Is intelligent design legitimate science? Should it be taught in schools?

Question

It seems like everyone I talk to has a different opinion!

I learned a lot from http://www.objectiveministries.org/creation/ but I think that site might be biased.

Answer 1

No. And No. Intelligent design is a euphemism for "let's teach religion!" That works okay if you're of the dominant religion in an area, but not so well if you're not. So...if you are in favor, think about how it's going to be when you have to move somewhere you aren't in the majority and have to learn the intelligent design of someone else's brand of god.

Answer 2

It is a very biased site, positing a creator where natural sciences do not.

"Intelligent Design" was a term coined by the creationist think tank, The Discovery Institute. No peer-reviewed papers have been published, no ID proponent conducts research.

What you have are people following ID founder and attorney Philip Johnson's approach of "Teach the controversy" where no controversy exists.

Kitzmiller vs. Dover in 2005 was a well known trial where the conservative federal judge John Jones was pushed to the point of anger by the Thomas More Law Center's silly antics as defendents.

"Intelligent Design is nothing more than creationism in a cheap tuxedo" -physicist Lawrence Krauss.

It's unneccessarily confusing to kids to think there are competing theories with the well established theory of evolution. If you are a science teacher, you know scientific theories are an explanation of a collection of facts, not a guess- that falls under hypothesis. More evidence arrives daily in support of evolution.

Teaching a theistic "God of the Gaps" philosophy is NOT science.

www.ncseweb.org

Answer 3

ID believes that it is possible to find the evidence of a Creator in creation. But how can someone distinguish between a God-made object and an object that came into being by naturalistic processes? IDs suggest that it is possible to discriminate between natural and an intelligently designed artifacts by looking at its complexity. If that complexity is "reducible", i.e. can be explained away by natural causes, then it is has to be considered natural. On the other hand, if it displays "irreducible complexity", i.e. science can not explain how this complexity came into being, then this is supposed to be a "proof" of ID. While this idea might seem appealing for many, unfortunately this is not a scientific approach, since in science you should also be able to show that there are no other possible explanations independently from your knowledge. In fact how can we rule out that this complexity isn't reducible because of our ignorance? Today we might not be able to explain the complexity of things we observe, but perhaps we will in the future. How do the ID people answer to this objection? They simply don't! They are doing the same mistake creationsts did for generations: if something can't be explained by actual science, then it must be God that made it, so they argue. But this is clearly not science. At best a phliosophical movement, a belief system, certainly not science.

The point is that someone should be able to distinguish between a mere philosophical hypothesis and a scientific fact, between an assumption and an empiric data, between scientific naturalism and a philosophical one (a distinction which BTW darwinists frequently miss too). This discrimination is really what should be taught in classrooms.

PS: And the following post of Questioner is the best example of what I was trying to say. There is NO science of "Design Inference" or "science of design detection" . This "science" is only in their minds and their system of believes.

Answer 4

The problem with ID is that there is more than the one version peddled by the Discover Institute. I believe the world was created quite recently by the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). According to the Gospel of the FSM, all apparent evidence to the contrary was planted by the action of His noodly appendage to test our faith. This explains everything in a way that, like non-FSM-ID, cannot be disproven, and has numerous academic endorsements (ref). If non-FSM-ID is to be taught in science class, then the Gospel the FSM should be taught too. I suggest 1/3 time for biological evolution, which uses the traditional overly restrictive definition of science (something about empirical testability, yada, yada), 1/3 time for non-FSM-ID, and 1/3 time for FSMism.

Answer 5

No it is not. The reason it is not is because science, BY DEFINITION, is the study of the workings of the natural world.

Intelligent Design makes the claim that there was some "force/entity/designer" with the knowledge and power to design all the species on Earth in the current form...which would be a SUPERnatural idea......so by definition it is not science.

The whole idea of Intelligent Design is a valid IDEA for religion or philosophy....but it is totally INVALID as a science.

This has been proved multiple times by the scientific community.


Let me give you a metaphor. You claim that "gravity" is a force of attraction between objects in relation to their mass....I claim that there are interdimensional bungee chains that create the pulling effect and can be stretched to allow for movement depending on certain circumstances

Both are valid as philosophies as no one can disprove either.

But is my idea science?



