"No one ins school has ever said "what they taught you here could possibly, just possibly, be incorrect,""

You must have gone to a very bad school then. I was taught that many times. ESPECIALLY when it came to science. In my middle school, high school, and college physics classes I was explicitely tought that in fact much of what we were learning was PROBABLY wrong, in that

@S.P.A.O.
Intelligent Design is not even a theory. I have not yet heard a coherent theory of Intelligent Design, i.e. what exactly it postulates, what we can determine based on this theory, and what new predictions can be made and tested? The most I've heard is the vague notion that maybe all living life forms came to be in just about their present form by some divine creator. Other than that, ID seems to be mostly about trying to disprove evolution.

Evolution is very much a science that follows the scientific method. I don't know where you heard that this was not the case, but clearly you haven't studied evolution to any appreciable degree... evolution is a more clearly understood mechanism than gravity. It is not a vague hypothesis, it is fact that evolution occurs wherever there is replication, variance, competition, and heredity. This has been proven countless times in many fields OTHER than life. Evolution is an inevitable phenomenon where such conditions exist, and life is the quintessential example.

Evolution is based upon an absolutely immense body of information and research, all of it corresponding perfectly with the idea that over a long period of time, organisms have undergone natural selection. If you really want me to teach you and give you specific examples, I can, for a long time, because the evidence is so overwhelming.

One of the most important aspects of evolution as a scientific theory is that accurate predictions can be made. After all, that's the whole point of the scientific method! Virus resistance to antibiotics can be predicted... innumerable characteristics of a creature that lived 150 million years ago can be inferred and predicted from it's place on the phylogenetic tree and then affirmed by fossil evidence.

You can predict things like noticing that one genus of fish has a characteristic formation in it's swim bladder, and notice which others do not, and without even looking, I can predict which species of fish must have this formation based on it's place in the phylogenetic tree, and voila, when I do check, I find my predictions were absolutely correct. Countless predictions of this sort and others have been made, and every one of them have been correct.

The only real evidence that I've heard in FAVOUR of ID (and not just some trumped up evidence that is AGAINST evolution, and doesn't necessarily prove ID, because this is no dichotomy) is that, the world is filled with such immense complexity and everything works with surprising efficiency and harmony, that I must conclude a conscious designer.

Allow me to point out just a small fraction of the major design flaws that not even a mortal engineer would ever make... We have a common passage shared between eating, breathing, and speaking, all of paramount importance, and together make a lethal combination in the form of the ridiculous number of people who die of choking every year. Any designer would be quick to separate as such. Oh, and having your reproductive organs share real estate with your excretory passages? Really intelligent... Not to mention the countless vestigial features and behaviours, such as appendices, pinky toes, hiccoughs, the list goes on.

I hope you don't throw astronomy out the window, because it indicates that in this mind bogglingly large universe life is only known to exist in the tiniest fraction, in a tiny mote in an almost eternal expanse we call Earth. And upon this Earth, complex life can only inhabit a small percentage of the surface. That's incredibly and astronomically wasteful... I have no doubt that humanity will soon outstrip our intelligent designer in our ability to design efficient ecosystems... Is our existence in such an infinitesimal corner of the universe really indicative of a divine creator, or perhaps simple driving physical forces playing the astronomical odds? You can say things seem just so perfect for us, but if they weren't we just wouldn't exist. The fact is we would only ever exist in places where so many conditions come so perfectly into play, and science shows us the mind blasting majority of places that aren't. It would be like a conscious puddle noticing how perfectly shaped the hole it was in was for it, and concluding that the hole must have been made expressly for the puddle's existence.

crap! hit post too early! Let's try that again!

"No one ins school has ever said "what they taught you here could possibly, just possibly, be incorrect,""

You must have gone to a very bad school then. I was taught that many times. ESPECIALLY when it came to science. In my middle school, high school, and college physics classes I was explicitely taught that in fact much of what we were learning was PROBABLY wrong, in that all of the theories were really just models. Just as relativity and quantum mechanics replaced Netwonian motion, so too would those theories probably be replaced by something that was more precise.

