Posted by Steve on July 07, 2005 | Comments (28) | TrackBack (1)

Via Chris Mooney, I see that The New Republic has an article (free registration required) in which they ask a number of leading conservative pundits what they think about evolution, intelligent design, and how they think schools should handle them.  Some of the answers are good, some are bad, and some are just incoherent.  Mooney seems to think that the big picture is “fairly dismal”, but I find it unsurprising, and possibly even encouraging.  My quick poll has 7 of them taking the pro-science side (or at least close enough), 5 of them giving a “don’t know” or otherwise wishy-washy answer, and only 3 of them taking the ID position outright.  I was also impressed with some of the members of The National Review, given that their magazine has in the past published a number of ID diatribes.  Maybe when they were actually forced to read the stuff it became apparent what was wrong with it.  Anyway, I highlight a few fun points below the fold, stuff which I find more strange than disagreeable.

Continue reading  “Your Favorite Conservatives on Evolution and ID”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on June 07, 2005 | Comments (163) | TrackBack (0)

Intelligent Design proponents who claim that they have a ‘theory’ often formulate it in the form of “evolutionary/Darwinian mechanisms cannot explain X”. When pressed for a scientific theory, it quickly becomes obvious that ID is scientifically vacuous.

Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as ‘irreducible complexity’ and ‘specified complexity’-but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.

Paul Nelson, Touchstone Magazine 7/8 (2004): pp 64 – 65.

For Paul’s explanation see this link

Posted by Pim van Meurs on June 05, 2005 | Comments (37) | TrackBack (0)

People have been wondering why critics of ID consider Intelligent Design to be scientifically vacuous.

Nichols wrote:

Proponents of Intelligent Design theory seek to ground a scientific research program that appeals to teleology within the context of biological explanation. As such, Intelligent Design theory must contain principles to guide researchers. I argue for a disjunction: either Dembski’s ID theory lacks content, or it succumbs to the methodological problems associated with creation science-problems that Dembski explicitly attempts to avoid. The only concept of a designer permitted by Dembski’s Explanatory Filter is too weak to give the sorts of explanations which we are entitled to expect from those sciences, such as archeology, that use effect-to-cause reasoning. The new spin put upon ID theory-that it is best construed as a ‘metascientific hypothesis’-fails for roughly the same reason.

  R. Nichols, Scientific content, testability, and the vacuity of Intelligent Design theory The American Catholic philosophical quarterly , 2003 , vol. 77 , no 4 , pp. 591 - 611

One need not look far to find supporting evidence as to why.

As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.

William A. Dembski Organisms using GAs vs. Organisms being built by GAs thread at ISCID 18. September 2002

Continue reading  “ID in their own words: Dembski”