Re: "Intelligent design"

Bill Bonde ('by a commodius vicus of recirculation') wrote:
> John O'Flaherty wrote:
> >
> > Bill Bonde ('by a commodius vicus of recirculation') wrote:
> > > John O'Flaherty wrote:
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > > Intelligence and beings are things that occur in a universe, not
> > > > free-floating entities without context. If the "universe" was created
> > > > by intelligent being(s), then they must be elements of some greater
> > > > universe, and you've got an infinite regress, or just an error of not
> > > > having defined your first universe broadly enough. In any case, at some
> > > > point you just have to surrender and admit it's a mystery, so why
> > > > introduce a lot of rubbish (god, baad, religion, all the rest of it) on
> > > > the way?
> > > >
> > > This is similar to saying that you shouldn't learn about atoms because
> > > they are made up of protons, neutrons and electrons, and you shouldn't
> > > learn about them because they are made up of quarks, and you shouldn't
> > > learn about them because they are made up out of strings or whatever,
> > > potentially on and on we go.
> >
> > What I said is nothing like what you said, unless you are equating
> > religion with physics and superstition with science
> >
> Actually, my comment is exactly analogous to what you said.

Sorry, it's not at all analogous. There were reasons to posit atoms and
electrons and all the rest of the menagerie- the additional
complication made the whole picture simpler and more understandable.
All of that stuff has been experimentally verifiable.

>You are
> using the oft used claim that ID is wrong because finding the creator
> just adds another level of how did the creator come about.

The main reason to reject ID is that it is a desperate attempt of
religionists to find a reason not to drop their faith - what has
allowed them to believe that they are important in a universal sense,
that they aren't actually going to die someday, that there is a big
daddy who loves them and listens to them and will one day caress them
for all eternity. The theory has no implications, it is not falsifiable
nor supportable by evidence. It is an unnecessary excrescence.

> It is absurd
> not to seek information about who created us because it doesn't answer
> who created the creator just like it is absurd to claim we shouldn't
> seek out the proton because it creates another level below the atom, the
> quark because it creates another level below the proton, the string
> because it creates another level below the quark.

It is absurd to think that a creator of whos would be another who. You
wouldn't expect atoms to be made up of littler atoms. And you really
shouldn't 'seek information' about something that you have already
decided must exist (because the belief makes you feel comfortable).

>
> > Anything there is
> > evidence for (electrons, quarks, bits of string, quantum foam, ultimate
> > fluff) and which actually explains something is a reasonable, useful
> > extension of knowledge. Anything that's unsupported and doesn't explain
> > anything must be dismissed or at least categorized as fiction.
> >
> But string theory had no evidence and likely still has no evidence, was
> simply a mathematical construct.

I guess that's right, but it's an attempt to unify and ultimately
simplify things that _are_ known to be true. It isn't accepted as dogma
everywhere, and even the people who work in it admit that it has no
testable predictions yet (as of the date of the popularization about it
that I read).

> Sometimes the theory is out ahead of
> the empirical evidence, the observations, other times it is the other
> way round. The fact that there is no evidence for something is not
> reason to seek evidence for something, certainly isn't reason to claim
> that such seeking can't be science.

I think I see what you meant by that. ID doesn't grow out of science,
and it can't invade it from outside. It is religion, just like
creationism.

> > That
> > includes any explanation for existence that reduces to "turtles all the
> > way down". Who needs the turtles?
> >
> The idea of the turtles holding the Earth up is pretty shot down by
> available evidence of a spheroid earth sitting lonely in a vacuum. What
> deflates intelligent design?

Nothing, for those who want to believe that there is content there.
When people want to believe something, there's little use arguing with
them. They'll get over it, or they won't. The thesis of ID is that we
find the universe and ourselves so complex, that they can't have arisen
on their own. To solve that problem, we postulate a being so
intelligent (and thus so complex) that it could have designed the
universe. By comparing the complexity of human beings with the
complexity of the things they design, you see that a conscious designer
is orders of magnitude more complex than its designs. The original
conundrum was complexity. You can't solve that by postulating an
unimaginably greater complexity. What you can do, if you want to, is
postpone facing the reality of false beliefs.
--
john

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