Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

username mentions The Enlightenment possibly hoping that by doing so we will all think he is enlightened.

The Enlightenment was a 17th century intellectual movement in Europe associated primarily with Locke, Voltaire, Diderot, Wolff, Lessing, Kant etc.

It was also known as the Age of Reason.

Its main doctrines were-

1-Reason is paramount.

2-Man is,by nature, rational and good.

3-All men are equal including women.

4-Tolerance should be extended to other creeds.

5-Priests, sacred texts and tradition are not a basis for beliefs. Only reason is.

6-The individual and humanity can become perfected.

7-That local prejudices and customs are derived from historical peculiarities and are worthless. One is not American or British. One is a man sharing rationality with other men.

8-Art should be instructive and a product of taste and not genius and education should impart knowledge and not mould feelings or develop character.

If you can stop laughing for a moment here are some of the arguments against it.

1-It erected the straw man that medieval philosophers accepted their beliefs on authority alone and that view does not withstand a reading of the works of those philosophers.

2-It goes against the view of Burke, and others, that the accumulated wisdom of past ages, traditional beliefs and institutions, is more likely to be correct that the view of one individual.

3-It demanded that we should subject all our beliefs to criticism and accept nothing on authority when the gulf between any individual's meagre first-hand experience and the range of knowledge available is vast and increasing exponentially.

4-Its egalitarianism is widely rejected both in theory and practice by every functioning society.

5-It was unaware that the limits of reason can be discerned only by reason itself thus opening the way to the dictatorships imposing their version of reason by terror.

6-It identified a whole people with the nation and thus reinforced nationalism.

7-The very reason which the Enlightenment used as a weapon against myth, religion,tradition, irrationality etc has, in advanced technological societies, become self-destructive and especially when it is allied with those pre-Enlightenment values which the movement is self-evidently unable to eradicate.

As Mr Burns said-

"The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley"

It was an anti-human, unrealistic and utopian fantasy conjured up by lonely scholars in their chambers and thus unenlightened to a high degree.

It did make the trembling violets feel better about themselves though so that's a plus.

If you think you can tar the idea of intelligent design by associating it with Creationism you are going to have me reminding viewers here that the concepts are miles apart. Polarised even. Enemies.

However, other people don't think the two concepts are identical as you saw in my post.

What do you believe Darwinian evolutionary processes can actually do?
THE EDGE OF EVOLUTION asks the sober question, what is it reasonable to think Darwinian evolutionary processes can actually do? Unprecedented genetic data on humans and our microbial parasites (malaria, HIV, E. coli) now allow us to answer that question with some precision. The astonishing result is that, even under intense selective pressure, and given an astronomical number of opportunities, random mutation and natural selection yield only trivial, mostly degenerating changes. The bottom line: the major events that produced life on earth were not driven by random mutations.

The book's subtitle speaks of the "limits of Darwinism." Are you saying that Darwin's theory is completely wrong?
Not at all. It is an excellent explanation for some features of life, but it has sharp limits. Darwin's theory is an amalgam of several concepts: 1) random mutation, 2) natural selection, and 3) common descent. Common descent and natural selection are very well-supported. Random mutation isn't. Random mutation is severely constrained. So the process which produced the elegant structures of life could not have been random.

How does the book evolve from the failure of randomness to the conclusion of intelligent design? Aren't there possible unintelligent evolutionary explanations other than Darwinism?
The new genetic results on humans and our parasites tell against not only Darwin's theory, but against any unintelligent process. In their reciprocal evolutionary struggle, human and parasitic genomes could have been altered in nature by whatever unintelligent mechanism had the ability to help. Yet virtually nothing did. Because the categories of "intelligent" and "unintelligent" processes are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, ruling out unintelligent processes necessarily implicates intelligence.

What evidence speaks most clearly to the role of intelligent design in biology?How does intelligent design differ from the prevailing Darwinist view of evolution?
To a surprising extent prevailing evolutionary theory and intelligent design are harmonious. Both agree that the universe and life unfolded over vast ages; both agree that species could follow species in the common descent of life. They differ solely in the overriding role Darwinism ascribes to randomness. Intelligent design says that, while randomness does exist, its role in explaining the unfolding of life is quite limited.

Is it necessary to conclude that the designer is God?One criticism of ID has been that it makes no predictions, and thus is unscientific. Does The Edge of Evolution address this?
The Edge of Evolution is almost entirely concerned with the major, opposing predictions of Darwinism and ID. The most essential prediction of Darwinism is that, given an astronomical number of chances, unintelligent processes can make seemingly-designed systems, ones of the complexity of those found in the cell. ID specifically denies this, predicting that in the absence of intelligent input no such systems would develop. So Darwinism and ID make clear, opposite predictions of what we should find when we examine genetic results from a stupendous number of organisms that are under relentless pressure from natural selection. The recent genetic results are a stringent test. The results: 1) Darwinism's prediction is falsified; 2) Design's prediction is confirmed.

Perhaps Spendi would be kind enough to spell out in simple terms what he does believe and not believe so we may all understand where he is coming from.

Be interesting to see if he's capable of doing so.

Behe is quite off, noone has stated that "random mutation " is part of Darwin's theory because Darwin never ever knew what a gene was.

EDIT: Note that this is a response to Stlstrike's post, because, of course, no one with an ounce of sense reads a post by Spurious, much less responds to it.)

xingu wrote-

Quote:

Perhaps Spendi would be kind enough to spell out in simple terms what he does believe and not believe so we may all understand where he is coming from.

Be interesting to see if he's capable of doing so.

I have done already. You simply have not read my posts carefully enough or allowed that they have a consistent pattern......The more modern science discovers about the basic components of matter the less intelligible it becomes and it hasn't the faintest idea what life is and never will have.

Once you eschew discussing social consequences you have lost the plot.