ID Uses Scien. Method; Infers Design by Testing Positive Predictions

In fact scientists have found that meteorites carry Amino Acids on them. The basic building block of life comes from rocks in space . Evolution does NOT address the origin of life. But it has been shown that life comes from meteorites...ID still wrong .

IC has been disproven thousands of time. ID has no merit whatsoever

ALL human design (and resulting construction) starts with what exists: a designer and things (entities). Human design is impossible without the designer understanding something about the existents he's designing with else he's not designing. At minimum he's juxtoposing entities at a certain time and place, in a certain orientation, which, itself is a form of design requiring human thought, a human able to act, and the ability to separate those entities from others by distinguishing their fixed attributes (order) from those of other existing entities.

ID trys to switch the argument from design with existents---a common human activity, to a non-existing designer that designs and constructs something from nothing. The design argument is false because of this bait-and-switch as noted by other commenter.

ID makes the common mistake of seeing what order and assuming that means it must have been designed. But, as I've shown, design requires order to prexist in the designer and the entities the designer designs with. Yes, new order is the result of the design, but that's how we distinguish what was designed or not. Not whether it has order, but whether it's possible for a human to have created it---designed and construct it.

Casey Luskin knows how to use impressive multi-syllabic words to suggest that he's intelligent. By gosh, he almost sounds like a scientist when he says that "The form of information which reliably indicates design is generally called 'specified complexity' or 'complex and specified information,' " whatever the hell that means. Apparently, all it means is that if a process with many components (therefore "complex") behaves so as to head coherently in a single direction (therefore "specified"), then it must be the result of intelligent design . OK, then try this one.

Get a hundred people to each throw a handfull of sand, perhaps a thousand grains per handfull (that's "complex"), at a wall. Watch to see what happens. If all of the 100,000 grains reverse direction when they hit the wall and then curve downward and end up on the floor (that's "specified"), with absolutely no communication among them, then surely they must have been guided by an intelligent designer.

Ah, but Mr. Luskin would object that the analogy is irrelevant, because while there was some random component to the movement of the various grains of sand, in the final analysis they were all subject to the overriding influence of gravity, and that's why they moved in a similar way and ended up on the floor. That's true. And in the same way, the various organisms and their various organs have shown significant randomness throughout their evolution, but in the final analysis, they were all subject to the overriding influence of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. The least fit died; the most fit survived and contributed their genes to the next generation.

The grains of sand all ended up on the floor without any conscious intention of going there, just because they were all influenced by gravity. In the same way, all those organisms kept on improving their fitness without any intention on anyone's part, just because those who were most fit survived and reproduced while the least fit died, as any reasonable person would expect. What's so mysterious about that? Would you expect anything different? Do you need to hypothesize a grandfatherly old codger in the sky who manipulated every gene in every organism? Get real.

I only need one sentence to reply to this: Can the existence of a designer be verified by the scientific method? Oh it can't? Oh darn.

I am an experimental scientist. The notion of intelligent design directly impacts my areas of study. However, unlike scientific theories, ID does not make any predictions that I can attempt to test. There are no working hypotheses that might enrich my thinking on the subject. No specific information that can help me predict the interaction energies of the molecules I study. I can either believe it, or not - either way nothing much changes. Evolution raises questions and makes many predictions, some of them I can test and others are longer term, which I hope to see tested during my life. If ID offered me anything I could actually evaluate experimentally, just hinted at some new interesting avenue of research, I would be immediately interested.

Scientists tend to pragmatic about big ideas - does it help me explore what I am most interested in? ID is useless to me as a scientist, so I don't bother with it in the lab. To be honest, Cosmology isn't much help to me either, but I can see that they are clearly making hypotheses and working to disprove them. They might uncover something more that I can use - I am certainly grateful for quantum mechanics.

ID is an interesting subject for late-night discussions after a party - like philosophy, comparative religion, politics, and sports history. All good stuff! Not science.

"Specifically, the theory predicts that we will find large amounts of specified complexity in natural objects."

