evolutionary theory.

Can you answer this: If it was scientific for Darwin (and Dawkins) to argue against design, then why is it not scientific to disagree?

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Scientists dated dinosaur bones using the Carbon dating method. The age they came back with was only a few thousand years old.

Can you answer this: If it was scientific for Darwin (and Dawkins) to argue against design, then why is it not scientific to disagree?

It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye with a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with spaces filled with fluid, and with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form.

Further we must suppose that there is a power, represented by natural selection or the survival of the fittest, always intently watching each slight alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully preserving each which, under varied circumstances, in any way or degree, tends to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; each to be preserved until a better is produced, and then the old ones to be all destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alteration, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement.

Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?

It's been fun and interesting to watch this crowd try to weasel their way back into intellectual dominance, or more correctly, into anti-intellectual dominance.

The "Creation Science" phase was, as they themselves admit, unsophisticated scientifically, logically, and most importantly, in terms of PR and political strategy. Once Assimov had framed their endeavor as being precisely equal to "Santa Claus Science", it was a wound from which they did not recover (though definitely not the only wound they suffered). His brilliant re-naming made transparent that the entire CS endeavor was in the service not of objective investigation but rather in the service of supporting/validating an irreversible item of religious dogma.

The two individuals who have recently arrived on the thread and who argue the ID case are interesting, if typical. They are both (I'll assume it is two people and not one) fairly well versed in the ideology and literature put out by the Discovery Institute and are appropriately evangelical in their mission here. One can predict with some high degree of certainty that they hold to the divinity of christ and would get a tad antsy if, while watching the Oscar ceremonies, some favored actor ran up the stairs, glowingly received his Oscar, and then thanked his mom and dad but, most particularly, Shiva or Satan.

Back home, the farmers are now harvesting tobacco. Some of the finest new varieties are grown in Pa. Smooth, mild, and not a cough in a carload.

Design theory does, in fact, make predictions. For example, it predicts that the genome was designed for a purpose and that a function would be found for what had been called "junk DNA." This prediction has recently been corroborated.67

ID assumes that biological systems are the product of intention rather than just luck and law. This prediction is used daily as biochemists seek to "reverse engineer" biochemical machines, that is, to take apart such systems in search of the "design decisions" that were built into their architecture.

Contrary to the claims of opponents, the biblical model does make predictions. For example, it claims that all men are descended from one man, Noah, whereas women come from up to 4 different blood lines (see Genesis 6). One would predict from this claim that males would have lower genetic variability on their y-chromosomes, compared to the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is passed on exclusively through women.

It is in the application of mathematics to the Scientific Method in the second stage and beyond that epistemological, ontological and even metaphysical presuppositions are made thereof, what with a slippery presupposition of the a priority of mathematics, a presupposed relation between an abstraction which is mathematics, and the material, etc.

2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.