Quath said:
For ID to become science, it needs to make some kind of predictions. Otherwise it is just a belief system. You could merge ID with evolution by saying that God designs by evolution. So we have to see how ID is different from evolution.
I think it would be very hard to discount evolution at this point in time with all the evidence. If there is a "Creationist" God, He wants to trick us by leaving humanoid fossils of transitional fossils.
So say that ID suggested that we are designed by function. We could disprove that by showing similar function organs that are drastically different in different species.
So for it to be science, ID will have to say something scientific. As it is, ID is just people that don't like evolution on personal belief grounds.
The competing theory for graviational motion of planets use to be angels. So I think we need to be wary of repeating the same mistake.
Quath
I do not agree with this characterization of ID and here's why:
First, I will provisionally concede that ID may not qualify as "science" in that it does not make verifiable predictions. But I think all (or almost all) will agree that science is not the only path to knowledge - historical events such as WWII cannot be reproduced but there is mountains of evidence that there was such a war. But regardless of the technical definition of what is or is not science, you cannot legitimately dismiss ID as "personal belief" or compare it to belief in angels. I will now explain why.
First, though, a common misunderstanding needs to be clarified (and this mistake is made very often). The misunderstanding is that a choice has to be made between evolution and ID. The form of ID that I am sympathetic to is based on the argument that
the very conditions that are a necessary precursor to evolution are most likely the product of design. Please read that again - a person can believe that evolution took place and was
not guided and yet still believe in intelligent design. This is a well defined, entirely internally consistent position. The fossils issue is a red herring.
I will now illustrate why ID is not just a "belief system". Now I will be emphasizing the
structure of the argument, not so much the
content. I will show how it
could be shown that ID is a legitimate hypothesis about the underlying truth of the World, that it is an hypothesis that can be rationally defended and distinguished from other hypotheses. I think I know where you are going with the example about gravity and angels. The "angels" hypothesis is really not distinguishable from the gravity hypothesis; it makes no distinctive claims that would allow one to differentiate it from a "conventional" explanation - you are correct here. But ID is not in the same category - it does make claims that distinguish it from "random chance" type explanations - and these claims
are a possible target of legitimate rational debate.
I will use analogy. Consider the following hypothetical situation:
On the morning of May 25, 2005 I leave for work at 8 AM. As of 8 AM, my garage is full of parts for a car - all the parts are there, lying in an unassembled heap on the floor. At noon, a violent earthquake hits that lasts for 4 minutes. Despite this, I continue to work, returning home at 6 PM, fearing that my house has been flattened. Fortunately, my house is intact. I go into the garage and find a fully assembled car sitting there (and I can verify that it is assembled out of exactly those parts that were on the floor that morning).
It is an entirely legitimate question to ask how this happened. At least 2 hypotheses come to mind.
H1: The car was assembled through the sole action of the earthquake. By incredible luck, the shaking and rattling just happened to cause all the parts to "jump" into place. There was no human intervention. The assembling of the car was entirely the work of "random chance" and the action of the earthquake.
H2: Sometime during the day, someone entered my unlocked garage and, for some unknown reason, assembled the car.
H1 could be true, H2 could be true. They are not the same hypothesis. How could I reason about H1 and H2? Well for starters, I know that H2 is possible because I know that human beings with the capability to do this
do in fact exist. I also can "do the math" and determine that it is extraordinarily unlikely that H1 is true, simply because there are so many ways that the "assembly by earthquake" could have gone wrong. So, I think most reasonable people would say that H2 is a more likely "explanation" for what happened.
Let's now return to the matter at hand - whether the Universe was in any way "designed". Presumably the analogy is clear. To be fair to the agnostic (I hope this does thread does not get "deleted" for my taking a "for argument's sake" position of agnosticism), I cannot
presume that God exists in the same way that I can know for sure that other humans exists (as per H2). Let G1 be the hypothesis that the universe was in no way designed and let G2 be the hypothesis that an intelligent being did at least some design to get the universe rolling. Assuming that H1 and G1 are equally likely (this is a total assumption for now) G2 is a lot weaker in relation to G1 than H2 is in relation to H1 precisely because it is certainly not universally accepted that God exists. Fine.
We could
still come to the conclusion that G2 is more likely than G1 if we examined
other evidence for the existence of an intelligent God and concluded that, even though we are not sure such a God exists, it is certainly more likely that such a God exists than it is a priori likely that G1 is true. Now of course, I know nothing about the a priori likelihood of G1. Nor am I ready to defend G2. But I think I have shown that the ID hypothesis is not empty of content as many have suggested. It is indeed a legitimate object of inquiry and belief in it can be based on (arguably sophisticated and complex) rational reasons.
