[achtung]

Giving these people attention is like feeding trolls.

YOU DONT DO IT

[G0atmaster]

Well, considering that ID refers to the whole universe, and not just humanity, or even life on Earth, what could it be but a force outside of the universe?  It couldn't be aliens, because something needs to have created the aliens.  It couldn't be the Flying Spaghetti Monster^TM, because something would be needed to create that.  It has to be something that is not created, I.E. God.

[karajorma]

Let me ask you this, what is ID? What are the 3 main principles?

[Mobius]

I have recently read an article about that episode. Karajorma, I agree with you. The Christians should have definetely done something, maybe they were afraid of being considered bad Christians or something like that.

American Christians sound like different Christians to me. The Vatican has accepted Darwin's theories, why would they continue to ignore theories that explain so many things? Why do they keep mentioning the ID?

Well, considering that ID refers to the whole universe, and not just humanity, or even life on Earth, what could it be but a force outside of the universe?  It couldn't be aliens, because something needs to have created the aliens.  It couldn't be the Flying Spaghetti Monster^TM, because something would be needed to create that.  It has to be something that is not created, I.E. God.

On a side note, Vatican has also accepted the existance of aliens. The famous Cardinal Ruini mentioned one or more parts of the Bible in which God refers to the habitants of the Universe, not only of the world where we live.

[karajorma]

I have recently read an article about that episode. Karajorma, I agree with you. The Christians should have definetely done something, maybe they were afraid of being considered bad Christians or something like that.

American Christians sound like different Christians to me. The Vatican has accepted Darwin's theories, why would they continue to ignore theories that explain so many things? Why do they keep mentioning the ID?

The Christian Right in America is a loose affiliation of different Christian groups each with often quite different views on the creation of the universe. They embrace ID because it allows them to teach Christianity in schools without having to resolve the question of whether the Young Earth or Old Earth Creationists are correct. It allows them to say that there must be a God without having to pick sides.

The Catholic Church on the other hand simply said that the Young Earth Creationists were wrong.

[Edward Bradshaw]

*ahem*  The Bible is the leading proponent of ID.

No, thats just religion. Intelligent Design doesnt just say the universe was created, it says there is scientific evidence of creation and that this is a valid scientific theory. Theres lots of Christian scientists that say ID is nonsence, but are still very religious. They are whats known as "Theistic Evolutionists", but they recognise that their religious beliefs arent science.

And the Discovery Institute could pretty much be said to be Intelligent Design itself, through having all the people that I can see that started the movement involved with it ie. Behe, Dembski and Jonathan wells. To say you believe in ID without following any of these guys you'd have to have pretty vague reasons for doing so since they hold all the arguments and pretty much started them all (aside from the ones they plagerised from Creationists)

Its not totally your fault you're confused, its what these guys want. Thats why they are calling it Intelligent Design and trying to distance themselves from Creationism. After all, if you ask a religious person if they believe the universe was intelligently designed they would answer yes, but thats not "Intelligent Design". Ignorence is what these people thrive on on and unfortunatly there are a lot of uninformed people around.

[karajorma]

Which is why I always ask people who say that they believe in ID to explain to me what they think it is. I've never seen anyone actually repeat what these guys say it is yet.

Most people who say they believe in ID actually believe in creationism and don't actually know what ID is. They've simply been told that good Christians do believe in ID and follow the party line.

[Flipside]

One thing I've never understood about ID is all the redundancies and evolutionary throwbacks that are present in most organisms, parts of the cell that are never activated, spurious DNA code etc. In many ways, I would have thought a creation intelligence would be a lot neater about the job they did, life really is a bit of a throw-together job.

[Mefustae]

One thing I've never understood about ID is all the redundancies and evolutionary throwbacks that are present in most organisms, parts of the cell that are never activated, spurious DNA code etc. In many ways, I would have thought a creation intelligence would be a lot neater about the job they did, life really is a bit of a throw-together job.

Oh, but you see, the answer to that is very simple. God The Designer implanted those imperfections to root out those of use who are not pure of spirit, to test us and make sure those whole believed in Intelligent Design were inquisitive, trusting and faithful.

