Vatican: Intelligent design is not science

Chip, you just said "All that would need to happen is to show that life can form by itself when the right conditions are met." suggesting that would falsify ID. I think we are done. Anyone interested in discussing the matter without personal attacks, I'll be here.

Huh? It would prove abiogenisis, not falsify ID. Put down the crack pipe

It wouldn't prove anything, science doesn't deal in proofs.

Quote of the effing century.

See? If I'd stopped you'd have missed that bit of hilarity

My mistake, carry on.

God has smiled upon us this day. With a SINGLE sentence, He has given us a humorous rebuttal for every single thing our resident ID'er could ever say.... and all we have to do is quote it.

Agreed. Self-defeating post of the millenium. Filed away and saved in the list of "quotable quotes from Second Life flamewars".

Oh surely you can't think you can stop Der with this trivial thing called logic. I got L$50 that says he comes back with some totally unrelated claim about god's master plan, or man's falability, or bigfoot, or sumptin.

To get back to the OP: yes, I too heard that the Vatican claimed that in their view ID is not science. Pretty progressive of them.

The only variation that is being put forth today is the one that says God is the designer rather than aliens, time travelling humans, or some other thing.



It most certainly would displace the God one, and the alien one. The problem with ID is there is no unified or well defined version of it. This has been one of my complaints in the past. It is too vague to examine properly scientifically.



Well I could tell you that it has been shown that atoms bond into complex structures based on specific chemical rules that eventually result in cells, dna, life, etc. But I hardly expect you to believe me given that you have shown a large degree of incredulity toward new information without volumnous support. As I indicated in my earlier post, I will not be providing you with the college education that may be required for the amount of convincing you'll need.



Well it's testable, it happened at least once too. You can still position your god before that and say it designed chemical rules or the universe. I suppose.

Move over Zeus, science explained you into obsolescence.

1. The only variation that is being put forth today is the one that says some intelligent designer started life. No need to go farther.

2. Man creating life wouldn't displace any ID theory, a God one or otherwise. Can you explain in one paragraph how that would displace ID? Because your post leaves out any reasoning behind the statement.

3. If there is a natural mechanism for abiogenesis, it's not a constant, because it only happened once, if one believe in it, and has not been found to occur otherwise. Evolutionists say there was only one common ancestor, which means they believe it happened once, and never again. If it did happen again, the evidence isn't there.

4. Nothing within the theory of ID discusses God. The fact some who reject ID bring up religion and God is evidence of a lack valid points. I never brought up God, and haven't suggested God is the only possible creator. It's just a logical fallacy..

A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:


Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim.

That's my opinion

I cannot count the ways on one hand in which getting schooled on logical fallacy by a guy who thinks science aims to prove nothing is ironic.

It has to be God, or a god. Anything else is circular. If aliens created man, who created aliens?

Oh really? I thought your issue was that opinion was the problem.

I recently saw Outfoxed which was scary enough in itself. One of the interviewees said something to the effect of:The net effect of this approach is that you can suffuse an ideology through a society without any support whatsoever. Put another way, any distinction between fact and fiction becomes essentially meaningless.

Der, they done learned ya good!

As I've said countless times, you MUST define the designer. Otherwise it is a purposeless philosophical arguement that barely has place in philosophy much less science.



If man can/could create all forms of life as we know it in a lab, (like lightning) can you explain in one paragraph why would you still think an ID theory involving God would still be valid (like a lightning theory involving Zeus)? It is supposedly something only a god or designer can do. If we are the designer (which would involve time travel too), some mysterious not-us agent is not the designer.



It happens constantly and can be replicated. You do not understand it. All other potential uncommon anscestors didn't make the cut at the cellular level. Again, the evidence is there and you can create different base ancestors if you want in a lab. They just don't survive in today's environment. The simple fact that we all use the same type of proteins points to common anscestory. (when it was quite possible that differen proteins were available and could have emerged dominant).



I hate using your own tricks. So you admit you don't know anything about ID? Okay sorry, that was mean. But seriously, the people who brought ID up recently are all Christian and strongly believe and support that the designer IS God. If you think it isn't then by all means start defining It.



I agree. So what part of the Vatican saying ID is not Science did you not understand?

This shows the misunderstanding you have of science. Science never proves anything to be true, science only proves things wrong through falsification. It's a myth that science proves anything to be correct.