If you went to a school where they teach that the science they are teaching is immutable unchanging fact, they were no actually teaching you science, they were just teaching you a set of facts.

S.P.A.O. - Science could, like all subjects, no doubt be taught better by some... there is always room for improvement. Talk to your kid's science teacher or principal if you think that your kid is getting short-changed. On the other hand, poor teaching by one teacher doesn't prove anything about the field of science (anymore than abuse by a priest proves anything negative about the beliefs of the religion that priest was charged to teach).

Science, by it's very nature, is constantly evolving... constantly open to new evidence... open to new interpretations based on that new evidence. Anyone who claims that science is static (like a fundamentalist religion, for example) either doesn't understand the scientific method and the history of scientific investigation... or is propping up a straw-man. In the many science classes I took, debate was always welcome... but positions needed to be supported by evidence to be taken seriously. Simple as that.

First off, I'm agnostic. Also, I don't think whether I believe in I.D. or not changes anything so it doesn't matter to me. I do think that if there was a creator there is no reason why evolution wouldn't just be a tool of that creator. ID and Evolution are not contradictory.

I also believe that the universe could have been created 2 minutes ago exactly as it is with everyone's brains programmed as they are. I think it unlikely, but it is certainly possible. (pause while people go "huh?") For all I know I'm a martian having a very strange, very detailed, dream.

But none of that matters. Whether there is a creator or not does not matter. Whether the universe is 10 billion years old or two minutes old doesn't matter. Any way you slice it you have to live with the world that exists currently.

I do think teaching ID in science is wrong. ID isn't science. But that doesn't mean ID is wrong. It just isn't science and doesn't apply to science.

SPAO? what was not scientific about the evidence I presented?
Please don't think about science as just the science of medical trials which you seem to have in your mind. Compare the evidence for evolution with the evidence for a murder. Of course you can't replay the whole day again.
You seem to be committing the "moving the goal posts" logical fallacy.

@Alderian: Thank you for saying what I couldn't.

SPAO. I'm taking two things you said that I have serious problems with.and addressing them.

"We try to tell kids that science is set in stone like grammar, or history, and this is wrong. No one ins school has ever said "what they taught you here could possibly, just possibly, be incorrect," but it can. Science is like calculus, there is room for debate."

Ok, I'm not a mathematician, but I don't know how much of Calculus is really "debated" per se. Having different notations is just like writing the same thing in a different language, its the same thing. But thats not my primary point:

You seem to think that grammar and history ARE set in stone. As someone who take university level history I can tell you that nothing can be further from the truth. The farther back you go, the more guessing everyone is making. Tons of accepted history is basically there because a single source detailed it to be so because sources are so sparse. But because it was corroborated by other things, because it makes sense, because lots of times we have no reason to believe that it isn't true, etc etc. Historians take it at truth.
Scientists are ALOT more rigorous about this than historians, but its true that 100% certainty is difficult. But it would be really difficult to teach things if we gave credence to every stupid idea. To keep up your history example, what about holocaust denial? Some people have come up with alternate theories that the holocaust never happened or was blown out of proportion. Why don't we teach that to our children? Because we are pretty sure they are idiots.

"We are not spawning mice from our viruses, and we are not making birds from our moths."

This is a common argument against evolution. Something along the lines of "my grandad wasn't a monkey".This essentially betrays their ignorance of the complexity of evolution. First of all, no mice didn't come from viruses, viruses are not alive. They are totally different things. Birds and moths are not related. Just because they both have wings doesn't mean scientists think they are cousins. Moths are insects, birds are not. Is that clear? Just because you don't know anything about biology doesn't mean you are right. It actually probably reduces the chance of you being right.

I don't understand astrophysics. But I'm not telling the physics department to give equal credence to my law of "god's will" on the basis of my clearly uninformed misunderstanding of astrophysics.

