What is Intelligent design?

Question

what does it mean what is it?

Answer 1

"Intelligent Design is creationism in a cheap tuxedo." -Leonard Krishtalka of the Kansas Natural History Museum

After creationists badly lost two Supreme Court Cases in the 1980s (McLean vs. Arkansas, Edwards vs. Aguillard), they licked their wounds and tried saying "Creation Science" but were advised by a new group in Seattle, the Discovery Institute, to work on a new name. Attorney Philip Johnson and others coined the term ID and Johnson designed the Wedge Stategy, which was leaked to the internet in 1999.

A creationist textbook "Of Pandas and People" was hastily rewritten, with the phrase ID replacing "created" or "creationism."

The term Intelligent Design is already on the way out after the beating they took in Kitzmiller vs. Dover in 2005. Watch for a new term: Sudden Emergence. Sounds scientific, no? It ain't.

Answer 2

While I do NOT support it:

Intelligent Design is based on the general assumption that in order for Life ot have been created as it is, it MUST have had a "plan" and that there is no way it could have simply happened as a random "accident".

It's the same type of thinking that says if you wander aimlessly, yet end up someplace specific, you must have "meant" to go there.

I'll personally take it with a grain of salt, but it's general enough that I don't see any argument with it. In spite of how many try to utilize it to the contrary, it does not support any specific line of religious thinking.

It does seem to me, however, that if there was REALLY an "Intelligence" behind the creation of Life on Earth, it would have been done much better than it was...

Answer 3

It means some really smart guy (not sayin' who) designed humans and other animals in their present form and placed them on earth (wink, wink, nod, nod, say no more). It is the result of word-smithing by Creationists to get Creationism taught in public school science classes by attempting an end-run around judicial decisions declaring teaching Creationism there unconstitutional. They literally just replaced "Creationism" with "Intelligent Design" in their "text book", thinking that judges are too stupid to notice. They were wrong, so everyone's waiting now to see what new term will take its place. "Sudden Emergence" is a contender.

The basic approach in justifying it as "science" is to challenge real scientists to come up with and prove a detailed mechanism (down to the molecular level in some cases) as to how some biological phenomenon could have evolved naturally. If they are not satisfied with the answer (and they never seem to be), they take that as "evidence" of intelligent design. Whenever they loose credibility for any one phenomenon being called "irreducibly complex" due to advancing knowledge, they move on to another phenomenon. To date, they've gone from the "missing link" to the eye to the flagellum. They're all on about the human immune system now.

Answer 4

Basically it is an analytic description of the various controls systems designed by our Creator for the functions of the Universe and all biological life there in.
The overall control system is investigated in terms of the synergism of Creation verses the probalibalistic approach of evolution philosophy.
As a scientific analysis in its the most monumental task which would run a whole gamut of scientific disciplines .

Control System Theory is expressed in terms of transfer functions. The result is very complicated solutions of differential equations.
if a scientist was to completely analyse all the control system intelligence in the Creation of the Universe he would never live to see the end
Presently science can only view the Universe in terms of Creation theories such as the Big Bang theory of the Creation of the Universe,etc..

Never the less there is a need to develop a science to study and unravel the mysteries that our Creator has set in the construction of the Universe.

Some how evolution Philosopy just did not cut it . Hence Theories of Creation needed to replace The concept of probablilistic Evolution by a concept of Control System Intelligence theory.

Answer 5

Intelligent Design is the concept that life on Earth is too complex to have evolved naturally, and must have been designed by an intelligent designer.

Intelligent Design is regarded by all intelligent people as the pseudoscience that it is. It is, in essence, creationism's vain attempts to sound scientific.

Answer 6

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. Any time we find information, whether it is in the form of a hieroglyphic inscription, a newspaper article, or a computer program, there was invariably an intelligent agent behind that information.

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.

As Dr. Stephen Meyer said (when being interviewed by Nightline), “From the evidence of the information that’s embedded in DNA, from the evidence of the nanotechnology in the cell, we think you can infer that an intelligence played a role. In fact, there are sophisticated statistical methods of design detection that allow scientists to distinguish the effects of an intelligent cause from an undirected natural process. When you apply those statistical measures and criteria to the analysis of the cell, they indicate that the cell was designed by an intelligence.”

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 behaving 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 a flat earth, etc., a significant percentage of the (tax paying) population believes in ID.

Answer 7

Religion has been losing every argument to science and its explanation of natural phenomena are being discredited.

Intelligent design is a dishonest attempt by some religious bodies to disguise religion as science and get it taught in schools. But the courts of US saw the deception and kicked their case out.

At first I was surprised that churches stooped to deception, but then I remembered that in their history they did far worse things

Answer 8

Intelligent design means that there had to be a creator with intelligence responsible for the creation of life. Why is it that nobody would question for one second that a wristwatch would have a designer or maker, yet they question whether the universe with all of the marvelous forms of life it contains had a designer/creator?

Answer 9

It is design, created by intelligence.

Answer 10

An intelligent designer (God) created everything.

In your kitchen cabinet, you've probably got a spray bottle with an adjustable nozzle. If you twist the nozzle one way, it sprays a fine mist into the air. You twist the nozzle the other way, it squirts a jet of water in a straight line. You turn that nozzle to the exact position you want so you can wash a mirror, clean up a spill, or whatever.

If the universe had expanded a little faster, the matter would have sprayed out into space like fine mist from a water bottle - so fast that a gazillion particles of dust would speed into infinity and never even form a single star.

If the universe had expanded just a little slower, the material would have dribbled out like big drops of water, then collapsed back where it came from by the force of gravity. A little too fast, and you get a meaningless spray of fine dust. A little too slow, and the whole universe collapses back into one big black hole. The surprising thing is just how narrow the difference is. To strike the perfect balance between too fast and too slow, the force, something that physicists call "the Dark Energy Term" had to be accurate to one part in ten with 120 zeros.
If you wrote this as a decimal, the number would look like this:

0.000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000001

In their paper "Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant" two atheist scientists
from Stanford University stated that the existence of this dark energy term "Would have required a miracle... An external agent, external to space and time, intervened in cosmic history for reasons of its own."

Just for comparison, the best human engineering example is the Gravity Wave Telescope, which was built with a precision of 23 zeros. The Designer, the 'external agent' that caused our universe must possess an intellect, knowledge, creativity and power trillions and trillions of times greater than we humans have. Absolutely amazing.

Now a person who doesn't believe in God has to find some way to explain this. One of the more common explanations seems to be "There was an infinite number of universes, so it was inevitable that things would have turned out right in at least one of them."

The "infinite universes" theory is truly an amazing theory. Just think about it, if there is an infinite number of universes, then absolutely everything is not only possible...It's actually happened!
It means that somewhere, in some dimension, there is a universe where the Chicago Cubs won the World Series last year. There's a universe where Jimmy Hoffa doesn't get cement shoes; instead he marries Joan Rivers and becomes President of the United States. There's even a universe where Elvis kicks his drug habit and still resides at Graceland and sings at concerts. Imagine the possiblities!

I might sound like I'm joking, but actually I'm dead serious. TO BELIEVE AN INFINITE NUMBER OF UNIVERSES MADE LIFE POSSIBLE BY RANDOM CHANCE IS TO BELIEVE EVERYTHING ELSE I JUST SAID, TOO.
Some people believe in God with a capital G.
And some folks believe in Chance with a Capital C.