Creationism/Intelligent Design

[Seshat]

What I do find is how easy it can be to belittle much anecdotal evidence in the 'face' of science (yet... such evidence encourages scientists to go bush to look for 'drugs'. Oh - and they tend to forget synergy between the chemicals in the plants to find that one 'active ingredient').

Anecdotal evidence can only be observation - it's what leads scientists to go looking for a hypothesis, which then gets tested. If it passes the tests it becomes a theory. It's not belittled - it's just not an appropriate basis to build a theory on. Theories are created by repeatable experiment.

The reason anecdotal evidence is what "encourages scientists to go bush to look for 'drugs'" is precisely what I said above: anecdotal evidence is the thing that leads scientists towards theories.

So...IF acupuncture works, and IF there is actually a force called Qi, then it would help us getting a little bit towards some of the other big questions that religion asks
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I just sometimes think that science decides what's 'disprovable' after a only few experiments and then let it go.
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I spose I just get annoyed that things get thrown to either the 'debunked' or the 'that's religion' way of things way too soon.
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If the creator of the universe wasn't actually a 'god' but in fact an alien scientist performing an experiment in a petri dish, shouldn't our scientists, eventually, be able to find evidence of that?? If they don't look, they'll never find.
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Couldn't God (or whatever) and the way god's things are manifested be considered a truth to be investigated?
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Getting back to the OP, is there evidence to suggest a lack of intelligence in the design? Isn't that a question scientists could work on? Or mathematicians?

My answer to all of this boils down to one word.

HOW?

How do you investigate the presence or absence of God?

How do you investigate the intelligence or lack of intelligence in the design of the universe?

How do you look for Qi?

How do you look for evidence that the world was created by a giant scientist working in a giant petri dish?

Scientists are humans. Just like you and me.

Now, I'm pretty sure, Slyt, that you've mentioned living in Melbourne before. That's a city with several universities and a fine state library. You therefore have access to a significant subset of the body of human knowledge.

You're absolutely free to go looking in the experiment results of previous scientists, and to absorb the existing knowledge, existing observations on the universe.

You have the same resources available to you as any theoretical scientist, and a great deal more than any scientist of previous generations.

(Admittedly, you lack the resources of many modern experimental scientists, but they have to go through about a decade of proving themselves before they get them - and even then they have to go through an experiment-approval process before they're allowed near the supercollider.)

You're perfectly free to go ahead and work on any problem you think 'they' should be working on. You're human, just like them. And you have most of the resources 'they' have. For free, even. Or for the cost of a train ticket into the city.

Ummm - curious... 'should' (always a good word at the best of times) our science be limited to our own 'actual' world only? What about possible worlds, or worlds which, in all reality, we will never be able to find out about with any certainty?

The scientific method:

1. Observe.
2. From those observations, attempt to develop a hypothesis.
3. Figure out ways to disprove that hypothesis by experiment or observation.
4. Attempt to disprove the hypothesis.
5c. If the attempts succeed, repeat from step 1.
5b. If the attempts fail, tentatively accept the hypothesis as a theory. Repeat from step 1.
5c. As technology improves and observations increase, repeat from step 4.


This method cannot be performed on things which we cannot observe. It also cannot be performed on hypotheses which cannot be disproved.

If you can think of ways to apply this method to other worlds, to the presence or absence of God, or more mundanely, to the presence or absence of Qi - go right ahead and apply it.

Write up a paper, explaining your hypothesis, your disproofs, and your proposed or practiced experiments - including results. A university library will have many examples of papers available, and the library staff may be able to point you to a mentor if you need one.

Your paper, presuming it is in an appropriate format, will be peer reviewed.

Peer review involves other scientists checking that your hypothesis explains current observations in the relevant field and that your disproofs actually are valid disproofs against your hypothesis. They then perform your experiments and check that your results approximately equal theirs within the tolerance for that particular science.
(Physics tends to require a great deal of precision, biology doesn't. No two pea plants are identical, after all.)

Should your paper pass peer review - congratulations. You'll have just scientifically studied something you considered scientists to have ignored. And it will be added to the body of human knowledge.

However, for the most part, the things science doesn't study are things it can't study.

There is a hypothesis (from Roger Penrose and S Hawkings I think...) that suggests we (our universe) is the product of a previous Black Hole. There is also a hypothesis that suggests that all Black Holes create new Baby Universes.

Scientists do have a method for speculating on things they can't study: they do 'thought experiments'. The most famous thought experiment is 'Schrodinger's Cat'.

Thought experiments and other such speculations are how scientists figure out things they can't actually study. But they don't call their speculations 'hypotheses' or 'theories' or even 'science' - because they're not science. They're speculations and thought experiments.