If that "prediction" really meant anything, then the "theory" might actually be a theory. But since "specified complexity" can never be properly defined, the "prediction" is meaningless and there is no theory. And since there is no theory, it's not science and all the other silly claims of the "intelligent design" propagandists are irrelevant.

"Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information.(20)"

Then reference 20:

20. For More on CSI Tests:
These kinds of tests were reported by pro-ID molecular biologist Doug Axe in Douglas D. Axe, "Extreme Functional Sensitivity to Conservative Amino Acid Changes on Enzyme Exteriors," Journal of Molecular Biology, Vol 301:585-595 (2000); Douglas D. Axe, "Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds," Journal of Molecular Biology, 1-21 (2004).

One reply to the 2004 paper ("Needless to say, the grand pronouncements being made by the ID camp are not warranted."):
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/01/92-second-st-fa.html

The 2004 Axe paper presents a claim that random mutations of a particular enzyme are likely to produce an enzyme with much reduced activity. In essence, it is a claim that evolution could not possibly work properly. But, of course, the critics say that the study is flawed.

"Intelligent design has scientific merit because it is an empirically based argument that uses well-accepted scientific methods of historical sciences in order to detect in nature the types of complexity which we understand, from present-day observations, are derived from intelligent causes."

Well, it would if it did, but since it doesn't, ...

From Wikipedia, the Scientific Method!

1. Define the question
2. Gather information and resources
3. Form hypothesis
4. Perform experiment and collect data
5. Analyze data
6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
7. Publish results
8. Retest

So you're telling me that a procedure that starts with 3, moves to 2, pretends to have done 4, combines 5 and 6, and never ever touches on 6 or 8 or 1 is "scientific?"

I am curious about one thing - Luskin states:

"ID investigations thus begin with observations about how intelligent agents operate and then proceed to convert those observations into positive predictions of what scientists should find in nature if intelligent design was involved in the origin of a given natural object."

He justifies this assertion with this:

"Specifically, the theory predicts that we will find large amounts of specified complexity in natural objects [after an exposition on an analogy employed by theologian/philosopher Meyer)...

As Meyer explains, “by invoking design to explain the origin of new biological information, contemporary design theorists are not positing an arbitrary explanatory element unmotivated by a consideration of the evidence. Instead, they are positing an entity possessing precisely the attributes and causal powers that the phenomenon in question requires as a condition of its production and explanation.”(18) "

In other words - Meyer is making an argument via analogy - made with lots of buzzwords and unnecessarily verbose prose.

If that is why ID is scientific, and if that is an example of a "prediction" that has been "tested", then I am afraid that ID is utterly worthless, for it consists of:

1. Construct an analogy
DNA is sort of like languiage, it is a code - why, we even call it th egenetic code

2. Make a syllogism employing the sketchy analogy -
Humans are complex.
Humans make language/codes.
DNA is like a language/code.
Therefore, DNA was made by a complex being like a human

3. Manipulate syllogism so as to appear to be an hypothesis -
DNA, being coded information, must have been made by complex intelligent agents, since we know that other complex intelligent agents, us, make codes/languages

4. Conclude what was assumed in step 1 and call it a tested and confirmed prediction -

ID predicted that DNA would be the product of an intelligent agent because it contains coded informaiton.
We know that coded inforaiton comes from intelligent agents.
Therefore, DNA was made by an intelligent agent.
Therefore, DNA was designed.

Brilliant.

Quote:

| Intelligent design (ID) has scientific merit because it uses the scientific methods
| commonly used by other historical sciences to conclude that certain features of
| the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not
| an undirected process such as natural selection.

There are two problem with this claim:

1) The other historical sciences look for known patterns. They use known data to cross-reference their finds. Thus, the comparison fails.

2) Natural selection is not undirected. This is a pretty fundamental part of Evolution. I am surprised that someone as strongly opposed to Evolution has failed to grasp even one of its most fundamental concepts.

| Proponents of neo-Darwinism contend that the information in life
| arose via purposeless, blind, and unguided processes.

