Intelligent Design is not creationism

[D2.0]

Quote from jem:

I have time to address this now.

I will ask you and then give you the answer.


1. What is the natural and scientific explanation for the appearance of design.

The answer is the speculation that there are billions and billions of universes or the Landscape.

2. Is that speculation provable or observable in our universe. Or is more like faith used to combat the appearance of design.

Right now it is faith.

3. What was Weinberg saying about Wallace and Darwin?

That he thinks the speculation about billions of universes, if someday proven, will allow us to say these fine tunings are not evidence of design.

Ok, this is workable. Replies will correspond with the numbers above.

1. "Appearance of design." That's an assertion that requires more exploration. AT this point, it's not all that necessary to have knowledge of a designer. But to assert design, you need to explore how it was designed in order to validate the subjective observation of design. I mean, you can look at the human body and say it looks designed. It operates like a machine. And we know machines are designed because we have designed them. So that's our frame of reference that gives us the ability to subjectively determine that something might be designed. But in the case of the human body or even one cell of it, to give the idea of design we have to ask how it was designed. From what we knowor more appropriately, speculate, it took many years of chemical reactions to "design" or more apporpriately, form a cell. many things and natural forces are responsbile for the shape, composition, and function of the cell. Thinsg which predate the appearance of the 1st cell. So you can then say that nature (all forces including entropy and environmental conditions) was the "designer of the cell." But then we have to ask how was nature , the "designer" of the cell, was designed. We know it wasn't always here. So how was it designed? Well forces in the universe appear to have been responsible for the shape, size, and composition of that nature. We call that a Planet. But, it all seems perfectly natural.

I could go on, but I think you see the point. If all these things seem natural and the how can be reasonably explained, why should designed be applied other than to assert "God or the ID did it?" It's unnecessary. We simply extraoplate higher that since on the small scale the "design of things" is a function of its environment, then all things are a function of a particular environment. And it all is natural.

2. Yep. When it comes to the origin of the universe, all theories are faith. But when it comes to lower order origins, its science. Is it possible that an ID set in motion the order of the universe that unfolded with mathematical precision without the need of micromanagement? Sure. But that's not science because the order may be perfectly natural and there's nothing to suggest it is otherwise.

3. Yeah, in a backwards ID proponent sort of way, it can be seem as such. But in a rational way he's saying, "why complicate matters with metaphysics?" Go with what you can prove on a smaller scale and see if it holds up on a progressively larger scale. And so far it does until you get to the point of the origin of the universe. But multiverse is the best answer and works perfectly well in order to be in keeping with the natural universe we live in.

A micromanaging ID doesn't work. A one-time set the order in motion ID might. But why bother with such metaphysics which has little useful application on a smaller scale?

 

[D2.0]

Jesus, are you from K-Pax by any chance?

 

[D2.0]

Quote from ZZZzzzzzzz:

Logical questions for those obviously logically impaired:

Is it a logical fallacy to assume design in the absence of specific knowledge of a designer? Must a designer be known to conclude design at work?

Is a computer generated program knowable without knowledge of the programmer?

Can computers be programmed to generate output that appears for all practical purposes as "random?"

Programmed randomness is still a function of design...

No, knowledge of a designer is not entirely necessary. That's the step that's required to strengthen the "how" something was "designed." Nothing implies design. Not even the proverbial watch. Recognition of design is subjective. Nothing objective about it because there's no objective means to determine design.

How would you determine the difference between a functioning yet "un" designed watch from a functioning yet designed watch? What objective criteria would be used? We should be able to apply that objective criteria to all things to determine if they are a product of design or one of "randomness."

We see things around as a a product of their environment. Different environments produce different things. Therefore, the environment is the "designer." But the environment appears to have oocured randomly at each scale level we look at. And there's nothing to suggest otherwise which can be tested. If we alter the environment, certain predictions can be made and tested as to what this new environment will produce. What does that say for design theory? Nothing.

What does that say for evolutionary theory? Everything.

 

[jem]

Quote from D2.0:

Ok, this is workable. Replies will correspond with the numbers above.

1. "Appearance of design." That's an assertion that requires more exploration. AT this point, it's not all that necessary to have knowledge of a designer. But to assert design, you need to explore how it was designed in order to validate the subjective observation of design. I mean, you can look at the human body and say it looks designed. It operates like a machine. And we know machines are designed because we have designed them. So that's our frame of reference that gives us the ability to subjectively determine that something might be designed. But in the case of the human body or even one cell of it, to give the idea of design we have to ask how it was designed. From what we knowor more appropriately, speculate, it took many years of chemical reactions to "design" or more apporpriately, form a cell. many things and natural forces are responsbile for the shape, composition, and function of the cell. Thinsg which predate the appearance of the 1st cell. So you can then say that nature (all forces including entropy and environmental conditions) was the "designer of the cell." But then we have to ask how was nature , the "designer" of the cell, was designed. We know it wasn't always here. So how was it designed? Well forces in the universe appear to have been responsible for the shape, size, and composition of that nature. We call that a Planet. But, it all seems perfectly natural.

