Questions for Intelligent Design

[Veho]

Idk, it's better to be taught nothing than to be taught wrong tbh

I agree, it's better to know nothing than to learn some harmful garbage that takes years to unlearn.

I was referring to the "teach the controversy" movement in particular. Creationists know they can't just remove evolution from the curriculum outright (yet) so they want to cram the curriculum with so much chaff that evolution is drowned out by noise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teach_the_Controversy


It's not teaching the wrong thing as such, technically, because technically they do still allow the teaching of evolution, it's teaching too many things, most of which are garbage, and removing the critical approach that would let people discern the garbage.

I feel the current media have a similar problem, the internet most of all. It's not the sites that are outright wrong, it's the enormous amount of trash, regurgitated content, half-truths, snippets, chaff, that makes finding out actual facts pretty damn difficult.

Neal Stephenson had a similar idea in his novel Anathem. The internet of the future is filled with so much stuff, most of which is noise, automatically generated content that diverges from the original material with every iteration to the point where it's useless but given equal weight; and you have specialists whose purpose is to filter out actual information from the sea of bullshit (actual, technical term in the book).

 

[GeekyGuy]

--all life beyond plants can be thought of in this way. Humans are parasites too, we are incapable of creating our own energy.


--feces can have nutrients present that should not be wasted, and also can transfer potentially helpful bacteria

...

Well, no, the plants, too, of course, feed (as you noted). Differently, perhaps, but still that same built-in requirement to feed. You can even see it from the opposite end of the spectrum: stars feeding on planets and such (and black holes feeding on galaxies) within their field of gravity, and that gravity being the energy that brings the food to its metaphorical mouth.

 

[RetroGen]

Oh no no no nooo, that would be religion, and "intelligent design" is "not" a religious viewpoint, it's an "alternative hypothesis."

I'd rephrase that and say that ID is a pseudoscientific reformulation of religious creationism, a pseudonym with the explicitly religious bits stripped away to make it appear more credible to an uncritical audience. God gets replaced with some unnamed "Intelligent Designer" (I like to call her Mothra). In practice, very few non-religious people ever advocate ID, and the people who do almost always have a religious agenda that they are trying to hide.

Evolutionary history is full of bad engineering, and so are we. This makes sense if the evolutionary process works by unintelligent natural selection. An intelligent designer would not install a ridiculously long recurrent laryngeal nerve. Evolution uses whatever works, no matter how unintuitive, inhumane, or disgusting it might be, as one might expect from a blind, amoral, natural process. And evolution doesn't have the ability to backtrack to square one once an organism exists, so fundamental design flaws continue for millions of years in descendants, often exaggerated over time.

An all-knowing god or intelligent designer would presumably be able to get things right the first time and be able to fix any mistakes along the way, plus have the ability to foresee any potential conflicts, moral, or otherwise. In other words, if the world were actually intelligently designed, we ought to see undeniable evidence of that intelligence in nature, without any significant design flaws. The brutality and injustice that exist in nature make a strong argument against such a notion. Then there's the question: who/what designed the designer? Creationism by another name... evolution by natural selection is the only reasonable, and evidentially supported, explanation.

More examples:
https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2015/01/12/the-poor-design-of-the-human-eye/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_poor_design

 

[x65943]

I'd rephrase that and say that ID is a pseudoscientific reformulation of religious creationism, a pseudonym with the explicitly religious bits stripped away to make it appear more credible to an uncritical audience. God gets replaced with some unnamed "Intelligent Designer" (I like to call her Mothra). In practice, very few non-religious people ever advocate ID, and the people who do almost always have a religious agenda that they are trying to hide.

Evolutionary history is full of bad engineering, and so are we. This makes sense if the evolutionary process works by unintelligent natural selection. An intelligent designer would not install a ridiculously long recurrent laryngeal nerve. Evolution uses whatever works, no matter how unintuitive, inhumane, or disgusting it might be, as one might expect from a blind, amoral, natural process. And evolution doesn't have the ability to backtrack to square one once an organism exists, so fundamental design flaws continue for millions of years in descendants, often exaggerated over time.

An all-knowing god or intelligent designer would presumably be able to get things right the first time and be able to fix any mistakes along the way, plus have the ability to foresee any potential conflicts, moral, or otherwise. In other words, if the world were actually intelligently designed, we ought to see undeniable evidence of that intelligence in nature, without any significant design flaws. The brutality and injustice that exist in nature make a strong argument against such a notion. Then there's the question: who/what designed the designer? Creationism by another name... evolution by natural selection is the only reasonable, and evidentially supported, explanation.

More examples:
https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2015/01/12/the-poor-design-of-the-human-eye/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_poor_design

It really depends how intelligent the intelligent design is

 

[zamastyle]

I feel like its somewhat odd to believe that a god created everything from atoms to the laws of physics and also to believe that the natural laws of the universe arent the tools that same god used to create life and humanity. Creationism and evolution seem like the same circumstances through different lenses.