Unintelligible Design

[kingandy]

This article on a poll regarding what should be taught in schools regarding the origin of man has already been posted elsewhere, but I'm intrigued enough to comment myself.

Over 2,000 participants took part in the survey, and were asked what best described their view of the origin and development of life:

• 22% chose creationism
• 17% opted for intelligent design
• 48% selected evolution theory
• and the rest did not know.

What I found interesting is not that ID is growing in popularity (it's still lower than 17%), but rather that Creationism is a separate thing. I've always assumed it was another word for the same thing.

Alright, so, Creationism is the theory that a omnipotent, pan-dimensional being reached down to Earth and created and every species on it, and they have remained unchanged since then. (Which, on the positive side, would not take long to teach in schools. "Today, the origin of species. God made us. The end, go out and play.")

Evolution is the theory that the random process of genetics produces a generation of creatures with varying characteristics - some of them more likely to survive, such as greater strength or fingers, and others that may be more of a hinderance, like lungs that thrive on ammonia or limbs that fail to work. And that those with unfavourable characteristics are less likely to survive to pass on their genes to the next generation, and therefore, over time, the species on average improves.

So ... what exactly is Intelligent Design? If it doesn't involve either a Creator God or natural selection ... what is it? Does it just say "We came from somewhere, clearly somebody was involved but we're not saying it also created the universe, perhaps it was aliens"? If a teacher is instructed to teach Intelligent Design but not creationism, what, exactly, do they teach?

Is it a hybrid of the two other theories, such that does not deny the existence of God but neither denies the volumes of supporting evidence for evolution? I suppose it could boil down to "God created the Universe and designed evolution into it" or "...and occasionally gave evolution a little nudge in one direction or another". Is it an explanation for the way evolution produces functional organisms? Or, in fact, is Creationism merely a subset of Intelligent Design?

I ask because, with little else to go on, I'm vaguely worried that it might be something I believe in.

Comments

[ash1977law.livejournal.com]

Hmm... as legion would say "speaking as a mother..."

I find literal interpretations of the creation story show a basic lack of understanding of the text, and thus flawed exogesis. The Bible dosn't imply days as the modern translation would have it, but rather periods of time. This is common in hebrew poetics where groups of numbers represent the quality of time rather than the quantity spent (time in groups of 40 are "times of testing", time in groups of 7 are "miracoulous times", time in groups of 3 are "times involving unexpeted change resulting in sudden salvation"). It's equivilent to us saying "A shed load of stuff" or "A ton of phone calls" - not a literal quantative measurement but a qualitive measurement.

If god created the universe then that is a religious matter. The nature of the creation itself is a scientific matter. If it was guided by god/gods/aliens/naritive probability/whatever that is a religious matter.

Inteligent Design is therefore a religious teaching rather than a scientific one.

[kingandy]

As near as I can tell from the Wikipedia article, it's a religious teaching cloaked as a scientific one - the theory in itself doesn't make any claims as to the identity of this mysterious Designer, but many of the more enthusiastic proponents are Christians. "Intelligent Design," in and of itself, basically says "I'm not saying I believe in God, but look at the Duck-billed Platypus, that's a dead giveaway, isn't it?" I think it's basically a whole big incoherent mess.

It's worth noting that it can't seem to make up its mind whether the Universe itself is so complex as to imply an intelligent creator, or only the organisms on this planet.

On a side note, I agree with you about the creation story as told in the Bible - I've always been of the opinion that this is the vast and indecipherable knowledge of an omnipotent, immortal being as filtered through the mind of an nth-century BC Hebrew - of course the vast abstract time periods would be more metaphorical than anything else. It's disturbing to note that this was reasoned out in my 13-year-old mind at least partially due to reading David Eddings.

[ash1977law.livejournal.com]

Right! Exactly!

Just look at the period in which the story appeared. Hebrews captive in Babylon. Babylonians worship the Sun, Moon, Stars, Plants, Animals (basically anything inexplicable).
So how does the story start?
"See that Sun? God made it! See those stars? God again! Guess who made the moon? God! Who made the plants & animals? God! Pa - silly Babylonians!"
It's a rallying call for captive israelites not to forget their own (obviously superior) religion. The propeganda worked, after all, how many worshipers of Mardok do you meet nowdays?

The organisms on this planet are not THAT complex. Irreducable Complexity is the cornerstone of ID. Basically it says:
"This is too complex to figure out, therefore it can't have evolved, therefore an infinately wise mind created it."
However when scientists say:
"Erm... we know how it was done. Mandlebrot showed us that infinate complexity can be explained by simple rules. Look at the Nautilus, see the semi-evolved eye? Want to see some new species of fruit fly we have created? Hey - here's a clear trail of fosil evidence! Here's a book on molecular biology, go read. Hey -here's my mate Richard Dawkins!"
The creationists (I mean IDers) go:
"Lalalala! Can't hear you".

[samharber.livejournal.com]

ID is creationism dressed up as science.
Its primary purpose is to not scare away the vaguely religious or those who worry about their place in the universe.

