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Intelligent Designerists admit they have no theory. What do they have?

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posted on Mar, 6 2007 @ 02:07 PM
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I didn't want to pull the creationist theory thread off-topic, so I decided to post it here.

Here are some of the words of ID proponents...


Audience question: I am a science text book editor and writer, … what is your alternate scientific theory of how life arose and how all these different species came to be here.

Jonathan Wells: I don’t think I’m obligated to propose an alternate theory. I don’t pretend to have an alternate theory that explains the history of life.
February 2007


Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory now, and that’s a real problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity” –- but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.
Paul Nelson, 2004


As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories.
William Dembski, 2002


(Rothschild)Q. And I’m correct when I asked you, you would need to see a step-by-step description of how the immune system, vertebrate immune system developed?

(Behe)A. Not only would I need a step-by-step, mutation by mutation analysis, I would also want to see relevant information such as what is the population size of the organism in which these mutations are occurring, what is the selective value for the mutation, are there any detrimental effects of the mutation, and many other such questions.

Q. And you haven’t undertaken to try and figure out those?

A. I am not confident that the immune system arose through Darwinian processes, and so I do not think that such a study would be fruitful.

Q. It would be a waste of time?

A. It would not be fruitful.
Michael Behe, Dover testimony, 2005

So what is this Intelligent Design exactly? It doesn't seem to be a scientific theory (this means scientific sense not common usage).

A while back, another blogger calculated that intelligent designerists have produced a ratio of 100:1 official media announcements to actual research (this is accepting as ID supporting the science articles they claim to have produced, which is questionable).

Is there any other science that produces 100 times as much media spin as actual science? The DI have spent around $4million and produced a pitiful amount of actual science, and they admit to having no 'theory'. Their own 'scientific ' journal has not published an article or issue since 2005, the ISCID essay contest have been cancelled, the conferences cancelled.

They solely seem to be aiming to poke holes in evolutionary theory, but as we see, even Behe prefers to let others do the work.

What exactly is 'intelligent design'? What exactly do ID 'scientists' actually do, apart from blogging, writing books, and media posturing?

"I don’t pretend to have an alternate theory that explains the history of life"

RIP ID 1987-2007

[edit on 6-3-2007 by melatonin]



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