I could go on, but I think you see the point. If all these things seem natural and the how can be reasonably explained, why should designed be applied other than to assert "God or the ID did it?" It's unnecessary. We simply extraoplate higher that since on the small scale the "design of things" is a function of its environment, then all things are a function of a particular environment. And it all is natural.

2. Yep. When it comes to the origin of the universe, all theories are faith. But when it comes to lower order origins, its science. Is it possible that an ID set in motion the order of the universe that unfolded with mathematical precision without the need of micromanagement? Sure. But that's not science because the order may be perfectly natural and there's nothing to suggest it is otherwise.

3. Yeah, in a backwards ID proponent sort of way, it can be seem as such. But in a rational way he's saying, "why complicate matters with metaphysics?" Go with what you can prove on a smaller scale and see if it holds up on a progressively larger scale. And so far it does until you get to the point of the origin of the universe. But multiverse is the best answer and works perfectly well in order to be in keeping with the natural universe we live in.

A micromanaging ID doesn't work. A one-time set the order in motion ID might. But why bother with such metaphysics which has little useful application on a smaller scale?

1. you gave your answer - but I wanted you to explain it in terms of what Susskind or Weinberg have said. Although you write well, your opinion on this subject if very unlikely to be the opinion of a top scientist in the field. If you are a top scientist in the field please let me know.

Susskind has let us know science is hard pressed to answer the ID critics and that there is no answer for the fine tunings right now. Now he is a top scientist. Weinberg has said similar things when he said (from my memory) it is ironic that Catholic Cardinal understands this subject better than many scientists. Otherwise I think we should stick to the quote I gave from Susskind which says if his theory is wrong Scientists are hard pressed to answer the Iders.

2. We agree that science has no answer other than faith. but I state that if you believe we only have one universe than we have evidence of design. I can cite you to numerous physicists who so state

3. Not in a backwards ID way. In reality.

Read the quotes. Break em down line by line. You are injecting your thoughts into his statements. The guy is a very precise. He is very anti religion. You think he would leave that opening if he did mean it. Read the sentences.

 

[D2.0]

Quote from jem:

1. you gave your answer - but I wanted you to explain it in terms of what Susskind or Weinberg have said. Although you write well, your opinion on this subject if very unlikely to be the opinion of a top scientist in the field. If you are a top scientist in the field please let me know.

Susskind has let us know science is hard pressed to answer the ID critics and that there is no answer for the fine tunings right now. Now he is a top scientist. Weinberg has said similar things when he said (from my memory) it is ironic that Catholic Cardinal understands this subject better than many scientists. Otherwise I think we should stick to the quote I gave from Susskind which says if his theory is wrong Scientists are hard pressed to answer the Iders.

2. We agree that science has no answer other than faith. but I state that if you believe we only have one universe than we have evidence of design. I can cite you to numerous physicists who so state

3. Not in a backwards ID way. In reality.

Read the quotes. Break em down line by line. You are injecting your thoughts into his statements. The guy is a very precise. He is very anti religion. You think he would leave that opening if he did mean it. Read the sentences.

You're reading too much into Susskind in order to bolster ID theory. I'm not going to bother getting in a debate over what you think he's saying as he's already clarified himself in written work and in lectures. It ain't like Susskind's book is the Bible. Science evolves over time especially with new information.

You can't say that without multiverse you're relegated to admitting design. It doesn't work that way and only works that way with an oversimplified idea of what multiverse is. The oversimplied idea being, "if we have many universes, the odds are one of them will have underlying rules which allow for the conditions for life."

With one universe, we still don't have a need for a designer. Since you like to oversimplify concepts, if we oversimplify the anthromophic principle, we get "the universe is the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to observe it." Meaning, it could all be perfectly natural and its laws a function of the outcome of a certain initial randomness that occured. Gravity could be a naturally occuring process that just happens to have the qualities it has and as such stars are able to form and don't collapse instantly. And because the stars are able to form partly because of the way gravity is, other chemical reactions occur which can only occur because of gravity and the fact that stars exist. And so on and so forth.

Still no need to introduce a designer.

And so you don't read the wrong things into what I'm saying, I'' sum some stuff.

1. I can't say that there isn't a designer. But I can't talk about it with any seriousness because I can't talk with any seriousness about design. It's subjective.