Here, the false claim that Evolution (Natural Selection) is "blind" is repeated. The previous claim to this effect was not a mere mistake, but rather reveals a pretty huge hole in the author's understanding of Evolution.

| Scientists employing ID compare observations of how intelligent
| agents act when they design things to observations of phenomena
| whose origin is unknown. Human intelligence provides a large
| empirical dataset for studying the products of the action of intelligent
| agents.

An interesting claim. Let's break it down:

1) How do you know that the alleged designer was human, or had the capabilities of a human? What research is there to support your assertion?

2) Humans have so far failed to create artificial intelligence, much less life that acts intelligently and can come up with its own design. The designs we have come up with so far are far from similar to our own brain. Computers are extremely good at calculations, but extremely poor at things our brain is good at.

3) By claiming that you are using a specific data set to look for design, are you not admitting that you must know the identity or ability of the intelligent agent which allegedly designed life? This seems contrary to the claim from Intelligent Design advocates that we need not know the abilities of the designer to detect design.

You now seem to be in a situation where you are contradicting yourself, which means that you have to clarify:

Either you must admit that your "design detection" is nothing like the historical sciences since you don't know what to look for, or you must admit that you are either making unscientific assumptions about the designer or you must claim to know the designer's identity/abilities.

| According to ID theorists, irreducible complexity thus is an
| informational pattern which may be taken as a reliable indicator
| of ID because “[i]n all irreducibly complex systems in which
| the cause of the system is known by experience or observation,
| intelligent design or engineering played a role [in] the origin of
| the system.”

In other words, ID is an argument from ignorance: "We don't know, therefore design."

| ID is a historical science, meaning it employs the principle
| of uniformitarianism, which holds that the present is the key
| to the past.

Are you saying that humans designed all life?

Casey Luskin writes:

"Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI"

How high is "high" ? Just what exactly are you measuring here? What are the units? At what value does something go from not-designed to designed? Why? What objects have you measured and what was their CSI ? What's the CSI of the following objects:

A dog?
A biscuit ?
An ecosystem?
A virus?
A clock?
A sculpture?

I have yet to read a single sentence from any ID proponent that provides "testable predictions about the type of informational properties we expect to find in nature if an intelligent agent were at work in designing a natural object." Over and over this or similar verbiage is used to defend ID, but ID never produces any predictions. This isn't a theory, this is an untested hypothesis.

"Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI."

Explicitly and accurately defining CSI in such a manner that a specific prediction can be made would be a good first step. For instance, no where do I find in any ID writing anything that I can use to identify CSI. Is CSI DNA? Is CSI morphology? Is CSI hair color or eye color? Is CSI behavior? How would I know CSI when I see it? Since I can't pin down exactly what CSI is, I can't make any predictions about it, or with it.

"Scientists employing ID compare observations of how intelligent agents act when they design things to observations of phenomena whose origin is unknown. Human intelligence provides a large empirical dataset for studying the products of the action of intelligent agents."

In the experience of human beings, other human beings are the only creatures we have ever demonstrably seen design anything. (Meaning we can prove that the designed thing was designed) ID STARTS from a biased position. How often has the design hypothesis, caused by this human bias to detect agents, failed when used to explain natural phenomena? Ask any child in Sunday school what thunder is, and you will hear a failed design hypothesis: "the angels are bowling."

"Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski observes that "the principal characteristic of intelligent agency is directed contingency, or what we call choice."(5) When "an intelligent agent acts, it chooses from a range of competing possibilities" to create some complex and specified event. Dembski calls ID "a theory of information" where "information becomes a reliable indicator of design as well as a proper object for scientific investigation." ID thus seeks to find in nature the types of information which are known to be produced by intelligent agents, and reliably indicate the prior action of intelligence."

What information is 'known to be produced by intelligent agents, and reliably indicate the prior action of intelligence?' Again, define explicitly what CSI is.

