Oops, DI's Freudian Slip is showing...

Um, Jonathan, if the Designer really does turn out to be an Alien, why should the question of his identity be left to religion?

Someone beat me to it, that 'religion' could be Raelianism. Now if he had said 'theology' instead of 'religion', he would be pretty much nailed.

Alas, poor IDiots: not just clueless, but Witt-less as well...

The real problem with "the Designer" is that even if "the Designer" isn't God, the Designer itself must have been made by a meta-Designer. Since the Designer must be "irreducably complex", the designer could not have evolved but must have been designed. Eventually, you get back to the ur-Designer who has to be God.

I'd probably play with their heads and suggest the Designer must be Satan.

The real problem with "the Designer" is that even if "the Designer" isn't God, the Designer itself must have been made by a meta-Designer. Since the Designer must be "irreducably complex", the designer could not have evolved but must have been designed. Eventually, you get back to the ur-Designer who has to be God.

Secondly, this idea that "creationism" [oops] is an old concept that the courts have already decided on flies in the face of the testimony of two credible scientists who basically testified, subject to rigorous cross-examination, that what they were basing their theory of intelligent design was scientific data, empirical data, that they saw in their labs, the complex biological structures that they viewed they concluded could not have been caused by Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random mutation; that these complex biological systems were there because they served a purpose. And that's the reason that they said it is an intelligent design.

Regarding the president's remarks on teaching "design" of the universe to school children, it should be understood that few if any legitimate scientists any longer believe in the fairy tale of evolution. There is absolutely no scientific evidence for evolution and never has been. The truth has not yet filtered down to teachers and professors (who ceased to read after leaving college) so they continue dumbing down our kids. The reason it hasn't filtered down is because, if there is a designer, his name just might be God and the immoral liberals can't stand that. It might cause them to have to clean up their act. Those who believe in evolution are ignorant people who refuse to read and are so taken in by the immoral people who want God out of the picture so they can keep on doing what they are doing. spineless Christians and preachers who do not stand up and scream loudly at the evil being perpetrated upon our young are just as guilty as those perpetrating the lies. No wonder our young act like animals. They are told that is all they are. Lori Brashear Clovis

The alien and/or time traveler hypothesis just begs the question "how did that highly intelligent life form come into being on its planet?" Can't they just drop that silliness and acknowledge that their hypothesis really is that somewhere at the beginning of something God acted and the results are what we see today? If enough fundamentalists understood that the ID leaders are willing to consider that the world was not created by God, that ID might stand for the proposition that aliens came here and started a process whereby humans developed through natural selection from lower forms of life, how much would the congregation kick in to buy the books?

I don't know that it's a slip at all. These are people who don't know science and don't even know religion at all well (note the idiocy of Johnson's conflation of a "supernatural designer" with an alien "designer"--no competent philosopher would make such a stupid mistake), and they can hardly keep such matters straight. They may even be deliberately abandoning their pretense.

The key to all of this would be that "naturalism" is labeled by them as "religion". Witt may have simply been saying that if one believes in God, the "designer" will be God, and if one believes in "naturalism", one would not resort to God as the agent. It's a senseless, distorted world of re-definition of science, religion, and of normal words we use to converse with, but it's this world that they'll gladly share and impose upon others.

It's the season for giving, you know.

Who cares what the stupid putz thinks. ID had its chance in court. It lost.

Game over.

I'm not interested in their whining and weeping.