2. No criteria for what constitutes design except that it may appear to be designed is worthless. You can't research design with any veracity under these conditions. You need to know that at least one thing is designed in order to diffentiate similiar "looking" things as being designed or not. But why would an IDer want to take this extra step or effort? Because the IDer believes everything is designed by one designer. They wouldn't even accept partial design as a conclusion they might arrive at.

3. Empirical evidence of design is just a fancy way of saying, "Hey Cheech mang, I thinks that looks like somebody made it cause it looks like something I made when I was sober." LIke chemical processes that look like engines - another IDer favorite.

Anyway, you need to stop appealling to authorities who have clarified what IDer's are stretching to support their cause. Why don't you Iders go out and do some real science so both sides and compare notes. All you guys are doing is critiquing ours hoping to find wording which might look like we've discovered design but can't accept our finding.

You'll never gain any respect with that approach. And you don't even have to prove a designer. That'll be self evident when you can prove that something that we consider perfectly natural is actually designed. Certain rock formations "look" like they are designed while others don't. How do you tell the difference?

 

[I am...]

Quote from D2.0:

Jesus, are you from K-Pax by any chance?

No, but "man" migrated from Mars, which was populated by a migration from elsewhere. RNA and DNA are from other star systems entirely.

It doesn't matter because all of this is still fiction.

The complexity/mystery shrouding this universe is designed to distract you from the way to escape it entirely.

You think you are looking at "planets", "stars", and "galaxies", "universes". How nice!

What you are really looking at is a battleground, fighting over ancient grievances based on a made-up concept of guilt for a trumped-up "loss" you think you have suffered.

All of this was made simultaneously. Time was but a single instant.
And all that was made in that instant was unmade in an instant.

Time is not linear.

Time is linear for the "guilty". Guilt is a state of consciousness. It looks to the past, where it thinks a crime was committed. It looks to the future when the inevitable punishment must come.

Thus, looking backward and forward, time is made linear. The "guilty" are trapped in time so long as they maintain that state of mind. This way they nail themselves to a cross, overlooking the vertical axis called "eternity"...or, "now".

Shifting guilt away via the traditional method does not work because there is only one mind. It's impossible to blame any appearance of guilt "out there" without blaming yourself.

Conversely, you cannot blame yourself for anything without including everything else. It's kind of a Catch-22.

There must be a simultaneous letting go of the concept of guilt for all concerned whenever a problem comes up in your face.

You are unaware of the extent to which the one mind feels guilty...so much so that it invented a "subconscious" just to bury it under layers of unawareness.

That is why you do not think it is a problem.

Yet it is what drives the world mad. You cannot ever underestimate just how insane is the world because of this.

The world was made because of this...in a state of panic.

Of course, guilt is not true. So the world was made as a defense against the truth.

The world is designed by a thinking mechanism that uses guilt to perpetuate it's existence. The thinking mechanism exists only in time, and guilt is the consciousness that keeps time going.

Anyone who comes to this world with the truth is labeled "crazy" or "insane", according to the mechanism's dictates. Because you are aligned with the thinking mechanism, you agree with it.

This is a very smart way to keep it going, don't you agree?

Time is simply a single instant multiplied over and over as long as guilt is in the mind.

The world you see is in memory, and you are simply observing/experiencing what has gone before. You are watching it like a movie, except you are in it.

All you can do to change the script is to interpret the scenes with the intent to forgive whatever you see.

In this way you begin to unravel the thinking mechanism that wrote and runs the script for you.

Like peeling layers of an onion, each time you forgive, you remove another layer preventing you from seeing reality. With persistence and perfection, you will soon eliminate the thinking mechanism altogether and wake up from a bad dream.

When you wake up, you will see that you have never changed, you went nowhere, and it was all made-up.

Does that sound crazy to you?

For some reason, my audience mainly consists of little children.



Jesus

 

[jem]

Quote from D2.0:

You're reading too much into Susskind in order to bolster ID theory. I'm not going to bother getting in a debate over what you think he's saying as he's already clarified himself in written work and in lectures. It ain't like Susskind's book is the Bible. Science evolves over time especially with new information.

You can't say that without multiverse you're relegated to admitting design. It doesn't work that way and only works that way with an oversimplified idea of what multiverse is. The oversimplied idea being, "if we have many universes, the odds are one of them will have underlying rules which allow for the conditions for life."

With one universe, we still don't have a need for a designer. Since you like to oversimplify concepts, if we oversimplify the anthromophic principle, we get "the universe is the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to observe it." Meaning, it could all be perfectly natural and its laws a function of the outcome of a certain initial randomness that occured. Gravity could be a naturally occuring process that just happens to have the qualities it has and as such stars are able to form and don't collapse instantly. And because the stars are able to form partly because of the way gravity is, other chemical reactions occur which can only occur because of gravity and the fact that stars exist. And so on and so forth.

