Putting aside it’s role as a vehicle for creationism, there seems to be a reasonable basis for some kind of science or mathematics of Intelligent Design.
That is, a scientific theory by which we could legitimately understand the features and properties of an arbitrary object, such that it could be determined or predicted if the object evolved or if was designed.
Something robust enough to identify a commercial banana as mostly evolved but partly designed, and a laptop as mostly designed but partly evolved.
Something that might, once we understood it, be used to establish with some level of certainty that man was evolved. Or not.
Does such a science actually exist?
Posted: March 8th 2010
George Locke
Evolutionary theory has proved that you don’t need a designer to produce a complicated set of interlocking parts. In other words, complexity per se is not enough to prove design.
How then do you distinguish a designed object from one that evolved? One way is to look for related ancestors, but there is already a scientific discipline for this: paleontology.
If you look at GMO’s, I think the only way to know that they are genetically modified is that we know the genes of their natural cousins and we know that the genetic modifications are too fast and directed to occur naturally.
Another way to tell if an object can evolve without design is, of course, whether it can reproduce itself. Seedless grapes or maize would be examples of plants that can’t reproduce without human interaction. A laptop, also, obviously, can’t reproduce itself. How this criterion applies to stars or rocks and the like isn’t exactly clear to me. We know of natural processes that produce these objects but they don’t exactly reproduce themselves. Many organisms, from parasites to flowers, can’t reproduce without neighbors, further complicating this criterion.
Yet another acid test would be whether the object is made from materials that appear in nature. Plastic fails this test, for instance. I see no reason that living things could not produce plastic or something quite like it, at least in principle. Again, this is an issue of historical context.
I don’t think this is a profitable area for extensive research. Evolutionary biologists are not so boneheaded that they would try to jam an organism into their theory when it simply does not fit. Finding square peg/evidence evidence that don’t fit the round hole/theory is how you get a Nobel Prize.
The strongest evidence that humans evolved is in the form of the historical fossil and genetic records which positively prove the common ancestry of all living things.
Posted: April 5th 2010
Dave Hitt www
The science doesn’t exist because we don’t need it. We have a pretty solid (and always expanding) knowledge base that explains everything without the need for a creator.
The question of “if man evolved or not” has been answered. We did.
Posted: March 30th 2010
SmartLX www
No, it doesn’t exist.
Evolutionary theory may be responsible for its absence, because it presents a plausible non-design origin for a host of biological creatures and features which appear designed by other arbitrary criteria such as usefulness. That makes it very difficult to claim any quality exclusively for designed objects.
Proponents of intelligent design “theory” have not been interested in creating such a method of determining the extent of design in an object. For the most part they’ve chosen various biological objects and phenomena, listed the qualities they share with designed objects, though not exclusively (usefulness, complexity, etc.) and then declared that there is no way they could have come about without design.
The closest they’ve come is to propose the measure of complex specified information, or specified complexity. In principle this is information inherent in an object which has to have been “specified” by a designer. If there’s a certain amount of this in an object, then chances are good that it was designed.
The problem with this is that it begs the question by declaring that the information is specified. Of course something is designed if it contains specified information. What they haven’t done is produce a rigorous test to determine whether the information in an object is specified, which brings us back to square one.
Personally, I think the greatest indicator of an object’s design is its artificiality. It’s the cast metal, the polished glass and the etched decorations on Paley’s famous watch which scream design, not simply the fact that it functions. From that perspective it’s hard to see any living thing as designed, especially when we can see it develop naturally from a seed or embryo all the way to an adult.
Posted: March 29th 2010