I suspect the idea is that once a lot of people have accepted ID, it becomes easier to push other aspects of faith. Its a canny piece of long term evangelism.

[annabellelaw.livejournal.com]

It dosn't say how god created life, so he could have used evolution. Either way I can't find evidence to support the idea that life didn't evolve, weither it was nudged or not.

[kingandy]

Yeah ... it doesn't really say much of anything. All it actually says is "Some things are really complicated, aren't they? Doesn't that make you think somebody must have designed it?" It's less a theory and more of a hypothesis.

[ash1977law.livejournal.com]

Yep.

[kingandy]

This is the conclusion I'm coming towards.

[kardrath.livejournal.com]

Nope, it's primary purpose is to get past the seperation of religion and state in the US to it can get taught it schools.

[blufive.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell, ID is just Creationism, but studiously avoids the G-O-D word and makes extensive use of "scientific" terminology and language, plus repeated repetition of the "evolution is just a theory"[1] trope.

The textbook that the Dover school board (the bunch at the centre of the recent hoo-ha in the US) was pushing was basically a creationism book that had a slightly-better-than-search-and-replace re-write to replace mentions of "God" with "an intelligent designer" and "Creationism" with "Intelligent Design".

Evolution does not necessarily deny God. It suggests that God is not necessary for the creation of life, and provides a non-supernatural mechanism for evolution to lead to the presence of complex life. Atheist believers in evolution[2] will therefore regard it as a complete explanation of how we got here - a refutation of Creationism, and therefore a refutation of the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, along with just about every other creation myth. This latter is one reason why many biblical literalists have a problem with evolution.

"God created the Universe and designed evolution into it" or "...and occasionally gave evolution a little nudge in one direction or another

Theist believers in evolution can and do subscribe to either of these positions, or even "...and carefully guided and nurtured every step of the the evolutionary process".

The fundamentalist version of ID is basically that "[a super-powerful being or beings] reached down to Earth and created and every species on it, and they have remained unchanged since then." So, Creationism with the serial numbers filed off.

The moderate version of ID appears to be as above, but allowing that evolution has occured since the "creation event". Since, if an omnipotent being created the Earth and everything on it (including fossils et cetera) [x] thousand years ago and set stuff in motion (including evolution) we would be fundamentally incapable of telling, this is basically a question of faith.

Since this version includes a creation event and ongoing evolution, and is fundamenally indistinguishable from the atheist version (unless we find the creator's signature under a glacier somewhere) it's probably the only compromise position I'm prepared to even listen to (though I find it pretty ridiculous). But, since it contains a creation event, this is the big-C-word WTSNFO again.

The most generous summary of ID I can come up with is that it's a version of creationism which allows that the creator might not have been the judeo-christian God.

The less-generous summary is that it's creationism dressed up in non-religious language, created[3] as part of an effort to get supernatural super-beings onto science curricula and discredit evolution.

[1] by the same measure, gravity is "just a theory". I await the levitating porcines with interest.

[2]That includes me, BTW.

[3]Sorry.

[kardrath.livejournal.com]

The key point of Intelligent Design as I understand it is that it argues that certian biological things are inherently too complex to have evolved and are therefore the product of an intelligent designer.

It tends to be things like blood clotting and the flagella on microbes. Things that have many complicated components and which fail if you take any one of them away and which 'therefore cannot have evolved from a more simple form'.

As it happens the simpler forms all tend to be useful, but maybe not for the thing they're used for now. Biology has a useful habit of finding something handy and discovering new jobs for it.

They used to use the human eyeball as an example but that's been pretty throughly debunked. You can evolve an eyeball at least as good as ours in an entirely reasonable number of generations each one being slightly better than the last, can't remember the number.

Also on the eyeball thing there's this argument
http://eddie.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Squid.html

[(Anonymous)]

Well most of the other replies have covered this pretty well, but the main categories should maybe be put like this:

1) 'atheistic' Evolution - we are all the product of random chance
2) Creationism - the world was created by God 6000 years ago, in 7 days and dinosaurs were destroyed by the flood
3) ID - the world was created by God at some point (quite open to 'science' providing the answer to when), plants / animals seem to have changed over time, on the small scale evolution / natural selection certainly occurs, but we're not quite convinced that the really big changes (from amoeba all the way to humans) could have happened without 'guidance' from God.

The third category really seems to have been created to counter the
way that 'Evolution' has become a byword for 'God does not exist' (even though the basic processes of evolution are compatiable with a belief in God - it is only when they are extrapolated, *assuming* the non-existence of God, and are then used as *evidence* of God's non-existence, that this becomes a problem).

I could go on, but I think the point is made

[kardrath.livejournal.com]

All 3 points of view are reasonable enough to hold (providing that for the creationism one you are prepared to accept that God is repeatedly lying to us in an attempt to test us 'Ok, ok so all the evidence points to that rock being billions of years old, course it does, I made it like that 4600 years ago.'), the problem with ID is that it claims to be science.