Questioner> OK but I cannot agree. All the "theories" of ID, which are in fact hypothesis scientifically speaking, have been refuted and disproven by the scientific community many times. The argument of the mouse trap/watch found as proof of design is logically invalid and scienctifically unsound...it is comparing INANIMATE objects which remain as they are until something acts on them to LIVING ORGANIC forms which move, grow, reproduce of their own volition. You are in essence comparing dead things to live things......comparing plastic apples to real living oranges. So I cannot accept much of what you say

Answer 6

The answer is NO and NO. Intelligent Design is simply a conservative Christian tactic to get around the growing body of evidence that casts doubt on Christian principles, namely Evolution which goes against the whole Adam & Eve/Garden of Eden thing.

Furthermore, ID takes just as much faith as believing in God because they are making the leap from something being complex to it being God's design. In reality, Evolution is a larger collection of basically simple changes that lead to something of increasing complexity. You can almost see this mirrored in the advancement of technology.

Answer 7

No, if a school must offer intelligent design, it should be done in a philosophy or world religions class. It is not science and has no place in the science classroom. Those who oppose the teaching of evolution seek to promote ignorance and stupidity, probably to profit their church.

Answer 8

Legitimate science forms hypotheses *on the basis of current evidence* and designs experiments whose results either refute the hypothesis or support it.

I don't see either - there isn't a single legitimate scientist working on "Intelligent Design", because there are neither hypotheses nor evidence. It consists of a series of assertions, and people with a foregone conclusion attempting to have those assertions treated as though they are as credible as science.

Answer 9

Intelligent design is flawed because it asserts that reality was created by some being or beings. This brings up another conundrum. Who created that being or beings?

The school system should be kept separate from religion. Surely religion can be taught in school, but it should not be used as a blanket explanation for things we do not yet understand.

Answer 10

So many people these days are confusing biblical creationism with intelligent design. "Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence" (Dr. William Dembski). That's it; it says nothing of who the creator is and how he/she/it/they did it. Intelligent Design encompasses every "creation" story, even aliens seeding life on this planet.

Although it has been around, in one form or another, since the time of ancient Greece, William Paley is probably the most famous for using the design argument. In 1802, he came out with a treatise called Natural Theology. He began by arguing that if one were to discover a watch lying in the middle of nowhere and they were to examine that watch closely, the person would logically conclude that it was not an accident, but had purpose; it had a designer. He went on to argue that the overwhelming design in the universe is evidence of a Grand Designer.

Now, is this a valid argument? Well, we detect design all the time. If you find an arrowhead on a deserted island, you assume it was made by someone, even if you can’t see the designer. We can tell the difference between a message written in the sand and the results of the wind and waves on the sand. The carved heads of the presidents on Mt. Rushmore are clearly different from erosional features.

The thing is, reliable methods for detecting design exist and are employed in forensics, archeology, and data fraud analysis. These methods can easily be employed to detect design in biological systems.

When being interviewed by Tavis Smiley, Dr. Stephen Meyer said, “There are developments in some technical fields, complexity and information sciences, that actually enable us to distinguish the results of intelligence as a cause from natural processes. When we run those modes of analysis on the information in DNA, they kick out the answer, ‘Yeah, this was intelligently designed’ . . . There is actually a science of design detection and when you analyze life through the filters of that science, it shows that life was intelligently designed.”

And for those who put so much faith in peer-review, check this out: http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2640&program=CSC%20-%20Scientific%20Research%20and%20Scholarship%20-%20Science

The four main areas the ID movement focuses on: Information Theory, Irreducible Complexity, The Anthropic Principle, and The Design Inference.

What about teaching it in school? I'm sorry, but I have to agree with George Bush: "Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about . . . Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought . . . You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”

Good science teaching should include controversies. But, whenever you mention this kind of stuff, evolutionists jump from their trees and start acting as if someone had stolen their bananas. Apparently, academic freedom is for other subjects.

As Cal Thomas has said, “Why are believers in one model—evolution—seeking to impose their faith on those who hold that there is scientific evidence which supports the other model? It’s because they fear they will lose their influence and academic power base after a free and open debate. They are like political dictators who oppose democracy, fearing it will rob them of power.”

Most Christians I know don't want biblical creationism taught in science classes. What we want is for molecules-to-man evolution to be taught with all its warts (they are not even allowed to present evidence that would put evolution in a poor light). And we want intelligent design to at least to be presented. Unlike leprechauns and unicorns, etc., a significant percentage of the population believes in ID.