SPAO: here's how science works:
1. Gather data
2. generate a Hypothesis based on data
3. make real world predictions that could easily be wrong
4. compare your predictions to the real world
5. if they match go to 3 and continue testing else revise your hypothesis

Here are some predictions of evolution:
- we won't find any cat fossils in rocks older than 70 million years.
- the Bonobo (a chimp like ape) gene for producing protein X will look more like the human gene for protein X than the crow gene for protein X

I have to object to your cat fossil prediction. You can't prove a negative. You would have to search every piece of rock that is older than 70 million years which just isn't possible. And even if you did find a cat fossil in rock that old, that doesn't disprove evolution either, just brings time travel theory into the equation, or something else.

@Alderian: you're right, you can't prove an negative, but to falsify my prediction and therefore the theory all you would need to do is find one of those cat fossils.

Just like in math I could predict that there are no prime numbers > 7 whose sum of digits is also a prime number.

To prove this I would have to show that this is the case for an infinite amount of prime numbers but to disprove it I only have to find a single prime number like 61 for which it is the case.

If you can't make falsifiable predictions with your hypothesis than it isn't science. Like your "the universe was created 15 min ago as is" hypothesis. What would disprove it?

@ sceptic_ka
I do think of Science as a series of Trials, because that is what science is. The investigation of a murder is the application of science, but it is not scientific research.
Evidently, I haven't been as lucky in my teachers as some of you. When I was taught biology, the teacher spoke as if every word coming from her mouth was fact. Contrast that to Chemistry, where the teacher says "Here is the VSPER model, which predicts molecular shape, conductivity, and bonding very well but does other things poorly"

@sceptic_ka "Like your "the universe was created 15 min ago as is" hypothesis. What would disprove it?"

I think his point was that it isn't falsifiable, and it isn't science. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be true. But it's impossible to prove or disprove so we shouldn't really bother worrying about it.

@SPAO "Evidently, I haven't been as lucky in my teachers as some of you. When I was taught biology, the teacher spoke as if every word coming from her mouth was fact."

Clearly you had a bad teacher. But that doesn't mean that there is no science to evolution, and it CERTAINLY doesn't mean that ID is scientific at all, or should be taught in a science class. I actually have no problem with discussions of ID in schools, but they should be limited to philosophy or religion classes, or occasionally perhaps mentioned in a science class to demonstrate the difference between science and... ...not science.

Alderian, true, true, true, but it is for this we have Occam's Razor. There's no use pondering all of the possible instances that I could have thrust into existence with complete memory and existence. I can explain my existence without having to invoke a strange dream, brain in a jar, or an entire universe thrust into existence complete with history and memory that indicates that it has existed for quite some time. The fact is that, for this strange dream, science has done a very good job of predicting what will happen next in the strange dream if I launch a projectile at 23 m/s at 30 degrees to the ground. This fantasy at least has measurable rules and laws that allow us to manipulate the dream into giving us cell phones and airplanes.

Alderian, the point of the cat fossil idea is mainly a general one. If we found any significantly displaced organisms in the fossil record then we would have significant grounds for doubting the current evolutionary picture.

S.P.A.O., you have a very strange understanding of Calculus... Mathematics is a tautological a priori truth, there is no debate in any real sense of the word. Yes, science changes, and what we believe to be true right now could very well turn out to be false, but ID certainly does not offer an alternative theory to evolution. Science doesn't go about by suddenly throwing out everything else for this new theory... it's refined and distilled to increasing degrees of accuracy.

For example, at one point it was believed that the Earth was flat. This is a decent approximation because for most rough intents and purposes the Earth's surface is basically flat, with a very small regular curvature that is often far over powered by any irregular contours in the terrain. It was later postulated that the Earth was spherical, and this is an even better approximation and for more accurate intents and purposes the Earth is basically spherical, with the real curvature of the Earth deviating only slightly from a perfect sphere. We now know that the Earth is not perfectly spherical but is wider near the equator as a result of it's spinning, and this is an even better approximation! We can now make predictions using the Earth's shape that are orders of magnitudes more accurate and precise than predictions made with spherical or even flat Earth approximations.

