For example, if you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design and look at their ‘External Links’, all but one of the links is either ardently pro or con. What about an interested, objective, thoughtful stance in which one doesn’t have a ferocious predisposition to misrepresent the other side of the argument?

Examples of what I am talking about:

1. It is a seriously fallacious mistake to keep equating ID with creationism, or neo-creationism, or disguised creationism. Creationists are simply trying to impose a particular, literal-minded interpretation of their religion on a scientific issue. Creationists as a whole are just as anti-ID as the Darwinists.

2. Similarly, it is a misrepresentation to keep insisting that at the heart of ID there is an attempt to invoke God as an explanation for the alleged inadequacies of traditional Darwinist theory. Read the ID books- you won’t find that.

3. On the other hand, it is a detriment to the ID theorists that, having identified what they perceive to be inadequacies in the mechanisms identified by neo-Darwinian theory, they traditionally stop there and keep coming back to the vagueness of “intelligence”. What intelligence where and how? A genuinely scientific approach begs the question of what other mechanisms might better account for the complexity of the life systems we observe. This sort of thing is traditional in the world of physics, where many topics are often out of the reach of experiment. For example, the Big Bang- read in Scientific American recent theories about a history that might have preceeded the Big Bang- scientific speculation, but interesting and not so subject to confusion with a religious inference.

4. Bottom line, my personal view is that I have read a bunch of the ID stuff (e.g. Behe) and find the arguments fascinating and worth considering. To me the logical sequella to those arguments should be either:

a) An attempt to explain the phenomena using current evolutionary theory. This has been attempted (most prominently by the anti-ID Darwinian defendants), but I find most of the arguments unconvincing, or

b) Why not speculation about other natural, observable mechanisms in addition to the already known natural selection and mutation, as prime factors in the fact of evolutionary history? If anyone is interested, I could offer up some examples…

It’s in my mind a copout not to propose natural, scientific alternatives or additions to known evolutionary mechanisms, but equally a copout to try to refute ID through misrepresentation, name calling, etc.

There ought to be a debate about evolution, but a scientific one. I propose that the real Horseshit here is the level of the discussion…

ID and science are not mutally exclusive. It is possible to interject a creator at the time just before we can make any predictions.

I’d like to add that this is the view that most mainstream Christians take. Most people who believe in the Bible are smart enough to realize that it should be taken metaphorically and not literally. In this view, it’s entirely consistent that everything we know about science (including evolution, the big bang, etc.) was set it motion by god.

It’s only the fundies that think that science is another religion or that there really was a woman made out of a rib who ate an evil apple. Unfortunately for mainstream Christians (and the rest of us), a vocal minority has taken over and insisted that their views should be injected into every aspect of secular life.

Theories are put in place to account for these observations that we accept as fundamentally true and make valid predictions about the future based on known past states. From there, we get things like the theory of relativity. We know certain physical aspects of the way light travels and how that effects time. Relativity is a mathmatical theory to make future predictions based on known states. We also have models. These are best guesses designed to fit with the current observations, but don’t make any predictions about future events. The big bang model fits with our observation of the universe, but it doesn’t tell me anything about how fast the universe is expanding or what it’s going to do tomorrow. Evolution is another thing that is a model. We know evolution takes place, but we don’t have a good enough theory to make any predictions about the actual outcomes in anything but trivial cases. For something to be a theory it actually has to make predictions. Evolution and the Big Bang in and of themselves do not. However, there are theories that incoporate them.

My problem with ID comes from the fact that it is impossible to disprove. They can argue any point and say “the creator set the universe, earth, etc. in motion this way.” That works for saying the dinosaur bones are fake. It works for saying that god created man. It works for anything you want. That keeps it from being science. To actually be science you have to have the ability to invalidate it. If I discover a particle tomorrow that quantum theory doesn’t predict, I’ve invalidated quantum theory. With ID I could simply say god created a new particle.

ID and science are not mutally exclusive. It is possible to interject a creator at the time just before we can make any predictions. In our current state of knowledge that means anything happening before the first few seconds of the universe. Of course, once our science improves and we can predict everything up to the big bang itself; we have to push god back farther. And so on for forever. This just shows why it’s stupid to worry about a creator in real science at all. For your work to mean anything you have to limit god to the areas which we currently don’t understand. If you want to make sense of those areas, you have to push god out of them too. So god just gets in the way of good science.

We also have to accept that we may never know some of the secrets of the universe simply because of limitations of our human brains. We have a hard enough time thinking in 4 dimensions, but current string theory says there may be as many as 20 dimensions. Most people simply can’t deal with that. Now to know what happened before the big bang we have realize that there is no such thing as time and space. You can’t say that this ball of concentrated energy existed for 1 sec or 1 million years because time is a product of the big bang and therefore didn’t exist before it. I don’t foresee in my lifetime humans able to grasp those concepts completly let alone theorize about them. We’ve had 50 years of quantum theory and still no one really understands it.