HUMAN SCIENTISTS FROM ANOTHER PLANET CREATED ALL LIFE ON EARTH USING DNA. Traces of this epic masterpiece of creation can be found in all religious writings and traditions. It is to them that Moses, Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed referred. It is now time to welcome them. WHAT HAPPENED? On the 13th of December 1973, French journalist Rael was contacted by a visitor from another planet, and asked to establish an Embassy to welcome these people back to Earth. The extra-terrestrial human being was a little over four feet tall, had long dark hair, almond shaped eyes, olive skin, and exuded harmony and humor. Rael recently described him by saying quite simply, "If he were to walk down a street in Japan, he would not even be noticed." In other words, they look like us, and we look like them. In fact, we were created "in their image" as explained in the Bible. He told Rael that: "We were the ones who designed all life on earth" "You mistook us for gods" "We were at the origin of your main religions" "Now that you are mature enough to understand this,we would like to enter official contact through an embassy" THE MESSAGES The messages dictated to Rael explain that life on Earth is not the result of random evolution, nor the work of a supernatural 'God'. It is a deliberate creation, using DNA, by a scientifically advanced people who made human beings literally "in their image" -- what one can call "scientific creationism." References to these scientists and their work, as well as to their symbol of infinity, can be found in the ancient texts of many cultures. For example, in Genesis, the Biblical account of Creation, the word "Elohim" has been mistranslated as the singular word "God", but it is actually a plural word which means "those who came from the sky", and the singular is "Eloha" (also known as "Allah"). Indigenous cultures all over the world remember these "gods" who came from the sky, including natives of Africa (Dogon, Twa, etc.), America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Leaving our humanity to progress by itself, the Elohim nevertheless maintained contact with us via prophets including Buddha, Moses, Mohammed, etc., all specially chosen and educated by them. The role of the prophets was to progressively educate humanity through the Messages they taught, each adapted to the culture and level of understanding at the time. They were also to leave traces of the Elohim so that we would be able to recognize them as our Creators and fellow human beings when we had advanced enough scientifically to understand them. Jesus, whose father was an Eloha, was given the task of spreading these messages throughout the world in preparation for this crucial time in which we are now privileged to live: the predicted Age Of Revelation. And most important of all, read the book, "Intelligent Design - Message from the Designers" the book which will revolutionize your thinking, transform your life and which is already changing the world. CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FREE E-BOOK!

As long as we're doing Raelians, why isn't much airtime given to the power of the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum events to produce intelligent life? Granted, it's unfalsifiable and I believe it is quite unnecessary given what we know, but it does have sufficient explanatory power.

The many worlds interpretation is roughly that there is a new universe spawned for every outcome of a quantum event. Now, suppose that intelligent life is possible in the universe (which after the Jones decision I'm more inclined to believe) but that it actually does require some kind of tornado-in-a-junkyard series of steps to get going.

A trivial consequence of "many worlds" is that there are some parts of the "multiverse" in which sequences of lucky outcomes of quantum events really do look like 747s assembling spontaneously in junkyards. As intelligent agents, we humans are only privy to whatever universe we happened to emerge within; so it really doesn't matter what we would expect to happen on average. It is with probability 1 that we exist in a universe in which events conspired to produce us. That this may be a vanishingly small part of the entire sample space is irrelevant as we don't get to see the rest.

You might argue that a tornado in a junkyard would stand out as a dramatic event, but maybe not. Among all the universes that produced intelligent life, the vast majority would have only the shortest series of lucky coincidences necessary.

Now I personally think it's with probability close to 1 that a single universe like ours would evolve intelligence. Evolution is the result of a long series of very reasonable outcomes that converge to self-replicating competing systems. But in the unlikely event that you need a tornado in a junkyard, many worlds will give you infinitely many of them. I don't see why this is any less plausible a hypothesis than a "designer." It's actually a much more interesting thought experiment. Any chance I can get this taught in high school?

The real problem with "the Designer" is that even if "the Designer" isn't God, the Designer itself must have been made by a meta-Designer. Since the Designer must be "irreducably complex", the designer could not have evolved but must have been designed. Eventually, you get back to the ur-Designer who has to be God.

Without studying these aliens we would not know whether or not they also had a designer/creator.

"This galvanizes the Christian community," said William Dembski, a leading proponent of the theory and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think-tank that promotes intelligent design research. "People I'm talking to say we're going to be raising a whole lot more funds now."

Think Dembski really meant to admit that in public?

I've been attempting to get an analogy straight in my head. It's quite a nice analogy, but I don't want to expose it to live fire until I'm sure it's valid. It goes as follows:

Irreducibly Complex systems are unevolvabe in the same way that arches are unbuildable. With an arch, you have to build both sides up and up and then start slanting them further and further inwards, and it's quite obvious that the entire thing is going to fall down before you can put the keystone in place. With an IC system, you'd have to build the parts into the system one by one and it's quite obvious that there'd be no chance of accumulating precisely the right pattern of parts to get a working system out. Both these proofs are wrong, because both assume that the end product is constructed piecewise without "scaffolding" of any sort.

