Putting a face on the ID movement

Ok, so you're watching Fox News, CNN or MSNBC. Some ID scientist guy comes on to chat with a Darwinist about ID's place in the modern world. The Darwinist won't get away from his/her position that ID is rubbish, and the ID scientist guy makes some logical arguments, but he's faceless, so to speak. If you asked 100 of your friends, how many would be able to name a prominent evolutionist? At least 95 could name Charles Darwin (not sure where the other 5 learned biology). A handful would probably mention a modern Darwinist who has made headlines recently with statements or debates. But could ANYONE out of the same 100 people name a prominent ID theorist? While Charles Darwin is now 'extinct', at least evolutionists have a face for their movement. Why doesn't ID? Is this a failure of public relations or an act of mass censorship by the media? What do you think??

I think it's a large combo with waffle fries. ID theorists connect too much with the older public. What about the young people - the next generation of scientists? IDEAcenter (www.ideacenter.org) does a good job of getting teens and college kids involved with the origins debate & macroevolution/ID debate. Still, the organization hasn't taken a big enough piece of the pie, IMO. The ID movement needs a person or a group of people that the public can identify with when they want to discuss ID. Without a face, the Darwinists might as well claim that ID is something that a Southern preacher dreamed up one foggy night: is there any other face for ID than the face that prevails in the media?

The only reason that Darwin serves as the face of evolutionism is because he published what was, at the time, a very, very controversial, stunning new theory that really grabbed the attention of scientists and religious scholars. These days, it's hard to publish such a stunning book as On the Origin of Species. It's much harder to capture the public's imagination nowadays via print. ID will have to make logical arguments and spread its ideas in a word-of-mouth campaign. People can say anything in print media, but it takes a lot more to convince them that a given statement is true.

goatmilton wrote:
"If someone finds a good peice of evidence for ID, one that would necessarily disprove evolution, then it would have to be accepted by scientists and you would get your face."

Your statement reveals tremendous faith and confidence in the character of scientists generally. Unfortunately, that faith and confidence is misplaced. Don't misunderstand… I do not intend to "put down" scientists generally. Rather, my point is simply that they are human. They make mistakes like all the rest of us, and they are just as prone to want to deny those mistakes as all the rest of us. Becoming a "scientist" doesn't automatically make you infallible and humble.

Your statement also reveals your own ignorance (that is; "lack of knowledge" NOT stupidity!) regarding the evidence for ID. The evidence for ID is overwhelming, hence the name of this site. That popular science hasn't admitted that yet only underscores what I said above… it in no way disproves ID. And by the way, there is also much evidence which disproves Darwinism. But understand, that does not mean evolution generally should be rejected. Even die-hard creationists endorse "evolution" in a specific sense. "Evolution" is a word that gets a lot of abuse… IDers fully accept that "evolution" has taken place. What we reject, and what evidence appears to disprove is the following: that all life has a common ancestor, that life is the result of random, unguided and unintelligent natural processes, and that one organism with a particular 'body plan' can morph into another organism with a different, more complex 'body plan.'

Periodically, science has to abandon entire paradigms. At one point scientists thought that Copernicus' idea that the Earth revolves the sun, not the other way around, was absurd, ridiculous and un-scientific. But guess what? They were wrong, and a paradigm shift was made. Same thing's gonna happen here, and more and more I tend to think we're gonna see that shift in our lifetime.

goatmilton wrote:
"On the subject of Creationists and IDers believing in evolution- in what way do you/they 'believe' in evolution? I have read with interest what you don't think evolution does, so, to repeat, what do you think it does?"

I'll take the example of "Darwin's" finches. We (IDers, but Creationists too) acknowledge that finch beaks changed over a period of time in response to certain enironmental pressures. But, note that over time, the beaks of finches became smaller again as well, also in response to environmental pressure. They never ceased to be finches. Actually it's slightly misleading to say that their beaks changed shape "in response" to those pressures… that's not quite accurate. As the drought approached, there were SOME finches that already had big beaks capable of breaking bigger seeds, etc. When the drought conditions came, these finches were able to find food. The others died, leaving only big-beaked finches to mate with each other. And that makes MORE big-beaked finches. But they're always finches. This "change over time" (evolution) is limited to the basic configuration of a finch. The finch can't evolve into anything other than a finch. And they never will.