"Myth 5: Science and its Methods Provide Absolute Proof


The general success of the scientific endeavor suggests that its products must be valid. However, a hallmark of scientific knowledge is that it is subject to revision when new information is presented. Tentativeness is one of the points that differentiates science from other forms of knowledge. Accumulated evidence can provide support, validation and substantiation for a law or theory, but will never prove those laws and theories to be true. This idea has been addressed by Homer and Rubba (197 and Lopnshinsky (1993).


The problem of induction argues against proof in science, but there is another element of this myth worth exploring. In actuality, the only truly conclusive knowledge produced by science results when a notion is falsified. What this means is that no matter what scientific idea is considered, once evidence begins to accumulate, at least we know that the notion is untrue. Consider the example of the white swans discussed earlier. One could search the world and see only white swans, and arrive at the generalization that "all swans are white. " However, the discovery of one black swan has the potential to overturn, or at least result in modifications of, this proposed law of nature. However, whether scientists routinely try to falsify their notions and how much contrary evidence it takes for a scientist's mind to change are issues worth exploring."

That's fascinating, Kevn. Did you know also that night is day, up is down, black is white, and your ass actually is a hole in the ground?

1. Man, using intelligence, makes a thing, it is ID in action.

2. There is no evidence at all for abiogenesis except for the fact life exists. That is no more a valid evidence than saying evidence of God is the life we see. It has never been recreated or observed.

3. The designer doesn't need to be identified in order to develop a theory that states a creator made the first life form. The only thing needed is evidence to support the theory. Evidence such as irreducible complexity supports the theory.

Well, nice talking with you. Goodbye.

To be pedantic, it's evidence of id, in lowercase, not ID, in upper case. It is not evidince of Divine Creation, which is the basic ghist of ID in upper case, as is being pushed to get into the educational system.



Except for all those pesky chemical constants, you mean.

By the way, I notice your last few posts have been attempting to attack abiogenesis, instead of macroevolution. Red Herring, much?



Irredicible complexity is neither evidence nor support for ID. It is, if you want to see it as such, support against macroevolution/abiogenesis, depending on how you want to apply it, but as I covered before, support against a thing is not support in favor of another thing. It does not follow. Non sequitor.

Further, the designer does not need to be identified, I agree, but if you want to support ID it has to be a divine source (Be it a hindu god, one of the Eight Million Gods, God with a capital G, Dannu, or whatever you want to believe in), or else you have created a circular explanation... If it wasn't a divine source (To which normal laws of causality do not apply), then who created the previous creator?

This thread is now, appropriately, about clowns jonesing for street cred.

This is wrong, which is why everyone is laughing at you. Science does deal in proofs.


Science does prove things to be true. Look at a theory. Conduct an experiment. If the experiment agrees with the theory you've just proved that under the conditions of your the experiment the theory holds true.


Finally, a correct statement. Science and scientific methods are used to asses the validity of a theory. The more proof that supports the theory the more likely it is to be true. The word Absolute is the issue. Religion and ideology deals in absolutes. Science deals in seeking for answers. Perhaps that is why you don't understand science?

Absolutes, like God, lie exclusively in the realm of language and idea- and exist as answers solely by faith.

To you, ID means "God, the Father of Jesus created life." The theory of ID doesn't care who the creator is. The issue you speak of concerning circular reasoning, were the creator must have had a creator isn't pertainate. That issue isn't resolved by saying it was a divine creator. Many ask the question, who created God. That question won't go away no matter who the creator is, and therefore is outside the realm of this theory. The theory basically says...

"the most basic life has many interrelated functions that must work together for the life to continue. The first life must not only become alive from non-life, but it must consume food and water, remove waste, grow and reproduce in order to evolve. Without an intelligent source to write the very complex dna code, that translates into a physical being, from a blue print too small to see, with more information than is stored in the entire set of encyclopedias. Under our current understanding of natural mechanisms, we find it more likely life as we know it was produced by an intelligent designer."

The issue of where the creator came from is a side issue, and has no bearing on this theory.

If you want to say irreducible complexity is a falsifying factor for macroevolution/abiogenesis, I will surely agree. But it also supports ID. I didn't say it proves ID, science doesn't prove anything to be correct, science only falsifies. So in that sense I'll agree, nothing will prove ID correct. If we can not falsify irreducible complexity, it will stand as a valid theory or law. That would support the notion someone or thing set life in motion. Because if life is too complex to form without design, the other option is forming by design.