Any thoughts? Is this one worth adding to my personal arsenal?

"People I'm talking to say we're going to be raising a whole lot more funds now."

Corkscrew,
I am not one of the ID-ists, but I have heard enough of their arguments to suspect that they will see the arch as an example of IC (or at least ID). Intermediate steps in the construction of the arch do not produce something useful; the arch gets built only because the builder has foreknowledge that the completed arch will be stable and useful. I see your point, but I doubt that an ID-ist will.

Don't know if this counts as a slip, but didn't Dembski once say

"finally, we're going to be able to take the evolutionist to court and make them defend their silly ideas"

Would anyone know where I can find that quote?

Corkscrew

I was thinking along the same lines a while ago, and then I found that origins of life biochemist A.G. Cairns-Smith had already considered IC systems at the biochemical level a decade before Behe--and used the metaphor of an arch to solve the problem. You might want to look at his writing for more detail on how he used it.

Freelurker

Actually, there are natural arches made from the erosion of stone. There's a whole national park devoted to them.

To my mind the problem with ID is not the idea of design but the idea of irreducible complexity. It's pretty easy to postulate a universe created by intelligence, given articles by cosmologists Alan Guth and Andre Linde on the subject. (for an intro, read Gregory Benford's "Cosm"). That is, universes can produce the inflationary events that lead to other universes. This implies both natural selection and domestic reproduction of universes by alien intelligent designers. It may even be true that a nice stable universe like ours is more likely produced by intelligences with a good grasp of the standard model. But this is actually a more thorough refutation of god than any assertion this universe is one-off, given all its odd life-supporting characteristics. It's simpler to suggest our universe is one in a series of types, and it's not an accident ours supports life, but only because cosmology evolved from good Darwinian principles to produce universes that produce universes like ours.

As Lee Smolin has written, a tell-tale for this theory would be if the tuning of our inexplicable constants were slightly sub-optimal, since that's how evolution tends to do things.

Whether such a produced universe could include instances of irreducible complexity is an interesting question. Maybe such an instance would indicate the signature of the C average alien grad student in our parent universe who produced ours as a rough draft.

Maybe Star Trek is a religion too?

— Norman Doering

Don't know if this counts as a slip, but didn't Dembski once say "finally, we're going to be able to take the evolutionist to court and make them defend their silly ideas"

May 11, 2005 The Vise Strategy: Squeezing the Truth out of Darwinists The recent hearings conducted by the school board in Kansas (May 5-7, 2005) made it clear that what needs to happen is not for our side to be interrogated by Clarence Darrow manqués (like Pedro Irigonegaray, the attorney for the other side in Kansas) but for our side to get to interrogate the Darwinists. As I pointed out on this blog (May 6, 2005, "Kansas Hearings: Scopes in Reverse? ---Yes and No"), Darwinists have a long record of evading critical scrutiny, a problem that goes right back to the original Scopes Trial. In the Scopes Trial, Clarence Darrow (cf. Pedro Irigonegaray) got to interrogate the evolution critics, but William Jennings Bryan (cf. Kansas attorney John Calvert for our side) did not get to interrogate the evolutionists. ... Thus, in a crucial way, the Kansas hearings repeat the pattern set by the Scopes Trial, which has been repeated many times since, namely, evolutionists escaped critical scrutiny by not having to undergo cross-examination. In this case, they accomplished the feat by boycotting the hearings. I therefore await the day when the hearings are not voluntary but involve subpoenas that compel evolutionists to be deposed and interrogated at length on their views. There are ways for this to happen, and the wheels are in motion (e.g., Congressional hearings over the teaching of biology in federally funded high schools for military kids). For such hearings to have the desired effect, however, will require that evolutionists be asked the right questions. What I propose, then, is a strategy for interrogating the Darwinists to, as it were, squeeze the truth out of them. ...

That's it, Dave. Thanks!