Duh!

[NGTM-1R]

One thing I've never understood about ID is all the redundancies and evolutionary throwbacks that are present in most organisms, parts of the cell that are never activated, spurious DNA code etc. In many ways, I would have thought a creation intelligence would be a lot neater about the job they did, life really is a bit of a throw-together job.

I've always liked the inactive viral code myself...

Yes, inactive viral code in your DNA. It's quite harmless, since it hasn't activated in a very long time, considering we share something like 20 such sequences with mice. Which also pretty much proves a common ancestor.

[Kosh]

One thing I've never understood about ID is all the redundancies and evolutionary throwbacks that are present in most organisms, parts of the cell that are never activated, spurious DNA code etc. In many ways, I would have thought a creation intelligence would be a lot neater about the job they did, life really is a bit of a throw-together job.

Oh, but you see, the answer to that is very simple. God The Designer implanted those imperfections to root out those of use who are not pure of spirit, to test us and make sure those whole believed in Intelligent Design were inquisitive, trusting and faithful.

Duh!

If the "Great Designer" was an engineer working for me, it would be fired. If it was working for microsoft, it would get a promotion.

[MP-Ryan]

One thing I've never understood about ID is all the redundancies and evolutionary throwbacks that are present in most organisms, parts of the cell that are never activated, spurious DNA code etc. In many ways, I would have thought a creation intelligence would be a lot neater about the job they did, life really is a bit of a throw-together job.

I've always liked the inactive viral code myself...

Yes, inactive viral code in your DNA. It's quite harmless, since it hasn't activated in a very long time, considering we share something like 20 such sequences with mice. Which also pretty much proves a common ancestor.

That's not what ID says though.  Incidentally, it's not what evolution says either.

*Warning:  Genetics lesson insertion*  (Sooner or later you guys are either going to know as much about genetics as I do, or quit posting things that let me teach about it.. )

DNA has introns, and exons.  Or, at least, that's how geneticists started diving it when they began looking at genomic sequences and nobody has yet bothered to get rid of those definitions because they are useful.  Exons are sequences of DNA that code for RNA.  They used to define it as DNA that codes for protein, but after the discovery of ribozymes (RNA that acts like protein) that is factually incorrect, so it's DNA that can be transcribed into RNA.

Introns are everything else.

Exons make up about 1-3% of your average genome in a complex eukaryote.  The "simpler" you get, the higher percentage an exon makes up.  Prokaryotes (e.g. bacteria) don't have introns [this is a big clue as to what introns do, because bacterial gene regulation is encoded in exons while eukaryote gene regulation is not].  Now, we used to think of introns as junk DNA sequences used for spacing which have just tripped around in the genome because they are sequences not under selection pressure.  That's not true, entirely.

Introns are the regions in which regulatory mechanisms act on gene expression via enhancers, silencers, and modifiers.  Now, there are also spacers in introns and areas that aren't under selection pressure (so they expand or constrict repeats, gain or lose viral DNA insertions, add translocations and delete regions, etc, ad nauseum) which is why some parts of intronic sequences are highly variant between individuals, but for the most part introns are essential parts of our genetic code.  They aren't redundant or superficial at all.

In fact, evolutionary throwbacks in cells are a misnomer - pretty much all of the genes and structures in our cells are used in some vital way.  Now, with evolution comes expanded function, so it is true that even in flies we see 3, 4, 5, up to 10 genes that appear to do the same thing, but in reality they all have slightly different functions but can replace each other at present.  Another million or so years and their functions will be entirely divergent.

Actually, and I hate to say this, but the presence of intronic sequences doesn't actually put a nail in the ID coffin.  It *cringe* is very efficient and elegant.  Now, I call that a product of evolution and its really only a coincidence that ID got this part right (in fact, they didn't know they got it right when ID came about, it so so happens that advances since the 90s have shown this to be true and they kinda jumped on it as more evidence of a designer).