If this is true, then there should only be speculation about the nature of those universes - both before and after ours. If this is the case, is there any point trying to look at them, in the same vein as ascertaining a designer of them. After all, while there might be 'evidence' to suggest things about them, we really can't go and find out....

I really don't know what you're trying to say here.

[Seshat]

Getting back to the OP, is there evidence to suggest a lack of intelligence in the design? Isn't that a question scientists could work on? Or mathematicians?

I'm a bit cranky, courtesy of a bit of bad design in the human body. So I'm going to take this on.

Signs of a lack of intelligence in the design of the human body.

1. To quote an anatomy professor I had "The playground (uterus) is positioned between the sewer (bowel) and the drain (urethra)". BAD design. Causes a lot of problems.

2. The proximity of the anus and vagina to the urethral opening in the human female. Women get urinary infections SO easily. Placing the urethral opening somewhere less vulnerable would have been intelligent.

3. The human (and great ape) spine. Using a suspension bridge design as a support structure? Hello! Instant recipe for serious problems!

4. The food and liquid intake crossing the airflow conduits. Can you say 'choking hazard'?

5. Menstruation. At LEAST install a sphincter! Even better, devise a method for which the endometrium can be reabsorbed. Rabbits can reabsorb embryos and even foetuses in times of malnutrition, so the technology is obviously available to our hypothetical deity. Why not use it?

. . . I could go on, but I think I've covered enough.

[AFPheonix]

You forgot humans and their teeth that need constant care. Good thing we've developed dentistry....

[Slytovhand]

ummm... Seshat and AFP... I was thinking more along the lines of physics, not particular biology. Mostly because, IFF ID is at least slightly plausible, it won't be in the form of a Judeo-Christian God.. so human supremacy (which I think is partly why the fundamentalists were pushing for it) is out the door.

Getting onto your previous post Seshat... yeah, you're right, but having access to information does not give access to research equipment. You have, though, made me think of going to do a Grad Cert in History and Philosophy of Science at Melb Uni.

Oh - and I had another thought. Unless I'm taking the 'scientific method' way too literally, it seems to only work in the world of physics. In medicine (for example), they take the observation, do the experiment and expect a number of failures. Even once they've decided that they've found what they're looking for, there will still be a number of failures. But...I could be grasping at straws on this argument

Also - I was going to say 'Chaos Theory', but then I'm really skating on thin ice on that one, cos I don't know a hell of a lot about it... but it is the term that various scientists will use.

My previous point was (as you were pointing out) is that 'science' (however it might be defined) sometimes decides in advance what it can and can't 'disprove', in light of a lack of evidence. And as I'm sure you've heard, "Lack of evidence isn't proof against".

Anyway....

(tell me - honestly, am I sounding like an idiot in arguing this debate? No - seriously, tell me....)

[Boozy]

Also - I was going to say 'Chaos Theory', but then I'm really skating on thin ice on that one, cos I don't know a hell of a lot about it... but it is the term that various scientists will use.

Chaos Theory actually points away from intelligent design, since it basically states that extraordinarily complex systems arise from very basic and simple ones.

[Sylvia727]

Signs of a lack of intelligence in the design of the human body.

YES. I'm going to have to remember this argument for future use. I for one would love to have a menstration sphinctor. Also, as long as we're redesigning the human body, could we eliminate the hymen? And get some protection for male genetalia? I know about temperature control, but c'mon, this way is just asking for trouble.

[Slytovhand]

Why have sex at all?? <ducks>

So - seriously though... how many issues and problems does the world have because of it? Go name all the great inventors and creators of the world - the one's who stand out in history... now name their 'partners'... and how many were celibate? (yeah - ok... not really a good argument, because most of the time we know nothing about their personal lives...but hey, it was worth a shot )

But society does seem to be so massively geared around it... go take a look at the sex industry, and the Great Porn Debate...

Let alone the testosterone that is involved in so much violence....

Can't we all just... spontaneously spawn??


Boozy - re: Chaos Theory - my thought was directed more towards not being able to predict it in any way, and that the very 'theory' seems to go against the Scientific Method - other than saying "umm...dunno about that one". Maybe that's just the one great irony the Intelligent Designer put into the system (and my last paper was on why Chaos was a valid argument against and ID got a credit for it... but it supposed too many things )


Oh - I had a thought... if a human skull was found in the Cambrian layer, it wouldn't automatically throw a curve-ball at evolution... it just means other things need to be taken into account... like aliens, or time-travel...

[AFPheonix]

I'm only familiar with super basic physics 101 level stuff, although I am trying to wade through The Fabric Of The Cosmos by Brian Greene. Kind of a layman's book on string theory and other newer physics theories. You might find it interesting, Slyt. I tend to gravitate towards Biology topics because, well, that's my area of study. I'm a nerd that way.

