So far my question raised on March 29, 2006 hasn’t been answered, I think.

Also, somewhat related, is our own inate ability to recognize complexity. With the above example, we recognize the M&M wrapper as not just created, but as something WE created. We can identify the familiar text that has been especially designed by humans to be recognizeable by other humans. What if it was not covered by the well recognized M&M logo but by apparently random dots and scratches. We might be more likely to see it as naturally occuring since the markings may appear more like those dirived from a natural phenomenon.

The truth is, our ability to recognize ‘design’ and patterns is incredibily powerful and incredibly biased. The number of sightings of the face of the holy Mother Mary every year is testiment to this. We see faces in natural phenomona far more often than they ‘really’ occur (the moon, burnt sides of pancakes, rock formations, calcium deposites under freeways …). But, faces don’t really get created naturally, we just (for survival reasons ) have a strong bias toward recognizing faces. However, if you take a real face and encode it in binary and represent the binary as dots on a TV screen, it looks no different to us then the naturally occuring electromagnetic noise we see when no signal is provided to the TV. Our ability to recognize that pattern hasn’t been developed.

I think humans are not as good at recognizing complexity, design, and functionality as we would like to believe we are.

ID claims that IC must have been designed, after the Big Bang, by a highly intelligent being (often described as God) because the universe hasn’t existed long enough for natural laws and chance occurrences to produce IC. I believe this argument is seriously flawed. Consider the following:

1. If a wrapper for, say, M&M’s were discovered on a planet in a distant galaxy, we would immediately know that it was designed by an intelligent being, as opposed to coming into existence by the same “mindless� processes that produced non-living structures like stars, planets, oceans, etc. The probability that those processes could have produced the candy wrapper is so small as to rule out anything but intelligent design.

2. The simplest life is far more complicated than a candy wrapper, and hence far less likely to have occurred through the aforesaid “mindless� processes. Can we then conclude that even the simplest life could never have arisen without intelligent design?

3. Doesn’t the argument that IC is too complex to have arisen by “mindless� evolution therefore suffer from the defect of proving that all life, not just IC, could never have evolved?

I would appreciate comments or citations to comments that address this matter.

You mention that ID suggests irregularities in the fossil record as evidence for “the advent of IC uncaused by a natural process.” This could potentially be a prediction in the scientific thought process that leads to ID. We first observe that life is highly complex, then we hypothesize that an intelligent being guided the evolutionary process, we then predict that there would be anomolies in the fossil record that are incongruent with Darwinian evolution. However, this test is really a test of our leading theories about the formation of rock layers, techtonic motion, and the nature of evolution itself. The leap in logic from “There are unexplained anomolies in the fossil record” to “A supreme being must have intervened” makes as much sense as jumping from “Some quantum aspects of gravity are not explained,” to “Gravity is controlled by invisible anomolous creatures called Graviton Fairies.” Ascribing intelligence and autonomy to some aspect of a natural process requires a test that can actually demonstrate intelligence and not just throw doubt on our own understanding of the process. There do exist scientific test of intelligence brought to us from psychology, however, I am unaware of any proposition about how to apply these test to the Designer.

I believe that one of the most powerful and important aspects of scientific thought is its ability to make meaningful predictions. That is fundamentally what makes it useful. If a scientific theory did not have that ability, it would be of no more use than any other myth. This is not to say that a belief that is incapable of making novel predictions is necessarily false, it just means it isn’t scientific. It has no testability. The difference be gravtions and Graviton Fairies is only in the acription of personality. Unless I can make a novel prediction about the interaction of massive objects due to this personality, and can then subsequently test that prediction, I don’t have a scientific theory. I absolutly believe that all scientific theories should be held to the same standard, and an exeption should not be made for ID because it hypothesizes itself free of prediction. That is fundamentally what all faith based beliefs do. If they were testable, they wouldn’t be a faith.

I definately agree about the use of ID by fundamentalists to attack “atheistic materialism.” Although, I believe that the rise of fundamentalism and the weakening of logical Socratic and scientific thought walk hand in hand. If students are taught how to rationalize the differences between faith and religion, and the differences between science and faith, fundamentalism will not have any ground in which to take root.

“. . . the idea of ID is that all of the observed phenomena and species are far too complex to have evolved from particles in a big bang, or that the big bang itself must have had some motivation.�

I don’t understand ID to claim the latter. ID, as I understand it, says that after the Big Bang, there were acts of designing that stand apart from the natural evolutionary process and therefore elude Darwinian understanding. If these acts occurred at the moment of the Big Bang, I don’t think evolutionary biologists would have a problem, just as they don’t have a problem with the idea that evolution occurred before and after “irreducible complexity� (IC) came into being. The essence of ID is that the act of designing/creation occurred during the history of evolution, not at the very beginning of it.

Mr. Bryan next argues ID isn’t science because, although it hypothesizes that a creator designed IC, it fails to offer an essential element of the scientific method: the means to test for a creator. I have two problems with this. First, as I understand it, ID suggests the existence of evidence in the form of irregularities in the evolutionary records (fossil and otherwise) that would imply the advent of IC uncaused by natural processes. Of course, no such evidence has been found (at least not to my satisfaction), but that isn’t to say ID doesn’t at least propose the existence of such evidence.

Second, as I understand it, ID isn’t a substitute for evolutionary theory. Instead, it purports to determine scientifically, through the science of probability and by means of necessary inference as well as the premise that all natural phenomena are caused, that evolutionary theory is flawed. Why? Because IC couldn’t have occurred “by accident� in evolutionary development, so that something else must have caused it. This being the primary thrust of ID, we shouldn’t demand that it make predictions the way the theory of evolution does, except, as noted, that there must be irregularities in the history of evolution after the Big Bang.

The major respect in which ID partakes of religion or faith is in the presupposition that a designer or designers (D) intervened in the history of evolution. This view, which parallels the widely accepted belief that God and other supernatural beings intervene in the world to bring about events that couldn’t occur according to the laws of science, cannot be proven. Yet virtually no critics of ID have attacked it on that ground.

Finally, Mr. Bryan, like so many others, fears that teaching students about ID will damage scientific education. Frankly, that’s a minor footnote. The real importance of ID is its use as a tool by fundamentalists to attack “atheistic materialism.� Once the attack succeeds, the way will be open to the establishment of a theocracy here in the U.S. similar to what we recently have observed in Afghanistan. I have in mind Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. I believe it’s vital that those of us who believe in freedom of thought devote our most considered attention to removing ID from the fundamentalists’ arsenal.

On the otherhand, ID is a faith, an idea believed in without predictions that are testable. ID makes no useful predictions that can be objectively tested beyond its original observation. This does not make ID false, it just makes it unproveable. Until people are willing to separate objectively testable knowlege from untestable faith, the debate will rage on.

I’ve written more at http://www.joshbryan.com/blog/2006/02/12/is-intelligent-design-science/ if anyone really cares .

Let people pay voluntarily to teach others what they believe. Let them pay to have their kids and others taught what they believe. Let people educate their children as they see fit, and with whatever resources and help they can find.