"Irreducible complexity is a form of specified complexity, which exists in systems composed of "several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning." Because natural selection only preserves structures that confer a functional advantage to an organism, it is argued that such systems would be unlikely to evolve through a Darwinian process because there exists no evolutionary pathway wherein they could remain functional during each small evolutionary step."

Every time I have read an example of irreducible complexity put forth by ID proponents, it has taken literally seconds for me to do enough research to discover that someone has already either

a) performed the scientific research to explain, using evolutionary science, the rise of said example from primitive and simple beginnings to the 'irreducibly complex' structure found in nature, or

b) is currently DOING the scientific research, and the initial results look like they will show an evolutionary pathway for said example.

"ID is a historical science, meaning it employs the principle of uniformitarianism, which holds that the present is the key to the past. ID investigations thus begin with observations about how intelligent agents operate and then proceed to convert those observations into positive predictions of what scientists should find in nature if intelligent design was involved in the origin of a given natural object."

Ok, fair enough. What are the 'positive predictions' made by ID?

"Specifically, the theory predicts that we will find large amounts of specified complexity in natural objects."

Oh, there they are. ID predicts that complex things are complex. Does ID offer anything MORE specific?

"Intelligent design has scientific merit because it is an empirically based argument that uses well-accepted scientific methods of historical sciences in order to detect in nature the types of complexity which we understand, from present-day observations, are derived from intelligent causes."

And it does so without explicit definitions of terms used in it's arguments, specific predictions, experiments that have validated it's predictions, or any other kind of evidence that is useful or relevant when evaluating it's truth claims.

When held to the standards of proof required for all other scientific theories, ID fails.

From Mr. Luskin's argument:

"Design theorists *hypothesize* that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information.... When experimental work uncovers irreducible complexity in biology, they *conclude* that such structures were designed." (*emphasis* added)

So ID first hypothesizes that CSI implies design, and then concludes that the CSI in biology implies design. But this is nothing but a restatement of the hypothesis! What ID forgets to do is to confirm their hypothesis, and somehow empirically support the claim that CSI necessarily implies conscious planning. ID never even tries to do this.

Instead, ID attempts to make an induction from a single data point, arguing that since human beings can build complex machines and humans are conscious, then everything which can build complex machines must be conscious. But one data point is not sufficient to induce the characteristics of all possible "intelligent agents", and so there is no justification for suggesting the cause of biological complexity (whatever it might have been) was a conscious entity.

One could, by the exact same reasoning, argue that everything which can build complex machines must have large, complex, biological brains. But this would mean ID can't account for the *origin* of biological complexity after all.

So ID does not use the scientific method to infer anything at all. It merely assumes that all CSI must come from conscious minds because we humans can create it too, which is a perfectly unscientific argument.

How does science explain information in life versus Intelligent Design proponents? And why do ID proponents misrepresent science when describing for instance neo-Darwinism?

--
Casey Luskin writes:
Proponents of neo-Darwinism contend that the information in life arose via purposeless, blind, and unguided processes. ID proponents contend that the information in life arose via purposeful, intelligently guided processes. Both claims are scientifically testable using scientific methods employed by standard historical sciences.
--

While I agree with Casey that science provides testable mechanisms to explain information in life, I disagree strongly with Casey's representation of neo-Darwinism where he conflates theological concepts such as purpose and where he equivocates on 'guided' and 'blind'. Anyone familiar with evolutionary theory would quickly come to realize that evolutionary processes are not 'blind' or even 'unguided', in fact, the only aspect of evolutionary theory which comes close to this description is the concept of 'random' as used when describing mutations. And all random really means is 'random with respect to the effect in a particular environment', in other words, mutations do no arise in response to environmental pressures immediately beneficial to said environment.
Casey's suggestion that evolutionary processes are blind and unguided, ignore, as is quite common amongst Creationists, that evolutionary processes include "natural selection" where the environment both guides and where the outcome of the process is not 'blind' but rather leads to function.
In fact, it is trivial to realize that natural selection is very similar to 'intelligent selection' where in the former case, information is transferred from the environment into the genome (as science has clearly shown to be the case), where the latter one involves the guidance of an intelligence responsible for said increase.

