Should Intelligent Design be taught in schools?

by AlmostAtheist 83 Replies latest jw friends

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  funkyderek

  hooberus:

  For example: If an observer in space were to come across the voyager spacecraft adrift would they first be required to explain how the complexity of its designer came about before theorizing and seeing evidence that it was a product of intelligent design?

  More bait-and-switch. Examining a particular object and determining that it most likely has an intelligent designer is very different from claiming that all complex entities must have an intelligent designer. The latter claim leads to the paradox that you try to dismiss.
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  Abaddon

  hooberus

  The point that you are attempting to make seems to be that design cannot be scientifically inferred for the origin of an object -unless the origin of its proposed designer can also be explained. I think that this is incorrect.

  No. I state that a theory which catagorically states complex designs must have a complex designer and does not explain the designer's existence contradicts itself.

  For example: If an observer in space were to come across the voyager spacecraft adrift would they first be required to explain how the complexity of its designer came about before theorizing and seeing evidence that it was a product of intelligent design?

  No. The 'origin police' wouldn't 'require' them to do that, LOL. Very funny.

  In your example the observer in space would rightfully assume a mechanism with no viable explanation for its existence other than assembly by an advanced tool-using civilisation with a desire to explore and communicate had, in fact, been assembled by an advanced tool-using civilisation with a desire to explore and communicate. Space probes are not organic or otherwise self-replicating and thus cannot develop independently and have successful surviving change preserved and developed in succesive generations.

  So your example isn't a good example, it's just the 'found time-piece' or '747 in a hurricane in a junkyard' shifted to outer-space, and equally invalid for equating the design of insensate non-living mechanisms to sensate living organisms.

  ID fails because it contradicts itself; it's adherants use magical thinking to excuse this contradiction by pleading the origin of their postulated designer is an exception to the rule that is the centre of the ID.
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  AlmostAtheist

  A better example of life might be a computer that randomly generates a colored shape (red triangle, blue circle, etc) and invites passersby to take the shape and add it to a collage. If the passerby thinks the shape doesn't fit well into the growing picture, he can reject it. Over time, the collage will change. Some people will see a person forming in it, so they'll add a circle to the top for a head. Another will come along and think it looks like the Eiffel tower, and so they'll add a triangle to the top. After hundreds of shapes get placed, the image might get very well defined.

  If you took away the computer and left the collage, an observer would surely think some single artist designed the collage from scratch, never suspecting that all the components were formed randomly, and placed one at a time by forces that never knew what the end result would be.

  The people placing the shapes would be following the rule, "Make it look more like whatever it looks like it is trying to be." Natural selection does the same thing with existing life forms and mutations, following the rule, "Keep what survives and reproduces."

  Dave
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  Abaddon

  .. by Douglas Adams;

  It's rather like a puddle waking up one morning? I know they don't normally do this, but allow me, I'm a science fiction writer? A puddle wakes up one morning and thinks: "This is a very interesting world I find myself in. It fits me very neatly. In fact it fits me so neatly... I mean really precise isn't it?... It must have been made to have me in it."

  ID IS NT