Please, S.P.A.O. can you put forth a coherent scientific theory of Intelligent Design that can be an alternative to evolution?

When I can look into a microscope and see imprinted on individual cells in very tiny letters: "(copyright) God, 4000 BC" I will take that as very strong evidence of ID (not of God necessarily, mind you, but of ID).

A theory in the larger context is a framework in which facts are organized. In the smaller context it is a tested proposition. All scientific facts or theories are provisional. They may at any point be proven limited in their applicability (truth) by observation and scientific method. No theory can be proven true. However, theories can be proven false. A theory can be proven to have usefulness in that it is predictive. A theory that correctly and consistently predicts an outcome to an experiment has a usefulness, one might call it truth. The Theory of Evolution is an explanation that brings coherence and order to many independently observed phenomenon. All facts and observations are weighed against the central proposition that life evolves and that this evolution of the the various forms lead to new forms has not be discredited. Many gaps in the record exist but there is nothing that contradicts the central premise.

That god exists is not provable by scientific method. Ok, nothing is provable. That god exists is not necessarily disprovable by scientific method either. So, as a matter of science there is nothing to say. However, there is Ockham's razor. Ockham's razor is a principle that says, basically, when multiple competing hypotheses are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the hypothesis that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. To explain the existence of the world by saying it was created by god, then one has to ask where did god come from and you are pretty much back to the basic question. Ockham's razor would dismiss the unnecessary premise of a god creator - since it adds nothing to your explanation for the source of all things. I am giving you the short form of the atheist critique.

Just an aside, people hate to hate reason or logic used to call their religious beliefs into questions and they really hate this Ockham's razor thingy. It's like "Your logic is not as powerful as my GOD!" Funny thing is, GOD gave us reason, but didn't expect us to use it. The Greeks, who gave us words like logic and theory believed that reason was the only tool we could use to know god. Theory is possibly derived from the greek "theion" roughly meaning to contemplate the divine order of the cosmos.

Science should not speculate on the question of (a) Creator God(Gods) simply because science is the inappropriate tool to use. Science is the exploration of the physical world through measurement, direct and indirect, of observable events and objects. Evolution absolutely does not exclude to possibility of realms of existence beyond that which we experience through the senses. It does say we don't need a force outside the physically observable world to explain the diversity and origin of life. No scientist can say that an creator god does not exist. For scientist to say that we don't need a supernatural being to explain the universe is not proof against the existence of a supernatural being.

Intelligent design is an entirely different creature. It does not explain observed phenomenon. It has no central thesis about the mechanics of observable phenomenon. It makes a prior assumptions about the existence of a creator god, and attempts to create a theoretical frame work based on the Judeo-christian traditions of creation found in the bible. Logic that uses the conclusion of an argument to prove an a prior assumption is not logical.

On the other side, I am always amazed at what some people claim for the power of the scientific method. The number one thing the scientific method should help you understand is don't make any claims for science that have not been rigorously tested. Declaring the non-existence of god or gods is just someone blowing it out their ass - not someone speaking as a scientist.

@S.P.A.O., Ok, fair enough, you must still be in high school, but if you do some more research into the matter perhaps you'll come to terms on your own. VSEPR is a relatively simple model of molecular shape that is a reasonable approximation like Earth is to a reasonable approximation spherical and Newtonian kinetics is a reasonable approximation. It is used because for many purposes it is accurate enough and far simpler to use than a more complex, albeit more accurate model. VSEPR relies on a few assumptions in the same way for less rigorous purposes, air resistance can be assumed to be zero as it is relatively negligible when modelling a thrown baseball. You have to drop the assumptions if you want a higher degree of accuracy in your predictions.

@S.P.A.O.: The same science that is applied to a murder investigation (determining say the relationship between two blood samples) can be used to determine the relationship between two animals.
I ask again: What is not scientific about that?

From sceptic_ka: "@Alderian: you're right, you can't prove an negative, but to falsify my prediction and therefore the theory all you would need to do is find one of those cat fossils."