I like sex, I'm not about to do away with it But if you want one example of scientists who got it on, there's always the Curies

No, the Scientific Method works quite well in every science field. In pharmacology, basically organic chemists ponder what kind of molecule they want with an assortment of R groups, do a specific set of reactions to make that molecule, then test it to see how it binds to substrates and what it will do in organisms.
Those pots o' chemicals yield several different molecules usually, several of which end up being turned into different drugs. For example, the active ingredients of Prilosec and Nexium are enantiomers of each other. They do essentially the same thing, but because Nexium is more specific to the area where they both bind, it tends to work better. Prilosec, because it's older, is far cheaper and works almost as well as Nexium.
Same story with Celexa and Lexapro, or Cymbalta and Strattera.
Biology is a huge field that can incorporate parts of physics and chemistry into its study. If we take a small area of say, cell biology, one could easily imagine seeing a particular type of glial cell in the central nervous system, hypothesizing what exactly it does, and then testing that hypothesis by staining it in various ways and viewing it with several different kinds of microscopes (light, TEM, SEM, etc), using spectroscopy and other methods to see what types of chemicals it produces if it shows evidence of being a secretory cell, and on and on. Pick up any of the science journals and you can see examples of many different studies and experiments, how they were set up, and the data gleaned from them. These are available at just about any library.

[Seshat]

ummm... Seshat and AFP... I was thinking more along the lines of physics, not particular biology. Mostly because, IFF ID is at least slightly plausible, it won't be in the form of a Judeo-Christian God.. so human supremacy (which I think is partly why the fundamentalists were pushing for it) is out the door.

I wasn't saying anything about human supremacy. It's just human biology that was really annoying me the other night.

The same urethral/vaginal/anal placement arguments can be made for most mammals. The 'suspension bridge as support structure' argument can be made for any vertebrate that spends significant amounts of time upright.


So you're tossing out the Judeo-Christian god. Okay. What are the qualities of your intelligent designer? What are the parameters we can work with?

If you're going to have a designer with an interest in Terran life, I can point out the weaknesses in the planet he's made for the life to exist on, and how precarious the life is.

If your intelligent designer just wants a bunch of rocks and balls of gas floating around in the cosmos, and is interested in a massive game of billiards, I'll grant you that I lack the cosmology to provide any evidence of lack-of-intelligence. But that hypothesis doesn't provide much opportunity to need intelligence to set it into motion anyway.

Getting onto your previous post Seshat... yeah, you're right, but having access to information does not give access to research equipment. You have, though, made me think of going to do a Grad Cert in History and Philosophy of Science at Melb Uni.

Knowledge is always useful.

But as for the research equipment: firstly, I said that. Secondly, there's an immense body of research results available to you. For any question you can think up, someone's probably already done the research, and someone else has probably already repeated the experiment to prove repeatability. Use their results.
You'll find them in one of the libraries you have access to - probably several of them.

If you did have access to the research equipment, you'd have to do that test for prior knowledge anyway. May as well go looking now.

Oh - and I had another thought. Unless I'm taking the 'scientific method' way too literally, it seems to only work in the world of physics. In medicine (for example), they take the observation, do the experiment and expect a number of failures. Even once they've decided that they've found what they're looking for, there will still be a number of failures. But...I could be grasping at straws on this argument

You're probably ignorant of 'double-blind' testing, and the methods scientists use to account for variation in biological experiments.

The short version is: scientists know that biological experiments are vastly different from ones for physics and chemistry. They use probability math, controls, placebos and other techniques to get empirical results which account for the variability.

My previous point was (as you were pointing out) is that 'science' (however it might be defined) sometimes decides in advance what it can and can't 'disprove', in light of a lack of evidence.

This is why experiments are required to be repeatable, and hypotheses are peer-reviewed.

'Science' is not one huge monolithic structure composed of a group mind. It's done by a bunch of scientists, some of whom hate each other with the kind of vehemence that Apple/Microsoft/Linux fans would envy.

Scientists who modify their facts to fit their theories get caught. Scientists who form bad (not-disprovable) hypotheses get caught at peer-review.

Where there is lack of evidence, but means to acquire it, the evidence is collected when a scientist who is interested in the subject acquires the funding to do the collecting.

Where there is lack of evidence, and lack of a means to acquire evidence, the question is put on hold pending technological change. And often discussed philosophically.

(tell me - honestly, am I sounding like an idiot in arguing this debate? No - seriously, tell me....)

Not an idiot, but occasionally uninformed. There is a difference.

Why have sex at all?

To promote greater genetic diversity than simple cloning or cell division can provide.

You did ask.

Oh - I had a thought... if a human skull was found in the Cambrian layer, it wouldn't automatically throw a curve-ball at evolution... it just means other things need to be taken into account... like aliens, or time-travel...

Neither hypothesis has any empirical or evidential support other than the skull in the Cambrian layer.