So, now we have a situation where we know that both natural and intelligent processes can cause information to increase and we are left to establish which of the various explanations are the best. Since ID refuses to contribute any scientific explanation which positively identifies the processes, mechanisms etc, it remains unable to compete not just with evolutionary science but also with our ignorance "we don't know hypothesis".

ID claims that information is best explained by intelligence and yet it provides no explanations.

Weird eh?

In order to better understand Intelligent Design, it is important to appreciate how it abuses and conflates terminologies. For instance, ID claims that science is unable to explain 'design' and yet it appeals to science being able to explain design as evidence that ID has content.

Let's look at the argument in more detail:

---
“In all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role [in] the origin of the system.”
---

Now remember that complexity refers to our absence to understand how to explain something, and that the statement basically states that "when we do not understand something" and it is 'irreducible' then it must be designed. However, we do know that natural pathways to irreducibly complex systems exist, of course, since these pathways are natural, the complexity disappears. However, the same applies when we provide a design explanation.

In order for the design inference to be reliable, ID has to be able to show that there are no false positives. And yet we know that historically, people have erroneously assigned design and designers to thunder and lightning, disease, natural disasters, solar eclipses and so on, so the claim that design inferences are reliable is flawed. Now, the mere fact that design inferences are not reliable, does not mean that science cannot use design inferences reliably. But for that science assigns a plausible positive hypothesis which can compete with other explanations. For instance in criminology we look at means, motives and opportunities, combined with eye-witnesses, alibis and physical evidence to generate a plausible hypothesis which can establish "beyond reasonable doubt" the guilt or innocence.
These forms of design as known as regular design as opposed to rarefied design. In an excellent paper Wilkins et al explain the differences (1)

--
he second way that the inconsistency can be resolved is as we have already indicated, by recognizing a distinction between ordinary design and rarefied design. For those events where our background information includes information about how agents or processes produce events of high probability, we would assign those to the HP category and explain them with reference to regularity. This would preserve a place for a class of rarefied design in the Explanatory Filter, but Dembski's earlier arguments about design indicating agent causation because his Explanatory Filter captures our usual means of recognizing design would only apply to the class of ordinary design, not the desired rarefied design. It is only by the attempt to inconsistently treat agent causation as a privileged hypothesis that Dembski can (erroneously) claim that ordinary design and rarefied design share a node on the Explanatory Filter.
--

In other words, instances of rarefied design, since they cannot really compete with the "we don't know" explanation, cannot be assigned the category of 'design'.

Notice how ID manages by bait and switch to claim both that ID provides an alternative explanation to scientific explanations as well as that ID uses the same scientific approaches as science to make its case. Needless to say, it is trivial to point out the inherent contradiction and show that because of this conflation, ID attempts to claim that it uses similar approaches to science to infer design. However, even a cursory scrutiny of their claims quickly reveals that ID relies not on a scientific approach of providing positive explanations and hypothesis, but rather on elimination and since they refuse to present any way to constrain their designer and thus the design, they are unable to compete with our ignorance.

Needless to say, science has found that such simple mechanisms as regularity and chance can in fact increase information and complexity and create what is called in ID parlance "specified complexity" in the same manner as ID claims that 'designers' can create such complexity.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that ID refuses to admit that there exists a theory which outcompetes their preferred 'single designer' thesis, and shows that a hypothesis of "multiple designers" explains the data much better. The unwillingness and inability to address even the simple alternative, shows that ID is more concerned about its religious position than about science.

Ask yourself: What has ID done in a non trivial manner, that increases our scientific understanding in a positive manner? Nothing, in fact, it has attempted to downplay scientific knowledge, misrepresent scientific findings, to further its case. More on the latter part in a future contribution.

(1) Wilkins, John S, and Wesley R Elsberry. 2001. The advantages of theft over toil: the design inference and arguing from ignorance. Biology and Philosophy 16 (November):711-724.