Intelligent design/objections

Overview

This page is in need of updating. We're splitting "direct creation" into "interventionist creation" and "supernatural creation", so some pages will need to be renamed and links here will need to be updated.

As a dispute over interpretation of available data, evolution vs. intelligent design is essentially the same argument as the ever-popular evolution vs. direct creation, and they both are basically criticisms of evolution with interventionist models of creation offered as supposedly much more sensible/reasonable/plausible explanations by comparison.

Intelligent Design (ID), which has never been (and perhaps cannot be, due to its essential nature) spelled out in detail beyond the level of an informal theory, is often proposed as a viable alternative to the scientific theory of evolution by natural selection. Mainstream scientists generally agree that ID is completely non-viable as a scientific theory, but the challenges continue – and many of the arguments advanced by the ID camp were initially appealing and difficult to refute without knowing specific facts – especially since ID proponents were quite willing to distort or twist known facts to their advantage, or bring up the same points repeatedly after they had been soundly refuted.

Notes

The OSC analysis (which used to be linked below, on this page; need to find it again -W.) seems a pretty reasonable treatment of a solution – i.e. ID may be in agreement with his beliefs, but it is based on religion rather than science, and US public schools have no business teaching religion – but proponents of creationism/ID do not appear to be interested in compromise.

Related Pages

• creation: how things got here
  • evolution by natural selection
  • intelligent design

• Hierarchy of non-scientific creation ideas:
  • anti-Darwinism: opposing evolutionary ideas for the sake of taking them down, not because of a better model
  • interventionist creation: not anti-scientific, but does not actually explain anything
  • supernatural creation: anti-scientific by definition

Links

Filed Links

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News & Views

• 2007-09-27 Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin: "But now, Dr. Dawkins and other scientists who agreed to be interviewed say they are surprised — and in some cases, angered — to find themselves not in “Crossroads” but in a film with a new name and one that makes the case for intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. The film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” also has a different producer, Premise Media. .. The film is described in its online trailer as “a startling revelation that freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-funded high schools, universities and research institutions.” According to its Web site, the film asserts that people in academia who see evidence of a supernatural intelligence in biological processes have unfairly lost their jobs, been denied tenure or suffered other penalties as part of a scientific conspiracy to keep God out of the nation’s laboratories and classrooms."
  • What, exactly, is a "scientific conspiracy"? True science is non-ideological and non-political, so any "conspiracy" intended to favor a particular ideological or political viewpoint regardless of its validity would be, by definition, anti-scientific. If they mean "a conspiracy by scientists", the scientists in question would be violating scientific principles in pursuing such a conspiracy, in which case this situation should be described more as "a conspiracy within the ranks of the scientific establishment". In any case, "scientific conspiracy" is an oxymoron. Talking about a "religious conspiracy" to smear and devalue science in the eyes of the public, however, is entirely within the realm of reason.
• 2006-12-15 Intelligent design: The God Lab by Celeste Biever
• The Other Intelligent Design Theories by David Brin
• Intelligent Design: An Ambiguous Assault on Evolution at LiveScience