Should such a skull be found, the relevant scientific communities would be re-examining all the evidence they have, trying to come up with a hypothesis which fits all the evidence.

Yes, aliens and time travel may fit the evidence. If so, they'd be taken seriously and further evidence sought. But if the only evidence for them is a single out of place bone, neither is likely to be the hypothesis of best fit.

[aniwahya]

I think that it can't hurt to bring up other view points in a respectful manner. Technically neither creationism nor evolution can be definitively proven, so in my eyes both are equally valid.

By proven I mean that creationists cannot have their God create a new planet in order to prove that it is possible. Nor can an evolutionist take a species and show that it evolved from another species (monkey to human) without a shadow of a doubt.

I think teaching only one theory and ignoring or mocking the other theory that you don't personally agree with is a sign of insecurity in your own professed belief.

[Boozy]

I think teaching only one theory and ignoring or mocking the other theory that you don't personally agree with is a sign of insecurity in your own professed belief.

Evolution is not a belief. It is a scientific fact, regardless of what the religious right is telling you.

For those of you who are still unclear on why evolution is called a theory, let me remind you that gravity is also called a theory in scientific terms. We do not question the existence of gravity.

Creationism is a belief without scientific merit or the potential to be tested in any way.

[AFPheonix]

Actually, you CAN observe evolution in action. I did so myself in some of the creeks above Multnomah falls where new fish species that are hybrids of others are evolving after being cut off from their parent populations. This is only one small example.

Oh, and humans didn't come from monkeys, silly. Monkeys and humans evolved from a common ancestor. Feel free to peruse a biology textbook. It will be eye-opening.

[Slytovhand]

I think that it can't hurt to bring up other view points in a respectful manner. Technically neither creationism nor evolution can be definitively proven, so in my eyes both are equally valid.

By proven I mean that creationists cannot have their God create a new planet in order to prove that it is possible. Nor can an evolutionist take a species and show that it evolved from another species (monkey to human) without a shadow of a doubt.

I think teaching only one theory and ignoring or mocking the other theory that you don't personally agree with is a sign of insecurity in your own professed belief.

And the argument isn't about teaching such things.. only where.

Now... while I'm all for ID to get a mention in the last lecture of senior physics, I wouldn't throw Creationism into it.. nor into Biology.

For me, that's a place for Social Studies or Comparative Religion.

(If I've managed to confuse some of you by apparently doing a back-flip... it's only because ID doesn't say anything about the designer, nor about intent or purpose. Creationism does talk about those things)

Slyt

[aniwahya]

Evolution is not a belief. It is a scientific fact, regardless of what the religious right is telling you.

For those of you who are still unclear on why evolution is called a theory, let me remind you that gravity is also called a theory in scientific terms. We do not question the existence of gravity.

Creationism is a belief without scientific merit or the potential to be tested in any way.

Evolutionary fact can be interpreted to support different conclusions. Not all schools of Creationism claim that their god created the world with wave of their hand and then walked away, perfect world now formed.
Evolution can happen, that is fact. The question of how it happened and the measure of evolution, or what started it is full of conjecture. There is no such beast as absolute certainty when approaching this discussion, so I do not see the harm in opening a dialogue to intelligently discuss other schools of thought. In fact, for people who lean towards science and logic you would only be strengthening the belief in evolution for a great many students.
Discussing in the classroom that not everyone believes that life evolved from primordial ooze containing random elements that came together in perfect harmony to form the perfect chemical composition to form living creatures, is not something that I feel is a threat to belief in evolution. I am not promoting that creationism and intelligent design be taught in classrooms, as gospel truth (pun intended because I am an eviiiil girl) or otherwise.What I am promoting is that schools at least discuss, however briefly, that there are other schools of thought. Even if you don't believe in creationism or intelligent design, hearing the argument for the other side can only strengthen your conviction in evolution and lead to intelligent discussion of it. Of course it would probably be more at home in a debate class or public speaking class, than a science class.

[Slytovhand]

Ah! I'm (and probably others on this thread :waves am glad of your last sentence...

I agree though. Religion ought to be taught as a matter of course in schools... the comparative type of religion...

The problem of doing the evolution/creation type stuff, is that there are so many forms of it, and so many religions, that to do it justice, it's going to be bloody hard, and take many classes.

Monotheistic versions are fairly easy... 1 God, bored, created stuff, *bling* done!

But polytheistic... way too many versions (though very similar in nature...). And too many deities to name quickly...


Oh... Seshat..

Not an idiot, but occasionally uninformed

Possibly not as much as you might be thinking... It's more that I happen to believe certain things that science has chosen to either disregard, or ignore, or say doesn't exist at all (even if it isn't 'true' science that is doing that) that annoys me, so I argue against it in some ways... I did do my science at school... Chem and Bio.. passed too Even know some History of Science too....