Intellegent Design without Christianity?

Originally posted by Nygdan

He's also a christian, and his ideas are an extension of christian natural theology, there is no evidence for intelligent design in nature, and behe has never been able to scientifically demonstrate that there is.

no evidence???you must be joking Just 'cause you can explain something away with bazillion to one odds see it's possible, says "one" right there I say the interpretation is lacking, must be based on someone's 'atheistic theology' eh?

Also, notably, Behe accepts that not only does evolution occur, but that man evolved from apes. Or perhaps its dembski, I often confuse the two to tell the truth.

I believe you're correct, and said as much in my previous post.

What would be difficult to find is an atheistic advocate of intelligent design. Thats because the intelligent agent in intelligent design is deity. Aliens from another dimension could've made man, but eventually you get to the first living intelligent beings, and they'd have to have arisen by the actions of a supernatural creator-god in intelligent design.

Well imho that's the real problem mainstream science has with IDT. Sure it could be aliens but....if the argument is that life could not have just 'sprung up' and evolved on Earth, then logically it didn't happen somewhere else. It's a tough one and as i said i'm not sure it's a testable theory or not.

I'm surprised Nygdan that as a biologist you can say you see no evidence of design in nature, i understand that perhaps you feel it's not proof cause you have no way to test the assumptions. I've read alot of your posts around here(gotta say your my favorite member/MOD to read With all you know and understand about cells, DNA, evolution etc................................................. can you really say you see NO evidence for design. What does that mean exactly random non-directional process' account for all we see, and that is emperically based 'solid science'?

Originally posted by Rren
no evidence???you must be joking

Neither demsbki nor Behe have been able to present scientific evidence that supports intelligent design. I'm quite serious, they haven't been able to present strong scientific evidence. At best, they've been able to say "this bacterial flagella is extremely complex, I can't imagine how it formed naturally", which simply isn't enough to demonstrate design.

as a biologist

I'm not a biologist, I have a degree, but I am not a biologist. I'm just this guy, see...

i understand that perhaps you feel it's not proof cause you have no way to test the assumptions.

It gets difficult to accurate discuss these things when one is talking about 'proof' and the like. Technically, so far as I understand it, science doesn't prove anything. Its like with medecine, you receive a vaccine and you don't get the disease. Thats not proof that vaccines work, in the technical sense.
Anyway, without putting too fine razor to the terms, I would say that if the statements of intelligent design can't be tested, then it definitly can't be said to be a science. If you can't test for intelligent design in, say, a frog, then there's no science going on.

cells, DNA, evolution etc

I understand very little, I'm just trying to figure out this stuff too.

you see NO evidence for design.

Another member noted that he didn't see a difference between natural 'design' and intelligent 'design'. Without getting into that here tho, I would say, no, there is no evidence for intelligent design in nature.
Indeed, if I thought that there was, I'd be advocating for it. I think that all intelligent design advocates have are some examples of structures that are exceedingly complex, and that certainly look just so complex that they can't have come up naturally. But thats not a good standard to go by, apperances are extremely deceiving. There was a time when people thought that amino acids were far far too complex to form without organisms making them. Miller-Urey demonstrated that this was incorrect in 1953. That was only slightly longer than 50 years ago, and its a pretty basic begining for the subject. I'm not at all surprised that there are still lots of things that we haven't figured out the precise sequences for, infact, I don't expect that we'll ever have an answer to every single thing. But thats simply not enough to demonstrate that an intelligent being created these things.

What does that mean exactly random non-directional process' account for all we see, and that is emperically based 'solid science'?

In breif, the random part of evolution is that mutations occur relatively randomly, an organism does expereince the need to run faster and therefore have mutations that permit it to run faster, or even to take in more oxygen with each breath (beyond the limits of acclimatization, like when you go from the sea-level to a city with great altitude). There is a background of mutations that is allways occuring in a population of individuals. Upon this essentially random background, the 'pressure' of selection can act. The pressure isn't an intelligent agent tho. In a herd of prey animals, the faster ones will tend to survive and produce lots of offspring and therefor, intrinsically and automatically, this requires, by simply logic, that the next generation will be made up of more individual that have these mutations and variations that permit them to run faster. By this relatively straightforward process, populations change over time. Even if the change is very small, given time (and steady application of this pressure), you can get great over-all change. That applies to 'increasing and decreasing' 'current' traits beyond their current limits, and also applies to the creation of new traits. I won't pretend for a moment that there are books anywhere with the entire phylogenetic history of the various proteins and chemicals that make up the animals in the world tho.

Did I say 'in brief'

Originally posted by Quest
Right or wrong, the evolutionist will keep making medicine and running society and keeping them all alive and evolving.

Correct. As long as rebiblicans and deitycrats alike stay quiet and subdued, the independent thinkers will continue to intelligently design pathways towards incredible scientific understandings about our universe. Which the floating-bearded-man groupies will claim appeared in a flurry of angel dust.

And I'm cool with that.

[edit on 27-8-2005 by cargo]

Groupies:

One can speak of all the Universes being designed by some form of vast cosmic Intelligence (i.e. not a random conglomeration of random atoms) without having to drag the silly creation myths of the Jews into it (i.e. Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2 which do not even match at any rate).

I mean, pause for a minute and THINK: What's so intelligent about T.S.? ('talking snakes")?

There are over 8,000 creation myths in writing (and more still being discovered by anthropologists as we speak). Many make more sense than domes in the heaven that don't exist, or vegegation being created before the sun and the moon, as the bible would have you believe Gen chapter 1:3, 1:6-8).

One can believe in a "divine mind" that guided natural selection by rules we do not fully understand, without having necessarily to believe that snakes walked upright before being cursed to crawl on their stomachs....