All I have to do? We just assume your theory is true until someone disproves it? That doesn't sound right to me. And as I said even if I did find a cat in a rock over 70 millions years old, that doesn't disprove evolution.

I'm just saying you shouldn't make negative predictions as proof of a theory. A negative prediction doesn't add support to an argument. The fact that we haven't observed and my never observe extraterrestrial life doesn't mean it isn't out there. Your second prediction was fine.

Sorry all for being a bit off topic here. Just having fun.

Read TheClark's post. It definitely sums up my opinion on the matter as well.

@Alderian, it's a negative prediction in with a wealth of positive predictions as well. There's plenty of evidence and proven predictions that support evolution, and it's been highly useful in explaining all biological phenomena. It's just quite impressive that there has been no real contradictory evidence and none of the many negative predictions has been falsified, but the possibility still exists.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying because he put up one prediction that I thought was bogus that I disagreed with his premise.

I quite often point out flaws in arguments that others make that I agree with overall. The purpose in pointing out the flaw is to strengthen the argument. To remove the flaw so that someone who disagrees can't come along and point it out and think they won.

@Alderian, I figured that. I hope you got what you wanted in my response.

@Alderian - "I quite often point out flaws in arguments that others make that I agree with overall. The purpose in pointing out the flaw is to strengthen the argument. To remove the flaw so that someone who disagrees can't come along and point it out and think they won."

I like to do the same thing, and appreciate it when people do it for me!

I will never understand the agnostics that go with TheClark's "atheism doesn't make sense and if you say as a scientist that god doesn't exist you're blowing it out of your ass" line of thought. The systems that would be needed for the existence of something as complex as a god would be so ridiculously large and the evidence for them so completely... absent, that you might as well theorize ANYTHING. Did you know that we're all goldfishes? We're all goldfishes and there's a system in place that somehow makes us all not realize we're all orange, tiny goldfishes. It's the great Goldfishness. It's very complex and makes us all believe in every way that we're shaped like humans. We just don't notice, it's what the Goldfishness does.

If it is your opinion, from a scientific perspective, that we're not goldfishes but humans, I suggest you reject the god hypothesis.

Example absurd on purpose.

That said I think I'm just going to end up insulting way too many people here so I'll remove myself from this debate. I believe it's a sad reflection on the status of mankind that things like this are considered something that must be debated.

As a scientist you should speak on the things that science as a tool of understanding can speak to. The existence or non-existence of god is not one of them. What exactly is the nature of "God". If you say a god exists some definition of the nature of god must accompany that position. God may be complex, may be simple, or incomprehensible. Arguments against god because god is impossible is ridiculous. No scientist should say that they know the limits of possibility. The history of science is littered with "scientist" that declared something was impossible when later this impossibility was proven possible.

My argument isn't for god. Just, that, as a scientist you must speak scientifically. Can't disprove or prove it. I can agree with you that many arguments for a god of any sort are not logical with the facts of science. That gods are not necessary to explain most features of the world. But, there is a lot that science has no explanation for. Centuries from now it may be that we have a deeper understanding of the universe, our self-awareness, etc. We may be able to manipulate properties of the universe we are not aware of today. Remember, roughly 150 years ago humans discovered electromagnetic waves. Someone declaring that we could never view images from the other side of the planet as events happened - that's impossible would be proven wrong eventually. The prevailing opinion of people before Einstein was that the world was a huge clockwork. Newtonian physics still work. But we now know Einstein's physics and quantum physics are better and more general descriptive models. These models foretell possibilities that were considered impossible at the beginning of the 20th century.

I am a spiritual person. However, I am very hesitant to describe "god". It's kind of a waste of time to talk about things we have no real ability to understand. I believe in an afterlife - can't say I know much about it. Live life for life, believe that the best values for the living is all you can live by, because that's all we can know about.

This is simple. IT"S BOTH!!!!!!!


1st there was an intelligent design which has been continuously evolving ever since. Evolution is and was part of the Intelligent design.


There, done....End of argument. :)