So the evolution which IDers and Creationinsts accept as irrefutable is "change over time". Quite literally, the fact that my daughters don't look EXACTLY like myself or my wife is "evolution" in this sense. I'm aware that humans are somewhat taller on average than they were 100 years ago, or some such thing. I've no problem with that. But we're still humans. This is "micro-evolution." It's quite obvious to me that natural selection is not a mechanism which permits "macro-evolution"… that is, natural selection is an obstacle to Darwinian evolution.

I don't know where it is written that a proper scientific theory must have this single "moment of inspiration" of which you speak. And to say that Darwinian evolution is somehow more simple than to say something was designed is, no offense, quite preposterous.

As to "who designed the designer", this is an old saw and it misses two extremely critical points:

First, it invokes the dreaded infinite regress, as though somehow purely naturalist explanations such as Darwinism don't suffer the same. Where did the first cell come from? Where did the stuff it was made from come from? Where did that stuff come from? Where did THAT stuff come from? And so on. So, you can ignore the infinite regress issue… as an argument, it cancels out.

Second, where the designer came from isn't an issue anyway. Nor is the identity of the designer an issue. And no, it doesn't need to be an issue. When the guys at SETI hear a certain anomolous signal through those radio telescopes, they're not going to cast it aside just because they don't yet know who is sending that signal, are they? No. They'll conclude, after very close scrutiny, that a certain kind of signal was produced by an intelligence. They will know they have found what they are searching for. Extra-terrestrial intelligence. And if there's no scientific method for detecting Intelligent Design, then those guys are just whistling Dixie down there. Detecting Intelligent Design is what SETI does.

goatmilton wrote:
"What an odd thing to say- 'it doesn't matter where the designer came from'. I find it unlikely that one of your first questions on meeting a designer would not be 'Where do you come from?', even if it was just out of polite conversation!"

That's after I meet the designer. We haven't met the designer yet, we just know there is one. The identity and/or origin of a designer is not relevant to the question of "is there a designer." I'm not saying we wouldn't eventually like to find out, but first things first. We're not there yet.

5. SETI
I'm not suggesting that the Intelligent Designer we're talking about is the one SETI is looking for. I'm simply establishing that detecting Intelligent Design is science. SETI is looking for signs of intelligence, are they not? Obviously they have a criteria for radio signals that would demonstrate an intelligent source. If they don't, then the whole program is a sham, correct? Why not apply those same methods to biology? It's scientific enough for forensics and archaeology, so why isn't it scientific enough for biology? This is a serious dilemma for the "ID Isn't Science" crowd. You're caught. You wanna be able to detect design "over here", but you say it's unscientific "over there". Inconsistency. Intelligent causes can be detected reliably via scientific means. Period. That's a blanket statement… if it applies in one area, it must apply in all areas.

4.Infinite Regression
goatmilton wrote:
"I think we have good evidence for creation of matter (quarks, sub atomic particles to atoms and onwards)"

How does that answer anything? Why are there quarks? Why does anything exist? How did anything come into being? This is where methodological naturalism reaches a dead end, because in order to explain, essentially, the existence of nature, it has to reach "forward" (in time) and try to pull a "natural" explanation out of nature. But when you're talking about origin of anything, namely nature in general… (is the universe itself not "nature"?) you cannot rationally invoke a "natural" cause because the natural realm doesn't even exist yet. You're trying to explain where nature came from, how it came to be, but you're using nature as the explanation. It's like the guy who was stuck inside a wooden crate and he needed an axe to break himself out. So, he got out of the crate, went into his garage, got an axe, and then climbed back into the crate and broke himself out. This is utterly illogical, irrational. So yes, most definitely both sides of this issue has an infinite regress looming over them.

3. Moment of Inspiration
No further comment necessary.

2. What happened to 2? (he, he)

1. Finches and extrapolation
I'm not saying that the variation in finch beaks is the 'beginning and the end" of evolution. It's just one example, one manifestation. Certainly, there is much more variability possible within the genome of some set of animals than merely the size of a bird's beak. Dogs are a good example of this. From one generic dog, perhaps a wolf, whatever, we can produce a range of creatures as small as a chihuahua and as large as a great dane. All different colors, different kinds of hair, different sizes, proportions, etc. But notice that through all of that selective breeding (the artificial version of natural selection) we still cannot get anything that has new features which place the creature outside the genre of 'dog.' Isn't that curious? And not only that, but many of those breeds can't even survive without man's intervention. This argues that natural selection will tolerate somewhat less variability than artificial selection, since many of these breeds would be "selected out" because they cannot reproduce or compete on their own, maybe a particular breed suffers so severely from hip displaysia, or maybe because a breed is so small it keeps getting picked off by hawks. You name it.