You're not wrong, there are many ancient viral (and bacterial, incidentally) insertions in the genetic code of higher organisms and we find them primarily in intronic sequences lacking regulatory mechanisms due to the absence of selection pressure, allowing them to shift around all the like without disrupting essential systems.  That said, there really isn't much DNA in your average cell on Earth that is redundant, superfluous, or a throwback at all.  I haven't seen revised estimates of DNA composition in about two years, but last I saw less than 10% of human DNA had no apparrent function.

[Herra Tohtori]

Creationism requires deities. ID does not.

That's a claim that is often used by ID people to try and avoid being labeled as creationism.

Technically, ID and creationism both require the exact same thing - an unknown* conscious operator to plan things out. Creationists call it God and thus connect this operator to their particular religious mindset. ID doesn't specifically name the operator as anything else but operator, but there is little or no difference when you consider the difference between "God" and "operator" in terms of what they were supposedly doing or did long time ago.

There is no functional difference as far as biology is concerned.

Thus it's arguable that both the Intelligent Designer and God are essentially the same thing (again, functionally as far as biology is concerned). The God of Gaps. Perhaps an apt name in Olympian style would be "Orifices"?

Creationists also attribute a lot of other things to God, but when making comparisions with ID, that is of no consequence.

I think the biggest claimed difference between Intelligent Designer and God is that ID people claim the Designer to be a natural occurrence, just "unknown" as of now. Creationists offer God as a supernatural explanation. But in closer inspection, this difference can be broken down by showing that there is no such thing as "supernatural" apart from the nice creepy word used to introduce unnecessary mysticism to the matters.

Supernatural does not (and can not) exist, because all that is part of universe is natural. Thus, if God is part of universe, God is a natural phenomenon, not supernatural (regardless of God's attributes, whatever they would be). Also, being part of universe can be defined by whether or not something affects the universe or not. Thus, if God affects universe, God is part of universe and thus a natural phenomenon. If God doesn't affect the universe... well, there's no problem because in effect, God does'nt then exist in the universe.

Thus, if God isn't supernatural, we have this from the ID people:

-a naturally occurring intelligent (and thus apparently conscious*) operator that essentially planned life as we see it (or alternatively some stuff about Boromir and Faramir and Stewards of Gondor and how other beings have degenerated from them, or something like that)

And in comparision, we have this from Creationists:

*a conscious (and to some extent, intelligent) being who designed and lo behold, even made life as we see it (and some extra like all the extinct ones)
*a natural occurrence, because everything in the universe is just that
*all the other attributes from religious context - almighty, all-seeing, the old stuff.

They just call it God.

The only difference I can see between God and Designer is the huge amount of attributes associated with God, from religious context. But as far as biology and origin of species is concerned, there is no effective difference between the two. Or, at least I can't see it. If someone can point any obvious faults in my deduction, please be my guest.

[karajorma]

While I agree that pretty much every ID supporter believes that the Abrahamic God exists they like to state the theory to hide that fact so as to avoid it being obvious what they were up to.

However that's not the only possible answer ID spits out. Suppose we have a parallel universe. That universe isn't as "finely tuned" as this one. That one can be explained fairly easily using it's own physics. That universe is able to "seed" new universes by creating a big bang (I remember reading a paper once which said that something similar was actually possible with our universe and that if you could seed a black hole correctly it would create another universe linked to ours"

Now all you need is an intelligent alien species in the other universe who have the desire to meddle with our evolution and the technology to visit our universe (It would have to be pretty impressive technology, their laws of physics probably wouldn't apply in our universe). Hell if you only want to explain "finely tuned universe" and don't care about the other two concepts you don't even need the aliens to be able to influence this universe after the big bang, they simply set off the big bang and left the universe running.

As you can see you don't actually need an omnipotent deity for ID, you only need something intelligent. If you start playing with interactions between other universes you can come up with a host of theories that fit ID.


I've always thought that Flying Spaghetti Monster was the wrong way to go about satirising ID. Funny as it is something based on the aliens I mention could not only be just as funny but it would have the side effect of actually appearing more credible every time the ID people tried to push their point of view.