[ubernils.livejournal.com]

What bugs me about the whole Evolution/Creationism/ID debate is that most people seem completely unaware of the fact that Evolution and Creationism do not, in fact, contradict one another. The key point that gets missed is that the creation story in the Bible was never meant to be taken literally. That's not how the Hebrew storytellers and scholars operated. The idea that everything in the Bible is 100% literal historical truth didn't emerge until people began studying it from a Western European, Scientific-thought-based mental paradigm. The real teaching in the Creation story is that God created everything in the universe, that God created us in God's own image, and that the creation was good and holy (again, that's the significance of the seven days timeframe). There's nothing in there about *how* God created life, and you gotta admit, the order given in the story does a surprisingly decent job of mimicing the order different types of life evolved on Earth. So in a nutshell, Creationism is more about why God created Earth, and was never meant to answer specifically how.

ID is annoying because it attempts to scientifically prove the existence of God. Which is, of course, completely silly, as we all know what happens when you prove the existence of God. ("Oh dear, I hadn't thought of that.")

The thing is, with one word, I can make evolution completely open to the idea that a higher power is guiding it without any sort of explicit acknowledgement of the same. Basically, all I have to do is say "apparently random chance." That's it. Now There's no need for ID anymore, because evolution theory leaves the possbility open quite nicely. If someone asks "what do you mean by "apparently" random chance?" "Well, the data suggests mutation by random chance, but whether or not it really is is a personal belief."

Fun random fact: There's an "Evolution Sunday" being organized for Feb. 12th, which involves Churches signing up and then using that day to talk about Evolution and Creationism and why you don't need to choose one instead of the other, why they can coexist and why people pushing for ID in schools are silly. My mom's signed up for it, which is cool.

[kermix.livejournal.com]

There is a lot of this stuff in convert_me which I stopped paying attention to at least a year ago.

If it were me, I would just make one required class, call it Comparative Religion, and be fricking done with it.

[invisible-al.livejournal.com]

This court decision, http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf pretty much nails why Intelligent Design is Creationism with the serial numbers filed off. Best piece of evidence was an early draft of a ID book that had the word Creationism where the phrase Intelligent Design was now. They'd just search and replaced it after the court case which outlawed the teaching of creationism in schools. The Judge does a very good job here and completely demolishes ID's case.

The case for "Don't Know"

[paulgregory.livejournal.com]

I would certainly be more in favour of Intelligent Design if the movement wasn't entirely supported by wealthy figures who are prominent in organised religion.

However, I am happy that the more open explanation does strike a chord. I am perturbed by the general feeling that because some stupid people believe something strongly, the entire broad concept should be dismissed as stupid.

I have always found evolution dubious as a universal theory; reliance on external environmental pressures with denial of the possibility of direct influence always seemed iffy to me. I recall a 3D artist who "evolved" patterns, personally selecting his favourite of six computer-generated offspring through several iterations of "evolution", not realising that this wasn't natural selection. Thus if I had to pick one model of life creation, it would be "Intelligent Selection". This I think would be categorised as Don't Know on the Horizon poll, although as an agnostic "Don't Know" is itself the most accurate statement of how I believe species are created.

My biggest problem with the poll is the question itself. I feel it is presumptive to suggest that all life has been created in the same way. Indeed, the "one creative force" concept is Judeao-Christian: many prior belief systems had individual gods with their own portfolio.

Many species alive today were created by man - via breeding or DNA pick'n'mix. Man has also designed (through the medium of fiction) many creatures and abilities that have not actually been randomly created in nature. Intelligent Design is not without a seed of plausibility; where it falls down is the "it's really clever so something clever *must* have created it" logic. Any given lifeform may have been created by chance, design, evolution or a combination of the three. Unlikely is not impossible.

However, whilst my entire position is founded on the belief that a lack of proof does not deny a possibility, I fear the real goal of Intelligent Design is to undermine the importance of proof.

Organised religion promotes an unprovable being called God, gives him the unprovable credentials of Creator Of The Universe, and states without proof that they are representives of this God. Conformance is rewarded by a heavenly afterlife, the existence of which is conveniently not proven until it is too late. Happily for organised religions, all conformance is in our tangible provable world. Religion provides unproven feel-good answers to big questions. Religion is not completely evil; it provides pleasure and a framework for many people's lifes.

For those dubious of organised religion, it is indeed worrying to find oneself in any level of agreement on a subject like creation. But it's not something where you *need* to pick a side. Even science is proceeding both with the the theory that life evolves, and the theory that life can be created by design. Life exists, and however it came about it's worthy of respect and admiration.

Intelligent Design, Creationism, Evolution

[si-lloyd.livejournal.com]

Intelligent Design is the name of the cunning mask used by Creationists during educational and cultural dilemmas.

The really hardcore creationists (literal biblical truth word for word) do seem to be more than a little bonkers, but many of them also have their PHDs in good order and are very good at picking holes in the presumptiousness of conventional science, which also accepts a lot on faith.

My main problem with Evolution is that it captured the imaginations of those who wished to reject God, and became a tool for them much as Intelligent Design has become its antithesis, for those who wish to wipe out God and Faith in our culture.