Andrew, I believe I already stated that the Big Bang Theory is nothing more than a model for the distribution of our universe. It’s ridiculous to say that the Big Bang isn’t a theory. It is, by definition, a theory!
Do you honestly believe that we will ever reach a point where we can prove that the Big Bang Model is, in fact, fact? I doubt it, but I also am fine with simply accepting it as true. My defense of Intelligent Design theorists (who, focus more on evolution than cosmology)isn’t because I favor their theory but because my own agnosticism keeps me from suggesting that a Creator (or Creative Force) couldn’t have, at some point, set this whole Universe into motion. In fact, as far as I’m concerned, the two concepts are not even really mutually exclusive.

All that said, however, I have to point out that the ID hypothesis is really trying to answer a question that science simply cannot. A scientist cannot ask “what happened before the Big Bang?” because that question makes no sense in her frame of reference. But to my way of thinking, the biggest flaw in the Big Bang hypothesis is that it has to leave unanswered the question of where this incredibly hot, dense, tiny point of proto-matter came from. Yes, the hypothesis appears to account very well for the phenomena that followed the appearance and subsequent explosion of that point of proto-matter. But I’d prefer a hypothesis that could account for all of that and also where the stuff came from in the first place.

The only thing I’d assert is that our primary causes are generally unknowable, and we can, at best, guess what happened, which is what Creationists do.

But what are those guesses based on? The big bang theory is based on over 75 years of observations in fields of astrophysics and cosmology. Over those years, the theory has evolved to include all available evidence. The theory has held up to numerous tests (as pointed out on this page of the site you referenced) to the point of becoming “a broadly accepted theory for the origin and evolution of our universe.” It’s not perfect and it’s still the subject of minor controversies within the scientific community, but it’s a hell of a lot more than a “guess”.

Creationism, on the other hand, is based on the opening passages of an ancient culture’s mythology that have been loosely translated at the whim of various religious and political leaders into multiple laguages before it was ever adapted to English. This may be fine for something that is taken on faith like religion or philosphy, but it ain’t science.

Take the Big Bang, for instance. The Big Bang works as a causal theory of matter’s distribution in the universe, but The Big Bang doesn’t explain the creation of the many structures in our universe…

The big bang model isn’t supposed to explain the creation of any structures. It’s not even really a theory, it is simply a model that fits the observation that everything in the universe it moving away from everything else. By extrapolating we can prove that everything must have been at one point at some previous time. It’s not a theory that is designed to predict anything, just a model used to be convinient.

No theory of the universe’s creation would be testable without the ability to “test” it, and to my knowledge, we are a long way from being able to build a universe from scratch.

Again that’s not true. Take for instance quantum theory. We can’t see quarks. We also haven’t found all the particles that it predicts. However, the parts of it we can test agree so perfectly that we know that quantum theory is a fundamental part of the universe. Because we know that quantum theory is correct, we know that there must be a theory of gravity that agrees with it. We are never going to be able to see the gravitron particle that we suspect is required (it would require a particle accelerator the size of the galaxy). We’re also never going to see the strings of pure energy that most likely exist to cause all these interactions. However, if we do discover a mathmatical relationship that predict gravity (which we can measure) and it agrees with quantum theory, we will know it to be correct even if we can’t validate it all experimentally. At that point, we can test the theory of everything simply by plugging in known constant values and seeing if the predictions it makes matches up with what we see in real life. Now even if we had this theory tomorrow, we couldn’t validate it with anything more than a trivial example because the math is just too damn hard; but as time passes we will be able to solve harder and harder problems. Solving these problems is what will actually test our theory of creation. If it ever spit out a wrong predicition, we’d have to refine it, or come up with a new theory. Just like we refined Einstein and Newton before him. And that’s were ID fails as being science. It doesn’t make any predictions. It’s a model that explains why things are the way they are, but it makes no predictions about the way things are going to be tomorrow and can therefore never be disproven. It’s actually pretty easy to tell if something is philosophy or science. All science is at is essence math. Biology is a subset of chemistry, chemistry is a subset of physics, and physics is applied math. That means with the right equations and a powerful computer you could describe any living organism by a set of equations. ID can never be broken into math and is therefore not science.

The Big Bang, according to this website rests on two pillars: the theory of relativity and the Cosmological Principle. The Cosmological Principle is an assumption which scientists are actively searching for information to support. Thus scientists are trying to prove an assumption accepted as a basis for a general idea about the creation of the universe. By searching for support for The Cosmological
Principle rather than looking for information which would disprove it, I would suggest that scientists are testing to prove a foregone conclusion about the origin of the Universe. Just to make sure that we’re coming from the same place, the big bang model was taught as the generally accepted mechanism for the creation of the Universe in your school, too, wasn’t it?

I’m not saying that religion should act as a substitute for science. By no means! The only thing I’d assert is that our primary causes are generally unknowable, and we can, at best, guess what happened, which is what Creationists do.