The point is, there is a barrier. We haven't bred dogs with wings. Or any other new feature that puts it outside the category of 'dog'. So if that's true, and it is, then how can we begin to think that evolution could produce all these different species, with different body plans, different features, etc, from one or even a few ancestors? You really think "time" is the answer? Well that's not going to cut it, I'm afraid. There's the little problem of 'information' that has to be accounted for. The reason we can't get dogs with wings is because the original dog genome never contained instructions to build wings. (wings is just silly example… insert your preferred feature if you like)

Where do you get the information for more complex critters? Where does the new information come from? Mutations? Reallly? When has NEW information ever come from merely copying errors? I'm a graphic designer by profession. Imagine I design a tri-fold brochure using my software, and save the file. Is it reasonable to suggest that if I copy that file millions upon millions of times that I would get a 60 page mail order catalog? Of course not. The file for my tri-fold brochure would become corrupted, degraded. The instructions would deteriorate. Same principle.

Natural selection cannot produce new information, it can only act upon existing information.

Fossils are interpreted, due mostly to homology, as being ancestral in some way. But that's merely an interpretation. There's no direct observation to show that this fossil slowly became that fossil. You just have two fossils which, through wishful thinking, get interpreted as having an ancestral relationship. And how, exactly, does the Cambrian Explosion support Darwinism? All phyla, or a huge number of phyla, all appearing at once in the cambrian layer?

See, the evidence for Darwinism is paltry at best. As a theory, I believe its days are numbered. Evolution generally? Fine… I've got no problem with change over time. But common ancestry? Come on…

Oh, you asked about the age of the Earth, universe, whatever. Most IDers, it seems, are old-Earthers. I tend toward the young-Earth position, although more than that, I insist that there is simply no way to prove or even estimate with accuracy or reasonable certainty, how old the Earth is. So ultimately my answer is "I don't know, but neither can anyone else."

For more discussion of this, so that we don't get bogged down into that topic again, look on this site for my comments under "Young Earth: A Design Inference" (that discussion is closed now, but you can still read my comments if you like)

Goatmiltons arguments may be old and tired, but why can't you use them to present the overwhelming evidence that seems missing or hidden on this site. Wouldn't it be better to throughly refute him rather than just ban him outright? I login every once in a while to see if some interesting or groundbreaking science is presented. This seemed like it might be a good chance to see some.

Oh, well.

I really don't understand the difficulty here with respect to finding information about ID. I mean, I realize some of the issues CAN be complex. Some of the discussions I've observed here with all the genetic "lingo" are certainly complex. But I find it fairly unnecessary to get into that kind of detail in order to understand the basic ID arguments.

It turns out I'm an Intelligent Design supporter perhaps before the term was ever coined. I've been a habitual fly fisher for 25 years, and as I entered the sport I learned to tie flies… I was about 11 when I started. Now, granted, I already believed in God. But I remember so clearly making a basic "design inference" while handling birds' wings, while tying flies. Note that the Bible was nowhere in sight. I remember looking at a duck's wing one day and noticing how well it is designed. And recognizing that it had to BE designed. The specific curve of the underside of the wing; the feathers and their individual characteristics and orientation. The different types of feathers and where those feathers are placed on the wing relative to their task. I knew a fair amount (for an 11-year old) about airplanes and the aerodynamic principles that enable flight, and knew how much work it was for man to "find" that shape, structure, etc.

That observation brought me to a simple, obvious and quite logical conclusion: If it takes humans with intelligence to design an airplane wing which properly exploits the laws of physics and enable flight, then it must take a designer with intelligence to design a bird's wing.

Now, I submit that if an 11-year-old can see that connection and understand why design is necessary, then ANYONE can. It's right there under your nose, folks. Not that complicated. Why anyone feels threatened by it to the extent that they refuse to accept it as "scientific" is beyond me.

Except for certain people I don't know who are students and who are not. It certainly helps when a registered member uses a college email address. As I've noted elsewhere, we moderators make exceptions (at least for now) for non-students who are ID proponents, sympathizers, or people who are openly curious and uncertain.