Still no need to introduce a designer.

And so you don't read the wrong things into what I'm saying, I'' sum some stuff.

1. I can't say that there isn't a designer. But I can't talk about it with any seriousness because I can't talk with any seriousness about design. It's subjective.

2. No criteria for what constitutes design except that it may appear to be designed is worthless. You can't research design with any veracity under these conditions. You need to know that at least one thing is designed in order to diffentiate similiar "looking" things as being designed or not. But why would an IDer want to take this extra step or effort? Because the IDer believes everything is designed by one designer. They wouldn't even accept partial design as a conclusion they might arrive at.

3. Empirical evidence of design is just a fancy way of saying, "Hey Cheech mang, I thinks that looks like somebody made it cause it looks like something I made when I was sober." LIke chemical processes that look like engines - another IDer favorite.

Anyway, you need to stop appealling to authorities who have clarified what IDer's are stretching to support their cause. Why don't you Iders go out and do some real science so both sides and compare notes. All you guys are doing is critiquing ours hoping to find wording which might look like we've discovered design but can't accept our finding.

You'll never gain any respect with that approach. And you don't even have to prove a designer. That'll be self evident when you can prove that something that we consider perfectly natural is actually designed. Certain rock formations "look" like they are designed while others don't. How do you tell the difference?

You do not comprehend how astronomically unlikely it is that our universe would have just the right cosmological constant for us to exist.


If you understood that all the values it could have taken based on what we know about the big bang and what the constant is you would undestand why string theory needed to be able to speculate that we could have 10 to the 500 universes or so before Susskind felt like there were enough universes to combat the conclusion of ID.

Susskind said millions of universes are not enough he needed billions.

 

[D2.0]

Quote from jem:

You do not comprehend how astronomically unlikely it is that our universe would have just the right cosmological constant for us to exist.

If you understood that all the values it could have taken based on what we know about the big bang and what the constant is you would undestand why string theory needed to be able to speculate that we could have 10 to the 500 universes or so before Susskind felt like there were enough universes to combat the conclusion of ID.

Susskind said millions of universes are not enough he needed billions.

Cyclic universe anyone?

http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn9114-cyclic-universe-can-explain-cosmological-constant.html

Like I said, stop harping on Susskind like he's some sort of god. He revises his theories regularly as new thoughts and evidence comes to him. You're using relatively old arguments in any case.

And the problems like fine tuning as related to certian theories does not translate into a nod for intelligent design.

You don't seem to understand the fallacy inherent in ID when approached from the standpoint of critiquing other theories which do have merit and are testable on some levels yet offering nothing substantive or testable for the cause of ID. You're defaulting to a "god-in-the-gap" game.

If Susskind said that there's a problem with supersymetric theories as it relates to the cosmological constant of zero, you don't go out and draw the conslusion that the answer is intelligent design. That's god-in-the-gapping.

Or if Hawkings remarks in a pantheistic way that the order of the universe is a "god," you don't take that to mean he refering to an intelligent and sentient designer. Because if asked, and he was, he'll tell you that he doesn't believe in a personal god or sentient dieties as being responsible to the order observed in our observable natural universe.

All you are doing is seeing where certain theories have trouble explaining certain things and saying, "well you're having trouble because you just can't admit God did it." Once you do that, problem solved." Problem is, once you do that, you introduce a whole new set of problems that significantly complicate things.

It's fine to believe in ID. But for the love of God, just show something that is designed. Just one thing. That's all it takes to remove the subjectivity in recognizing design.

But geez dude, stopping looking for holes in scientific theories or hanging on misinterpreted meanings just so you can fill it in with God. Do some real freaking work already. But you know, that's unfair of me to say as I really shouldn't ask you to do that if your "leader," Dembski hasn't and apparently won't either.

 

[Teleologist]

Quote from D2.0:

It's fine to believe in ID. But for the love of God, just show something that is designed. Just one thing. That's all it takes to remove the subjectivity in recognizing design.

What would you count as evidence for design?

 

[D2.0]

Quote from Teleologist:

D2.0 wrote:


What would you count as evidence for design?

Good question.

Something where the subjectivity is reduced to a minimum. I don't think you can get absolute certainity of design without seeing the designer in action. But it may be possible to determine that something has been designed in an objective manner.

Looks designed won't cut it. Because, as an example, some "rock formations" look designed while others do not. How can we tell which is which? You need some kind of objective standard to differentiate.

So in essence I think what's needed is an objective means for determining whatever we observe to be designed. I don't know of any. You? Give me a set of objective rules so I can go out myself and determine if what I observe has been designed or not.